Cataclysm Beta: Part 2 — Darkshore

I arrive in Rut’theran village and am in awe at the lush visuals. Wow, what a change! Sure, I’ve just been questing in a typically grey area — don’t get me wrong, the palette fits the area, but grey is grey — so this place is particularly shiny. I’m a real sucker for lush, beautiful environments in games, so I find myself looking forward to a lot of it in Cataclysm! I finally grab my heirlooms from a Darnassian mail box, bust out a celebratory backflip and plough onward to Auberdine… or so I thought.

Auberdine has effectively been levelled, but it’s all good because there’s a new equivalent called Lor’danel. It’s like Auberdine, only better. Great! Apparently something is going on with the water elementals in the area, so you’re ordered to kill some. As well as that are a couple of old quests, revamped in such a way that there’s some sort of a link but they’re actually rather new. I guess this is to help Blizzard with ideas for the near-limitless amount of quests they’ve added in this expansion. Anyway, it was actually quite fun to revisit some old quests that actually aren’t old quests.

Remember those owlkin to the east of Auberdine? There’s only one left, and he’s sad. How about the notoriously hair-tearing sunken treasure quest? Replaced by a quest to mob and blow up hoards of murlocs as a robot. The buzzboxes are there, too, but they’re quite different now. Anyway, so I’m still in the northern-centre area of Darkshore and some themes begin to surface. The biggest one in the upper area is that trolls are attacking the night elves and have been looting the Tower of Althalaxx to boot. Lots of kill quests as a result of this, but not too many to make you sick of them. The biggest flaw with the troll quests is having to run through a whole bunch of mobs whose kill quest you’d cleared about 50 kills ago.

Other than trolls, the wildlife is becoming corrupted — yes, once again, something I have very little interest in but the night elves love to send me on errands for — and so are water elementals, which I suppose is somehow a separate theme. More towards the south are some very fun quests involving Twilight’s Hammer cultists attempting to summon old gods and their minions, along with a fairly long line in which Malfurion Stormrage — yes, he himself is here, although he’s strangely also in at least Darnassus at the same time — attempts to control a storm with the help of the local wildlife. Finally, there’s a short line involving Naga, where Queen Azshara herself makes an appearance.

By far the highlight of Darkshore, for me, was the legendary Absent Minded Prospector. If you’ve never played through Darkshore, this may be lost on you to some extent, but there are a few quests involving him and his gang this time, and each one of them is hilarious. Any quest line in which you build murlocs a new home is great in my book!

The environment itself is far more lush than it used to be, with ancients featuring heavily, along with generally brighter tones of green. Darkshore no longer lives up to its name for the most part, though the shape of the land is mostly the same.

Overall Darkshore is a fun area, particularly for those who remember how much it was not a fun area. Quests follow a logical pattern and none of them will have you spending far more time on it than it’s worth; and for that matter, none will ask you to go see Mr. Miles Away on the other side of the world. The storyline is mostly uninspired, but there are some gems that more than make up for that. Many of the quests also include a liberal helping of elven bigotry and hypocrisy, which is annoying or delectably sarcastic depending on how you look at it!

Other than Darkshore, I decided to try a run through Wailing Caverns. The only noticeable (and very nice) difference was that quests are all presented at the start of the instance. No trudging around the entire world before entering an instance queue!

Gallery’s up next, and it tells quite a story. Check it out!