The lore flops of the Burning Crusade
by Alex Ziebart 
Mar 16th 2008 at 1:00PM
The Burning Crusade has a lot going on in it. In the very first zone you run into the Burning Legion, the Ilidari, the Fel Orcs, the Broken, the Forge Camps, the Mag'har, the Arakkoa, and so much more. This is a pleasant change from so many Azerothian zones seeming very static, fighting the same type of thing from one end of the zone to the other.I found many of these stories to be very fun and interesting, but some of them just fell flat. For one, the Arakkoa. When the Arakkoa story began with Kirrik the Awakened and Rilak the Redeemed, I was rather excited. This race was pretty cool! The Arakkoa would be the most beast-like of the known Light-worshiping races and a recent addition to the Naaru's 'Army of the Light.' The models for the redeemed Arakkoa were cool, too. A bunch of pretty birds following them around? Neat!
Unfortunately, this aspect of the Arakkoa was quickly forgotten. An intriguing side story to the race which could supply another facet of understanding to the Light simply fell apart. It broke down to 'oh man the Arakkoa are TOTALLY evil' nonsense and we were doomed to encounter them in absolutely every zone and still manage to learn nothing new about them. Everything you need to know you learned in Lower City. Terokk is a bad guy who was worshiped as a hero. The Arakkoa are dark and naughty. The end.
Terokk finally makes his appearance when you hit level 70, as a summonable boss in Skettis. The ultimate villain of the race you battle in four out of Outland's seven zones is nothing more than a summoned boss tied to a Silithus-esque grind. Who in the world enjoyed farming hundreds of pages and pieces of clothing off of Twilight Cultists? Nobody. The resolution, which was a disappointment before we even reached it, broke down to Silithus 2.0. There's a very good reason everyone and their cousins hated Silithus. Terokk doesn't even give any compelling reason to summon him. His loot, for the most part, isn't especially powerful or interesting besides the arakkoa disguise.
What would I have done differently? Lower the Arakkoa presence in many of the zones. Terokkar, fine. Blade's Edge? Ehh, okay. Hellfire Peninsula? No. Shadowmoon Valley? Not unless you're going to expand on the Old God-esque storyline that ended in a fizzle.
Add Terokk as a summonable boss inside of Heroic Sethekk, just like Anzu. Maybe Ikiss could be guarding a shrine to the 'hero', or is using his precious trinkets to gain the power of Terokk, and killing him accidentally frees Terokk himself. Perhaps place Terokk inside of an instance up in Skettis. There's a lot you can do, and a painfully long grind for drops is the worst possible choice.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Burning Crusade, Lore
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Runstadrey Mar 16th 2008 1:18PM
I started grinding those dusts, it was as boring as boring could be. Then I read about the end of those grinds - that I would need at least 2 other bored silly friends to finish the grind, and I quit messing with the insipid thing.
I'll get my ray by scrambling eggs.
Matt Mar 16th 2008 1:21PM
i can totally agree, i started doing this with 1 guildie, and when i brought 3 more in we all ended up getting pages and stuff...took us like 4 hours...and totally not really worth it!...good 60G from the quest chain...wish there was more story behiend it...
Dave Mar 16th 2008 1:33PM
Yeah, a 4 hour grind for a single questline totally compares to a multi-week epic guild-wide grind in silithus that required killing several raid bosses within time limits.
Totally the same thing.
Brazen Mar 16th 2008 1:50PM
Erm, he wasn't reffering to the raid part ynow. I believe it was the solo /5-man grind for epics that he was talking about.
And besides, it only take 4 hours if you grind it with several other people, otherwise you're looking at a lot longer timeframe.
Dave Mar 16th 2008 2:13PM
solo 5-man grind for epics?
What silithus rep are you talking about?
the only rep you get there is Cenarion Circle, which the smart people got by running AQ20/40. You never had to grind at all if you were raiding.
The real grind was the workup to the gates to do the scepter chains and knock the gong.
I guess if you're a non-raider and you absolutely HAD to have all the stuff from CE for some bizzare reason (even though as a non-raider you weren't likely to get a lot of use out of it) yes maybe it was a long and tedious grind. But it was relatively quick and easy if you just ran the AQ instances a few times. The only painful part was opening the gates in the first place, nothing of which the very very mild Skettis grind entails.
If you JUST do the escort quest every day, you should be able to get the dusts to get enough elixirs. It might take you a month of not even barely trying. Then you spend maybe an hour getting the texts, they drop really fast and it's not very painful at all honestly.
I'm not real sure what other sort of grind this could be compared to.
Thorium Brotherhood, that was a grind. Timbermaw? That was a grind. You couldn't instance those at all.
This is a very very weak grind.
Segmund Mar 16th 2008 1:45PM
I think you've missed out on something, in Blades Edge you find out alot about the Arakkoa and who they worship. If I recall correctly its a giant Raven god, and you find his stories in the Blades Edge Mountain settlement. I really liked this element, learning about another "Old God"-esk figure through their stories. Of course this requires actually reading the stories X_X. Overall though, I liked the Arakkoa.
crsh Mar 16th 2008 2:27PM
Heh, Skettis is pretty bad, so is Ogri'la. "Ogres are mean and bad, blah blah blah.. So evil, blah blah blah. Oh, here's a bunch of enlightened ones, they're good, here's a new grind. Enjoy!"
And really, the worst of all lore flops.. Blood Elves. They're Horde, but their Prince is crazy and betrayed everybody, but Silvermoon *still hasn't heard anything about it*, so effectively the NPCs aren't the same faction as the playable race, but they still worship the evil guy somehow. Even Kael'thas' group is split between bad-bad Belves aligned with him (thus betrayed Illidan), but many are still allied with Illidan in Black Temple.
Yes we can somehow make sense of it, but it was terribly played out.
Alex Ziebart Mar 16th 2008 2:29PM
@Dave: http://www.wowwiki.com/Abyssal_Council
Not the Cenarion Circle rep grind. The grind for all of the items required to work your way up to the final summoned bosses.
Carbon Mar 16th 2008 2:35PM
Yeah, the blood elf situation is like so screwed up... its like when you get to terrokar and you find the first real blood elf encampment and are like "oh ma gawd, HAI!" and they they're like "kek" and try to kill you, and then you're like "lol wut?"
hopefully they kinda "fill-in" this whole issue before WotLK.
The arakkoa story had promise, but i think they just half-assed it. So much is done 'working against skettis' while you're in terrokar, and then once you finally GET to skettis its like "well, that sucked" after 5 levels of hype.
theRaptor Mar 16th 2008 8:32PM
If you skip the quest in Hellfire which tells you that the forces under Kaels command are naughty. But of course it makes much more sense to go "lollore" when you where to lazy to even read all the lore yourself.
Destron Mar 16th 2008 3:02PM
I quite liked the arakkoa, but was very disappointed with the implementation. I really think that Terokkar Forest and Blade's Edge both had some interesting concepts that didn't really work out in the execution.
One problem is that Skettis is so unremarkable; it's just one of the Veils writ large. I would have actually preferred to see a full-on arakkoa instance. I don't mean something like Sethekk Halls, where you have a bunch of arakkoa living in draenei ruins, I mean an instance done in the arakkoa style.
It could be rather evocative. A vast treetop manse, winding passages filled with the detritus of millennia, great circular nest chambers and libraries draped in rotting silk, and at the center of it all, in a shadowy temple sanctum, Terokk himself.
I think a lot would have helped if the Bone Wastes were a separate zone. Honestly, I kind of suspect it was intended to be, but they ran out of time or something. It just clashes with the rest of the zone, and looks too much like Desolace. Since Outland's very alien, they should have used blue sand and dust or something, and done more with the bones. Like, say, a Forsaken settlement built inside a giant ribcage, with the skull as the inn.
I have no major problems with the draenei and blood elves though.
Elmo Mar 16th 2008 3:57PM
I like the idea and the looks of this race but the total lack of lore around it is pretty dumb indeed.
leibowitz Mar 16th 2008 6:00PM
I agree with the above posters, the blood elf disaster is far worse than the Arroka.. which are just cute references to D&D and the Dark Crystal.
Abhinav Kumar Mar 16th 2008 6:00PM
Great point. I never thought about these bird men people this way but as a huge lore nut i totally agree with you.
Calaana Mar 16th 2008 7:18PM
As far as I'm concerned, TBC was coming up with mechanics, and hoping they implemented them right... which normally they didn't. Multi wing instances? Great! Arc? Not so great... Yay more rep! ... Too much rep... Oooh repeatable gold quests!... oh god shoot me with a gnome...
Zghuk in vacation Mar 16th 2008 7:40PM
Almost no one in my guild likes them. Not the story, not their visual appearance...
I think this is because of the long, long quest line. When you are questing you are leveling at 64 and 65 too quick. You have too many regions to chose... blade edge, nagrand, still zangar and then the bone desert... with 65 and 66 there are some new instances like mana tomb, durnholde and so on.
this quest line is unfortunally only for enthusiasts...
Ravenswing Mar 16th 2008 8:23PM
"There's a lot you can do, and a painfully long grind for drops is the worst possible choice."
Not if you are a producer of an MMO and you want to have players logged on for hours and hours doing repetitive tasks to keep the subscriptions rolling in.
It's not inspired design, but it is absolutely typical design.
Harlequinné Mar 16th 2008 8:37PM
The only problem with the Arrakoa story is that is was implemented too late. By the time you could kick his feathers, people were already doing Kara / Gruul / SSC. A relatively long grind to epics isn't going to appeal to anyone.
And Silithus is peanuts compared to the long, hard slog to Timbermaw. Don't even start about stuffing 10 stacks of Kingsblood down a Dark Iron's throat.
garuktaag Mar 17th 2008 12:15AM
Silithus? Timbermaw? Thorium Brotherhood? Phfft!
Come back once you've ground your way to Exalted with Gelkis Clan Centaurs.
Peter Ellis Mar 17th 2008 3:53AM
This is content aimed fair and square at the (very large) section of the populace that don't do instances at all. So of course it has to be accessible via some kind of progressive process that can be completed in small chunks over a long time - i.e. a rep grind / collection grind. Did it come out too late to be interesting to the people who were raiding by then? Yes. Was it too late for its intended audience? No - they were only just getting to near level 70.
WoW has many audiences. This content appeals to some, but not to others. End of story. One of the stupidest things about the various fan sites and forums is the personal outrage that so many people seem to feel at the fact that there is content aimed at players with a different playstyle/availability from one's own.