Posts with tag exploration

Blizzard CM Crithto has temporarily abandoned his laps of Stormwind Keep to lay down a challenge in the forums. A few days ago, player Carianate posted a great thread discussing all the Easter eggs and little surprises they'd found while out exploring Pandaria as they waited for their queues to pop.

CM Crithto then popped his head into the thread to lay down a challenge to its readers:

Crithto

Any of you explorers find the in-game reference to something that happened in the Mists of Pandaria trailer?

source

WoW Insider is way ahead of the game on this little challenge, which even has an achievement associated with it, Restore Balance. Our very own Anne Stickney wrote a guide to completing the achievement, so huge detail here isn't necessary, and I don't want to completely spoil Crithto's challenge for those who haven't found this yet! Suffice it to say that it's well worth doing, it's a wonderful view, and it's really fun to head up there and see Pandaria just as it was in the trailer.

What cool little things have you found? What fun little easter eggs have surprised and delighted you? If you're looking for pop culture references, and aren't the sort to go exploring the world without a map, the lovely Panser put a video guide together for people just like you.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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It is a difficult balance, you know, writing a guessing game like this. It's a bit like the difficult balance facing developers of computer games. You don't want to make a challenge so utterly impossible that the majority of people feel excluded, but neither do you want to make it so easy that everyone guesses it within a few seconds! But who am I kidding -- I'm not Blizzard!

I am, however, impressed with your speed and accuracy in guessing the last Where in Warcraft installment. DavidSikes, almost to my annoyance, had it within moments of posting! Good job, DavidSikes. You win a cave near Ahn'Qiraj and the respect of the girl who writes this feature. (The last one is a rather dubious reward, let me tell you.)

Anyhow, as the Foo Fighters sang in All My Life, on, on, on to the next one. The above screenshot was kindly submitted by Trakand of The Maelstrom (EU). Thanks very much, Trakand. And before you yell "faction bias," this scene is out in the world for anyone to find. And that's all I'm saying about it. Or it'll be guessed in all of three seconds again.

So you know the rules: I have to be able to find my way to this location with your instructions. I'm also adding a new rule to avoid situations like we had a while ago: Your guess has to be in a new post, not a reply to another post. Otherwise, it's impossible for me to know who guessed first! That leads to unfair decisions, and nobody likes those.

In other news, in England, Where's Waldo? is called Where's Wally?

There seems to be something different about exploration achievement in Mists of Pandaria, and it's different in a really amazing way. To date, all exploration achievements in WoW have involved simply uncovering areas on your map. While that's fine for viewing scenery, it lacks a certain something, doesn't it? Well, the exploration achievements in Pandaria are taking a wholly different path. Hidden away in different areas of Pandaria are shrines like the one pictured above. Each tells a different piece of a story, and each piece that you find unlocks part of the overall achievement.

These don't quite seem to be a replacement for uncovering zone maps so much as an addition to them. The stories found in the different areas involve various parts of Pandaria's history. Considering the fact that Pandaria's been shrouded in mists for 10,000 years, we don't really know a lot of that history at all. These shrines and their associated achievements are a wonderful way for lore hounds out there to find out all they can about Pandaria's past.

What's more interesting is that there seems to be a new tracker for multi-objective achievements like this one. Each time you find a shrine, a faint window will pop up and notify you that you've completed a step in the achievement's objective. Once it's completed in full, you'll get the full-on burst of light that you usually see with an achievement's success.

This is a great way to integrate lore and exploration into something new and fun for players that really love the lore of the game. While these achievements are all marked as Not Yet Implemented, they seem to be tracking progress already. The one and only plaintive request I have is that completing these achievements give the player a specific reward -- a book that contains the full story that they've just completed discovering. What can I say? I like books!

Whether or not these achievements will actually be implemented is up in the air, but I hope that they are. Searching for hidden shrines has become just as much fun as questing through the zones themselves.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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The question of whether flying mounts may have ruined Azeroth is a hard question for me to even posit, because I love flying mounts. I love being able to fly right over things that annoy me, drop right in on quest objectives and soar right out again. I loved that we could finally fly in Azeroth when Cataclysm shipped, and I was absolutely in favor of being able to use my flying mount to skip over stuff I disliked when questing and leveling up.

But it's worth considering: Did that convenience that I so love come at too high a cost? Did being able to fly over obstacles keep me from appreciating how much detail went into the zones? Did it ruin world exploration, something that a lot of players got a lot of enjoyment out of for a great deal of vanilla WoW's run? Did incorporating flying mounts into Azeroth, in addition to forcing a complete redesign of the world, also end up stripping out interesting and cool places you had to really work at to find and visit? Let's discuss the pros and cons.

Are you in the beta for Mists of Pandaria yet? Are you fastidiously avoiding spoilers about all beta-related content? As a site that covers Warcraft news, you'll find more often than not that we have a lot of content up on the site that could be considered spoilers. And if you're someone who's avoiding all that spoiler content, it can get a little frustrating to have to keep scrolling past all that information -- or even more frustrating, dealing with the temptation that all of the spoiler information you could ever want to indulge, just behind that click.

Well, that's not what this article is about. It's about the beta, but it's a spoiler-free look at the beta. You'll see some screenshots, but mostly what you'll be reading is what the beta is like. No spoilers of cool story information or anything of that nature here -- just information on Mists, how it looks, how it's shaping up, and what to expect in the event that you do get a beta invite and would like to indulge.