Oh dear, Vashj'ir

This post contains spoilers about the storyline of Vashj'ir, as well as a plethora of negative opinions. If you haven't finished Vashj'ir or you prefer to read optimistic and constructive posts, you have been warned.

Apparently, overly opinionated posts criticizing Cataclysm's content are all the rage in the blogosphere these days. Of course, I'm in no position to judge Cataclysm as a whole, which presents a bit of a problem when writing one of those total review posts. I have yet to experience the 5-man content and will probably never experience the raid content, and PvP hasn't interested me in years, so I haven't experienced fighting in Tol Barad, The Battle for Gilneas, or Twin Peaks. What I have experienced is every zone's one-time quests and all of the daily quests (Alliance side, anyway), as well as Archeology, but being that I have already given my thoughts on the latter (though I have taken a decidedly more neutral view on it since then), it is the former to which I shall turn my discerning eye this week. And by discerning, I mean incredibly subjective and opinionated, so get your grain of salt ready before you start reading today.

Got it? Good. Now, I was originally going to write a post about all of the zones, including the daily quests in their own section, but I had so much to say about Vashj'ir that I had to give the zone it's own post, so I plan to put the other zones under the lens on Wednesday. Without further ado, let's get to my very opinionated review of Cataclysm's underwater zone.

It's something of a tradition in video games that if a game contains a water-based level, it's going to be the least fun level in the game. There are many reasons for this: if swimming isn't an integral part of the game otherwise, a physics engine for swimming may need to be thrown together for just that level, which will likely lead to that engine being sub-par due the limited amount of use it will actually get. Breath gauges are also a nuisance, as is the often low visibility in water levels. Blizzard managed to avoid these common pratfalls when they designed Vashj'ir thanks to the fact that WoW has always had swimming, so we are used to navigating water, and thanks to the sea legs buff, which does away with the breath gauge, and the Abyssal Seahorse mount, which largely does away with the limited mobility typical of a virtual aquatic environment. Which is why it's such a shame that Vashj'ir was the zone I liked least out of all of Cataclysm's zones.

Maybe it's the zone's size. Vashj'ir is the only zone in Cataclysm's high level content that had to be split into multiple subzones--and three of them, at that--and moving around in these huge zones became tiresome at times (especially the latter quests in Darkbreak Cove). Maybe it was the lack of any grounding aspect of the zone's storyline. Moving from shelter to shelter without any constant base that could be considered the main outpost of the zone made the whole zone feel very disconnected. Vashj'ir is the only Cataclysm zone (to my knowledge) that will send you to a different part of the zone, depending on where you are in the quest lines, when you use its portal in the capital cities, and that becomes disorienting, especially since the caves all look the same, as do many of the environments, beautiful though they may be. This leads to the zone not having many landmarks that give us a definite sense of where we are, which doesn't help things.

But maybe, just maybe, what makes Vashj'ir so unenjoyable is the impossibility of creating the mood that Vashj'ir is trying to create. From the moment the boat sinks on the ride over, it's clear that Blizzard's intention with Vashj'ir was to create a zone where we are constantly on the run, ducking for cover in an environment where we are out of our element, while being constantly surrounded by foes who would love nothing more than to rip us to shreds. And yet, as they are trying to create that mood, there is nothing preventing me from swimming to the land in the zone, mounting up, and flying out of there, or better yet, hearthstoning back to Stormwind. Was I supposed to be in danger or something?

Now, Mount Hyjal is similar to Vashj'ir in a lot of ways, in that we are constantly moving throughout the zone and the zone tries to create a sense of urgency on the part of the player. I'll go over this zone more in another post, but the reason the creation of tension works in Mount Hyjal and not in Vashj'ir is that Mount Hyjal's tension is much more feasible to maintain. In both zones, the enemy is supposedly right on our doorstep, a threat we need to face immediately. In Mount Hyjal, there are earth elementals right in the front lawn of the zone's main hub, so this sense is created successfully. In Vashj'ir, these enemies are often far away, and though their numbers are supposedly imposing and dangerous, they rarely are if we actually go an have a look at them. In other words, in Mount Hyjal, Blizzard successfully followed the mantra of "show, don't tell", whereas in Vashj'ir, that was not the case.

And as for the sense of urgency, in Hyjal, that sense of urgency is created by the fact that the mountain is on fire. If we leave the zone, it will continue to burn, though we may now be safe. As such, though we can leave the zone and its problems with little difficulty, its conflict still remains. As for Vashj'ir, I get the distinct feeling that the zone is trying to create tension by implying that you yourself are in danger by being stranded in the zone, but if you hearth or fly out, oh look, problem solved! Sure, the soldiers of your faction and the Earthen Ring might still be in trouble, but again, the zone depends too heavily on telling us that our allies are in danger without ever showing us how they are in danger. Do these naga that we need to be afraid of ever storm the caves we get our quests from? Do they send out scouting parties to see if we have become a threat yet? Nope, they just leave us alone, and whatever tension that could be drawn from this situation is diffused by the fact that the zone just tries too hard to create it, breaking the tension by exceeding the capabilities of text-based tension creation.

Then there's the zone's length. It's bad enough that the zone doesn't create the kind of tension that can keep me interested in the storyline, but it then drags me through that tension-less chore for longer than any other zone in the game expects me to stay within its boarders. If Cataclysm's one-time quests werre like a novel with five chapters, the only one that wouldn't have any kind of suspense or tension would also happen to be the longest one. A lack of tension compared to other parts of the story can make anything seem to drag on, even if it isn't longer than the other parts of the work in question, but Vashj'ir has the double wammy of seeming to drag on due to its lack of tension and actually dragging on because it is so much longer than the other zones. For members of the Horde to get the quest achievement for Vashj'ir, they need to do 25 more quests than they need to to get the achievement for the next longest zone. The Alliance have it even worse, needing to do thirty five more quests to get their achievement, making Vashj'ir almost a third longer than any other zone in Cataclysm for the Alliance. Unbearably long, and boring, to boot. Oy vey.

And then there's the ending of the zone's storyline. I'm not even going to bother talking about that submarine ride that made Crime and Punishment feel like a haiku and forced you to watch the battle as your sub-mates narrated the fact that you were losing because the battle itself was so uninspired in its design that you really can't tell who's winning and who's losing (there's that "telling instead of showing" problem again). Or the inexplicable hole in the bottom of that submarine (or maybe it was a different one; I can't differentiate between the submarines when I remember them) that invites you by its very presence to go for a swim, only to deposit you in the ocean if you should swim too deep, with the submarine moving too quickly for you to catch up and get back in. No, let's just get right to the ending.

After losing the battle, Erunak is pulled into the breach by a mysterious tentacle and your commander follows. Without actually giving you a definite prompt to follow your commander into the Abyssal Maw, the quest simply leaves you outside of the rift, with no one around, abandoning you in the deepest, most desolate part of the most disconnected-from-the-rest-of-the-world zone in the game. It's about as lonely as WoW can possibly make you feel, and that's how this chore of a zone ends: an empty ending to a tension-less story. And if you do follow your commander into the Maw, you have to enter an instance to continue the story. So you are left with an exceptionally unsatisfying ending: you have been defeated in battle, your allies are nowhere to be found, and you have to do an instance to finish the story. If you wanted to move on to the next zone's quests after finishing Vashj'ir, too bad; go into that dungeon and find out what happens!

And speaking of moving on to the next zone, I think I should do that mentally, because all of this accentuating the negative isn't good for my psyche. So let me conclude by saying that if you are still working through Northrend, Outland, or even the remade vanilla content and you still have to make the "Hyjal vs. Vashj'ir" choice, choose Hyjal. The only reason to go to Vashj'ir is for the extra gold, Earthen Ring rep, and quest rewards to disenchant. On Wednesday, shall I move on to Mount Hyjal, and perhaps another zone or two if I don't have enough to say about Mount Hyjal alone.