Speak up, Ramkahen!

It seems Uldum has become the new acceptable target for the blogosphere. From my own post on the motivation dissonance of the place to Spinksville's post on the zone to Murloc Parliament's post about keeping Nazi's out of WoW, there are plenty of negative opinions going on about poor ol' Uldum. Now, I for one found the zone to be pretty enjoyable (though it did have two bad cases of "incomplete storyline" syndrome due to questlines continuing into dungeons); though some people would prefer that WoW take itself more seriously and not reference pop culture as much as it does, I, for one, enjoyed the Harrison Jones quest line. But as for the Ramkahen questline, I found myself decidedly unopinionated. There was nothing wrong with the quests themselves, as far as I'm concerned, but they all felt a little bit empty. And upon reflection, I think they felt empty because I really didn't care all that much about the Ramkahen themselves.

From the beginning of Uldum, the Ramkahen aren't really given much of an introduction. Here is this new race of beings that we have never encountered before, entrenched in a war we have no context for, and upon helping one of them escape the same prison we find ourselves in (one I was able to fly in and out of with no difficulty), we immediately side with them and help them fight their conflict. Yet several questions are left unanswered before we start helping them. Who are these cat people? Where did they come from? Why are they fighting who they are fighting? The exposition on the Ramkahen is decidedly sparse, and though we get some idea of who they are as we fight for them, they never really struck me as sentient beings. Oh sure, they give us quests, buy and sell things to us, and even speak in cutscenes, but something about the Ramkahen prevented me from conceptualizing them as people (by the loosest definition of the term; in fact, let's just go with "humanoids". Something that had made me able to empathize with Sporeggar, with the Sons of Hodir, and with other clearly non-human factions was missing in the case of the Ramkahen.

Maybe it was their models; the Ramkahen's bodies just don't look at all natural to me. I find them to be too top heavy; whenever I look at one, he looks like there should be no way for him to support himself, especially with all their support centered behind their torso due to their centaur-like structure. Their animations don't seem all that natural, either; when they move, a whole lot of their body stays still, and they seem to glide rather than walk or run. But even greater than these issues I have with the models is how difficult it is to see their faces. The face is where we look when we are trying to connect with another human, and something about the Ramkahen's models make finding that face and connecting with it difficult. Maybe it's the absence of any perceivable neck, or even a distinct head. Whatever it is, whenever I looked at the Ramkahen with my camera zoomed out to a normal distance, I just saw a body, with no real face or head to speak of. Sure, they're creations of the titans who probably fell victim to the curse of the flesh, and if they were created by the titans rather than natural selection, it might be permissible for them to have body structure that isn't exactly natural. But Dwarves and Gnomes are in the same boat in terms of being titan creations that fell victim to the curse of the flesh, and they look natural enough.

But even worse than their models, even worse than the fact that they come right out of nowhere and we are expected to accept them and ally with them, is the fact that they are completely silent. I don't mean that they never communicate with us; they certainly do, with their quests and all. What I mean is that they never make any audible sounds. I just have no idea what a member of the Ramkahen sounds like. Even in battle, they make no sounds other than the clang of their weapons. No grunts, no utterations of any kind, just their silent existence. Most other friendly NPCs make some sort of noise when you click on them, but the Ramkahen do not, and I never realized how important those simple sounds were until I clicked on the members of Ramkahen and got nothing. When the game featured that cutscene of the three advisers talking to the king, I had no idea what kind of voice to put to those words because I had no idea what the Ramkahen sounded like. And with no voice to put to their words, they seemed much less human...oid to me. If anything, they seem more like Beasts, and I just can't conceptualize a faction of beasts.