On death knights.
[spoiler warning: if you don’t want to know anything about Wrath of the Lich King before you play it, you should probably skip this post. Riff, that means you.]
So I have a death knight now. It’s sort of a new class option, except that all the other classes are on the side of Good and death knights are on the side of Evil. They have their own starting area, a big ol’ evil bunker deal hovering over a town full of the Good Guys who oppose them - well, I say Good Guys, but every time I run into any on my Side of Good characters, they scream something about my taint and how they want to twist my nethers and then they all run at me with their weapons and try to kill me, so who even knows what is up with these guys. Y’all are just nutballs, Scarlet Crusade. Stay away from my taint.
As a death knight, I report to the titular Lich King, who apparently has nothing better to do than hang around the starting area giving people their first quest. I have to say I was surprised to see him, since on the Good Side he is the End Boss, the Ultimate Big Scary Bad Mans (Riff and I caught a glimpse of his astral-projection deal once after killing a boss, and that was neat as hell) and my hunter won’t get anywhere near him until she’s got seven more levels and assloads of gear upgrades and played through the entire game and then the guild will get together with thirty other people who have also done this and we will fight our way through his dungeon (probably dying a bunch of times) and then, only then, will we be in the presence of the Lich King, so seeing him first thing on my death knight (“Oh, hey, thanks for coming. Call me Artie. Runeforge is in the back, holler if you need anything”) was maybe just a shade anticlimactic. (You’d think he’d have people for that. He’s got me, after all; I could do that. I would be very good at that actually.)
As one of my first quests, I was sent into a village to kill X number of people while they screamed at me to stop killing them because they had children. (It is a good thing that never ever works, or we’d be even more overpopulated than we already are.) “Please don’t kill me!” they’d beg. “You don’t have to do this!” No mercy, the Lich King would whisper in my chat window. Honestly, it made me feel sort of horrible.
Here’s the thing, though: the difference between that quest and just about every quest I’ve ever gotten on my Good Side characters is that the things they send the Good Guys to kill don’t lay guilt trips. With a smallish number of exceptions, every quest in the World of Warcraft falls into one of these categories:
Kill X number of dudes. You don’t have any reasons of your own to be killing these dudes, it’s just that someone has come to the difficult moral conclusion that they need some exterminating, and is offering you a reward if you’ll do it so they don’t have to.
Get X number of things that drop off dudes when you kill them. In this case the dudes don’t necessarily need to die themselves, but it’s all right if they do; the important thing is their stuff. Going up to them and explaining that you need six Moonfrost Crystal Idols, you don’t care who dies in the process, and you have already taken out half of their town without actually managing to sustain any damage is, somehow, never an option.
Pick up X number of things off of the ground. You would think you’d be able to do this without killing anybody, but the things you want are generally surrounded by dudes who absolutely insist that you slaughter them. Every aggressive mob in the game (unless they happen to be much higher level than you are) is effectively suicidal, actually. They see you bending over trying to gather Filthy Murkpods or whatever it is you’re doing, note that you are eight levels higher than they are, in full plate armor, with a giant axe named Skullthwap Deathbringer on your back, while they themselves are completely naked and armed with a stick that seemed really pointy when they left the house but now they’re not so sure, and instead of being pants-wettingly grateful that you are busy gathering murkpods and have no interest in murdering them, and seizing the opportunity to get the fuck away from you, they run up and poke you with their stick. If you ignore them, and try to walk away, they will follow you, poking you with their little poky stick, interrupting your murkpod gathering, demanding that you kill them, until finally you go “ALL RIGHT ALREADY I’LL KILL YOU!” and hit them with your axe. Once. Maybe twice.
Same deal with “go somewhere and check out this thing” quests and “use this thing I gave you on this other thing” quests. It’s technically possible to be a pacifist in the World of Warcraft, but hot damn would it be annoying.
Honestly the death knight content squicked me out a little bit. I still want to play it, but I don’t know if I can condone it, morally, which is really sad because I have like three morals and two of them are just mispellings of “molar” and live in my mouth. Then again, the Good Guys are also amoral psychos… what a terrible game!
The walrus dudes are cool, though.
11 months ago