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Ulduar: Defiance
2018-Dec-18, Tuesday 11:37
Two-and-a-half weeks off (more on that later), and so on this Tuesday morning and I'm sitting and rewatching Ulduar: Defiance, the World of Warcraft machinima about the Lich King raid Ulduar :
A decade ago, I remember eagerly waiting for each chapter of that to come out. It was the same time as my WoW guild, the Pig & Whistle Society
, was working our own way through Ulduar, so all the boss fights and quotes were constantly in my mind. To this day, it's my favorite instance in all of World of Warcraft, and those runs through Ulduar with my friends are some of my fondest memories of my six years of playing the game.
I got an addon later that let me bind in-game sounds to my skills, and of course I used Ulduar quotes: Freya's "Children, assist me!" to Force of Nature and Algalon's "The stars come to my aid" to Starfall.
Ulduar had a lot of problems from a lore perspective, of course. It's obvious that it suffers from the dropping of the iron dwarves plotline in favor of Yogg-Saron, since the first half is all about the Curse of Flesh and the armies of iron, and then suddenly there's tentacles everywhere. Tyr is nowhere to be seen (though apparently he shows up in later expansions?).
But I still think it's the best-designed raid Blizzard ever made because of the hard modes. The concept of a specific action needed to unlock a hard mode rather than just flipping a raid toggle was wonderful and it really let me get into Ulduar as a place rather than just a dungeon I was going into for the purps. The Assembly of Iron was easier or harder depending on what order the bosses were killed, Freya's servants empowered her and leaving them alive made her stronger, Mimiron was much harder if you started the battle by pressing the Big Red Button (my guild didn't really understand why the fight was so infamous until we tried hard mode and suddenly the whole room was on fire)...Blizzard even included the Archivium as an in-game way of determining each boss's specific hard-mode criteria, though of course we just looked it all up on Wowhead.
It's part of why I stopped playing WoW, the move away from it as a real place and toward a guided game experience. Hard mode toggles just weren't as interesting as unlocking hard modes, and exploring the world was a lot more fun than following the rails laid down by Blizzard. It's why I quit part-way through Cata and never really looked back.
Blizzard is bringing back Classic servers, and they're interesting to me but not decisive, but if they brought back a Lich King server? Well, well.
A decade ago, I remember eagerly waiting for each chapter of that to come out. It was the same time as my WoW guild, the Pig & Whistle Society
, was working our own way through Ulduar, so all the boss fights and quotes were constantly in my mind. To this day, it's my favorite instance in all of World of Warcraft, and those runs through Ulduar with my friends are some of my fondest memories of my six years of playing the game. I got an addon later that let me bind in-game sounds to my skills, and of course I used Ulduar quotes: Freya's "Children, assist me!" to Force of Nature and Algalon's "The stars come to my aid" to Starfall.
Ulduar had a lot of problems from a lore perspective, of course. It's obvious that it suffers from the dropping of the iron dwarves plotline in favor of Yogg-Saron, since the first half is all about the Curse of Flesh and the armies of iron, and then suddenly there's tentacles everywhere. Tyr is nowhere to be seen (though apparently he shows up in later expansions?).
But I still think it's the best-designed raid Blizzard ever made because of the hard modes. The concept of a specific action needed to unlock a hard mode rather than just flipping a raid toggle was wonderful and it really let me get into Ulduar as a place rather than just a dungeon I was going into for the purps. The Assembly of Iron was easier or harder depending on what order the bosses were killed, Freya's servants empowered her and leaving them alive made her stronger, Mimiron was much harder if you started the battle by pressing the Big Red Button (my guild didn't really understand why the fight was so infamous until we tried hard mode and suddenly the whole room was on fire)...Blizzard even included the Archivium as an in-game way of determining each boss's specific hard-mode criteria, though of course we just looked it all up on Wowhead.
It's part of why I stopped playing WoW, the move away from it as a real place and toward a guided game experience. Hard mode toggles just weren't as interesting as unlocking hard modes, and exploring the world was a lot more fun than following the rails laid down by Blizzard. It's why I quit part-way through Cata and never really looked back.
Blizzard is bringing back Classic servers, and they're interesting to me but not decisive, but if they brought back a Lich King server? Well, well.
