Guild Wars 2 is out, and apparently awesome. I’ll get it someday, money and time are tight at the moment, but in the meantime, Syl has some great comments up on the game. Others do too, I’m sure, I’ve just been out of the loop lately. GW2 is the sort of game that sounds like something I want to play (I loved the first one), I just… can’t. Not at the moment.
World of Warcraft‘s latest patch, 5.0.4, came out at the same time (the nefariousness!), and it’s apparently also amazingly awesome. I’ll play WoW again someday as well. Probably just by firing up my free account and making a Pandaran, though if I ever revisit my “paid” account, I’ll be happy to see some things like shared mounts and pets. My daughter will love that she can have her character access the pets I’ve collected on my Tishtoshtesh character.
Oh, and as an aside, I love that Hunters now have no minimum range on their ranged weapons, but the deletion of their melee potential makes me sad. I wish they had made the Survival tree into a melee-heavy Hunter, sort of like a Warhammer Online White Lion class. That might spawn a few hundred thousand more Drizzt clones though, I guess.
In the meantime, though, I wanted to share a couple of photos I found that reminded me of WoW. Y’see, sometimes it’s derided as being “too technicolor” or something of the sort. Well, so is my home state, sometimes. And it’s a blasted desert.
A Sea of Purple in the Badlands of Utah
And then there’s this mini-maelstrom in Hawaii… it’s not quite the size of Darkshore’s sinkhole or The WoW Maelstrom, but I think it looks a lot more impressive for its detail and energy. And that whole “it’s real” bit. (Another shot of the area over thisaway, also by Patrick Smith.)
Both of those were featured in this “best photos of 2012” list, which includes some other fantastic photographs. Go, peruse, enjoy!
When you’re done with that, you could go peruse the archives at the Astronomy Picture of the Day. There’s a ton of great stuff there. The shot from this morning even almost fits the theme, looking vaguely like a northern Azerothian badland, complete with some airglow fun.
…I wish I had more time for photography, too. I meant to go to some local ghost towns this summer and look for texture photos and other interesting shots. Alas, home repair/remodeling and other Stuff ate up my time… and none of those are even done yet. I probably ought to sleep sometime, too.
…so yeah, I hope you all are having fun in those MMO worlds. Take some screenshots for me, will you please?
I love stuff like that. It always reminds me that the real world is a far more weird place than any fiction or game can be. 🙂
Agreed. As much as I love coming up with crazy ideas, it’s more fun to *find* them in reality.
Here are some shots of my Human Warrior in GW2. This hardly shows the cool areas though.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wofi9tvw4iiu36h/j-gVQ9b4vg
We’ll be happy to see you in Tyria when you do get the chance to join up. You’re totally right about the real world inspirations behind so many game environments. It reminds me of how Medieval or Renaissance era Europeans assumed Chinese landscape paintings were highly stylized, when in fact they were accurate depictions of the Yangtze River valley and other places.
OH MY GOSH. My boss emailed this to my work email and I thought the exact same things, hahaha!!
Grizzly Hills has always reminded me of a visit to the coniferous forests of British Columbia when I was younger. I’ll always remember how beautiful it was out there, and so it’s no wonder that GH is one of my favorite zones in WoW.
GH is absolutely my favorite zone in WoW for those same reasons, though it was the California redwood forests for me.
Grizzly Hills is awesome. I grew up in Washington, and I miss the pine trees. I like the Utah mountains and red rock, though, so I’ll live. (And it turns out that I love pre-Cataclysm Thousand Needles, because it reminds me of Utah national parks.)
Eva Marie, nice! 🙂 Funny how that works out, eh?
Rowan, indeed. The Chinese landscapes have some really incredible vistas. I studied Chinese watercolors for a while, and a lot of Art History, and I have a lot of respect for the classical paintings of both East and West. More modernly, I’m reminded of the Chinese area that inspired the floating mountains in that Avatar movie. Um… here’s a link for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhangjiajie_National_Forest_Park
Thanks for sharing, hallamigo! I really do love the art style of the Guild Wars games.
I fired up my freebie WoW account on the weekend and discovered Starter/Trial accounts can now create Worgen and Goblins. Hooray! Okay, so it’s still the same old game as when I cancelled my Sub, but now I get to play through the Worgen and Goblin starting areas, experience their stories, etc.
To be honest, even though the content was new for me, it felt kind of old at the same time. Old as in repetitive, as in “Haven’t I done this numerous times before?” And I suppose I have. Enough times that even new content seems stale.
Yeah, most of the mechanics are unchanged, it’s just new places to see. That’s enough for me to have a bit of fun with it, to be sure, but not enough to really play for long.
…and I love the Worgen starting area. I have more fun in it when I can fly around Gilneas to take aerial screenshots, but still, it’s a well-crafted zone. It’s a big step up from the Tauren starting zone that introduced me to the game, years ago.
I remember reading about your experience in the Tauren area. I actually think Mulgore, at least before Cataclysm, was one of the more pleasant starting areas. Very bucolic, Arcadian even. Dare I say it: pastoral.
Oh, I still liked it, to be sure. It was just nice, clean and simple, perfect for the Tauren feel, I thought. Gilneas is just far more complex and has a lot more going on in it. It’s a step up in technical expertise, artistry and craftsmanship… but absolutely, that doesn’t mean Mulgore was bad. I still remember it fondly. I’m just a Tauren (Druid) kind of guy, I guess. I love the open spaces.
…which is weird, maybe, that I’d like Gilneas, but I do appreciate the artistry of it. It evokes a brooding Victorian feeling very well. Maybe it’s just the steampunk fan in me that really appreciates it (along with Gnomeregan… I imagine a fusion of the two would be fantastic). So I do like them both, quite a bit, just for different reasons.
Fantastic Real Life photos! They really look like they could have been screen shots from WoW fancied up in Photoshop to look very real.
~Mama Druid
Yeah, crazy, huh? It really makes me want to go out and take photographs. 🙂 I imagine a series of photos to reflect WoW locations… but I’m not quite *that* ambitious.