The Stack

I’ve been spending some time in goblin lands. I’ve been doing this because goblin NPCs are the most entertaining company of all the playable races. They’re also one of the newest playable races, having come in with Cataclysm. I suspect that these two things are connected — that, now that WoW is such a proven money-maker, the team behind it is granted whatever resources they need to polish the new content to a glossy sheen. (Not that you’ll find a glossy sheen anywhere in goblin territory.) Now, I haven’t bought Cataclysm, and therefore I can’t actually play a goblin character. But the expansion has effects in the core game, probably in part as a way of advertising the expansion.

I don’t really know what role goblins played in the game before Cataclysm, but I assume it’s greatly expanded since then. I was kind of wondering how they would be plausibly powerful here: the D&D goblin, after all, is basically just one of the lower steps on the Evil Humanoid ladder, right above kobolds and below orcs. But in fact, Blizzard had established a precedent for goblins back in Warcraft II, where they drew less from D&D and more from Magic: the Gathering, which gave them access to crude explosives and balloons and similar unreliable, prone-to-backfire technologies. WoW takes that further, making them not just figures of slapstick violence with lots of explosions, but also Azeroth’s masters of industrial technology.

Note that WoW already had a diminutive, technologically-oriented race on the Alliance side: gnomes. Adding goblins as a player race is something of a step towards symmetry. Just how much symmetry there should be between Horde and Alliance seems to be something that Blizzard has seesawed about for a long time. (In the original Warcraft, the two sides were exactly equivalent modulo graphics until you reached the point where the more powerful spellcasters were available.) Gnomes and goblins are very different in style, though. Gnomes are portrayed as craftsmen who create marvelous clockwork devices. Goblins are more into fossil fuels, explosions, and despoiling the environment. Gnomish devices tick and whirr; goblin contraptions shudder and belch fumes. Every playable race has a special type of mount that characters of at least level 20 can buy and ride: the humans’ horses, the skeletal steeds of the undead, the wolves of the orcs. Gnomes get gleaming mechanical chocobos. Goblins get little three-wheeled go-karts with exposed engines. One of the first things you see when you exit Orgrimmar in the direction of goblin territory is a bunch of ungainly goblin-piloted mechs with buzzsaws for hands, busily clear-cutting the forest so they can strip mine the hills it’s on. Their disregard for nature is rivaled only by their disregard for personal safety. If you bring a goblin an unknown device as part of a quest, chances are that they’re going to poke and prod it until until it explodes in their face. There’s one quest where a lab accident set a bunch of goblins on fire, and they just run around on fire indefinitely.

The really important thing to understand about goblins, though, is that they speak with New York accents and Pesci-esque verbiage. This underscores the despoiling-of-nature part again — just as New Yorkers are content to live on an island that’s been almost completely paved over, so too would goblins pave the world if there’s a buck in it for them, or if they thought it would look neat. But more importantly, the mode of speech suggests an attitude, even an ethos. Goblins aren’t just ravening maniacs, they’re beings who do what they do because it fits their sense of cool. It’s just that their sense of cool involves heedlessness of consequences. This is probably also why they generally have the most aggressive style of communication, all “Whaddaya want?” and “You want a piece of me?”, even when addressing being three times their height.

As industrialists, the goblins are naturally also the Horde’s masters of commerce, and their various faction names all have words like “company” or “cartel” where other races would have “order” or “kingdom”. Looking over the special features of player-controlled goblins, I see the connection is made even more strongly there: goblins get discounts at stores and can access the bank from anywhere. Taken in combination with the accent, and given the treatment given to Tauren and Trolls, my first reaction is that they’re drawing from Jewish stereotypes. I’m certainly not the first to suggest this, either. But a quick google suggests that not everyone sees it: on forums where someone suggests it, it’s generally followed by vociferous denials and accusations of trolling (which are probably accurate). Let’s just say that nothing in WoW is just a racial stereotype, and that goblins definitely have stereotypical attributes all their own, apart from any real-world inspirations. It does, however, strike me as particularly problematic in this context that the goblins as seen in Warcraft II were suicide bombers. That was all very abstract at the time, but throw in identifiably ethnic attributes, and it retroactively starts smelling political. If I ever design a CRPG, I think I’ll leave out an explicit “race” mechanic just to avoid this kind of thing.

I spent a little while creating new characters to see if there was anything I liked better than the undead warlock. The short answer: no, not yet. Perhaps my first (and still longest) experiences with the game have colored my perception of how it should be played? Do most people stick with their first choice? I didn’t bother advancing any of my experiments beyond level 5, so I suppose I haven’t really seen the possibilities at their best. But then, a more dedicated and knowledgeable player than myself informs me that the classes only start really playing substantially differently at around level 30.

The first alternative I tried was a troll rogue. That’s one that I pretty definitely won’t be taking to level 30. Not because of the rogue part — I didn’t really play long enough to see it diverge noticeably from vanilla fighter, and will have to try another rogue sometime to see how the stealth mechanics work — but because of the troll part. The characterization of playable trolls came as surprise to me; somehow, it isn’t one of the parts of WoW that’s managed to seep into the public consciousness. Playable trolls in WoW are jungle-dwellers, or perhaps beach-dwellers to judge by their starting area, which is full of grass huts and tiki idols. And they talk with Jamaican accents. Not only that, their Jamaican accents are transcribed phonetically in their printed dialogue. And that gets right up my nose, because it reminds me too much of one of the things I hated the most about Everquest. My primary character in EQ was an ogre, and thus spent a fair amount of time interacting with other ogres down in Ogreopolis ¹Not its real name; I don’t remember what Ogreopolis was really called. Ogres were supposed to be dim-witted, so signposts and other written materials tended to be misspelled, and a lot of players took this as a cue to misspell things a lot in their spoken text. And it got worse over time. The signposts were at least comprehensible, but the ogre community left them behind and continually upped the bar in their abuses, seemingly competing to see whose dialogue would take the most effort to decipher. I doubt that the troll players in WoW have taken things to that extent, but the memories make me wince every time I see words like “dese tings” pop up in the dialogue window. It’s something I’d like to avoid, and thus, troll NPCs are also things I’d like to avoid. It doesn’t help matters that they also have gangly frames and long ears, which combine with the accent for a Jar Jar Binks flashback.

The more familiar attributes of Orcs, by contrast, give me nothing other than a thrill of recognition. These are the first things in the game that I’ve felt were clearly modeled on the original Warcraft. They have spiky, thatched watchtowers! They have workers who say “Zug-zug”! They have pig farms! They’re also the only things I’ve heard say “For the Horde”, which I don’t remember from Warcraft, but which is such a familiar WoW catchphrase that it’s nice to finally hear it, to solidify the impression that I’m playing the game I’ve heard so much about. This was pleasant enough that I actually made two orc characters, a warrior and a mage. The only real drawback I’ve found to orcs so far is that they have a certain number of troll NPCs hanging around.

The mage worried me a little, because, unlike the warlock, it doesn’t get an automatic pet, and therefore nothing other than friends to draw the enemies away. Apparently mages eventually get spells to freeze enemies in place, but I didn’t get that far, and had to just overpower them with damage, which they seem to be capable of dealing pretty quickly at low levels. The one interesting mechanic I found for the mage was that for the spell Arcane Missiles, which costs no mana to use, but which you can’t cast at will; sometimes in combat you just see a bracket appear on the screen indicating that your Arcane Missiles are ready now. I’m not completely clear on what triggers this, and all that the various WoW websites seem to say is that it’s a “proc”, without explaining what that means.

The warrior class turns out to have a somewhat interesting overarching mechanism: Rage. Rage is like mana, in that it powers various of the Warrior’s special attacks, but unlike mana, it doesn’t just build up over time. By default, it decays; most combats begin with your rage meter empty. You fill it up by fighting. Thus, it’s a mechanic that forces you to not start off with your most powerful moves, kind of like limit breaks. It also provides a motivation to immediately seek out a new enemy once combat is over, so that all the rage you’ve built up doesn’t go to waste. I suppose this isn’t the only game that has a mechanism like this, but it was nice to see it on a melee specialist, which could be pretty bland otherwise.

One thing that was really striking about the experience of creating several characters in a short span of time was how difficult it was to come up with names. (The character creation screen has a button that will generate a random name for you, but where’s the fun in that?) I mean, it was difficult coming up with the name of my warlock, in that it was a decision I agonized over. But with these new guys, it was different: I just found it difficult to come up with a name that wasn’t already taken. I must have just got lucky with “Pleasance”, which was a first attempt. As I kept failing, I tried sillier and sillier things, eventually realizing that all the silly character names I had seen on other players were a product of exactly what I was going through.

So, here I am again, making repeated posts about my failure to make progress in a turn-based fantasy strategy game. I’ve started the other campaign in the hope that this will help. There are four four sides in the conflict, but in campaign mode, they’ve divided into two alliances, so you have the red/black campagin and the green/blue campaign. I had started out on the green/blue (or Vitals/Kinets, as the game calls them), which gives you just green heroes on the first two maps and switches to blue on map 3. The red/black (Chaots/Synthets) campaign similarly starts you out red, and switches to black on the third map. How it goes after that, I still don’t know.

It’s not at all unusual for strategy games to provide two or more separate campaigns, so you can play as both the good guys and the bad guys — although, as I’ve pointed out, there aren’t really any good guys in Etherlords. How the different outcomes are reconciled varies from game to game: some, like Command & Conquer, treat them as alternate and exclusive events resulting in the complete victory of whichever side you played, while others, like Starcraft, treat them as happening one after the other. The original Warcraft was notable for providing two campaigns that seem like they both end the war in victory, and thus are incompatible, but if you were paying close attention, you realized that they could in fact be taking place simultaneously — and indeed, the sequel is predicated on the consequences of the final missions of both sides.

In a game with asymmetric sides, providing multiple campaigns is also a way to give the solo player the full experience, letting them use everything and have everything used against them. And the sides in Etherlords do play rather differently in combat mode: blue has cheap flying units, red has lots of direct-damage spells, and so forth. (I’ll have to do a fuller post on the differences, once I have a better handle on black.) But combat mode isn’t really where I’m having problems. It’s in the strategic map that I can’t seem to get things organized fast enough, and that’s basically the same for both sides, apart from the graphics. Still, playing as black, and seeing what tactics I fall to as black, might give me some ideas about tactics to use against black. Better tactics could mean that I could challenge the high-level heroes earlier.