I did a book review! I don’t want to spoil it for people just scrolling by, so find it here.
World of Warcraft
Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #26 – Be Cool, Fellow Nerds (16/7/19)
Life at the time of writing
World: Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
Gaming: Gods & Monsters has elements of Assassin’s Creed, but is more ‘lighthearted’
I’m playing: World of Warcraft, Apex Legends, Super Mario Maker 2
“At first, Taurens didn’t get mounts. They instead got the Plainsrunning ability, which made you serve as your own mount, sort of. You’d have to build up a gallop by running around without being hit, and you’d move faster and faster until eventually, you’d reach a top speed which would match the top speed of any other mounted race,” MadSeasonShow explains. “So as you’d imagine, it gave an unfair advantage in PvP since you could just run circles around people. As long as you could kite, it was like being able to attack while you were on a mount, making Tauren Hunters quite the force to be reckoned with.” I slowly take another bite of my pasty, eyes wide. I am enthralled.
A few months ago, when all of the Game of Thrones controversy was spewing itself across the web, some of the worst offenders with their vitriol were criticised for making the show a part of themselves. In theory, the problem with them was that they considered themselves such devoted fans to the show that they’d made it a part of their personality – of their clothing, their go-to references in conversation, that sort of thing. And while I am very much in the camp of disliking people who went on tirades about the show ending badly, I also find that idea troublesome, because as detailed above, I very much do make certain things that I love a part of my identity.
I’m sat here in my free time, watching a Youtube video that explores the history of every World of Warcraft patch from beta til now, and I love it. I have a 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition of the game arriving in a few months complete with a statue of one of the game’s first end-of-raid bosses. It is absolutely a part of who I am. But when the game sucks, as it inevitably sometimes does, I don’t take to the forums and screech at the developers about it. It is possible to make something which you love a part of yourself and to also forgive its flaws. In fact, I’d argue that if you truly do see it as part of who you are, you’re more likely to do so.
The thing is… I get it. I unsubscribed from r/WoW after the launch of the latest expansion because I was getting whiplash from seeing the community praise the shit out of a game and then go right back around to saying that it’s always been terrible when something they didn’t like happened a few months later. I unsubscribed from r/Forza a month after Forza Horizon 4 released as, despite it being an extremely well made and well received game, people found gripes and nitpicks and escalated them into world-ending issues even there. And you could say that my mistake would be thinking that reddit is a viable place to discuss things we enjoy, and at this point I don’t think I’d disagree with you. But maybe the difference between me, who sees WoW as being part of my identity, and a screeching internet scrotum who sees WoW as part of their identity, is that I also browsed r/Forza and r/Destiny and a variety of other communities. Maybe the problem isn’t people who make things part of their identity, but people who make things their entire identity.
Maybe it’s dumb to make an entire journal entry based on the semantics of an argument that circled the internet two months ago. I don’t know. It just felt like people were going “Oh, it’s the nerds who are angry,” and as someone who quite demonstrably falls into that category I felt a little alarmed at the prospect of nerds being viewed in a negative light again. Damnit, guys, comic book movies are mainstream right now! Don’t ruin this!
Anyway, I don’t know how future Kristian is doing but it looks like my two year streak of working two jobs unsustainably is finally coming to an end. What’s that, this should have been the main topic of today’s journal entry? Well, yeah, I guess. I’ve already written it though, so…
Further reading (this section almost never includes reading does it)
Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #14 – Quantifiable Magic (22/4/19)
Recent headlines
World: Extinction Rebellion: Climate change protesters at Natural History Museum
We’re two episodes into the last season of Game of Thrones from my perspective, and I think I’ve decided that it’s my favourite fantasy universe. This sounds like an easy opinion due to its overwhelming popularity, but remember that I’m a fantasy enthusiast who has sunk literally thousands of hours into World of Warcraft over the years. I always thought Warcraft was my favourite fantasy, but the more I experience the World of Ice and Fire, the more I come to respect how little magic is used. It’s never used overtly in the show, barring the existence of dragons and the undead, and that allows power struggles and grand battles to be more relatable, whereas magic in Warcraft is less quantifiable and therefore harder to measure in a fight. The latest expansion’s war campaign sees players enacting magical strategies and countermeasures to turn the tide of battle, and I can’t help but feel that the ability to fling goblin shredders into void elf black holes is nonsensical in a story which emphasises a need for a naval advantage. If I ever do write a fantasy novel, I’ll try to bear this in mind.
I’ve just had a week off, so I don’t have all that much to discuss, bar the works of fiction I’ve been absorbed in. As an introvert, I typically don’t go out much, even when I’ve booked time off, and sometimes I get a little self conscious about that. The truth is, though, that I’m perfectly happy sat at my PC, maybe gaming with friends, maybe binging a series. This week I caught up on World of Warcraft while listening to podcasts. I also had a friend over so I could show them Labo VR, and went to my sister’s for Easter. It was pretty chill! It’s just not the kind of thing you can stretch out for 600 words. Let’s meet back here next week, okay?
Further reading:
The Weekly Deathmatch #52 – Overwatch – A Year of WDM in Hindsight
Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #9 – Everything Old is New Again (18/3/19)
Recent headlines:
World: Third Brexit vote must be different – Speaker (Just expect Brexit headlines for the next few weeks, I guess)
Gaming: Halo: The Master Chief Collection devs were sent far too much pizza by fans (IT’S HAPPENING!!! Future Kristian, I am SO jealous of you!)
I’m watching the livestream reveal for Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC in a public bathroom, with the sound off, squinting at the hosts and wondering if now would be an opportune moment to learn how to lipread. Only a few minutes go by, however, before a very obvious trailer appears on the screen for the game. It’s only when the Steam logo appears at the end that I discover that the stall next to me is also occupied, by the type of person who lets out a discreet cough when their cubicle neighbour hisses “yes!” and pumps the air for seemingly no reason.
Well, maybe I’d just had a really fantastic poo, Steve. Don’t judge.
Nowadays I’m lucky enough to own a good gaming PC, a PS4 and a Nintendo Switch, leaving only the Xbox base untouched. The only Xbox exclusives I’ve ever been interested in, however, are Forza, Sunset Overdrive, Crackdown, maybe Gears of War – and Halo. Halo, most of all. With the announcement of the Master Chief Collection for PC, I no longer feel restricted by any kind of system boundaries, which is the kind of childhood dream that feels wonderful to finally fulfil. Part of my dream came true a few years ago when Destiny 2 was announced for PC, Destiny being the successor IP to developer Bungie’s Halo series, of which many of their design philosophies are also prevalent in.
This was just the start of a week full of scraps of good news, so I’m sat here feeling pretty good about life, barring the fact that I seem to have contracted the actual plague. I feel creatively fuelled, with a new video series on the brain and even a few story ideas pulling at my synapses. (I don’t know if that phrase makes sense, but a quick Google threw up terms that I do not have the degree required to decipher.) I haven’t had a significant emotional conundrum to tackle all week, unless you count a volume of Batman being so surprisingly eloquent at portraying grief that I dreamed about my own experiences with it. Besides that, though, that leaves me with little to blog about, which is a problem for this journal. Well, is it? It shouldn’t be! I can talk about positive things too. It’s just that a lot of attainable happiness in my life currently exists in the form of me being able to chill out, in a game, with a friend, at my desk, without anything tugging at my brain. And that’s just not fun to write about, is it?
Speaking of old videogames though, my father found a WoW Battle Chest in his travels the other day which I immediately purchased from him. It contains discs for vanilla and the Burning Crusade, manuals and two full guide books for each. I’m elated as this product was my entry into the franchise, but I lost mine years ago due to negligence on my part. Having spent literal thousands of hours in Azeroth since then, it’s amazing to own this simply as a physical link to my virtual second life. Plus, the vanilla game guide may come in useful when they release Classic WoW this summer! Nevermind WoWDB or WoWWiki, future Kristian is going to live that true oldschool experience and flick through a guide.
Apologies for the fragmented nature of this entry; I started writing it with a massive headache, and then got distracted by a Ratchet and Clank speedrun hosted by the game’s original developers. (It’s been a good week for my favourite game franchises.) One more completely disconnected thread before I leave though: I’ve decided to buy the occasional lottery ticket. I’ve always been quite cynical regarding the lottery, but looking at it rationally I can’t think of many reasons to hate it. They’ve just started a version of it that’s fairly cheap and nets you £10k a month for thirty years if you win, which is somehow immediately more appealing to me than a large sum at once. The idea of not having to worry about income and to have the funding and the time to pursue my own creative interests is… frankly, too enticing to fully put into words. I suppose I’d prefer the trickle over the lump sum because I value freedom of self over wealth. Not that I’ll ever win, but hey, on the off-chance, it’d be fun to read about it in my journal through time.
Further reading:
Book Review: Wolfheart by Richard A. Knaak
I strongly recommend that you read my other review on Knaak’s book Stormrage before reading this one, as I use it as a reference point multiple times.
Mild spoilers for Wolfheart by Richard A. Knaak below! If you want to approach this book with no preconceptions, avoid this blog post.
As may be apparent by the timing of this review, I’ve taken to reading the World of Warcraft novels in chronological order, and after reading Stormrage I moved on to Christie Golden’s The Shattering, which takes place shortly after the events of Stormrage. However, I didn’t write a book review for The Shattering as I didn’t feel like I had much to say about it. As usual, Christie Golden delivered an enjoyable reading experience which, whilst not surpassing the masterpiece of Arthas: Rise of the Lich King or War Crimes, was still a wholeheartedly wonderful novel.
I was less apprehensive when I then started Wolfheart than I was with Stormrage, though I’ll admit I didn’t expect the former to trump The Shattering. But in my opinion, it did, and it definitely surpassed Stormrage and avoided most of the issues I had with that book.
Getting right into it, Wolfheart is set not so long after the events of Stormrage (during the events of the World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm), and features many of the same characters, albeit under somewhat different circumstances. Not to give too much away, war has now officially broken out between the Alliance and the Horde, both of whom are still reeling after the cataclysm wrought by the mad black dragon Deathwing, leaving much of the world in a state of peril. The repercussions of such an event heightened the need for resources and opened new opportunities for taking territories, and has such led to the re-ignition of old rivalries.
This novel focuses mostly on the Alliance side of matters, with a few different sub-plots. In the city of Darnassus, the recently forgiven Highborn night elves who have been welcomed back into night elven society are being murdered, in a series of attacks which threaten to destabilise the summit called to debate the introduction of the Worgen into the Alliance. This in itself is a separate plot point, one which focuses on human King Varian Wrynn, who is trying to come to grips with the two halves of himself warring within. And finally, the war for Ashenvale, which is told mostly through the eyes of Haldrissa, also plays a key role in the novel.
The concept of a World of Warcraft murder mystery written by Knaak was probably the least appealing plot line to me before I started the novel, largely because as a WoW player I already knew the answer to the whodunit riddle. Despite this, though, Knaak delivered a fully intriguing narrative that not only keeps the reader guessing, but also does a superb job of introducing the Highborne and the still largely unwelcome Worgen into the overall narrative, as well as introducing Jarod Shadowsong as a very well likeable character.
Whilst I was originally not all that fussed with him, it was after reading War Crimes (set after the events of Mists of Pandaria, roughly two years ahead of this novel) that I became a huge fan of the character of Varian Wrynn, a thoroughly complex character who goes through a myriad of character development over the years and truly shines in the latest expansion. (May I direct you to this trailer? Spoilers in the comments.) The events of Wolfheart depicted a massive turning point for his character, and it was not one that Knaak took lightly. This was a shining gem of the novel to me, and for that I commend him.
The war for Ashenvale took a while to warm up, for me, which is admittedly a criticism I had with the previous novel Stormrage. But it was a slow burn, and it truly paid off from the middle to the climax of the novel. One thing that I discovered in Wolfheart was Knaak’s ability to write a clearly understandable and enjoyable battleground, with sound tactical decisions and believable hindrances. Tying into this, Knaak is a master of the fight scene, with numerous skirmishes being described in crystal detail, and one particular fight in Darnassus during the novel’s climax that I hold above all other fight scenes in writing. Perhaps this is more of a comment on my ability to imagine than it is on writing, but I find it a rare occurrence that I am able to completely visualise every move and blow of a fight and how it leads into the next. As invested as I was in this point of my reading session, it felt more like I was watching a Monty Oum animated fight scene that reading a book.
I may have evaluated the different plot lines separately in this review, but do not for a moment believe that this is a fractured narrative. These plot lines often meet and diverge, influencing each other, and by the end of the story they’ve converged into a most natural coalescence. The only issue I have with this novel is that the actions of one of the character’s doesn’t line up with how they are betrayed in the wider World of Warcraft story later on, but I firmly believe that Knaak is not to blame for this. This novel has kindled my faith in him as a writer and I look forward to reading his other works.
Book Review: Stormrage by Richard A. Knaak
Let’s try something new. This will be my first ever book review.
Mild spoilers for Stormrage by Richard A. Knaak below! If you want to approach the book with no preconceptions, avoid reading this blog post.
Stormrage, it must immediately be noted, is a novel that takes place within the game World of Warcraft, and, like the other WoW books I’ve read, successfully expands the narrative outside of the confines of the initial game. In the case of Stormrage, it depicted an event within the narrative which I was not previously aware had even occurred, and thus added to my enjoyment and knowledge of the game world as a whole. As with the other WoW books I’ve read (namely War Crimes, Illidan, and Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, in that order), it has been an enjoyable fantasy novel for me, but not one that I’d consider recommending to somebody who isn’t already acquainted with the Warcraft universe, as there are often many settings, character relationships and events which have been conceived and developed outside of the book series.
Out of the aforementioned Warcraft books I have read, Stormrage is that first I’ve read that has been written by Richard Knaak, the others being written by either Christie Golden, or newcomer to the series William King. Having heard some previous criticism of Richard Knaak’s writing, I entered into my reading with caution, and indeed did find some criticisms which I shall note further on.
Stormrage, then, is a novel which depicts events taking place between the World of Warcraft expansions Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. The Emerald Dream has long been an alternate plane of existence in which the blueprints of a perfect Azeroth could be experienced, with no demonic or otherwise sentient meddlings shaping the world. Maintained by the druids of Azeroth, it has long been a place of paradise and prosperity. However, when an unearthly mist starts causing the citizens of Azeroth to fall into a comatose state, it becomes clear that all is not well, and it soon becomes apparent that Arch-Druid Malfurion has been captured within the Dream, which is rapidly becoming tainted by what is soon to be known as the Emerald Nightmare.
If I had to describe this book in one word, it’d be ‘long-winded’. I’ll immediately emphasise that I did enjoy the book, and I don’t regret reading it, but the malign forces which beseech the characters keep growing in stature, and when reading about setback after setback it might soon occur to the reader that the narrative might be shorter and sweeter should a few of these setbacks fail to occur. I found myself somewhat lost in the geography of the story arc when almost exactly midway through, I began reading what felt like a (hard-fought) climactic struggle. The narrative also suffers from the task of portraying too many abstract concepts, such as the barriers between Azeroth and the Emerald Dream breaking down, and a druid (whom I shall not name) wielding powers of global proportions sometime in the narrative.
One thing this novel does right, though, is provide an excellent platform through which to explore the characters we have already seen in-game, and challenge their deepest fears as they face the onslaught of their worst nightmares. Tyrande, in particular, is noted as fearing her evil predecessor as leader of the night elves, and the corruption which threatened to lead her people into darkness. Stormrage also introduces lesser characters such as Broll Bearmantle, whom I severely hope will make an appearance in an upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, Knaak is tasked with portraying some very abstract concepts which I feel many writers would choose to avoid if given the chance, whereas Stormrage, being in the rare position of depicting events of what is typically a visual and interactive world, must make do attempting to describe them; Knaak’s writing, whilst imperfect, never left me clueless as to the events unfolding before me. I do feel the need to make an example of some of his stiff writing, however:
The vision had so troubled her today that Shandris could no longer sit still. Hoping to clear her thoughts, she had personally begun patrolling the length and breadth of the capital, wending her way from the fortified bastion of the Warrior’s Terrace down into the commercial sections of the Tradesmen’s Terrace, on through the mystic Temple of the Moon and across the lush, sculptured islets of the garden. There, she had made a detour to the industrious Craftsmen’s Terrace before returning to her quarters in the Warrior’s.
The only purpose this paragraph serves is to portray Shandris’ uneasy state of mind, and there are much faster ways with which this could have been achieved. Knaak’s description of her patrol through Darnassus was, whilst descriptive, an entirely futile endeavour, and I regret to say that the novel is riddled with similar such passages. The other pet peeve I have is the way Knaak will hint at a character’s discovery, discuss it at length, but fail to inform the actual reader what the character is talking about until at least a few pages later. All this does is make me feel lost and irritated, rather than in suspense, as is likely the intention. Perhaps if the novel was not dealing with such abstract concepts, this style of writing would be more forgivable.
If you are a World of Warcraft fan, though, I recommend this book nonetheless. One of the upcoming raids of the next expansion has players actually fighting in the Emerald Nightmare, so this will be some good background reading, and despite my criticisms of Knaak’s writing, he does the job of providing an entertaining narrative featuring some fan-favourite characters. I must admit that I prefer other works within the series from Christie Golden and William King, but I’ll certainly not shy away from reading other Knaak books.
Perpetually Perturbed 