World of Warcraft: Cataclysm -- Life as a Goblin

by Charles Onyett - IGN.com | 12 July 2010 12:00
 
Playing as the Horde's comic relief race.
 
The starting experiences for the races being introduced in Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, so far, are very impressive. After the introduction of phased questing in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in late 2008, the designers at Blizzard have compiled all that's been learned and put together some of the most entertaining MMO questing experiences I've played in a long time. The Alliance get the Worgen race, a wolf-like race of humanoids you can find details about in previous coverage . The opening tale is a serious one, still inflected with Blizzard's goofy Warcraft humor but also grim and dark, a tone mirrored in the dense, misty woods and jagged rocks of the Gilneas starting zone. The Goblin race, which joins the Horde, is by comparison much more lighthearted in tone and, at points, quite funny as you strap on rocket shoes, throw parties, and drive ridiculous cars to get through the first few levels of life.
 
As a Goblin you're tossed into the action fairly quickly. Right from the beginning you're gunning for a promotion to Trade Prince on the island of Kezan, which is a big deal for Goblins. The initial quest is simply to go into a nearby mine to get the Trolls in down there working again, and along the way you might pick up a can of Kaja'cola. Consuming one of these is good for a short, small bonus to Intelligence, but also "gives you ideas" which in one case caused my Goblin character to shout out "A truck that delivers ice-cream. With a catapult!" It's silly, but it's a style of humor Warcraft fans would expect at this point, and works within the fiction Blizzard has built up around this particular race within its world.
 

The Goblin Dance

Once that's done access is opened up to the rest of the starting area, which is large enough that it's a pain to trot around on foot between quest givers. Thankfully it's not long into the experience until you're handed a Key to the Hot Rod, which lets you summon a gigantic car at any time to speed around at a faster rate. While in the car you can turn the radio on, hit the hot rod's horn (which coincidentally sends any Goblins in the area running in all different directions), and get a temporary 50% speed boost. If you happen to hit an innocent Goblin while driving this thing they'll yell and go flying into the air, which is particularly hilarious if you run through the line of Goblins waiting to get into the bank. As they soar through the air after the collision they'll yell at you, call you a bad driver, and threaten to sue.
 
Driving through the city reveals an area that's full of machinery and smoke stacks and, for some reason, fake flamingos. Outside the house you start in the trainers aren't just standing around like robots. The Rogue trainer is stealthing around the yard, the Mage and Warlock trailers are firing magic projectiles at each other, and the Warrior trainer is a wooden cutout bobbing back and forth on a spring. With NPC names like Bruno Flameratardent and Sudsy Magee, it gives a pretty good indication of the kind of quest tasks you'll be getting into.
 
Take the footbomb field, for instance, where a Goblin dressed in what appears to be football pads drops you into a nearby Shredder. On a field of artificial turf you then need to blow up the opposing team, the Steamwheedle Sharks, using footbombs, as the crowd cheers on all sides. He then hands you another bomb and asks you to kick it through two smokestacks that stand like uprights in a football game. Unfortunately it seems your kick goes a little too far and slams into the island's volcano, which then starts to shudder as the ground shakes underfoot. This rumbling remains constant for the rest of your time on Kezan, which helps to reinforce the idea that you're making changes to the game world.

Rocketboot Hunting

For me, the highlight of the whole starting experience was getting a party together to boost social standing on the way up to the rank of Trade Prince. The beginning section requires you to motor around town and pick up components of a "hip new outfit." When it comes time for the party you have to put this on and there's absolutely nothing classy about any of the components. The glasses are especially ugly in a funny kind of way, as the purple lenses that periodically flash are topped with rows of blinking lights. Along with this new attire come new skills like the ability to give champagne to partygoers, drop buckets in front of Goblins who've imbibed a little too much, hand out snacks and fireworks, and generally make sure that everyone in attendance has a good time.
 
The party itself happens out by a pool near your home base, and is part of the phased questing system where the attendees show up just as soon as the quest begins. After making the rounds and ensuring the guests are having as good a time as they possibly can, the quest can be turned in. Unfortunately the party is then attacked by pirates, who you can see rampaging through partygoers when you go back to the pool. The pirates need to be killed, and afterward news breaks that the current Trade Prince was behind all the attacks to begin with. You go to confront him, but remember that rumbling volcano? It's about to erupt and everyone needs to get off the island as quickly as possible, so you need to gather together a giant sum of money to board an escape ship.
 
Back outside, the area is now on fire and magma balls are falling from the sky. To get cash, you have to go back to the main part of town and run over a bunch of rampaging citizens with your hot rod to make them drop their loot bags. You also get a quest to break into the local bank, which gives you another unique skill bar with five separate skills. The game prompts you to press them one at a time and if you hit the appropriate ones the break-in attempt is successful and the cash can be procured. For the finale, you send a gasoline robot trotting into your headquarters and burn the whole thing down for the insurance money. Finally you've got enough to get on the Trade Prince's boat, but unfortunately he takes it all and makes you his slave.
 
That's a whole lot to take in after only a few levels and hours played, and more importantly provides a lot of variety to keep the pace of the action from bogging down too much. But it doesn't stop there since your boat is smashed to bits by the Alliance, landing you in a new area with better quests. You're shocked back to life on a floating slab of wreckage and once onshore need to deal with existence on a hostile jungle island. The quests here show how the Goblins get folded in with the Horde, meeting up with local Orcs an and eventually even rescuing Thrall (who's a VIP in the Warcraft world) from a magical cage in the depths of a boat. He's not very happy in there and when you spring him he turns you into a whirling cyclone and you can zap Alliance sailors from afar.
 

Rocket Jump

When you return to the main island, all the Goblin survivors have lined up at a giant slingshot, and they use it to hop from one jungle island to the next, again giving the story a sense of momentum and progress. One of the most spectacular examples of quest phasing happens here as you soar to the big island. There's no town over there, after all, and little reason why the Goblins would have an existing position with class trainers and vendors. Blizzard solves this by giving the Goblins a town-in-a-box item, which is a large pile of explosives that sits near your landing spot. You trot over and slam the plunger down and get shot high up on the air. Clouds of smoke from the explosion obscure the ground below so that when you land again there's a whole town there filled with NPCs and quest givers. Like much of the rest of the quest string, it's wildly over the top, but it fits in nicely with the fiction.
 
There's much more to the early questing experience for Goblins (my Hunter is level 11 right now), but at the risk of drawing this out way longer than I should, I'll stop here. I'll just say at one point I was able to build a robotic hammerhead shark submarine that shot rockets, and that at no point so far have any of the quests felt tiresome. The pace is fast (likely because it's still low level), quests are bunched together so you can knock out a handful at once, and the setting is often switched so you're always going after a new objective or after a new target.
 
Throughout all this, a few of the racial abilities Goblins got were useful. The Goblins apparently always get the lowest gold price anywhere with their appropriately titled "Best Deals Anywhere" skill, get a 15 point bump to Alchemy, and a one percent boost to casting and attack speed. There are two triggered abilities, which includes a rocket belt that swiftly shoots you forward over a short distance with a two minute cooldown and a rocket barrage that deals direct damage to an enemy, which shares the two minute cooldown timer of the belt. The nice thing about the rockets is that the damage scales with level, which could be a great thing once you hit level 80, should you actually decide to level another character all the way up with one of the new races and a non-Death Knight class.
 
There's way more that's changed in Azeroth than the Worgen and Goblin starting zones, so look for more coverage as long as the beta stays up and running.
 
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