Why The Fuck is Nobody Reviewing Brawlhalla?

Some years ago I had to beg various employers to let me write about Warframe, because nobody seemed to give a fuck and the few media outlets that did, mostly did a shit job at reviewing the game properly. "It's too weird", "it's got no content", "it's just another F2P title". Yeah well...

It's currently topping GTA V in the god damn Steam charts, you stupid cunts!

By the time someone was finally smart enough to let me do a proper review about the whole thing, most other magazines already spent their 20something minutes looking at it, telling people it was nothing special. The game has its own annual fan convention, peaked at over 120k consecutive Steam users a couple weeks ago (not including users of the standalone client or the console versions) and keeps getting bigger and more popular by the day, but hey, let's not fucking cover it, because it's certainly nothing special.

I'm currently noticing something similar about another indie gem, which is certainly never going to be as big as Warframe, but it's easily one of the most popular fighting games on Steam - and has been consistently popular for as long as it's been around: Brawlhalla.

Right, let's get the obvious crap out of the way - that trailer looks a bit shit. You can tell there's a small team with an even smaller budget behind this game when you look at it. But here's the thing: Brawlhalla maintains a steady 9-12k consecutive player peak day after day. For comparison, here's a massively overhyped Street Fighter V struggling to maintain 1,500 consecutive users, with Mortal Kombat X having even fewer users and Killer Instinct may as well not exist at this point. Same for Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and the latest KoF. To be fair, I can't tell how well these fighters are doing compared to Brawlhalla on consoles. One may also argue that Brawlhalla is simply a different type of fighting game and can't really compare to these other titles, but Brawlhalla's main game mode is all about 1vs1 ranked matches, it's a 2D competitive fighting game and you can go suck it.

Here's my character punching 3 other players at the same time. I'm still losing, but I'm doing it with style.

You can tell straight away that Brawlhalla is closer to Smash Bros. than it is to Street Fighter. And there are snobs arguing about whethter Smash Bros. should even be a thing at fighting game tournaments, because it's more "noob friendly" or some shit. Because a fighting game can only be good if it requires you to memorize 38 button combos in order to stay competitive. I'm sure the folks competing for the $100,000 prize pool at the Brawlhalla World Championship really care about what you think.

So yes, at first glance this game shamelessly rips off Smash Bros. You get your triple jump, walljump, your light and heavy attack, then weapons, bombs and other shit will spawn in the arena and players use them to weaken the other fighters, hoping to smack them off the screen to score a point. It's the Smash formula minus the popular Nintendo characters and, sadly, minus any decent music. Seriously, the one thing that genuinely bothers me about this game is its dull soundtrack.

Some of the more boring characters look like something out of an old Penny Arcade strip.

Brawlhalla seems deceptively simple at first. Each playable legend (read: character) uses two out of the 11 weapon types in the game. At the beginning of a match you'll be using only your fists. Weapons will spawn into the arena a few moments later, then combatants start hacking and slashing away at each other with claws, swords, axes and all that sort of thing. Each weapon and fighting style has its own strengths and weaknesses, they all come with their own range, damage and speed. In a nutshell, you use light attacks to weaken other players, then finish them off with a heavy attack. These vary depending on your weapon and character of choice and whether you use neutral attacks or use them whilst jumping or in combination with a directional input.

Getting into it is really easy. But it'll take lots of practice to get the right distance and timing in order to counter each fighting style. Ideally, you'll slowly go from spamming random attacks to leaping all over the arena whilst kicking people off the screen left, right and center, throwing your weapon at them to finish them off, then picking it back up mid-flight. You can do some seriously cool shit on there.

It's not as Viking-themed as the title may imply.

You can compete in the aforementioned ranked 1vs1 matches in order to unlock cosmetic weapon and character skins and colours and ranks for bragging rights. There's also ranked and friendly 2vs2, free for all brawls for 4 players and custom matches for up to 8 people. There are 30something legends available right now, ranging from vikings to pirates to ninjas and medieval knights and there's also a gangster and a cowgirl and a minotaur and a lizardman and about a bazillion alternative skins and appearances for each legend. You can turn just about every legend into a mecha-version, a dark elf, a zombie, an anthropomorphic animal or some other crazy thing if you dislike their default appearance. There are unlockable colours and fighting styles, which may make your legend a bit tougher, lets them attack harder or swing their weapons faster at the cost of some other stat. There's a ton of customization in Brawlhalla. Granted, much of that cosmetic stuff costs real money, but I'd rather spend a fiver or two in order to customize my favourite character in an otherwise free game than spend 60 Bucks on fucking Street Fighter V, then 40 on the fucking season passes, then another 8 per fucking costume and then I still only get half a game.

Brawlhalla is free. There's a rotation of free trial legends, which changes frequently. There's also a practice mode, which lets you experiment with every legend for as long as you want before you decide to unlock them. You can do so simply by playing the game and earning ingame currency. Alternatively, you can throw some real money at the screen and get any character you want for pennies. Or buy the All Legends Pack and get every single current and future character unlocked for life, which will cost you $20 or whatever the fuck people in your country use in exchange for videogames.

Free for all brawls are a bit of a pointless clusterfuck. Just how I like it!

Brawlhalla is currently sitting on nearly 55,000 user reviews, 85% of which are positive. The game came out of early access a couple weeks ago and is mostly ignored by the games press for some inexplicable reason. If you like fighting games at all and you're not completely put off by the cartoony visuals, give Brawlhalla a go. It's seriously good.

WoW: Ramblings of a Holy Cow

I'm extremely lazy and a bit weird. Since launch day, I've only ever really played a single character on WoW - my warrior. I've created the odd random character here on there on the side for shits and giggles, but none of them ever made it past level 25. I really like just having one character to gear up, to "master", to do stuff with. That's the lazy part. As for being weird - WoW is an MMORPG. I like consistency. I'm a warrior. This is me. This is my avatar. That's what I play. I'm not this guy and that guy and that chick, I'm not also a hunter and a mage. I'm a warrior. I punch things. It's what I do.

Thanks to Argus and an extremely helpful druid taxi, I managed to get my old warrior from level 85 to 110, with his first legendary and an item level in the 900s over the course of just a few days. Getting there was alright, but to be perfectly honest, I'm bored enough to uninstall now. I've seen all the new raid content, I've seen the dungeons, we've even completed a bunch of mythical dungeons as a 4 man group with no healer and one 'DPS' who struggles to maintain 230k, also known as "40% of what the tank is dishing out". I don't mind, we still get it done, everyone is having fun, it's not a competition, whatever.

I'm sick of killing these fuckers now.

I top the DPS charts in guild runs again, I top the scoreboards in BGs, I've got semi-decent gear and I have absolutely zero desire to run any more LFR shit or to repeat the same stinking dungeons over and over again now. I went to the Halls of Valor for fun the first time around, went there for a zone quest the next time, went there for a guild achievement afterwards, now I'm supposed to go there for a class quest and at this point I'd rather shove a hedgehog up my urethra than do yet another fucking playthrough of that place. The problem isn't WoW, it's me. I don't care about repetition. I don't care to join another big fucking raid guild. I don't mind running silly little mythic dungeons with the guild in those rare moments where everyone is actually available. But I can totally stop doing that and not miss it if it means I'm no longer paying a monthly subscription fee.

Back in the beta I really wanted to play a paladin, but friends told me that only cunts played paladins. They were considered broken and overpowered and generally awful and my young self gave into peer pressure and picked the next best thing, which I felt was the warrior. It's a bit funny how paladins turned into a complete joke back when people started raiding in vanilla, because they were so useless. Meanwhile, my friends played rogues. Who's the real cunt here, fellas?

That awesome T2 set, though!

My favourite race were the tauren, because unlike most other races, they weren't super keen on all the warring and shit and really wanted to be left alone. This may not be super accurate with the lore, but it's how I interpreted their description at the time. Besides, I didn't like most of the alternatives. All male humans looked like middle-aged janitors. I mean, for fuck's sake, the majority of their hairstyle options were bald, balding, Captain Picard and skullet and they all came with creepy handlebar mustaches. I like dwarves, but I just can't see myself playing a little bearded fat man with a Scottish accent. Gnomes are tiny old people with pink hair! That's not warrior material! And then there's the male night elf, also known as the missing link between man and ape.

Things weren't much better on the horde side of things. Scrawny blue hunchbacks with tusks and Jamaican accents, the Iggy Pop fan club, butt-scratching cows aaaaaaand.... well...

You can tell he's a great thinker.

I'm not super into cows or anything, but I figured that as a tauren at least they'd see me coming before I stomped them into the ground. I also liked how they get high and chase after spirit coyotes and weird shit like that. And then my family joined the alliance, so that was the end of that plan. I did what absolutely fucking everybody did at the time and rolled the only decent-looking thing on their side - a female night elf. It was perfectly normal back then to end up in dungeon groups consisting of nothing but female night elves.

Anyhow - that shit is about 14 years in the past now, so let's fast forward to the bit where I roll a tauren paladin. You've read the fucking title of this post. It's what I did. Boosted him to 100, am level 106 now and going.
Now first of all, I don't get faction pride. Lots of people have characters on both sides and you get the same cunts in both factions. To me, the alliance and the horde may as well be the US and North Korea. Alliance gets all like, "Oh look, Sylvanas retreated, she must have totally planned to leave us here to die." Horde is all, "Shit, all our leaders are fucked, we gotta fall back. Alliance will probably understand." Aaaand they're at each other's throats again, because fuck talking. They coulda sent letters or something. "Hey, they killed our king because you cunts fecked off!" - "Yeah, sorry, they offed our faction leader after just one expansion, so we had to hearthstone out lol". All cleared up. But noooo, we need some forced conflict here. For what it counts, I think it's pretty awesome how both factions get different cutscenes in that Broken Shore battle, showing only their side of the story. You need to play both parts to understand what's going on.

Fuck the story, everyone just raged about her slightly less slutty new clothing.

That was actually quite fun. "Oooooh, so that's why she didn't help! I had no idea!" And then I started paladining hard. Prot spec, not because I'm oh so desperate to tank random LFP shit, but because I have a bulwark and I'll be damned if I ain't mogging the shit outta that on a paladin! I just char... wait, no. I casually walk into groups of enemies, because I have no charge or a heroic leap and my mounted charge is always on cooldown. Then I turn the battlefield into a giant pinball machine by throwing a bouncy shield at baddies, which whacks everyone in the face before it comes back to me. Fun.

I can soak up retarded amounts of damage. I can bubble up. I can self-heal for days. And I can still kill shit at a reasonable pace, which feels new. As a prot warrior, you'd only see stuff die of old age. Mind you, I haven't played since Cataclysm, so maybe tanky warriors are really awesome now. I wouldn't know, I go fury. And then something weird happened. Some random player appeared, fought some of my mobs with me, then sent a private message. "Need any help?"
-"Nah, I'm good. Thanks", I responded and he went on his merry way. Probably just a coincidence, but I don't get random whispers on the alliance side, unless it's gold spam or when somebody wants to tell me I'm a cunt because I killed a quest mob or some other shit.

The toxic community turned Jaina into a total bitch.

I also can't go anywhere without getting spammed to death with fucking guild invites. Right, different faction, so no guild here. I should probably set this to auto decline and worry about it later. But there's more weird shit happening that I'm not used to. I'm in a quest hub, completely surrounded by guards. Some night elf watches me for a minute, then onehits me, because a fully geared-up level 110 probably considers a level 105 in leveling gear a challenge or something. The fucker gets completely eradicated by guards in seconds, probably thinking, "Worth it!" Earlier that day Claire and I were getting corpse-camped by a level 110 alliance death knight for the better part of two hours while we were trying to get our quests done.

I'm not saying these things don't happen when you're on the alliance side, because of course they do. But I didn't get repeatedly ganked by the other faction when I leveled my worgen from 100 to 110, especially not when completely surrounded by guards and friendly NPCs. For some reason, folks on the alliance side seem a lot more aggressive towards my horde character and I get murdered all the fucking time. Such a cool idea to have forced pvp with players several hundred item levels above me, with literally ten times my DPS and health. Dunno what I expected when I picked a pvp server all those years ago. Again, I still think you get the same shitheads on both sides, but right now I hate the alliance.

Both sides are shit now, anyway. Fucking pandas.

Surprisingly, I'm having way more fun than I expected. Do I wish it was mandatory for every player to connect their genitals to a car battery, which will shock them every time they behave like a cunt? Of course I do. Does that shit still completely ruin my day? Nah. Yes, getting ganked a dozen times in a single quest is annoying as fuck, but that's really the exception, not the rule. Most shitheads onehit you once, then fuck off. Of course I'd like it better if that wasn't a thing, but then I did pick a pvp server. People don't want fair pvp. They only attack you when you have absolutely zero chance to win. I have never been attacked by a player who was at my own level and/or didn't have at least two friends with him.

Apart from that, though, it's actually pretty great. A dozen enemies at once? Let's fuck 'em up! Random rare elite baddie? Let's tank that fucker and solo it! Group play is for pussies, anyway. I'll be 110 in the coming days, then get that purple item level next weekend. Claire has rolled a holy cow of her own. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to duo mythic dungeons once we get a bit of Argus gear. One of us can tank, the other one can heal or deal damage. Maybe we'll both go as tanks. Our 3.5 man mythic alliance group doesn't need dedicated healers, so why should we? Maybe we'll both tank up and make people's lives miserable in the arena. Frankly, the only thing I really miss about the alliance side right now is my legacy pvp title.

I'm pretty sure this will get old fast and is doomed to become just as boring as my warrior's daily Argus trips. But right now I'm having the most fun that I had ever since coming back. It's probably just the novelty of it. Strictly speaking, I'm still doing the same shit, just with differently-coloured buttons. I don't know. We'll see. All I know is this - in the unlikely event that I won't just uninstall after my sub runs out, I'll be too lazy to play more than one character. I honestly don't know which of them, the warrior or the paladin, will come out on top. Gonna be fun to see whether I'll still enjoy being a cow a week from now.

WoW - 7 years of content in one weekend

I quit playing WoW sometime around Cataclysm. Back when everyone in the arena was a pillar-fucking frost mage, when LFR became a thing (and by 'thing' I mean massive clusterfuck of complete idios) and when I got too tired of grinding yet another set of top-tier items only to watch it become obsolete with the next content update. To be fair, the latter is simply how MMOs work, but I felt I was no longer the target audience. And that feeling was confirmed the moment they announced those fucking pandas.

So I cancelled my sub and endured seven years of family gatherings, where Claire, her sister and their mother would talk about nothing but WoW. Did you know warriors now do this and rogues can do that and now they're bringing back these guys and pandas aren't so bad and hey I got my first legendary and blah fucking blah, only interrupted by my occasional "I don't care", "I'm not coming back", "Please stop talking to me".

Fuck Pandaria with a rake!

It's one of the reasons why I hate this game so much. It's all-consuming. People get so stupidly crazy about it, they don't care whether you want to hear it or not, they don't care if you care, they just wanna talk about it. Things get really annoying when I have to listen to stories about the lore. I hate the lore. The lore is stupid. Hey, let's rip off every overused fantasy cliché ever, let's use everything in Norse mythology and change a single letter in the name of every deity, event and location, cram all the Asian stereotypes we can think of into one of the expansions and add a stupid race, which causes the community to get as racist and offensive as they can manage with their naming, that'll be fun!

I don't care about Illidan, Malfurion, Thrall, Jaina or any of these other cunts, so please shut up about it, stop talking to me and save it for a fucking blog or something. I don't read the comics, I don't give a shit about the novels and the only bit of WoW-related entertainment I willingly endure is the odd Dark Legacy strip or one of the videos by Carbot Animations. Look, I don't walk up to you and tell you how I find female armpits strangely and inexplicably arousing or how the number of "varieties" listed on a Heinz product is completely made-up, because you never asked and I presume you don't give a shit. So please extend the same courtesy to me. Shut up about WoW if I don't ask.

Wizard cat doesn't care if this offends you.

So, what the fuck am I even doing here?
Well, as you might have heard, I've been dicking around with one of thise weird little magic boxes, which let you play computer games on the go. These things run WoW and do so remarkably well. I had a fiddle with Claire's device (huehue), installed a controller add-on and the game looked, felt and played insanely good.

This blew my mind, because it goes above and beyond everything I have deemed possible in regards to 'mobile' gaming. I love my 3DS, but at the end of the day, those are games on a shitty, interlaced low-res screen with annoying jaggies and (often) simplistic gameplay mechanics. Sure, there's your Monster Hunter and Bravely Default, but you also get Miitopia and Tomodachi Life and other fun, silly time-wasters. Most of them are really great, fun games and I'm not knocking them. BUT - on a GPD Win I can play Dungeon Siege, Baldur's Gate, Wizardry 8, a modded Skyrim or stuff like Elder Scrolls Online and WoW on the go. Well, you'll want Wi-Fi for the last two, but you get the idea.

Suddenly I'm playing a fucking portable MMO. Not some dumbed-down shit like Phantasy Star Portable or Final Fantasy Explorers. Fucking WoW, playing like a 3rd person action game. And it worked stupidly well, especially on Claire's demon hunter, what with the double-jumping and gliding and shit. So I made the ultimate mistake. I went there. "You know... I've been clean since 2010, but I could totally see myself playing this on a portable device like that."

Daddy is back.

I checked back on my old account, then subbed to have access to my old characters, then set up the controller addon, played around for a little bit and ultimately put it all on the big screen. I still play it on the portable, as well, but heyho. Options and all that. I even rolled the character I was never allowed to play back in the day - a Tauren Paladin. Friends in the beta told me paladins are for pansies, so I rolled a warrior. Family told me they wanted to go Alliance, so I rolled a night elf. Now my friends and family are dead and cows can become paladins, so I could put everything into one new character. And I shall name him Impaladin. Because he's a paladin. And impales things. Cows aren't impalas, though. Ugh... this one may need some more time in the oven.

WoW runs at 45-60 FPS in 4K with all settings cranked up. WoW still looks shit in 4K with all settings cranked up, because it's so old and it was never pretty to begin with. So I lowered my expectations, went to Pandaria, being level 85 and all, and absolutely hated the shit out of it. The fucking cheesy music they play in every Chinese restaurant around here, the stereotypes, the cringy pretend accents, topped off by the dullest, most monotonous quest design you could get in an MMO. Quests always appeared in threes: Kill X guys, click Y things, rescue Z NPCs. Hand in, get three follow-up quests. Again and again. All the enemies died in two or three hits, they couldn't possibly hurt me and the only reason not to just finish the entire thing using only auto attacks is to speed things up a bit.

Transmogrification is the true endgame.

I was too stupid to bring any heirlooms or boosters and suffered through this crap for much longer than I wanted to. Orgrimmar raid was fun, though. I think I've only encountered one actual pandaren player, so far. A level 110 female panda, who could have destroyed me in one click (I'm on a pvp server), but instead of death I was treated to a /pet emote. Weird.

Warlords of Draenor was even weirder. Storm the dark portal with a huge army of NPCs, mash your AoE-button of choice, never be at risk, because you're always surrounded by dozens of virtual babysitters and get insanely powerful gear for every single quest. I liked some of the garrison stuff, even though I should have known that everything I did there was a waste of time, as the whole thing would be replaced by class halls in Legion. Quests still appeared in threes and NPCs never seemed to run out of follow-up tasks. Mind-numbingly easy and dull. I bumped into rare baddies highlighted with an asterisk on the compass. Those were fun, especially the boss monsters recommended for groups of three players. They were tough to solo, so that was a nice change of pace at least.

"FOR THE ALLI... um... actually, I think I've left the stove on."

At this point it wasn't possible for me to hate this game any more than I already did and I had alienated everyone in the guild to a point where they left me alone when they saw me log on. I jumped right into Legion when I hit level 98, then played the scenario stuff up to the part where Varian kicks the bucket. I never read the novels or comic books and the game itself did so little to make me care about the guy, I really didn't mind him dying. Massive coffin was a bit weird, considering he exploded into green goo, which was clearly left behind by the Alliance. Maybe they just put his favourite boxer shorts in there or something. Great production values, though! Cool cutscenes, finally some more story I actually got to see, even if it was all about some other guy again. WoW is always about Thrall and Arthas and Varian and a whole bunch of people and never about my character. I'm some random asshole who gets to help the main characters. Some RPG.

Fortunately, this was about to change when I got to hang out in the warrior class hall with "Odyn" and "Hymdall" and other suuuuper-inventive and original characters. That bit was cool, because for the first time, WoW was actually about my character. Go get an artifact weapon, go hire a bunch of guys and boss them around, go do some heroic shit. Still had to kill plenty of murlocs and other such boring crap, but heyho, it was still an improvement. With certain limitations. "You are my most powerful weapon", says Odyn, while my humble level 99 guy is surrounded by fully decked-out level 110 warriors with millions upon millions of HP. Yeah, I'm the tough guy around here. Sounds plausible.

The mighty Somethingsomethingstrasza, aspect of GO FUCK YOURSELF!

When I ran out of class hall stuff, I made the worst possible mistake - I picked Highmountain as the starting point for my Legion quests. This area is impossibly huge, there are 300 quests for every square pixel in the area and Blizzard are going out of their way to make you run around like an idiot as much as humanly possible. Wanna fly? FUCK YOU! You can unlock flying by solving ALL THE FUCKING QUESTS IN ALL THE ZONES! Meanwhile, enjoy walking around stupidly long, narrow, winding mountain trails, chock-full of fucking monsters, which respawn every 3-5 seconds. And once again - kill some things, click some other things, rescue some guys. Fucking everywhere. The variety was killing me!

Fortunately, after completely clearing three zones, the game allowed me to move on after only getting 'friendly' reputation with the remaining zone factions. Then I did the absolute minimum required for me to do at the Broken Shore until I was finally allowed into Argus. I was a fresh level 110 character with a gear score somewhere around... the low to mid seven-hundreds, maybe? I had a little over a million HP, with the average player around me sporting 4-8 million. That was on Sunday morning. Claire dragged me to all of my quest locations via druid taxi, grabbing every world boss, rare mob and treasure chest along the way.

The family calls it Argoose. Still not sure if that's a community thing or an inside joke.

A few hours later I had all my weekly invasions done, bought my first two level ~920 Argus items, then we flew all over the Broken Shore for a few hours to farm more chests and bosses. After spending thousands of nexus crystals or whatever it is you farm over there on level 850 gear we fired up the raid finder and played every single Legion raid. Started with the simple, harmless stuff and went all the way to Gul'dan and Kil'jaeden. For the most part, it was stupidly easy, but also a lot more fun than the casual raid back in Cataclysm. Kil'jaeden even required a bit of knowledge and I'm not ashamed to admit I caused a wipe on the first try, because I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

Raiding took about half a day, then my item level went up to just under 900. Claire needed a few heroic Legion dungeons for some quests, but it was now almost midnight, so there were no groups around. So we teamed up and 2-manned them (tanky bear druid + fury warrior). Odyn, Helya and Raven...something... vampire guy? They went down just fine with just the two of us in there. All I have to do now is find some legendaries and get a few more Argus items. I'm assuming the next content update is already being made, so my gear won't stay decent for very long. But getting from level bullshit to level awesome has never been so quick and easy before. I'm okay with that.

I'm gonna need mogging gear with higher-res textures, though.

I like to be one of those elitist dickheads, who tell everyone how "back in the day you couldn't just murder 20 mobs at once. There were lots of group quests and nobody could solo elite enemies. Maybe raiders, but noobs like you weren't cool enough to be raiders. Fucking welfare epix cunt" and all that. But to be perfectly honest, I think that right now WoW is probably the best it has ever been. Yeeees, there's a bunch of RNG, you don't know whether your next epic is gonna be just that or warforged or god knows what. Finding that next legendary may take a day, but it may also take for fucking ever. Thing is, though, everybody gets at least a certain level of awesomeness without being forced to turn WoW into a second job.

I never liked raiding with 40 people. I don't like raid guilds. And for as much as I've enjoyed my better days in the arena, having to fight week after week after week in order to keep up with the better players and to maintain a certain rating wasn't always fun. It was a chore. I went from complete worthlessness to reasonably well-geared over the course of a few days instead of weeks or possibly months. And don't gimme that "hurrdurr, back in the day you still had to work for your items" bullshit. So fucking what if you did? Folks seeking a challenge can still do the mythic raids with their guilds and get stuff, which is still a little bit more powerful and looks a little more awesome than its non-mythic counterparts. You're still the better player and it's not like the filthy casuals are taking anything away from you. You're just pissed off, because now they get to have powerful gear, too. Well boo fucking hoo!

Burn, cunt!

Legion is basically WoW 2. It brings back some of the best stuff from vanilla, BC and WotLK. The zones, signature items, bosses, even remixes of classic tunes basically remind you of everything you've done on WoW over the years. It's more of the same, but it's prettier, looks and sounds nicer. Of course this comes with the obvious downside that much of the classic content now looks really shit by comparison. Not that anyone still spends a lot of time there anymore these days, anyway.

And there's so insanely much to do! I may not give a shit about Pokémon-style pet battles, but some folks do and they've been a thing for years now. World quests and world bosses with massive rewards. The hunt for legendary items. Casual raids, which are easy to join and laughably easy to play, as well as hardcore raids for folks who seek a challenge. Claire and I are playing heroic dungeons without a group. Who knows, maybe we can take it to mythic ones when I get my legendary items. Battlegrounds now put everyone on an even level, much like Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2, so you have to win by skill (or flavour of the month) now, not gear.

It uses lots of pretty colours, too.

Finding a group for any world boss, invasion or other team-based activity only takes seconds now, thanks to the improvd LFP-tool. The auction house is more comfortable than ever, there have been lots and lots of little UI improvements over the years and WoW has never been so user-friendly and comfortable to play before, even entirely without addons.

I'm gonna get my legendary items next, gear up on Argus some more, then duel for a while, top the occasional DPS chart and that's the plan for now. Will I stick around after that? I dunno, probably not. I don't care for titles, achievements, pet battles or collecting shit. I'm playing a warrior and I wanna punch things in the face. Yet another kitten, beetle or dragon whelpling won't help me punch harder and I don't need yet another 'rare' dragon to park my ass on. I've already got 20 flying mounts and only one ass. The sheer variety and quality of content makes it easy to see why so many people are still hooked after so many years. That said, the boring, generic quest design in the open world can really kiss my ass. I know I said that having a bit of voiced dialogue in games like SWTOR or (T)ESO doesn't make a generic quest any less dull. I may have been wrong. Having a wall of text to click through before playing the generic quest might actually be worse. No challenge, no variety in quest design, no interesting story - does anyone enjoy this bit?

How World of Warcraft Destroyed My Family

Disclaimer: This isn't some 'cautionary tale' or some bullshit about how WoW or MMOs are bad and you shouldn't play them. It's a story about a weak-willed man, who was destroyed by addiction and escapism. Had it not been for WoW, it would have been alcohol, gambling or some other shit. But to me, WoW will always be the game that let me bond with my father, yet ultimately lead to him dying alone in his apartment in his fifties.

I never cared for Warcraft much. I liked Warcraft 2 back in the day, because I really enjoyed the music and artwork. Badass elves with giant bows, epic warships, corpses slowly decaying on the battlefield - it was a bit like Doom or one of the Duke Nukem games where everyone had a demo version sitting around, so I played that for a bit. Warcraft 3 came and went without me looking at it much and I pretty much ignored all the news about the upcoming World of Warcraft. I thought it looked stupid. Sure, the crude, cartoony looks resembled Warcraft 3 and it's all oh so nice and timeless, but I prefer a more realistic style.

Probably the first image of WoW you've seen back then. You can quite easily count the polygons here.

And then a friend sent me a code for the closed beta. I figured I may as well have a look at what all the fuss is about, rolled a Tauren and... meh. I was playing this huge hunk of beef, who pounded boars to pudding with a comically huge hammer. The pace was dreadfully slow, obviously, because it's an MMO and I had one or two abilities in my hotbar. Pound a boar, sit around and wait for health, rinse, repeat. It was the middle of the night, so it was dark and that particular bit of the Tauren starting area looks a bit shit, so my first impression wasn't great. I was ready to stop there.

I used to spend most of my weekends at my family's place back then and my dad saw me play. He got curious, so I let him use my beta account for a bit. He dicked around on there for a bit, then my stepbrother watched him play and started sharing the account, as well. A little while later they opened things up a bit and you could just apply for beta keys, so the two of them got their own keys and then all three of us played the beta.

Mulgore was still a bit bland.

I finally started to enjoy the game a little more when Goulash, my Tauren warrior, gained a few levels and the Alliance started gathering in my area. At first it was just a guy or two, then a dozen, suddenly there were fifty or so people filling my screen, some of them on horses. I had never seen anything like it. More and more Horde players gathered as well, both sides separated by a crappy little stream, which still had that weird glittering water effect back then.

We genuinely thought it looked pretty.

I don't actually remember a lot of fighting happening that night. I can't remember whether the servers died or whether it all went offline for maintenance, but what really left a lasting impression was how two small 'armies' formed on both sides. It was intimidating as fuck! One moment you're just walking around killing boars for some generic, boring quests, the next you're being stared down by a bunch of armored soldiers on horses and everyone is getting ready to kill each other. This wasn't planned, scripted or staged. You don't get moments like that in an offline game. Well, you sorta do in a way, but only because they're supposed to happen then and there. But at that moment, WoW told a story. My story, the story of the Alliance and the Horde, something that only happened once, to us, right there. It's hard to describe without sounding completely mad, but I still remember how it made me feel one and a half decades later.

The release version came and I still remember playing disc jockey, waiting ages for the installation to complete, only to wait even longer for updates, then spend hours trying to register my account. The website was completely dead. My dad and stepbrother created their accounts the second it all went live, but I was still at work and now they were gaining levels like crazy while I didn't even have my account, yet. Grrr!

When BC came out, we queued outside the store all night for the midnight release. They played WoW tavern music.

When I finally managed to actually get into the game, the family had already ruined it - I wanted to be a Tauren warrior, just like in the beta. But my traitorous kin went Alliance. My dad played a dwarven hunter named Redbeard and my brother was a gnome mage named Lightcry, because he was an edgy teenager. I think his ICQ handle back then was Lightcry_of_Dark_Magic. And suddenly, my email address, which started in Knuckles.Echidna felt only half as cringy.

So my warrior was now a night elf and we all started to explore Azeroth together. My brother figured out portals, then we all ended up hanging out in Elwynn Forest, we whacked Hogger, went through the Deadmines and I felt a superhero, because it was suddenly my job to set the pace, lead the charge, tank the bosses. Warrior stuff. That same character had been my main ever since. I had found my place, my job, the thing I wanted to do on there. And we fucking bonded over that shit. Dinner talk was all about the goblin shredder, Mr. Smite and Van Cleef. We did something together, experienced something wild and epic and it felt like we had really achieved something.

What a fucking great first dungeon impression that was!

Most importantly, though, I finally got to spend some time with my dad. He was pretty much always working, sleeping or sitting in his office playing computer games all day, so getting any kind of interaction from him was borderline impossible. To give you an idea of how awkward things were, I didn't wish for any presents on my tenth birthday. I just wanted to spend an entire day with my dad, so we ended up going to the park together for a few hours. He just didn't know how to deal with us kids or what to do with us. It didn't help that I had severe anger issues in my teens, so I wasn't exactly easy to approach, either.
Now he was still playing a computer game all day, but that game was an MMO, so we were usually playing together. There was just one problem - his other activities, working and sleeping, got dialed back more and more to make more time in his schedule for WoW.

It's difficult to acknoledge a problem when you're having so much fun. The three of us would stay up all night, occasionally meet in the kitchen to have some chocolate, cookies, cereal, toast and most definitely caffeine, play till the sun goes up, finally sleep until the afternoon hours, then go right back to WoW. That's a perfect weekend if you're roomies, but it's hell to everyone else when you're a family and things like money and education are a concern. My dad didn't spend as much time with our stepmother as he should have done, he didn't work as much as he needed to and my stepbrother flunked out in school and got in trouble with his girlfriend, who ultimately broke up with him. Meanwhile, I decided to buy the game for my (other) brother, who did the most reasonable thing anyone could have done in that situation - he traded the game for some pot. He was studying hard at the time and didn't want to get completely sucked in like the rest of us.

Say yes to drugs, kids!

It was bizarre. I'd spend just about every weekend at my parents', bring my computer, we'd stay up all night to play WoW and on my occasional trips to the kitchen I'd find my stepmother, just sitting by herself in the dark. Drinking. Looking back, that's probably not very surprising. It's the weekend, it's way past bedtime and she's all alone, because her husband is playing an MMO all night. Again. He wouldn't come to bed until a time where most normal people got up. It didn't seem like a big deal to me, because fuck yeah, Scholomance! And then T 0.5 sets! And then Molten Core! Ragnaros dropped his dagger and I paraded it around Ironforge (as a warrior!) like it was the world's greatest treasure and people from all over the server sent me private messages to congratulate me and tell me I was awesome. You didn't get free epic welfare items in the mail back then, so they were a pretty big deal for a little while.

Come to think of it, maybe I had a problem as well. I was in job training back then. Wholesale and foreign trade. I aced all the tests without studying, because that shit was stupidly easy. I finished my final exams a year early, just because I could. And then the company didn't hire me. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that I installed WoW on my office computer. I only played when I was on my lunch break, but people don't see you taking your daily one hour break from work. They see you playing a computer game at work.

I went from a complete job training, certificate and everything, straight into unemployment. My stepbrother had to repeat a year in school. My parents had to move, because they couldn't afford the rent anymore. Or any of the bills.
Things got downright depressing when I visited my parents over the following years. What used to be four brand new cars turned into one or two shitty, used ones. What used to be one palace after another turned into a fairly modest house. I'd see my dad sleep on the sofa more often than not. But I only really started to understand there was a big fucking problem one Christmas eve. The whole family sat together at the table, we exchanged presents, had a nice dinner, everybody was talking and in the middle of it all my dad got up, excused himself and said he had a raid. And he went to play WoW.

The atmosphere. God. My dad sitting in front of the computer, my stepmother walks in. Deathly silence. Not even looking at each other. There was the occasional glimpse at what things were like when they were okay. When my dad asked for a cup of coffee. And my stepmother would bring it. Here you go, thank you, human interaction, thank fuck, they're talking. Not much later my stepmother gathered the family and said she had to tell us something. "Oh, so you finally got divorced", I said. Again, I was difficult and not entirely subtle.
"Oh, so your dad has already told you?" Nope. There was absolutely no need.

What gave it away? Was it all the sleeping on sofas or the drinking in darkness and solitude?

My stepmother and I weren't very close. I think deep down she resents me until this day, because I was an enabler. I got my old man into this game, kept coming over to keep him playing all night. In my defense, I don't think WoW was the real problem. He wasn't raking in as much cash as he used to as a real estate manager. Midlife crisis. Losing his hair and his bite. He knew his marriage was falling apart, his bills remained unpaid, shit was getting worse by the day and he ignored it, ran away from it, spent his time in Azeroth, where he could be a hero, a dragonslayer, someone! If it hadn't been WoW it would have been some other addiction, some other form of escapism.

Still, I dread to think about how much of this is my fault. I was just happy to stay up all night and do something with my old man. Those were the best weekends, ever - and I was hooked just as much as he was. Should I have told him to stop at some point, go to sleep, spend some time with our stepmother? Would it have made a difference? I was a kid back then and just craved the attention of a man, who never showed up when I sang in the band, when I was in the play, when I held the graduation speech in school in front of all the kids, teachers and parents. Looking back, it's easy to say I should have stayed at home, stayed away from him and the game, encouraged him to get his ass to work and to spend some real time with the family. I honestly don't think it would have made a difference. I'm just not sure the rest of my family sees it that way.

Hanging out with one of Claire's first ever characters.

I had just hooked up with Claire back then. She lived in the UK and I lived in Germany, so WoW was a great way for us to stay in touch and do something together. Claire, my dad and I did some crazy shit on there together! He taught her the odd bit of German here and there and got her into crafting, we cleared dungeons together, fought in the battlegrounds and everything was great in Azeroth while real life turned to shit a little more each day.

I had fallen out with the family and was no longer welcome at their weekend dinner gatherings. I lost my new job less than a year after I got hired. We bought WoW for Claire's sister and their mother. They had never seriously played any computer games up to that point and had zero interest in WoW, but they were willing to give it a try. By the time Claire moved in with me, WoW was their way to stay in touch with her. In that situation, WoW wasn't bad at all. Quite the opposite, really. Even though Claire was with me in Germany, her mom and sister could play and chat with her every day. And we all did stuff together.

Real gaming families are a lot fatter and less enthusiastic than that, though.

My dad and my (former) stepmother had finally split up. They'd still gather for family dinners and such, but I was never invited. The official explanation was that I simply lived too far away and nobody had the time or money to come pick me up. I had no car and no money toget over there and that suited me fine. Thing is, I didn't have a job, I played WoW a lot just like our dad did, and to them it was probably my fault he did it in the first place. Everyone was constantly on edge. My stepmother was drinking and didn't know how to deal with all the debt they had piled up. I was broke, had no job and hated my family for being dicks to me. My old man wrecked his marriage and he was still broke, addicted and generally fucked. Us kids were all young adults now, we all had our problems and frustrations, things between us were tense and there had been lots of shouting and slammed doors and people leaving in anger for a while, long before I was officially banned from all family gatherings. None of us were in a particularly good place.

Things got so weird with my dad over the next few years. My former stepmother hooked up with some elderly rich guy and I'm sure this happened completely out of love and not because of her financial worries or anything. My dad would make fun of them, talk about how the divorce was the best thing that ever happened to him and how he's now banging some 20 year old chick. It's hard to tell how much of that, if anything, wasn't a lie. We fell out when I asked him if that was really the sort of thing he should be bragging about to his son. We particularly fell out over lots and lots of empty promises.

He was great at telling people the exact thing they wanted to hear.

He always went on and on about how he had this great new job now and how he'd come visit us in the UK, so we could hang out. Year after year. At some point I told him to stop promising things and just book a fucking flight, already. Told him I'd pay for it. But he refused, saying he'd want to save up some money first, so we could actually do something together when he gets here. My brother back in Germany asked him over and over again to meet and do something, but he'd always make excuses. 

He died alone in his apartment of what the police said were "natural causes". He was diabetic and had not taken his medicine in over a year. In fact, he also hadn't paid the rent in over a year and my uncle had to pay his electric bill for him when they turned off the power. I met his "colleagues" at the funeral and they said he was a nice guy, showed up in the office now and then to send his emails to me, but he didn't actually do much of anything. I'm not sure if he ever actually made any money. One of the folks at the funeral said he used to play WoW with my dad. Apparently they were in the same guild or something. Funny how that works. He was buried right in the city where he died, not near any friends or relatives, in a shitty little grave with a shitty little slate on the ground instead of a headstone. We didn't have the money for a better burial and I'm not sure most of the family really cared enough.

Classic AV.

It's as though he was simply waiting for it to happen. He didn't work. Not really. Just used the computer there to talk to me. He didn't pay any bills. Didn't go to the doctor. Didn't want to see anybody. I still saw him on battle.net all the time, even though I had since moved on from WoW to Diablo 3. Azeroth was his happy place.

I didn't log on there since the day he died. No WoW, no Diablo. Couldn't face it. Heck, I've been gone from WoW for nearly seven years now, but Claire still plays and friends and (her side of the) family sometimes nag me a bit, ask me to come back, that sort of thing. So I had a quick look at it this weekend. 

My dad's contact has been deleted from my friend list. I'm not sure how that even works. Maybe one of his guild mates told Blizzard he had died. Maybe somebody picked up his old account and deleted me off the contact list. It's like he never existed. It's weird. Passing the gates of Ironforge, where I used to duel Redbeard, his dwarven hunter. No constant popups from his revolving door of crafting characters. No messages asking if I'm up for a dungeon. 

No more telling him to stop being so shit in pvp.

I port to Stormwind, it plays that familiar tune and it feels like a punch in the gut. I should probably just forget all about the game and move on with my life, for all the shit that has happened around it. But at the end of the day, Azeroth was the only place where I could be close to my old man. It was the only way for us to really bond, to do stuff together, to have some semblance of a father-son-relationship, no matter how fucked up it was and how much damage it has done to everyone around us. If I could, I'd place a tribute to him right there in the game. Have a dwarf named Redbeard patrol around Loch Modan, side by side with his trusty war pig. Because that's the one place where he was really happy and it'd be so much better than a shitty little grave in a place where no one is ever going to visit him.

My former stepmother sent an email or two after the funeral. I always took the time to respond, but we haven't talked in what must have been two years now. My brother, who used to be a professinal CS-gamer with sponsors and everything, has completely given up on gaming. I don't think his son is allowed to play any videogames, either, which makes me feel a bit sorry for the kid. He still nags me because my son spends so much time with his computer. Yeah, well. I play videogames for a living and if my son wants to do the same, then I'm not going to stop him. But my brother wants absolutely nothing to do with any of it. My stepbrother hasn't talked to me since the funeral, but last I heard, he's focusing on work, school and his new girlfriend. I'm not sure if he even still has a computer.

Claire's family never stopped. They're still on there all the time, buying all the expansions, doing everything together. They go to work, they have healthy relationships and they seem to be relatively stable human beings. I think online games can be a great way to bond and stay in touch. They can also ruin lives, just like any other addiction. I'm not sure where to go from there. Probably just hang out with them, move on with life, do my thing, not overthink shit. I'm not sure it's ever gonna stop feeling so weird.

I will always miss you, you big jerk.