Tuesday 24th November 2020

One of the things I’ve realised from doing all the thumbnails for my various Warcraft-related The Climb blog posts, is that Azeroth is dark.  Even the light areas.

Yes, there might be a lot of colour, but it’s all toned down.So, as a result, my first reaction to Bastion is just how light it is.

This zone is Blizzard’s take on Azeroth Heaven.  There are lots of clouds, light colours, and of course angels.  We go there because, the creatures that came from the Shadowlands and took the NPCs we went to rescue had wings.  And through the course of the story, we learn that maybe Bastion isn’t the heaven we thought it was.

Aspirant’s have to go through trials, and as we progress we learn that it involves giving up your memories.  Given that the Azeroth afterlife does a Harry-Potteresque sorting hat to decide which covenant you join, this seems like there’s little choice in the afterlife.

Shadowlands will take my character through four different convent zones before I have to choose a covenant to align with.  My plan is to mix it up with all my various alts so that – given time- I have characters in each.

And for my main, I’m 80% certain of which I’m going to choose.  However, I have decided that in playing through the zones, I’m free to change my mind.

This covenant system has caused some issues with fans.  Whilst there are some ways to change covenant if you’ve made a mistake, it’s designed to be a choose one type of deal.  And some players have found themselves stuck between choosing a covenant that gives abilities that are best suited to the character for raiding, and choosing that which makes sense for the RP of the character.

Given that my main doesn’t raid (other than solo old content) and is unlikely to this expansion, I’ve decided to make it a primarily RP decision.  And that’s the reason that Bastion is out.

The problem is that it’s just too nice.  Everything is bright colours and happy people and I like a little morally grey in my characters.  Now if you could align with the splinter group who’ve gone off and seemingly aligned themselves with the jailer over the lack of free will and the need to give up their memories, I might be more interested.

It’s not that it’s bad.  Indeed there’s a lot I like about Bastion… it’s just not this character.

I’ve been surprised just how much I’ve levelled.  Whilst I know Blizzard scale the XP requirements so that it takes progressively longer to get to max level, I’m already level 54 with one zone done.

Best of all, I’ve somehow managed to do this without unlocking half the map.  That signals to me that there’s still a lot of max level content in these zones and that’s a good sign.  I’m going to be spending the next two years in these zones and I want to feel there’s still more to discover.

What I’ve particularly enjoyed so far, is the sense of distance from the main content.  When we went to Draenor, it didn’t really feel  we were a world away in a different timeline, whatever the story might have suggested.  With this expansion, we’ve gone to The Maw, then escaped to Oribos and now we’re here, and it feels we’ve travelled.  I feel alone and away from Azeroth, and that’s great.  So much so, I’ve made a note of this for if I ever want to write something that feels distant.

Bastion has been great andan interesting zone, but I don’t think I’ll be calling this covenant home.

Next I have my least favourite zone:  Maldraxus

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