Ultimate Quest: Chapter Seven - The Badlands

Welcome back to the Ultimate Quest, where we play through every zone in World of Warcraft to determine, through an exacting and rigorous science, which quest is truly the greatest of them all!

This week, we team up with a whole bunch of dwarves to save dragons from themselves - but not before we murder some people for their beer.

Keep your feet on the ground!

(Spoilers abound.)

Scrambling through the mud and dirt, your heart soars as you trace your finger across an indented stone. "At last!" You think. "Surely this treasure holds the answers I seek!"

It takes only a few minutes to pull the tablet from its resting place. Your eyes confirm what your hands suspected: a hieroglyph is affixed to the earthen stone. An ancient, unknown language that will surely prove of interest to the dwarf who sent you down here in the first place.

You toss it in your sack with your other treasures - a broken chalice, a dusty vase, and a crude tool, gathered more for completionist's sake. "It's a rock," your partner observed when you pulled it out of the hands of the trogg skeleton. You had shrugged. Dwarves love rocks almost as much as anything else.

"Chalice... worthless," the dwarf scoffs, tossing the precious artifact over his shoulder. It thumps quietly in the rusty dirt behind him. "Vase... counterfeit." Another toss, another thump. "Hieroglyph... interesting, but rather common." This one is tossed over another shoulder and lands in a pile of tablets, stacked as high as the dwarf himself, all sporting the same stupid icon. You feel blood rise in your cheeks as he shakes the dirt off the trogg's rock.

He pauses, dusts it off some more. "What's this?" He turns it over, and his eyes begin to gleam beneath his beard. "I've never seen trogg craftsmanship of this caliber! You've stumbled upon something rare indeed!" He looks back to you, ready to talk business.

The quest, "All's Fair in Love, War, and Archaeology" is a subtle moment in the Badlands sequence, but a handful of lines and flavor text is all that is needed to tell a story about dwarves. The morale? A dwarf does not look for glitter and gold but sees beyond the surface to understand the true meaning of a thing. Vain creatures, the dwarves are not.

The Badlands is a wonderful revisit of the dwarven character that was first explored in Dun Morogh (which we will evaluate later in this series). Here, a line is drawn between the dwarf and the deepest, darkest histories buried beneath the planet Azeroth. Of all the surface races in the World of Warcraft, so concerned with the short term and dealing with the latest crisis, the dwarf stands alone in his and her quest to understand where they came from that they might better understand where everyone is going. It's a salient journey too, given how important the Old Gods will come to be in the course of World of Warcraft's story.

So a quest to steal beer from the dark iron dwarves nearby, murdering a good number of them in the process, might have been played as a critique on the dwarven ego. It could have made a statement about the blindness we have to our own bias, that even the dwarves, so willing to see beyond the surface, are susceptible to prejudice and hate.

But it doesn't. Nothing in the game suggests the writers even considered the dark iron murders as anything more than a given. It's a problem too often seen in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and not one we should feel the need to excuse. We know that we know better.

"I am experimenting with black dragons," the goblin woman, Rhea, says. "Specifically, I am interested in how they procreate."

Not much is said by Rhea, but you begin to suspect something is up almost immediately. First, there is her name. Second, there is her manner of speaking - direct, precise. Third, there is her concerns - black dragons. If there is profit in black dragons, it's not obvious. So when Rhea reveals herself to be a red dragon, you are barely surprised. Instead, we are impressed that the writing is strong enough to give it away. Goblin writing really does sound like goblins; dragon writing sounds like dragons.

This questline carries through most of the region's storyline, and it is strong. The black dragonflight, led by the unmistakeable Deathwing, is corrupt, and Rhea is leading an effort to restore them that spans species and eras, starting with the discovery and purification of a single black dragon egg.

It's a wonderful sequence connecting a host of seemingly disparate events - the empowerment and corruption of Deathwing, formerly known as Neltharion the Earth-Warder; the Old Gods that keep showing up in World of Warcraft end games, from C'thun in Ahn'Qiraj to Yogg-Saron in distant Northrend; and the Titans, whom the dwarves have been eagerly investigating since the game's launch, as early as the dungeon Uldaman.

The events of this purified egg story have far-reaching implications, and, to its credit, the Badlands does not bend over backwards to explain it. Like the hairy trogg skeletons in the Tomb of the Watcher, these events simply exist. The player is left to stumble upon their import at his or her leisure, like a dwarf shifting through rocks for that valuable tool.

But again, these great moments are undercut. The entire region is split in half by the Scar of the Worldbreaker, Cataclysm's titular villain, but your primary interaction with Deathwing here comes first as a series of ridiculous, poorly structured flashbacks, and then as a deus ex machina against your favor, in a poorly shot and not-voice-acted cut-scene at the storyline's climax.

But at least that final moment works. In a rare moment, the storyline ends in tragedy. Rhea, and the purified egg, are seemingly destroyed by Deathwing. It's a moment that enrages the player, and rightfully so - but it is immediately followed by the revelation that the egg is saved. Tragedy turns to eucatastrophe in one of Cataclysm's best endings.

Many of the regions we've examined so far struggle to connect different bottled areas into a unified sense of place. The Badlands overcomes this tendency in interesting ways. Although there is plenty to do for Alliance dwarves here, it is primarily home to an intimidating Horde city, New Kargath. And the Alliance are keenly aware of that fact, holding up in a barebones outpost with a nervous pair of eyes on the Horde fortress.

Then, in an intriguing twist, the Horde city is later invaded by the black dragons themselves - and even the Alliance are forced to come to its aid in order to save the egg.

But once again, the Badlands' structure undermines itself. Here, it's sense of place and connectedness is entirely dropped by the goblin town, Fuselight. Fuselight is the entry point for the region, and it is introduced with a lovely switchback trail up a mountain, lit by dangling arrow signs of goblin craft. You are led to believe you are in for something special here, but within 10 minutes, you've left the city - and the last real goblin - behind for good, having done no more than a handful of fetch quests for them. If the goblins are disrupting industry here, no one knows it. Whatever their role could have been, it is quickly abandoned for other concerns.

They are certainly as violent as everyone else in the region. The goblins task you to murder ogres who are learning magic, simply out of fear, without establishing any history of violence or conflict on the ogre's behalf. Later, the Alliance military tasks you with stealing food and clothing directly out of the ogre's homes. In the middle of all of it, Rhea mourns the murder of corrupt dragons even as she tasks you to do it - the sole acknowledgment of the horrors of violence here. In the end, we are left to wonder why the left hand of the writer doesn't seem to be talking to its right.

There is no undercurrent of criticism here - not even a backhanded comment about the questionable nature of your actions. Whatever credit we might want to give the writers here for this being a role-playing game is discredited by the game's requirement that you complete every quest, even the genocidal ones, to progress the story. Whatever the quest for the black dragons has to say about hope and forgiveness the Badlands overwrites in bloodlust.

Elf Corrupted; In Other News, Water Wet!

The egg quest is a nice deconstruction of the stereotypical evil of big, bad (and usually) black dragons. There is hope for them, after all, and in that hope, we also find forgiveness.

Novelty Games

The Badlands is crammed with bad ideas. A terrible turret-shooting sequence best left on the cutting room floor; three completely silly and ineffective flashback sequences in the Scar of the Worldbreaker; a sequence requiring you micro manage three dwarves that doesn't work as well as it could.

But it also offers something that the rest of this enormous game would profit from: puzzles.

Basilisk Urethras

The goblins do have you punt rams off their mountain. It doesn't seem likely the rams survive.

This War Ain't No Hammer

A goblin faction is named "Quality Asplosions," which is silly but a little too real-world.

The aforementioned dwarven team you work with is clearly a nod to Blizzard's own The Lost Vikings.

And there is no better place to note Martek the (orc) Exiled's dismissive remark about his companion's stories: "Neither of their stories had hot babes in them."

Yikes.

The Badlands is a tricky region to rate. On the one hand, it tells a wonderful story about forgiving our greatest enemy in order to save them from themselves. On the other, it reinforces the casual racism so inherent to the World of Warcraft, and undercuts nearly every great moment it has with misleading or contradictory stories.

V. Arathi Highlands

For all its stumbles, the Badlands does at least tell a coherent story. And despite being very orange and very ugly, it breaks up the action with interesting set pieces.

The Badlands is quite a bit better than Arathi Highlands.

V. Durotar

Yet for all its triumphs, the Badlands makes no effort to question itself or its characters. There is not even a hint of criticism over the act of murdering ogres and dark irons in their own homes. It's problematic in a way that Durotar is not, which takes its contradictory elements and uses them to say something about the nature of violence.

Durotar is better than the Badlands.

Conclusion

We've done it. And now we know:

The Badlands is the sixth best World of Warcraft zone.

Complete Rankings