Ultimate Quest: Chapter Five - Durotar

Welcome back to the Ultimate Quest, where I 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!

Today, we meet a new pair of orcs: the grizzled war veteran, Mokorgar Ironheart (played by me!), and his indefatigable dreamer and partner, Ardann the Shaman (played by Ian Clark, in rare form). Their journey begins in Durotar, where new orcs must do as all new orcs must do: learn how to orc better than any orc that has orc before.

Lok-narash!

You stand at the top of the Razor Hill Sanctuary watch tower and gaze out across the devastation wreaked by the cataclysm. You see a single orc standing in the rubble of his home, dazed; a troll stands in a flooded field, searching; an orc woman gazes at the horizon, devastated. Your mission is simple: go help the victims of this (un)natural disaster (are there any natural earthquakes in Azeroth?) with whatever succor they require.

To be an orc, you realize, is not always about war. Sometimes it means helping your fellow citizen on their worst day.

You deliver a package of meats to an innkeeper in Orgrimmar. She hands you a note to return to the butcher. You read it, finding not payment but a love letter: "You're so cute when you're bleeding!"

To be an orc, you see, is to show acceptance in love.

But before all of this, you avenged a wounded hunter and saved him from certain death. And that you would fight for a stranger's honor,, while other tasks occupied your time," says your mentor. "Your own honor is heightened."

To be an orc, you understand, is to aid your fellows at your own expense.

When you first step into Razor Hill and the horns open to blare out the Orgrimmar refrain, the air filling with the thunderous kodohide drums of the orc war song, you know: you are Orc, and you have come home.

Durotar does so much with so little, taking the time to both show and tell what an orc, and the Horde, stand for. Further, it establishes stakes by heavily featuring human incursions and demonic cultists throughout the region.

But let's talk about those stakes. They are low and point to greater dangers, which is imminently appropriate for an introductory zone. But they also go nowhere. You fight a human lieutenant holed up in the ruins of an old castle, and you get a handshake and palmful of gold. That's it. Whatever the humans are up to, nothing comes of it here. Nothing is resolved. There is no plot.

Worse, you are tempted into odd asides. A casually sexist goblin asks you to track down goods for his caravan. A gladiatorial slave owner has you beat on his fighters, chained nearby. You are asked to wipe out a village of quillboar for reasons that explicitly amount to genocide. And let's not forget that you are poisoned by demonic blood that turns you, temporarily, into a demon.

Durotar's characters and stories do little, if anything, to make sense of all this. As much as we are shown what an orc is, we are also distracted by things that orcs do that don't appear to line up.

Then again, maybe it's just that the orc doesn't know what he or she is.

The cataclysm sundered more than Kalimdor. The orcs are a people at war with themselves, and the Durotar sequence reveals this conflict explicitly.

You meet two orcs outside Orgrimmar's battlements. The first asks you to do the standard quest type things. The second asks you to listen to a story and heed a warning. Making a point of distancing himself from "Hellscream's Horde", the shaman pleads with you not to intervene in the natural order of things. His companion scoffs, dismisses the warning as the dying words of an old age, and gives you your next set of orders.

Earlier, a troll shaman asked you to right the balance. Plainstriders, giant bipedal birds, had come to Durotar in the cataclysm. Rather than kill them, he tasked you with scaring them back across the water to their own territory. Afterwards, he begrudgingly asked you to put down a raptor. Destabilized in the cataclysm, the creature had begun to act out of balance and was beyond saving. You learn that force is necessary with one hand, but not the only solution with the other.

These interactions brings the entire story of "orc-ness" into question. Though you are repeatedly directed towards violence, particularly as you draw closer to Orgrimmar, there are yet a handful of moments where World of Warcraft seems to be winking back at you. "Yes, go complete your quest! Now, are you sure you did the right thing?"

And so the quest following the shaman's plea is titled, "Ignoring the Warnings."

Elf Corrupted! In Other News: Water Wet

A sequence to help an orc in the ruins of his devastated home is derailed by an ill-explained desire on his part to commit genocide against the local quillboar population. They appear to be doing nothing more than living in their villages, but we will kill them anyway, because Quest and Evil.

Novelty Games

An early quest pits you against a giant scorpion boss, complete with "don't stand in the fire" acid puddle mechanics. It's no deadlier than anything else in the Valley of Trials, but it's still a satisfying introduction to core boss mechanics in World of Warcraft.

Sadly, interactions with the world are still limited. You "scare" the plainstriders by fighting them and simply watching them flee at a certain health percentage.

Basilisk Urethras

You are immediately asked to kill six boars on a farm for no real reason beyond "training." Are we really using animals as target practice here? It doesn't sound evil, just incredibly inefficient. Also, ok, it's kind of evil.

You later kill giant scorpions (scorpids) for antivenom. Although not quite how that works, at least it's a reason.

You eventially kill a whole lot of crabs for "juju" - so there's that.

This War Ain't No Hammer

There aren't many direct references to other material here, but a quest to find "juju" for a witch doctor is played for laughs too hard to be aware of the poor stereotype it perpetuates. Despite myself, I was amused by being given a list of ailments to choose from, and being given different cures. Ian was blown several stories into the air when he told the doctor he was feeling down.

The introduction to orcs (and the Horde) in Durotar is more nuanced than it first appears and establishes the orcs as a troubled people at war with themselves, their natures, and their desires. Sadly, it does too little to draw these connections together in a meaningful way, and too many of the quests go nowhere, lack purpose, or distract from the themes simmering beneath the blood-red sands.

V. Tirisfal Glades

Where Tirisfal Glades quickly establishes some core motivations for undead players, with overall goals to satisfy ("Choose your destiny, but consider serving the queen. Accept your fate in the universe."), little is done to establish any greater motivation for the orc player. The only clue as to your initial purpose is the name of the first region: Valley of Trials.

Both zones introduce their host races in contradictory, underdeveloped ways. Both present differing fates for these people, and both ask the player to question their options. Yet Durotar has one layer that Tirisfal Glades lacks: it has a shaman in a hut who issues you a warning.

But it's only the one hut. Deathknell's unsuccessful reanimations, Lillian Voss - Tirisfal Glades is a procession of people searching for their identify. Durotar is too scattered with filler quests and incomplete conflicts that don't say anything about the people itself.

Tirisfal Glades is better than Durotar.

Conclusion

A thrilling start to a new orcish adventure is capped by the peace of knowing that Durotar is the fourth best zone in World of Warcraft.

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