Ultimate Quest: Chapter Twelve - Loch Modan

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 boil blood sausages over the smoking ruins of local landmarks and critical infrastructure.

Don’t give up, hero! I won’t!

The trip from Dun Morogh to Loch Modan was arguably one of the most astonishing zone transitions in World of Warcraft. 15 years of expansions and the addition of dozens (and dozens… oh god… so many dozens) zones later, it remains one of the most memorable.

Starting from the mountainous, snowy reaches of Dun Morogh, you duck between a stone archway. Ironforge banners flank the tunnel entrance, and the interior passageway is lit by quiet, stone braziers. Occasionally, passing through, you come across a lonely Ironforge mountaineer. Occasionally, it is just you and the thousands of ton of mountain overhead.

You emerge from the other side to a completely new scene of shimmering green hills, and a pair of domineering, dwarven statues seated on stone thrones, as larger than any home. “Valley of Kings”, booms the scene title.

I have made it, you think. What magnificent wonders of dwarven majesty await me here?

As it turns out, a cave full of hairy, smelly troggs. And not much else.

The initial adventures in World of Warcraft’s Valley of Kings were always bad, a senseless grind in unremarkable caverns and a bland valley, and they are not much better here. If only Loch Modan’s crimes against spoiled granduer ended there.

Moving on to Thelsamar, a quiet warren, improves things only slightly. We are encouraged to collect ingredients for some blood sausages (because nothing spells adventure like harvesting your own, locally sourced meat and meat by-products), harass local beastmen populations, and purge scary spiders, to the relief of arachnophobes everywhere. Thelsamar even offers a glimmer of intrigue, as we continue a storyline started in Dun Morogh to find a Dark Iron saboteur. The problem there is that Dun Morogh ended with the Dark Iron Queen condemning Dark Iron insurgents. To see the Dark Iron dwarves repeated in Loch Modan as villains is disappointing. Worse, the writing appears oblivious to Queen Moira’s turn. The Dark Irons are just comic villains to be thwarted, their rightful place in the dwarven homeland entirely omitted from their politics. Are these more insurgents, rebelling against their Queen as a collaborator? Are they just criminals? Or is the Queen not to be trusted? We never find out.

The storyline does introduce one of the zone’s few shining points, however, with an optional side quest to collect missing documents for the local Explorer’s League, using only a Dark Iron stash list. (All good spies keep journals in their safe house.) Unlike nearly all quests in later World of Warcraft expansions, the hunt does not appear as HUD markers in a quest log and is not resolved immediately. Instead, it offers a treasure hunt, thematically appropriate, and dutiful adventurers are rewarded with a neat cache of goodies.

The Thelsamar storyline culminates in an amusing “Axis of Awful” conspiracy, as the aforementioned local beastmen populations (murlocs, gnolls, kobolds - oh my!) unite to give the local dwarf population a good bout of PvE. But something is missing here. The political intrigue, the making of sausages - it’s all well and good, but isn’t this place called Loch Modan? Where is the loch?

Anyone who watched the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm cinematic knows the answer already. The loch is gone, drained with the destruction of the Stonewrought Dam. Loch Modan, in other words, should now be a high desert. Except it isn’t. Nor are the dwarves talking about it.

But this must have an enormous impact on the local economy. Thelsamar, once a lakeside village, should be dry. So where are they getting their freshwater? For that matter, how much local wildlife depended on the loch for sustenance or their very breath? And what impact does that have on hunting season for this little village? And for that matter, what exactly is going on with the big purple tower on the horizon that no one wants to talk about?

It does not feel like the designers here took the destruction of the iconic Stonewrought Dam and subsequent draining of Khaz Modan’s beautiful Loch all that seriously. Instead, it feels like they took the existing storylines and conflicts, updated them for 2009 MMORPG sensibilities, and sodded off to the next zone in their backlog. And that is a shame, because the original Loch Modan environment was one of the most visually interesting zones in the game.

But either the designers failed to realize this or failed to value their own handiwork. If you are going to destroy something this iconic, then surely you would replace it with something just as significant. Yet Thelsamar is essentially the same as ever, as is the local dwarven dig site (every dwarf-themed zone has one), and the pointless hunter’s lodge beyond. The storyline simply runs its paces, and whatever world-building could have been done in the aftermath of the dam’s destruction is left on the other side of that initial mountain passageway.

(Speaking of crimes against game design, I would be remiss if I did not mention the escort quest that serves as the transition between Thelsamar and the rest of the zone. Because it is terrible. Like every escort quest in World of Warcraft. Of all things to bring forward from the original game - an escort quest?)

It is not until we are past the Farstrider Lodge that we find encounter any in-world awareness of this calamity. There, we meet a young gnome named Ando Blastenheimer and get a glimpse of what Loch Modan should have been all along.

We come upon Ando next to the smoking wreck of a gnomish flying machine. The green-haired gnomish teen (we are assured of his age, despite appearing like every other gnome in World of Warcraft) is licking his wounds on the outskirts of a camp of doomsday cultists known as the Twilight’s Hammer.

“Look at them,” he says. “The Twilight’s Hammer ruined this land! That cult caused this Cataclysm, and broke the Stonewrought Dam, and drained the entire Loch. And nobody is brave enough to challenge them. Not even you! You see? It’s all so stupid…”

Stupid, you think. Yes, this is getting to be pretty stupid.

But alright. At last, here we are. The harbingers of cataclysm make their appearance. The great villains of this piece, entering from stage right. This is what everything was building up to, right? This is the rousing climax to the Loch adventure, where our brave dwarven heroes stand up against the faithless and cancel the apocalypse.

Except… not exactly.

Oh, sure, we batter cultists about the ears for a little while. But there is no triumph. Since the writing does not acknowledge the actual impact of this cataclysm, even in this campaign against the cult, we are never allowed to feel the impact of our actions. Are they too little, too late? Have we sparked a small fire of hope in a land that had lost it all? Who knows! As far as we can tell, the dwarves were never really all that bothered about the destruction to begin with. “I think that tower to the End of All Things adds a nice bit o’ color to the horizon, personally,” you might hear over ale and blood sausage at the Stoutlager Inn. “Suits me just fine.”

(Incidentally, the big purple eldritch tower on the horizon is never addressed. As it turns out, it is planted in the Twilight Highlands, all that remains of the dwarven fortress of Grim Batol, so we will be visiting it much later in this Ultimate Quest.)

In the end, the whole storyline falls rather flat, and we pass out of Loch Modan, on to greener pastures, and wetter lands.

Loch Modan was never a strong adventure, but it always offered inspiring landmarks and iconic vistas. It’s replacement in Cataclysm drops the iconography but only makes the faintest effort to up the ante. Once one of the most irreplacable stops along every dwarf and gnome’s journey, Loch Modan is now one of the most unnecessary.

v. Arathi Highlands

Loch Modan is a waste of a zone, but compared to Arathi, it is a hearty adventure packed full of intrigue. Loch-less though it may be, there is still visual variety, and there is at least good characterization for some of the characters involved. I also did not fall asleep.

Loch Modan is better than the Arathi Highlands.

v. The Hinterlands

Loch Modan has 20% of a full story, 100% of which is totally disconnected from anything else in the zone. The Hinterlands has 40% of a full story that is 60% connected to the rest of the zone. Do the math, folks. This is science, after all.

The Hinterlands is better than Loch Modan.

Conclusion

Loch Modan was once a beautiful follow-on to the stirring Dun Morogh. Now it is a wasteland of both plot, character, and environmental design. A shame. But at least we know...

Loch Modan is the eleventh best zone in World of Warcraft.

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