Ogres everywhere

Time for an update on my progress through Outland on my way to 70. I did a couple guide posts last week and totally forgot to mention that I hit level 67 and over the weekend I made my way to about a third of the way to 68. I'm getting pretty excited at this point because as a druid I will be getting flight form soon and I have never gotten to fly in in this game so I'm really looking forward to it. I pretty much finished up my work in Nagrand, although I wasn't able to do most of the elite quests there, but that isn't to say I didn't try. After all the worrying about looking for group members in general chat, I tried it several times throughout my play time and the response was not what I expected. Actually I expected some sort of response at least, but I got nothing at all, and It got pretty frustrating. I know there are a bunch of 70's running around that zone farming for motes, and there have to be some others leveling and in need of help on those quests as well. In the end I didn't think it was worth my time to stick around and wait for help, so once every quest there said '(Group)' next to it I headed up north to Blade's Edge Mountains.

BEM is interesting in that it's not really how I pictured it would be. I was sort of imagining it to be a desolate mountain landscape, with very little plant life, and lots of hostile beasts. Well I guess it isn't a total disappointment, there are a lot of hostile beasts, but coming out of the cave and finding a grove of trees and grass threw me off a little. I got used to it though and got down to business. First order of work was to kill off some big cats that the night elves were worried about, so I got rid of them, then made my way to an Arakkoa camp and stole a bunch of their feathers before using their own magic circle to create a glowing bird which I took back to the elves for them to check out. Then they told me about some wolves that were threatening, so I headed out west across a big bridge that didn't look man-made, but I don't think rocks naturally form like that. Oh well, it held up, and I killed some wolves, taking their tails as proof, and finall made my way to their den mother and had to kill her too. Making my way down the hill I stopped off to kill a bunch of ogres, actually 30 of them, stole a bunch of their beer, and gathered some crystals from their mine before heading back to turn in all those quests.

It's really looking like Outland is ogre central. Somehow they have taken over a lot of the higher level zones and are very threatening to Alliance and Horde. Is it just me or were they on the Horde side for a while before? Maybe Blizz just couldn't think of a way to make a female ogre, although they managed it with orcs and trolls. Luckily ogres are pretty easy to take out, it was their dogs I was worried about, roaming around the camps with that little circle above their heads meaning they could see stealthed people. I really had to be on my toes in there since I usually sneak around in stealth form, but this time I had to be extra careful. Next time I will be heading back to the ogre camps to kill more, just in a different area, how original.

On the topic of playable races, I can understand why Blizz didn't make ogres playable. They are too big, hard to make females, and would probably be very limited in the available classes. There are, however, other humanoids that could be implemented as playable characters, it would just take some imagination to come up with how to do it. Most of the humanoid races are enemies of both Horde and Alliance, but there are those few among them that don't attack on sight, and those are the ones that we could potentially side with one or the other. For this reason they could add those races into the game as neutral races. Since the other humanoids tend to be enemies of each other as well they could not just make another faction and lump them together, it wouldn't make much sense and they can't just have huge cities pop up randomly to accommodate them. The solution would be that the player would somehow have a way to choose which faction to side with.

The easiest way to choose sides would be to choose during character creation, but another way would be to somehow use reputation, similar to the way we choose between the Aldor and the Scryers. This would give the player a way to change factions if they want to, to defect to the other side, maybe through a quest line that you can choose to do that would have you work as a double agent for the other side. Now that would add a new dimension to the game as you run the risk of being exposed by other players if you announce in general chat that you are doing one of the quests or if they catch you trying to do one of the quests. I suppose the problem here is that they couldn't justify making this defection available to races such as humans or orcs who would not change sides and Blizz does not seem to be the type to make certain content available only to some players. I also don't know how this would work with PvP servers where all your characters have to be the same faction and I'm sure there are many other problems that could arise, but it is an interesting idea that would add some more depth to the game that we haven't seen before. Or maybe it's just a dumb idea that would never work, I only just thought of it while writing this and I'm already finding lots of problems that would arise with it. What do you think?