In WoW you can usually find all kinds of quests. Anything between helping someone find something, kill aggressors or help injured people. There are also quests that are a bit shady, quests where you will kill first and ask questions later or sometimes even torture someone to get the answers that you need.
I remember reading discussions about the quest in Northrend where you torture a man to get answers, and some people questioned whether this was something your character would actually do. My character is a Warlock and I suspect she wouldn’t even bat an eye while using that neural needler on another person.
In fact, she hasn’t ever really been bothered by any quest in WoW. She does what she considers necessary, caring little for others as long as she benefits from her actions. I didn’t think the day would come when there was a quest she (I) had a problem finishing. There have been several sad quests in the game, where we know the story is based on a real life person, but this was different.
I took my Warlock to Darkshore, since I am slowly working on Loremaster and I thought I’d start there since it gives you a pet as well. While there, you end up getting a quest to kill the corrupted bears roaming the forests. This is usually not an issue for me… Only these corrupted bears had little cubs following them. And when you kill a bear, this happens.
“Mommy?”
The bear cub(s) will sit down and stare blankly at the corpse of their parent. I found this incredibly sad. I don’t remember a quest being quite this sad for me before. Eventually the cub will give up and run off into the distance. Blizzard, please give us a new quest where we save the cubs! Even my hardened Warlock couldn’t do this quest without feeling guilty!
Have you ever done/found a quest that you feel bad about?
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Saga@spellbound.nu
My priest while leveling through vanilla/Outlands/Northrend was an undead, so nothing threw her off. She hated the living, so why would she ever feel guilt for anything she did, right?
I can’t think of any quests she did through Cataclysm that made me go “oh, a blood elf might not want to do that…” I had planned on trying for Loremaster in Cata before I realized they had deleted all of my credit for the old zones, so I’d gone from having one or two quests left to having no quest credit, so I don’t really know about the old zones’ new questlines.
I haven’t actually logged on in a few months, since late March or early April, and I don’t really miss the grind. I miss the people, I miss it being fun, but the people weren’t around anymore and it wasn’t fun when I finally stopped playing. Latus (of the Undercity) and I used to play around on alts, but when we were both in school there was so little time we had free at the same time so even that stopped happening.
Siiiigh.
On the plus side, he is thinking he’ll probably buy Pandas even if he doesn’t think he want to, so I’ll have someone to tell me if it’s worth buying at all.
On the negative side, this means I’ll be stuck leveling alone. As a priest. Fffff.
All my old credit was deleted as well, which is why I’m only now starting to slowly work on Loremaster. It was so frustrating seeing my questing drop back down to 0 for Azeroth.
I do still enjoy the game, but admittedly I don’t know how much I’d play if I didn’t have friends to chat with or play with. I’m glad that they added Real ID, because then I can chat with my friend even if she’s off playing her horde character on another server.
Pandaria as far as I can tell I think will be fun. There looks like so much to do, without being forced to do it. I think it will allow someone to play fairly casually if they want to, or do it all if they want to do that. But in the end, it’s always about what someone wants to do of course, and if you’re not enjoying the game you shouldn’t be playing. Leveling a priest alone is usually horrible, though I hear Shadow is in a pretty good place for the expansion if that’s any help
Yeah, my warlock kinda liked that needle quest, too. Maybe too much. (http://grimmtooth.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-do-it-again_13.html) But the Kirin Tor do tend to bring out the haters.
I was running a lowbie alt with some former guildies last week and we hit those bear quests you were speaking of. Between the cries of the baby mammoths in Borean Tundra and the sad little sighs of the baby bears in Darkshore, it’s best to keep some happy thoughts handy.
I’ve always had a soft spot for animals to be fair. I’ll watch movies of people being murdered and maimed without caring, but if they attack the dog or I’ll be very upset!
I was fine with needling people, in fact I was slightly sad that I couldn’t use it on my party mates. After all when you cast Mind Blast, Mind Sear and the like on a day basis, what’s a bit of needling?
Quests I find heartbreakingly sad include The Mosswalker Saviour (http://www.wowhead.com/quest=12580), “We not do anything… to them… I no understand.” I could cry just thinking about it. The Keristrasza chain always makes me feel bad too because I feel slightly responsible for her fate.
The Mosswalker Saviour is definitely sad. I didn’t feel that as acutely though since at least I wasn’t personally responsible for their fate. At least we were trying to help, even if it was horribly sad. And yes, Keristrasza’s story is a sad one as well. I always feel kinda bad when killing her inside the Nexus. Sometimes I wish we could just save her instead, instead of having to put her down.
When I played the game as an Elf Druid it was very hard for me to be really sentimental about anything due to the immortality and all that, they have such a detachment from the world around them even as they inhabit it and care for it.
But that changed tremendously when I began to play my Human Paladin, I could immediately connect with the anger, frustration, hatred from all that he had lost conflicting with the ideals of the Light edging him towards peace and meditation. The character lost that fight, and tumbled into an abyss in the end, but before that, doing quests with him was my absolute favorite time in the game as I could really get into the game with him in my head. Wrath was the perfect expansion to play him with.
As I was leveling him, for me, the most heartbreaking quest was the old Tirion questline in the western plaguelands where Tirion is trying to reconnect with his son who’s become part of the Scarlet Crusader. You go and do all this stuff to remind his son of the ideal of the Light and all that by showing him the toys and mementos from his childhood that his Tirion has you collect, and as you’re fighting your way out of the fortress, the Scarlet Grand Crusader guy shows up to kill him before Tirion can save him and after the fighting Tirion drops down next to him is like, “Look what they did to my boy.”
That just broke my heart. But that was right before we were having a kid, so that might’ve had something to do with it.
Oh, I’d forgotten that questline with Tirion. That was definitely sad!
Hey Saga
Since I haven’t leveled the Ally side since the Cataclysm, I haven’t seen this quest. However, being the animal nut that I am I would tend to agree as to the empty feeling it would probably give you.
I’m not sure if you have seen or took part in the Horde questline in Southshore where you are given a shovel? I apologize that the name escapes me, but those quests had me question what I was doing more than once. It’s up there with the conflicting motives behind the CoS dungeon and made me wince a few times in my actions.
I haven’t done the new Southshore quests, but I am thinking that I want to level a horde up through there since I hear they’re good. I’ve done Silverpine, and those quests were awesome!
Dear Saga,
I had faced the exact same dilemma when doing that quest. I felt sad for those cubs. it’s weird, that we feel that way knowing that its not real. I wonder how can people in the real world go hunting down animals without feeling anything.
I like that about Blizzard, what they have done to connect to the player’s emotional/empathetic side and also about you that you put in so much thought/feelings in your gameplay.
~ liquidkey
Blizzard definitely did a good job at creating quests that tug at your heartstrings, that’s for sure