One of my biggest issues with modern instanced PVE is there’s no time to really appreciate the artistry of their design. I really enjoy wandering around outdated raids and dungeons because you can actually appreciate all the artistic choices. There’s a lot of visual storytelling in them that you’ll never notice as you rush through to down the bosses.
Torghast on the otherhand can be played by yourself, has no ticking clock and even have empty floors where you’re free to AFK for a bit. It’s also designed for you to pay close attention to your environment to look out for traps and bonuses. As a pure dungeon crawling experience I enjoy it. Mechanically my only complaints are the difficulty curve is more just a wall sometimes, with bosses going from difficult to insurmountable in just a floor. Plus I kind of wish you could get gear from it like with Visions. I get this is an mmo but I think it’d be nice to not completely leave players with weird schedules in the dust.
But from a visual perspective I really find the place dull, and I’m kind of perplexed why they’d make this the setting you’re supposed to amble through and carefully observe.
I had just sort of assumed the drab, blueish gray corridors were boring and interchangeable because these maps would randomly change their layout as they said this was inspired by roguelikes. But either this isn’t the case or the changes are so pultry I still knew exactly where most things were going through lower levels on my alt.
And I’m just sort of confused why they went with this environment for this gameplay mode. I imagine something like this in the style of Waycrest Manor, Karazhan or Castle Nathria. Someplace where people at least lived. Maybe have some books hidden about with lore details that could be safely ignored by disinterested parties but savored by dorks like us. Or that could simply let you pause and consider the tragedy of the place. Great and happy memories were once made in these halls but now there’s but dust and nightmares. Hell I’d take roguelikes Razorfen Kraul - at least you’d get some insight into how Quilboar society operates.
I think what stands out to me is the only meme I’ve seen about the place was in regards to that side quest where you get to have a touching reunion between a boneboi and his abomination. Maldraxxus continuing to be just the GOAT for ringing emotion out of the land of the dead. Now that might sound like an odd thing to note, but it means nothing else about the place stuck out in anyone’s memory long enough for them to take the time to make a funny picture about it.
But why would anything else? It’s gray blue corridors full of gray blue enemies. And the enemies are mostly just suits of armor. I’ve said before how dudes in armor can make for bland and forgettable enemies but here they didn’t even spring for the dudes it’s just the armor. I speak no hyperbole when I say Antorus and Naxxaramas were more interesting to putz around as at least some undead and demons have personalities reflected in their lairs. Which can’t be the case here as it’s mostly just automatons.
Blizz can if nothing else be relied upon to design fascinating worlds that are a delight to explore. Which is why it’s so bewildering to me the game mode designed to be carefully explored and observed is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen in this game.
Prisons in most of the world aren’t like… nice? Or visually stimulating. In fact most of the time they’re intentionally designed to break you down psychologically.
Plus if they did add too much detail, perhaps it would reveal too much on the origins of Torghast and the Maw.
I mean they already removed all the “Maw Lore Items” readability, most of it watered down and turned to quest text, but some of the most important items text were removed from the game outright.
Now IMHO what they should’ve done is add a lot more horror to Torghast. More mutilated corpses of various gameplay races, abominations made with multiple limbs of multiple races, that scream in agony as they attack you, etc.
I just don’t buy “It’s hell prison” as an excuse. This whole concept was invented for this expansion very recently. The Maw we saw in Edge of Night was described as more of a formless nightmare than anything like this. They could’ve made it whatever they wanted.
So “hands tied it had to be boring 'cuz lore” does not hold water for me. They had to decide at some point recently to go with these visual design. Besides have you seen like Hierynmous Bosch’s interpretation of hell because that place has swarms of bats exploding out of people’s buttholes. It is definitely not visually dull.
I can say it is certainly the last place I’d want to be stuck for eternity but it does that job far too well.
Like Hell, if we’re speaking in terms of Apostolic Christian (read: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Church of the East, i.e. Not Protestant™), isn’t a prison. It is a place of punishment. It is comparable to Islamic Jahannam.
It isn’t even really Tartarus (at least for now, perhaps the Maw/Torghast seals something else like some are speculating). Definitely not Jewish Gehenna. Not Nahua Mictlan, not Incan/Andean Urin Pacha. Not Norse Hel either tbh.
Prisons, in theory, are to separate criminals from society and eventually rehabilitate them to re-enter society (not that this ever happens, but that is the sociocultural discourse). Prisons do not exist to punish per se.
The prison warden/guards IRL do not flog you daily and draw out your blood until you’re rendered insane and turn into one of the guards under the warden beating prisoners.
Which I think is missing from the general equation.
They’re trying to conflate the idea of a “prison” with the idea of “hell”, when our idea of what Hell “should be” is radically different and much more complex than what a prison fundamentally is.
The idea of a prison does not sate our creative expectations that the idea of hell gives us.
See the thing is there, even if we go “It’s a prison” angle, when it could’ve been anything else, other prisons in WoW are more interesting because they at least say something about the society that built them or at minimum have some interesting inmates.
Like with Torghast at bare minimum they could’ve made it an interesting moral dilemma when it came to absolving condemned souls. As, for all we know this formless soul could be the Hitler of their world. Could we be freeing things just as bad as the Jailor?
Well, no. Because we know they broke the data sorting algorithm so all souls are filed into this cosmic spam folder regardless of sins or virtues.
I mean, are they? Kul Tiras’s prisons just dusky tbh, just a few lovecrafty motifs. Stormwind’s prison is just a cellar tbh?
Oh yeah I wish they had done more of a “Dante’s Inferno” 2010 video game way of doing the weekly quest.
If you haven’t played, in the game all the souls that Dante talks to in the book you find within the zone, and you’re given a short blurb about their life.
After reading, you decide whether you will absolve that soul (sending them to Heaven, granting Holy Points for Holy Talent Tree) or obliterate the soul (destroying them forever, granting you Damned Points for Damned Talent Tree).
Rn we’re just getting any soul we can find, just assuming they aren’t like, Gul’dan lol
I’m going to disagree on the idea that Torghast as a whole is dull. There are some interesting areas that I find to be both compelling and intriguing in the visual story telling department.
I think my favorite wing to point to would be the Coldheart Interstitia, which is full of Mawsworn that sweep down to attack from the slate grey skies and house spirit remnants that are trapped in their own personal tornadoes. The massive chains and brooding towers make for a harrowing skyline and the limitless void both above and below can be very unsettling when you get too close to one of the walkways edges.
Not that I don’t appreciate that the other wings are kind of monotonous. It seems like the Skoldus Hall is the base design and the Fracture Chambers are just that but with ghosts and slightly greener, and the Soulforges are just that but with lava and fire traps, and the Upper Reaches are just that but with Venthyr and more spike traps. They all seem to have a vague Icecrown Citidel look to them, but without the Scourge’s charm.
The only other wing that’s really all that visually is Mort’regar, which I admit is very similar to the Coldheart wing. I just like the dingy green and the upside down hanging cages. Makes it feel like some sort of underwater hellscape, and it was neat running into K’valdir trying to escape here. I just liked the idea that there was a section of Torghast that seemed to be designed for the souls Helya had brought with her.
I think the big problem with the wings though is that they are mostly homogenous for six layers, leaving only the Twisting Corridors to provide any variety, but what little variety it has is just a hodgepodge of the other existent wings. If the Twisting Corrudors had truly randomized the rooms and you didn’t know what the next layer might be each time this might have been okay, but instead it has the same vibe as just doing three separate wings back to back. It’s exasperating and, yeah, pretty dull. They probably should have just made the twisting corridors their own thing, or made infinite runs possible for those that wanted them, like on beta.
Skoldus hall = Cold Icecrown, but with a lack of ice/frozen stygia
Fracture Chambers = Unholy Icecrown but with a lack of diversity of the mutilated horrors
Soulforges = “Fire”, “These souls are being smelted into weapons! oh no!” but again without any… real horror?
Coldheart Interstitia = Cold Icecrown again, BUT WITH BRIDGES OOH LALA; the fact there isn’t some kind of strange organ-like effect (interstitial space of the body) sucks
Mort’regar = Unholy Icecrown again, BUT WITH BRIDGES AND PORTALS OH MY
Upper Reaches = Soul Forges BUT WITH BIGGER ROOMS
It’s a prison world with no contextual horror that does not spark “Hell” outside of visual motifs.
Like we’ve said in the other thread: Anduin looks fine! Literally clean and well fed.
Well we learn Tol Barad is a corrupt for profit prison (bit of an oxymoron there) where letting giant monsters be trash disposals is kosher, and also apparently it can be deliberately flooded to drown anyone there. The presence of worgen also suggest they don’t care to extradite foreign nationals guilty of crimes against the Admiralty.
The Stockades show the Alliance prison system is a broken mess. Stuff apparently suffers from so many prisoner coups that at this point the exasperated guards are happy for support even it’s coming from Horde adventurers who probably aren’t in SW as tourists.
The Violet Hold shows the Kirin Tor treats its prisoners more as research subjects. And the Acatraz shows the Draenei believe in containing even toothy monstrosities from behind the furthest stars so they probably aren’t pro death penalty if it can be helped.
What’s the Maw tell us? Well maybe Zoovals great crime was being an insufferable wet blanket because good God is Goth Mr.Clean’s sense of decour drab as dishwater.
This didn’t wind up being the case? I haven’t done it enough to notice one way or the other.
If nothing else, though, I’m pretty sure that it was a design goal at some point in the process. So even if the idea was eventually scrapped, the visual look might still have been set while they were planning on random generation.
Tol Barad was the island prison/PvP zone/raid from Cataclysm that was run by Dalaran and Stormwind mages who used it as a prison for demons, undead, and rogue wizards.
That’s the one. Although Tol Barad also has a prison in it, funnily enough.
And as to your earlier post;
I’ll fault myself for not noticing that, to a point. It does kind of train you to watch the ground as a scratch mark on the floor is one of the tell tale signs of a pendulum trap. Plus just fixing the camera downward like I’m playing old school Diablo is my method for moving through the traps. Well outside just using dispersion.
Frankly I might not detest it as much if it wasn’t comparatively so boring. It blows my mind that they managed to make Maldraxxus scenic. I enjoy hanging out in the necropolis while waiting in ques and just seeing the landscape roll by as I float around in my flying skull fortress.
This is seriously the first WoW expansion that’s made me want to invest in a new laptop that I otherwise use for work or either dated or not graphically demanding indie games. Because I have friends with all those improved lighting and shader mods with the graphics maxed out and it looks absolutely stunning. But I’ve noticed none of the screenshots they’ve taken are of the Maw or Torghast.
If it is I genuinely can’t tell. I know for a fact at least certain rooms are identical. Because I recognized them as I’d been killed there on my main and knew to approach more cautiously this time.
The Maw and Torghast strikes me as recycled (or upscaled) Wrath concept art with an even more bland color palette. It’s strange that the art team dropped the ball so hard after doing such a great job with the other afterlife zones. Throw is some generic “spooky” music, add in LONG BOUTS of just walking and dodging mobs, and you realize that its not even scary. Its just, boring.
The Maw looks like the Eternal Battlefield of Diablo III’s Expansion Reaper of Souls.
Incidentally the Dungeon next to the Eternal Battlefield Pandemonium isn’t scary either and looks like a less scary(as in more well lit) version of Moria(Torghast and the Maw’s architecture in comparison looks like the Gates of Mordor in general which in turn seem to be a spiker version of Barad-dûr’s architecture)!
Yeah the core gameplay loop isn’t grand either. I got to the one the other day that suddenly jumps from six to twelve levels and isn’t that just taking oceanic levels of piss.
And then after only having a few close calls, and only one death because I got hit at a weird angle with a knock back and fell off a ledge, the final boss completely mopped the floor with me. Four times I fought the guy and four times I lost because even when I dodged every AoE thing perfectly just his regular hits struck like a runaway ice cream van.
I remember Visions actually getting me to rage quit, and they had a lot of entirely different, entirely awful problems of their own. But at least they caused an emotional response. After that I just shrugged and was happy to just go do something else.
Edit: I did really love the one level where the traps suddenly grew a spine. Lot of overlapping ones that meant I had to pay attention. Whereas before they were more speed bumps than a danger.
I’ve heard a lot of glowing reviews about the Maw being posted of the WoW subreddit when I was overseas, but I’m sure that’s just bots or people who don’t even have an active sub in a echo-chamber.