joint post

First Impressions of WoW: The War Within

Eppu

The newest expansion of World of Warcraft, The War Within, has been out for a few months now. Time for a first impressions post.

Eppu

The environments are really impressive, both visually and geographically (for the lack of a better term). The landscapes look more like they could’ve developed according to natural processes. (Check out, for instance, the Ruptured Lake and the descent into Azj-Kahet from Hallowfall!) And into all that, they’ve squeezed an incredible amount of distinctive questing areas, some above or below others or just down a cliff, hidden behind a hump in the hill, or the like. The flora is imaginative and unusual—we are largely underground, after all.

There are also a lot of fun details. To mention only a few: The tents that look like books are neat, and kinda remind me of the upside down ship houses in Boralus. The masses of candles in the Kobold areas look amazing, as does the darkness effect in e.g. Kriegval’s Rest. The Steam Vent in Dornogal has these heated beds for the Earthen to relax on. Looks very cozy!

WoW TWW Dornogal The Steam Vent

The only zone I don’t care for is Azj-Kahet; it’s too dark overall, even if some areas have really cool and interesting details. (The exception here is the Wildcamp Or’lay area, where the Beneath the Roots quest ends; I really could’ve gone on adventuring there much longer. Fabulous, I love it!)

Most of the music is lovely, nicely varying, and thought-out. On the other hand, almost all of the nerubian characters have too deep voices; they’re incomprehensible. Bad directing leads to wasted voice acting.

This time, Blizzard opted to hoist hero talents on top of the talents introduced in Dragonflight. (With tweaks to the talents, because you have to tweak talents for a new expansion, otherwise the world would implode, right?) That works really well, I think; no need to re-learn absolutely everything. With professions, it’s possible to craft something useful for your toons from the beginning; that’s really nice.

There are lots of creature comforts I wish Blizzard had included years ago. For example, more options to skip certain story quests on alts, the Warband bank and Deposit All button (even if it deposited also all applicable Dragonflight items, so I had to go prune them out afterwards), the Leave-O-Bot at the end of delves, or quartermasters in cities marked on the map. And speaking of maps, the functionality of clicking anywhere on the map and have that point become a tracking caret on your screen (much like it’s been possible for quests).

Also the fact that flight points are opened to alts once one of your toons has discovered them (and reached 80?) is fantastic. As a visual person, I deeply appreciate the difference in the map boot graphics: yellow boot with wings = a discovered flight point, green boot without wings = an undiscovered one.

WoW TWW Flight Points on Map

I LOVE that there now are a few dragonriding mounts that can carry a second character! As Erik doesn’t like dragonriding at all and I love it, when playing together we get to take advantage of the higher speed of dragonriding if I steer and Erik travels as a passenger. 🙂

Delves are a lot of fun, but they could also use some improvement. Like Torghast in Shadowlands, I really love the flexibility of delves—except this time, we do get loot at the end! (Something we wished had been a feature of Dragonflight.) On the other hand, we don’t get many interesting game effects like the anima powers in Torghast. Also, delves are set apart from dungeons and raids in that travel to their location is required and simply queueing (like for follower dungeons, which offer a similar type of flexibility) isn’t possible. Love the Leave-O-Bot, though, plus an easy exit at the end of a dungeon. I also like follower dungeons a lot, they make playing dungeon content easier. They could use some fine tuning, but the concept works.

A random observation to end with: Something about how the story in TWW unfolds reminds me a lot of Battle for Azeroth. Perhaps it has to do with the character-focused approach? Just about every plot point refers to its effects on people, and many quests literally focus on the personal, instead of running around fetching bucket handles or grinding through endlessly respawning faceless enemy mooks. Also, children aren’t entirely forgotten.

Erik

Almost everything I have to say about The War Within is good. This expansion delivered a lot for me to enjoy.

When the new expansion was announced as an underground experience, I was nervous. I’ve never much liked WoW‘s underground zones. I found Deepholm dull and Zaralek Cavern claustrophobic. Still, I was willing to wait and see what the design team would do, and I have been pleasantly surprised. The Ringing Deeps and Hallowfall are both beautiful zones that feel very distinct. You know you’re underground, but they don’t feel dull or oppressive. And when you need fresh air and sky above you, you can always go up to the Isle of Dorn. I don’t care for Azj-Kahet, but three out of four zones is more than enough for me to have a fulfilling game experience.

Within those zones, there is lots of attention to detail in both environment and storytelling to fill out our sense of the new peoples we meet there. The culture of the Earthen is fascinating to explore, as they find their way between the dictates of order and the pull to free will. Our kooky, scrappy, candle-wearing Kobold friends make excellent comic foils to the serious Earthen. The Arathi of Hallowfall introduce fascinating possibilities in the larger lore of WoW. I’m not interested in the Nerubians, but as with the zones, there is more than enough in the rest of the expansion for me to discover and enjoy.

WoW TWW Torchsnarls Cave2

Turning to aspects of gameplay, delves and follower dungeons bring a welcome new range of possibilities to the game for people like us who don’t like to do group content. Delves are short enough to fit a casual play schedule, challenging enough to be a satisfying test of skill, and rewarding enough to be worth doing repeatedly. Follower dungeons make it easy to enjoy dungeon content at the appropriate level without worrying about bad groups and grouchy strangers. Delves, follower dungeons, world quests, and weekly quests offer great flexibility in how to play and advance my characters. This expansions gives players like me more to do than ever before.

The most fundamental mechanical change of the expansion, of course, is the introduction of Warbands. The ability to share everything from renown progress to crafting materials seamlessly across all my characters is liberating and refreshing. Combined with the changes to transmog that let you learn any appearance you pick up, whether the character you’re playing can use it or not, these changes mark a significant shift in Blizzard’s attitude toward players. We finally have an expansion that welcomes me to play as many alts as I feel like without making it feel as though I am missing out on something important.

With all of these positives, the things that I don’t like about the expansion seem minor and unimportant. I don’t like Azj-Kahet and have no interest in the Nerubians. My dislike for the zone is not because it is badly done, though, and I hope that everyone who is into dark spidery stuff has a blast there. It is completely okay for Blizzard to make parts of the game that aren’t for me.

Dornogal feels a bit bland as a capital, less thriving and alive than Valdrakken, less magical than Dalaran, less characterful than Boralus or Zul’dazar. Still, it does have a sense of place and its own kind of beauty. I’d much rather spend an expansion in Dornogal than in Oribos.

Hero talents have turned out to be less interesting than I hoped. On most of my characters, the choice is made for me because of the two options available, one revolves around a talent I don’t use or serves a playstyle I’m not interested in. Few of the individual hero talents feel like they make much of a difference to how I play. On the other hand, I don’t really want a big shake-up to how I play my characters, so on balance, I’m fine with the system.

I find the main story of Smug Floating Shadow Elf Doing Vaguely Evil Stuff to be boring, but the truth is that in every expansion, I’m usually bored by the main story. I find my joy in the small stories we experience along the way, and The War Within has not disappointed with its side stories. From wacky Kobold bedtime stories to sensitive reflections on aging and the loss of treasured memories, this expansion has plenty to offer. Just like Azj-Kahet and the Nerubians, I can completely ignore the Smug Elf, Traumatized Prince, and Angry Ranger Show and still have more than enough to do.

Overall, my reaction to this expansion is: There are things I don’t care for and am not interested in, but there are so many things for me to enjoy that I hardly even notice the rest.

Images: World of Warcraft screencaps

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

Some Thoughts on The Hunt for Gollum Adaptation

Eppu

The news has been out for a good long while now: a new live-action Middle-Earth movie is in the works, set to be released in 2026 and produced by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens. It’s provisionally called The Lord of the Rings: Hunt for Gollum, and Andy Serkis will both direct and play Gollum. Apparently it’ll be the first of multiple films by Warner Bros. based on Tolkien’s books, and told from Gollum’s perspective.

Since this fall has been surprisingly full of Tolkien for us (we both re-read LotR in addition to our two trips to Tampere, first to see the John Howe exhibit and then the theatrical adaptation), we ended up talking about the upcoming Gollum movie and our misgivings with it. Below are some of those thoughts.

Erik

I’m not excited for The Hunt for Gollum. Nothing about the character of Gollum or the long and mostly fruitless search for him, as described in the book, sounds like promising material for further on-screen exploration. I fear that this film will turn into more overstuffed action/fantasy/comedy like the Hobbit trilogy. At best I hope to enjoy the settings, costumes, props, and other details that were made with such love and dedication by the production team on the earlier Middle-Earth films. Still, I’m always ready to be pleasantly surprised.

For films that fill in more of the story we haven’t yet seen on screen, I’d be more excited about an exploration of Sauron’s attacks to the north. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings mention that Sauron’s forces at Dol Guldur assaulted Lothlorien and ravaged the lands of the Mirkwood Elves while an army of his allies from the east came against the Men of Dale and the Dwarves of Erebor. In the end, Sauron’s forces were defeated. Galadriel, Celeborn, and Thranduil cleansed Mirkwood and overthrew Dol Guldur while Bard II of Dale and Thorin III of Erebor pushed Sauron’s allies back to the east. There is plenty of scope here for big action set pieces, drama between the folk of Middle-Earth, and the return of some favorite characters. At the same time, there is enough blank canvas that for new characters to join the cast without feeling like they were squeezing out Tolkien’s story. It would be nice to see what was happening to places and people we know from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings while Sauron’s main offensive against Gondor was going on.

I could also enjoy a movie set in the Shire in the years after The Hobbit. A light-hearted comedy of Hobbit manners about the Sackville-Bagginses and their designs on Bag End could intertwine with the growing up of Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam and the forging of the friendships that would be tested in the crucible of war far from home. A movie like this could give appropriate scope to Jackson’s taste for slapstick comedy while also allowing hints of the slowly creeping darkness of the ring and its effects on Bilbo to show through.

Eppu

My very first thought was: why would we want to see this particular story? Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum will always be stellar, and I’m always up for seeing more of Weta’s work, but otherwise I’m quite unsure why this story was picked and why it should excite us.

Firstly, there isn’t that much to go on in LotR. According to Appendix B, Aragorn and Gandalf searched for Gollum together a few separate times, and the whole process takes them some 16 years.* In the second chapter of book two, The Council of Elrond, we get the most detail. There’s first a reference to a long and hopeless search. (Gandalf says that they went to the Mountains of Shadow and “the fences of Mordor”, where they guessed that “he dwelt there long in the dark hills; but we never found him, and at last I despaired”.)

Aragorn is the one to actually catch him: apparently he by chance found Gollum’s footprints leading away from Mordor and caught him somewhere in the Dead Marshes. Then followed an unpleasant walk to Mirkwood, and, finally, Gandalf questioning Gollum there.

What I see so far is a long, tedious, and possibly uneventful beginning followed by sleeplessness, stink, and cruelty (Aragorn himself says that Gollum “bit me, and I was not gentle […] making him walk before me with a halter on his neck, gagged, until he was tamed by lack of drink and food”).

A very skilled writing team is required to make something exciting out of that.

You know what I would rather see? For instance:

  • anything do do with the Hobbits arriving into Eriador (1050, c. 1150 of Third Age) and settling first Bree-land (c. 1300) and then the Shire; also the Stoors leaving the Angle and some returning to Wilderland (1356)
  • the heyday of Osgiliath (before the city was burned and its palantir lost in 1437)
  • Gondor and Arnor renew communcations and form an alliance (1940)
  • the fall of Arnor and the northern kingdom; how the heirlooms of Arnor are given to Elrond’s safekeeping (1976)
  • Dwarves live and mine in Moria and eventually are driven out
  • Thorin I leaves Erebor and goes north to the Grey Mountains (2210)
  • excavations of Great Smials (begun 2683), Bandobras Took defeats Orcs in the Northfarthing (2747), Gandalf comes to aid Hobbits (2758)
  • life in Dale, the coming of Smaug (2770)
  • Thráin II and Thorin wander westwards (from Moria?) and settle in southern Ered Luin beyond the Shire (2799-2802)
  • how and where Aragorn’s mother Gilraen (born 2907) lived in the north, her wedding to Arathorn, son of Arador (2929); death of Arador (2930) and birth of Aragorn (2931), Gilraen’s travels to Imladris with Aragorn after the death of her husband (2933)
  • The Fell Winter when many northern rivers are frozen, incl. the Baranduin (Brandywine) (2911)
  • Gandalf and Balin visit Bilbo in the Shire (2949)
  • Aragorn meets Gandalf and their friendship begins (2956), Aragorn’s journeys in the Wild begin in earnest, including time in Rohan and in Gondor in disguise (2957-2980)
  • Balin leaves Erebor and enters Moria (2989), the end of Balin and the Moria Dwarf colony (2994)
  • The Scouring of the Shire and the Battle of Bywater after the destruction of the Ring
  • King Elessar rides north, lives by Lake Evendim for a while, including meeting his Hobbit friends on the Brandywine Bridge, Elanor, daughter of Samwise, becomes a maid of honor to Queen Arwen (1436 Shire Reckoning)
  • Samwise, Rose, and Elanor ride to Gondor, stay there a year (1442 S.R.); Elanor marries Fastred of Greenholm (1451 S.R.), they have a child, Elfstan Fairbairn (1454 S.R.), and later move to Undertowers on the Tower Hills (1455 S.R.); Rose dies and Sam rides to Tower Hills and gives the Red Book to the Fairbairn’s keeping before leaving for the Grey Havens (1482 S.R.)

(All pulled from Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings.)

So much could be told about the the Shire’s early history. The tidbits on fighting with Orcs, a company of Hobbit archers sent to assist the King in the north, and the Fell Winter are tantalizing. Or the later history, too, especially focusing on Sam, Merri, and Pippin and their families.

There also has got to be a lot of unmentioned history behind details like “Gondor and Arnor renew communcations and form an alliance”, but I can see the (probably economic or marketing) reasons for focusing on characters we’ve already seen on the screen.

So, you could go with “Thráin II and his son Thorin wander westwards. They settle in the South of Ered Luin beyond the Shire”, or “Gandalf and Balin visit Bilbo in the Shire”, and keep a reasonable connection to events in the movie adaptations. The latter took place some eight years after the events of The Hobbit and 40 years before Balin sets out for Moria—surely a lot of leeway for embellishment there.

I also would really love to see the scouring of the Shire. Understandably the sequence would take a lot of reworking, since Jackson et al. chose to kill off Saruman and Wormtongue already at Isengard, but that kind of major revamping is hardly new to the team.

In any case, we’ll reserve final judgment until we know more. Here’s hoping it’ll be good.

This post has been edited to correct a typo.

*) Appendix B lists three years to do with the hunt for Gollum. First, in the year 3001, “Gandalf seeks for news of Gollum and calls on the help of Aragorn.” Second, in 3009, “Gandalf and Aragorn renew their hunt for Gollum at intervals during the next eight years, searching in the vales of Anduin, Mirkwood, and Rhovanion to the confines of Mordor. At some time during these years Gollum himself ventured into Mordor, and was captured by Sauron.” Third, in 3017, “Gollum is released from Mordor. He is taken by Aragorn in the Dead Marshes, and brought to Thranduil in Mirkwood.”

In Creative Differences we discuss a topic or question that we both find interesting.

When a Walrus Shows up at Your Door

Erik

There’s been a thing going on in the past month on the Internet about fairies and walruses. If you’re not in the loop, it all started with a poll posted on tumblr by user baddywronglegs that asked respondents to consider which one they would be more surprised to find at their front door, a fairy or a walrus?

The fun of this poll is that it pits two very surprising (in most parts of the world) things against one another, but those things are surprising in two different ways. Fairies don’t exist, but if they did, it would be perfectly plausible for one to knock on your door. Walruses do exist, but the idea that one would survive the trip out of the Arctic, make it to your front door, and knock is beyond belief. What’s more surprising: the most unsurprising surprising thing or the most surprising unsurprising thing?

But, then, surprising things do happen sometimes. Like walruses showing up where they have no business being. A lost walrus found itself on the shores of southeastern Finland in the summer of 2022. It didn’t knock on any doors, but it did take a nap between some beached rowing boats, literally rolled around on someone’s yard in the grass, and posed in front of an emergency vehicle.

Yes, Finland is an Arctic country in the sense that we straddle the Arctic Circle, even though most of our land area is south of it. We do not, however, currently have any coastline in the north; all of our salt water access is to the south and west, i.e., to the Baltic Sea. Visits like this are, therefore, extremely rare. The walrus had to travel all the way around Scandinavia, through the Danish Straits (Kattegat and Skagerrak), and east along the Gulf of Finland to reach Hamina and Kotka.

(Alas, the poor thing turned out to be famished, and died in the middle of an attempted rescue en route to the Wildlife Hospital of Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki. It’s since been preserved and it’s on display at the Finnish Museum of Natural History.)

Wikimedia Antti Leppanen Haminan mursu

It’s quite staggering that we live in a place where, theoretically—very much in theory, but nevertheless—a walrus could turn up on the yard! (No sign of fairies, though.)

Images: Screenshot of tumblr post by baddywronglegs. Stuffed walrus in the Natural History Museum of Helsinki by Antti Leppänen via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0).

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Dragonflight: A Mid-Expansion Reflection

Erik

We’ve been in Dragonflight for about a year, and we now know that the next World of Warcraft expansion is about a year away, so it seems like a good time to reflect on what we like and don’t like about this expansion.

Erik

I have been very happy with this expansion overall. I enjoy a lot of things about it, and I will be quite content to spend the next year or so in and around the Dragon Isles.

The only thing I really dislike about Dragonflight is dragonriding. I learned how to use the system effectively to get around, and it doesn’t bother me very much any more, but I have never enjoyed it. I find it over-designed and unengaging. It’s nice that, in the right terrain, it gives you a faster way to get from point A to point B, but it doesn’t give me the thrill that it gives a lot of other people. I accept that I am in a small minority with this opinion, and I am happy for everyone else who is enjoying dragonriding, but I’m delighted to be able to go back to the old, regular flying, even if it is slower. The rest of you can zoom and swoop ahead of me as much as you like; I’ll get there when I get there.

I love the Dragon Isles zone design. The artwork of this expansion is beautiful and bold. Every zone has its own identity while also feeling like they belong in the same space together. Having the four main zones in contiguous space, even though separated by cliffs and ridges, is also something I appreciate. The Shadowlands zones were well designed, but the fact that they were all separate from one another at times felt claustrophobic. I don’t much care for Zaralek Caverns, but I can mostly ignore that zone and still have plenty of things to do elsewhere.

I like that this expansion has taken a different approach to quests, dialog, characters, and their stories than we have seen in most of previous WoW. After a year of living with the story of Dragonflight, I think I can put my finger on what makes this expansion different: it is about the nuances of how we respond to trauma. Dragonflight is full of characters living with and reacting to histories of trauma, but different characters respond to that trauma in different ways. I know some players have been frustrated with the Dragonflight story and are annoyed that this expansion is less about Dragons Having Awesome Fights and more about Dragons Having Feelings and Talking, but I really appreciate an expansion that takes seriously the idea that the things we experience can inspire feelings other than rage and reactions other than violence. The last time World of Warcraft tried to engage with the trauma of war and the power of emotions was Mists of Pandaria, which lacked subtlety and came off as shallow and preachy. Dragonflight feels like the Warcraft writers’ room is finally staffed by people who have an adult understanding of life, and I hope that this is a change that sticks.

In terms of systems and gameplay, there has been a lot of good development in Dragonflight. I was a fan of the new talent trees from early on, and my fondness for them has not wavered. Now that I have had some time to play with the new crafting mechanisms, I am mostly happy with them—they sometimes feel overly complicated, but I largely enjoy exploring the new options that the crafting system has opened up. Once I got used to the flightstone/crest gear upgrade system, I’ve found it quite workable, and I really appreciate getting to collect tier sets without having to raid. The proliferation of world quests and events in the open world has sometimes felt bewildering, but for the most part, I appreciate always having something to do.

Eppu

Unlike Erik, I LOVE dragonriding! It’s perhaps my most favorite single thing in Dragonflight. Don’t get me wrong, it was a learning curve, and I still stumble occasionally (especially if my ageing mouse decides to act up). Optimally, I’d like a multi-character dragonriding vehicle (like the Sandstone Drake), so that when we play together I could ride us around and Erik would get the benefit of faster transit without the bother.

WoW Dragonflight Onahran Plains Emerald Bubble

I do agree with Erik about the zone design. It’s an absolutely gorgeous expansion. While Zaralek Cavern is not a favorite zone, per se, I quite like the cave-ish-ness of it, for the lack of a better word. Deepholm was already an impressive, underground-cavern-like-enough space with multiple levels of quest areas and subzones. ZC takes the fully matured terrain design to its logical conclusion with an absolutely, breath-takingly amazing underground space that is somehow at the same time huge enough to allow dragonriding between areas and claustrophobic enough to feel constricting. Hats off to the design team from me!

I also agree with Erik on collecting some tier gear without raiding. I have quite enough on my plate at the moment without that particular time sink.

However. Am I the only one who’s driven to distraction by the [multiple expletives removed] constant resetting of talent trees? Sheesh! While I’m all for tweaking and re-tweaking certain aspects of one’s life to one’s satisfaction, a computer game character’s talents isn’t one of them, and certainly not over and over and over. Perhaps I should just go with the suggested talent builds instead, even if it means losing some individuality.

I still find that the world quest refresh rate doesn’t work for me, and events don’t make up for that lack. Because I’m dealing with a more limited gaming time IRL, the last thing I want is to have to track game events’ start times and schedule my playing accordingly. Bleah.

Another aspect that currently doesn’t work for me—and for exactly the same reason as above—is the writers’ room’s penchant for ending campaign quest chains in a dungeon. Although, it sounds like Blizzard is about to change that radically with the new Follower Dungeons coming soon-ish(?) in patch 10.2.5. (In short, the idea is that players form a dungeon group with 1-4 characters and the game generates NPCs for the remaining slots.) I’m rather looking forward to being able to run a leveling dungeon privately, without risking a random jerk (or two or three) with a Looking For Group run.

The new customization options for druids at the barber shop are great fun.

WoW Dragonflight Druid Moonkin Form Barbershop

What kinds of thoughts do you have on Dragonflight thus far? Chime in!

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

Making Clothes 9: Calculations

Erik2 Comments

This post is a part of our Making Clothes series.

Now that we’ve gone through the process of producing raw materials, turning those materials into textiles, and turning those textiles into clothing, we’re rounding out this series with a little math. Given the labor and resources that went into making one outfit, how long would it have taken to make, from start to finish, and how much land did it take to grow everything on?

Our figures here are necessarily approximate. There are too many variables to take them all into account. A good year’s flax harvest or a clumsy hand at wool-carding could make a difference to how fast workers could gather and process materials. We’re also generally working with optimistic estimates. A more thoroughly realistic assessment would have to allow for lost time and material from shrinkage, breakage, wastage, crop failures, inclement weather, and so on. We’re aiming here to get a rough sense of just how much of an investment of labor time and productive land, at minimum, one set of clothes represented in the pre-modern world.

We are also assuming a community of skilled agriculturalists and crafters who know their trade and do not need to be taught or to experiment with processes of production. The passing on of such knowledge to new generations was in itself an important part of historical agricultural and textile production, but we leave that labor out of our calculations.

Pixabay Jo-B Medieval Man

Our example outfit consists of several pieces, each of which required materials and labor to make:

  • A long-sleeved linen undertunic reaching to the mid-thigh
  • A long-sleeved silk overtunic reaching to the knees
  • Leather footwear
  • A rectangular wool cloak of about knee-length

To see what it would take to produce this outfit, it is helpful to think backwards: the dimensions of our imaginary wardrobe tell us how much raw material would be needed to make it, which in turn dictates how much work would go into producing that material. We’re imagining this outfit for a person of any gender of about medium height and build. It does not represent any specific historical outfit, and does not belong to any particular place or time; a certain amount of vagueness in the design allows our outfit to reasonably stand in for clothes that could be found in many places and historical eras.

We calculate the following dimensions for the items in our wardrobe:

  • Undertunic: The undertunic is made from a piece of fabric measuring 210 x 75 cm, which is cut to yield two sleeve pieces and a long piece folded poncho-style for the front and back, with a hole cut for the head. The whole piece of fabric amounts to 1.575 square meters.
  • Overtunic: The overtunic is similarly cut from a piece of fabric measuring 225 x 90 cm, with two sleeve pieces and one long piece for front and back, amounting to 2.025 square meters of fabric.
  • Footwear: Our shoes are made from approximately one third of a square meter or leather per shoe, thus two thirds of a square meter for a pair.
  • Cloak: Our cloak is a rectangle 1 meter by 2 meters, for 2 square meters of wool.
T-Tunic Patterns Small

Finished clothes

Undertunic and overtunic – The construction method of these two garments is essentially identical, so the amount of time spent cutting, sewing, and finishing each one is approximately the same. With some reconstructed historical pieces for reference, we estimate that sewing a tunic-style garment such as these takes about 6 to 9 hours. We’ll take the average of the range and estimate that each garment takes 7.5 hours to cut and sew. The two together add up to 15 labor hours.

Footwear – Leather is slower to sew than fabric, but shoes are smaller than tunics. Our shoe models have around 120 cm of seam, and reconstructions show a leather stitching speed of 50 cm per hour. Allowing time for cutting and shaping (but omitting time for fitting to the wearer), each shoe would take about 2 hours to make, thus 4 labor hours for the pair.

Cloak – The cloak is straightforward, since it is simply a rectangular piece of woven cloth needing no sewing beyond the finishing of the edges. If the fabric was woven at a width of 1 meter, the selvages would make the long sides of the cloak; only the short sides would require hemming. At a hand-sewing speed of 1 meter per hour, sewing the cloak would take 2 labor hours.

Total cutting, sewing, and finishing time: 21 labor hours.

Fabrics/leather

Many factors affect the speed at which woven cloth is produced, from the size of the loom to the skill of the weaver. Historical recreations yield a range of weaving speeds from 180 to 255 square cm per hour. For the purposes of our project, we use an estimate of 200 square cm per hour for all types of fabric.

Linen – We need 1.575 square meters of woven linen, or 15,750 square cm, which would take approximately 79 hours to weave. Allowing time for set-up and maintenance of the loom and other necessary by-work, the production of the linen fabric from thread would require around 90 labor hours.

Silk – The calculations are similar for our silk. Weaving 2.025 square meters of silk would take a bit over 101 hours. With additional by-work, we can estimate about 110 labor hours to produce the silk fabric.

Wool – Likewise for our wool, the 2 square meters of wool we need would take about 100 hours to weave, coming to around 110 labor hours with additional work.

The time that it takes to spin the thread needed for weaving depends on how much thread goes into the finished fabric, which is affected by a host of factors: the thickness of the thread, the density of the weave, the width and length of the fabric, and so on. Rather than try to calculate all these possible elements, we work with a rough estimate that each of our fabric pieces required 10 km of thread, a measure based on both modern textile production and historical reconstructions. The further thread needed for sewing is a negligible addition. This rough figure allows for the possibility of variations in how each individual textile was produced while still giving us a reasonable estimate for the total investment of labor.

Spinning by hand yields around 40 to 60 meters of thread per hour. Taking the average of 50 m per hour, the 30,000 meters of linen, silk, and wool thread needed for our three pieces of fabric would take some 600 labor hours to spin.

Dyeing is a further step in the production process. The amount of time it takes to dye cloth depends on what dyestuffs are used, what kind of fabric is being dyed, and what the desired result is. Sourcing dyestuffs and preparing the dye bath also add to the labor. We estimate 10 hours of labor for each piece of fabric, and soaking in the dye bath adds several days of passive production time.

Flickr Shawn Harquail Spinning and dyeing the fibers

Leather – Leather production is complicated, as we outlined in our post about it. The two thirds of a square meter we need for our shoes could come from a single sheep hide (which typically yield 0.8 square meters of leather), but a lot of preparation and processing would have gone into making that hide into usable leather.

The amount of time it takes to produce leather from a fresh hide is widely variable depending on how the hide is treated and what steps are desirable for finishing it. Much of the time that it takes to prepare leather is passive time, as the hide sits on a rack or in various liquid treatments. For our purposes, we estimate that producing the leather for the shoes took 30 days from beginning to end, during which there were 12 hours of active labor. The passive production time for the leather can overlap with the passive dyeing time.

Total textile and leather production time: 952 labor hours, 30 days passive production.

Raw materials

We are estimating 10 km of thread of each fiber type for our complete outfit, but we must make a further calculation to determine how much raw material went into producing that thread. Threads can be spun at different thicknesses, so to get a sense of how much raw material went into our threads we need to convert length into weight. This conversion is expressed in a unit called tex, which gives the weight in grams of 1,000 m of a thread or yarn. Thinner threads are suitable for finer fabrics, while thicker threads can produce bulkier, rougher textiles. We consulted historical reconstructions to assign texes to our different threads.

Linen – For the linen undergarment, we want a fine fabric that feels good against the skin. For this purpose, we use a tex of 55, which means the 10 km of thread weighs 550 g. To get 550 g of spun linen thread we have to start with a much larger amount of flax, since flax processing removes as much as 90% of the material gathered from the field. Our 550 g of linen thread would require around 5.5 kg of flax.

Modern experiments with historical farming methods have yielded flax harvests of about 1 kg per square meter of field, so 5.5 kg of flax would need only about 5.5 square meters of field to grow in, which would take less than an hour both to plant and to harvest. Flax processing takes several steps, but for a modest amount of flax like this, the total active work time is not great. We can estimate 15 labor hours for flax processing from planting until the fiber is ready to spin. Along the way there is also about 100 days growing time for the plants, and some weeks passive time for retting.

Silk – For the silk tunic, we chose to use a coarser and heavier fabric with a tex of 180, which amounts to 1.8 kg in 10 km of thread. This amount of silk fiber represents the output of around 5,400 silkworms consuming the leaves of some 540 mulberry trees, which would need roughly 2 hectares of land to grow on. If starting silk cultivation from scratch, these trees would need a year to grow to maturity from the planting of cuttings, but we will assume that our silk comes from an established grove, and not count the planting, tree tending, or growing time into our estimates.

What we do need to account for, however, is the growth cycle and tending of the silkworms. Silkworms take 28 days from hatching until they are ready to spin, and require care as they grow. For our purposes, we estimate that caring for the silkworms takes at least eight hours of labor every day, between preparing food, feeding, and management. Once the cocoons are spun, a skilled hand can unreel their fiber quickly. Altogether, we estimate that the production of silk fiber takes 225 labor hours and 28 days of passive production.

Wool – Our wool cloak is a sturdy outer garment meant for warmth and protection against the elements. For this purpose we choose a tex of 500, which makes for 5 kg of wool thread. Historic breeds of sheep yield between 1 and 1.5 kg of wool per shearing, and some of that weight is lost in processing. We estimate that one sheep could yield 0.5 kg of wool fiber fit for spinning, so the 5 kg of fiber needed for our cloak represents one year’s fleece from 10 sheep.

A flock of 10 sheep would need some 10 hectares of grazing land. Sheep are sturdy animals and fairly self-reliant, but they do need tending to keep them safe from hazards and fed during the winter. We are being optimistic (perhaps even unrealistically so) and estimating 100 labor hours for sheep tending in a year. Once the fleece has grown, shearing is quick for a practiced hand. Based on various numbers given by modern shearers using hand shears, we estimate that a skilled shearer would be able to shear our 10 sheep in two hours. For the needs of wool production, then, we count 102 labor hours, a year of passive production, and 10 hectares of land.

Leather – The leather for our shoes could come from one of the sheep in the flock. Since the labor for tending the sheep is already accounted for, and slaughter and skinning are quick processes for an experienced hand, we add only 1 more labor hour to account for the production of the hide for tanning.

Total raw material production time and land needs: 343 labor hours, 1 year passive production, 12 hectares of agricultural and grazing land.

Final calculations

As we have noted many times, a lot of our figures are rough estimates at best. The actual production time for an outfit like ours would depend on numerous real-world factors that are beyond the scope of our project to account for. We are also largely discounting the effects of loss, wastage, and natural or human disaster—a flooded flax field or a neighboring people’s raid on the sheep pastures would throw all our calculations into disarray. Nevertheless, here is a rudimentary good-faith estimate of the time and land investment involved in making a single set of clothes in pre-modern conditions:

Active working time: 1,316 labor hours

Passive time: 1 year

Land requirements: 12 hectares

1,316 labor hours represents over 164 full 8-hours days of work for one person. Some of the work could be shared among several people, but there is a limit to how much efficiency could be gained by division of labor—you can’t make sheep grow fleece faster by adding more shepherds, for instance.

Once raw fibers have been produced, it would take some 973 labor hours to turn those fibers into finished clothes, or nearly 122 full 8-hour days. Even with a worker dedicated full-time to each material type (wool, linen, silk, leather), it would still take more than a month to finish the whole ensemble.

For one outfit, for one person to wear.

Flickr Billy Wilson Small Herculaneum Woman

Furthermore, every labor hour devoted to clothing production was an hour of labor not available to produce food, construct or maintain buildings, care for children or elders, or engage in other activities that were necessary for the safety and well-being of a community. Clothing was not just something to wear for historical people; it was a statement about the prosperity of their own families and the communities they lived within.

Further Reading

Ejstrud, Bo (ed.). From Flax to Linen: Experiments with Flax at Ribe Viking Centre. Esbjerg: Ribe Viking Centre and University of Southern Denmark, 2011. https://ribevikingecenter.dk/media/10424/Flaxreport.pdf

Köhler, Carl. A History of Costume. New York: Dover, 1963.

Mallory, J. P. & Victor H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

Mannering, Ulla & Charlotte Rimstad. Fashioning the Viking Age 2: From Analysis to Reconstruction. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark, 2023. https://natmus.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Editor/natmus/oldtiden/Fashioning_the_Viking_Age/From_Analysis_to_Reconstruction_-_high_resolution.pdf

Owen-Crocker, Gale R. Dress in Anglo-Saxon England [revised and enlarged ed.]. Woolbridge: Boydell Press, 2004.

Pasanen, Mervi & Jenni Sahramaa. Löydöstä muinaispuvuksi [From Finds to Reconstructed Dress]. Salakirjat, 2021.

Postrel, Virginia. The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Strand, Eva Andersson & Ida Demant. Fashioning the Viking Age 1: Fibres, Tools & Textiles. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark, 2023. https://natmus.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Editor/natmus/oldtiden/Fashioning_the_Viking_Age/Fibres__Tools_and_Textiles_-_high_resolution.pdf

Walton Rogers, Penelope. Textile production at 16-22 Coppergate. York: Council for British Archaeology, 1997. https://www.aslab.co.uk/app/download/13765738/ASLab+PWR+1997+AY17-11+Textile+Production+for+web.pdf

Images: Medieval man via Jo Justino at Pixabay. Sample T-tunics by Eppu Jensen. Hand-stitching leather shoes, photograph by Jeff Mandel via ExIT Shoes (CC BY 4.0). Spinning and dyeing in Chinchero, Peru, by Shawn Harquail via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). July, from the Grimani Breviary via Wikimedia (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana; 1490-1510; illumination on parchment). Small Herculaneum Woman, reconstruction of a marble statue, by Billy Wilson via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Making Clothes 2: Historical Inspirations

Erik1 Comment

This post is a part of our Making Clothes series.

For the purposes of these posts, we are imagining an outfit that might have been made and worn in many parts of Eurasia or North Africa in the premodern period. Our imaginary wardrobe takes inspiration from a variety of sources, both archaeological and written.

Our oldest piece of inspiration comes from the Altai Mountains in central Asia. In the fifth century BCE, a woman was buried in a tomb on the high Ukok plateau of what is today the Altai Republic in Russian Siberia. The cold, dry climate of the region helped preserve the burial until the late twentieth century when it was discovered and excavated. The woman, popularly known as the Siberian Ice Maiden, was well dressed for her burial, and her clothes were remarkably well preserved. She wore a dress of wool and camel hair, a silk shirt, and thigh-high leather boots, along with a tall headdress made of wood.

Reconstruction of the Ukok woman’s clothing and coffin, photograph by Sue Fleckney via Wikimedia

For our next historical reference, we look to the Vindolanda Tablets, an assortment of documents written on thin sheets of wood found at a Roman fortress near Hadrian’s Wall in northern Britain. Wooden tablets like these were used in antiquity for personal letters, memoranda, and other everyday documents of the kind that rarely survive for very long. These documents were written in the first and second centuries CE, and survived because they were preserved in waterlogged ground around the fortress. Among them we find the household accounts of Roman soldiers and officers detailing what sort of clothes they were spending their money on. A couple of tablets record the business affairs of a man named Gavo. We do not know who he was or what role he played in the life of the fort, but he seems to have supplied a lot of clothing and other textiles. One tablet lists some foodstuffs along with several bedspreads, a cloak, and thirty-eight pounds of wool. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 192) Another tablet, part of whose text has been lost, listed at least ten cloaks of different types, three tunics, seventeen hooded cloaks, and some number of capes. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 207) Yet another letter—we don’t know from or to whom—evidently accompanied a gift of underwear, socks, and sandals to some lucky soldier. (Tabulae Vindolandenses II 346)

Reconstruction of a Roman soldier’s dress, photograph by Fabryb13 via Wikimedia

Our last piece of inspiration comes from Egypt in the late antique period, probably the fifth century CE. It is a beautifully preserved tunic made of linen with intricate decorations woven into the fabric in dyed wool. The decorations include flowing vine motifs and depictions of the god Dionysus in surrounded by mythical sea creatures.

Tunic with Dionysian Ornament via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

We’ve chosen this set of examples to inspire our fictional wardrobe for a few reasons. Between them they span nearly a thousand years of history across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. They come from a wide range of environments, from the cold, arid heights of Central Asia to the hot, dry Egyptian desert to the rainy British Isles. The Ukok woman presents us with the complete outfit of one person; the Egyptian tunic gives us a detailed look at the construction of one garment; and the Vindolanda Tablets help us see individual items of clothing in the context of a larger economic and social world.

Our Example Outfit Described

For the purposes of quantifying necessary raw materials and production time to make a single outfit, we needed a specified set of clothing.

Our imaginary wardrobe starts with a long linen undertunic or short linen underdress. (From the point of view of materials and time required, we consider a dress very roughly equivalent of pants plus a tunic.)

The underlayer is topped by a silk overtunic. For the under- and overtunics, we imagined a simple T-style cut. Many historical tunics use gores at the side and central seams to add comfort, but we’ll try to keep our numbers manageable and stick with a basic design.

In addition, we include leather shoes or boots. Finally, a good-sized, rectangular wool cloak or mantle protects the wearer from elements.

For simplicity’s sake, we postulated a dyed but otherwise unadorned outfit, since the size and amount of decorative banding, embroidery, etc., can vary so widely. Accessories like underwear, wool socks and wool legwraps, hoods and headwear, belts, pouches, bags, and the like were also left out of our example.

How It Happens looks at the inner workings of various creative efforts.

Dragonflight: Our Thoughts So Far

Eppu

Dragonflight, the newest World of Warcraft expansion, has been out three months now. Here are some initial opinions.

WoW Dragonflight Valdrakkar

Eppu’s thoughts

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first:

  • The world quest cycle seems too slow. Way too slow!
  • The climbing-related world quests seem to have inordinately many glitches. (I stopped doing them for quite a while, in fact.)

Positives:

  • Playing Horde and Alliance together outside of dungeons as well seems to have been enabled (at least for world quests) even before Dragonflight launched properly. Yay!
  • It’s so nice that the Horde don’t continue to embody only awful-looking designs. In the earlier expansions—speaking very roughly, of course—Alliance areas and characters looked normal and nice, whereas Horde ones were full of spikes and angst. In the past Blizzard has introduced nods in the direction of changing it (Blood Elves, Pandaren, Vulpera), but then they eventually slide back to the dark/awful-pretty/shiny divide (e.g. Maldraxxus and Revendreth vs. Bastion and Ardenweald in Shadowlands).
  • Dragonriding (which I’ve started to call gliding as opposed to flying with regular flying mounts) is fun!
  • The druid pink paw buff is back—hooray! I’ve so missed having Mark of the Wild.
  • Among the background sounds, there are chickadees! While they’re nothing I grew up with, they’re nevertheless similar enough to some childhood favorite birds that I appreciate having them. (As a rule, I also appreciate including actual northern biomes into any story. There’s little enough of the real north in mainstream media that isn’t ridiculously exaggerated—seriously, it sounds like people think we live on the planet Hoth from the Star Wars universe.)
  • I’d like to retain player choice with regard to dungeons: that, like Torghast, you can choose to faceroll or challenge yourself. However, I’d also like to get actual loot reliably, like a normal dungeon. (Haven’t been in one yet due to life getting in the way.)
  • Taking into account the story, environment and sound design, talents and professions plus the mechanics thereof, and the personal gaming experience (as nebulous as that can be), I’d say Dragonflight is the best WoW expansion so far.

Erik’s thoughts

I really only have one negative, so I’ll get it out of the way up front.

  • I didn’t like dragonriding at first. I really didn’t like dragonriding. I was physically cringing every time I had to do it. Figuring out how to turn off the screen-distorting effects at high speed made a big difference, though, and now I can use it just fine. I still don’t enjoy it, though. It’s useful if you’re starting somewhere high up and want to go somewhere far away and lower down (and you don’t care very much about where exactly you land) but otherwise I miss the reliability, pausability, and accuracy of regular flying. If we get regular flying later in the expansion, which I hope we do, I’m just going back to my old flying mounts and won’t touch dragonriding again.

Now, on to the positives.

  • What beautiful environments! I have a hard time picking out a favorite zone, but Azure Span delights me every time I go there. Unlike Maldraxxus and Revendreth in Shadowlands or Drustvar in Battle for Azeroth, there’s nowhere in Dragonflight that I don’t enjoy spending time in.
  • I’m really enjoying the new talent system. It probably still needs some tweaking, but I like being able to make choices that really affect how I play my characters.
  • I hope that Blizzard continues on the path laid out in Dragonflight for Alliance-Horde relations. It is a relief to finally have an expansion where it just doesn’t feel like it matters what faction you play. Now if they would continue this to let Horde and Alliance characters communicate, group up, and play every part of the game together, that would be great.
  • This one is a little harder to define, but quests feels more meaningful this expansion. It feels as though we are addressing real problems, not cleaning up after someone else’s emotional tantrum, which describes too much of Shadowlands. I rarely get to the end of a questline in Dragonflight and think to myself: “This could all have been avoided if some people had just gotten around a table and talked to each other.”
  • I still don’t quite feel like I have a handle on the new crafting systems, and there are aspects that I don’t like (like having to be near a designated crafting table to make a lot of recipes), but I enjoy the fact that crafting is now more complicated, and I can specialize different characters in different aspects of the same profession.

Anything else come to mind that we didn’t think of? Please share in the comments!

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

What We Hope Dragonflight Learns from Shadowlands

Erik

In less than a week we will say farewell to Shadowlands and move on to the next World of Warcraft expansion: Dragonflight. In anticipation, the two of us reflect on what we hope the new expansion learns from the successes and missteps of the old.

Erik: The biggest thing I hope Dragonlifght builds on from Shadowlands is Torghast, specifically the great flexibility the Torghast dungeons had in how many characters they were for and how difficult they were. Torghast was great for us to play together just the two of us or to do solo when we felt like it. The biggest weakness of Torghast was that it had no rewards beyond materials for legendary crafting. My dream is an expansion where every dungeon adjusts to any size group, from one to five (or even more) and scales its difficulty appropriately. What about you?

Eppu: Agreed! (This is literally the first thing I wrote down, too, when drafting my thoughts for this post.) While it’s fantastic to play through a dungeon that’s adapted to your gear level, getting no proper loot sucks.

The other big thing I hope for is convenient and comfortable flight. You had a few more thoughts about that, didn’t you?

Erik: Yeah, I’m excited that we get flying early in Dragonflight. While I haven’t minded the way Blizzard has handled flying in the past few expansions—starting out on the ground and earning flight by playing through the game on one character—I like the idea of flight being unlocked right out of the gate.

At the same time, I’m a little worried that we’re going to see a classic Blizzard overcorrection and they’re going to turn flight from a convenient method of getting around into some overdesigned, unfun “gameplay” like what happened to mission tables in Shadowlands. Are there any features from Shadowlands you’re hoping won’t make a return next expansion?

Eppu: One, and they already took care of that in the new crafting interfaces. I seriously hated the info box for the marks that you can add onto other crafted items. It was so fecking clunky; I’m really glad it’s gone!

I’d also love to see professions improved. These days whenever you have the mats to make something, your character has already leveled past it. You could always craft items for auctioning, of course, but I find additional management like that annoying. It’s not what I come to WoW for. The crafting orders sound like those who want to dink around with auctioning now will have that opportunity. It will remain to be seen whether the rest of us will have anything useful to craft. How about you?

Erik: I’m interested to see what’s going to happen with crafting, too. I’m right with you on that infernal info box on the crafting interface!

As for things I hope don’t come back, the scarcity of anima was a theme in the lore of Shadowlands, but it also affected the gameplay of the expansion too much. I never explored even half of what the covenant sanctums had to offer just because I never had enough anima to do anything. World quests felt unrewarding for the level of time and effort they required. I hope we don’t have the same scarcity-based design in the next expansion.

But enough about the negative. What are you looking forward to the most in Dragonflight? Blizzard keeps blowing me away with the art design of their zones, and Shadowlands was the best yet. I can’t wait to see the art and design in an expansion focused on dragons and elemental powers.

Eppu: You’re right, the anima scarcity wasn’t satisfying at all—haven’t we done the grind for, what, 18 years now? It’s also true that the art has improved a lot since Draenor (if not Pandaria). But I’m not quite sure what you mean by best art design yet. Would you elaborate?

Erik: I think what I’m trying to get at is this: Each of the main zones of Shadowlands has a clear aesthetic that looks pretty simple at first: Bastion is peaceful fields and clear skies, Maldraxxus is carnage and gore; Ardenweald is a dreamy fairy forest; and Revendreth is crumbling gothic ruins. But the longer you spend in each zone, the more you discover. Bastion is less peaceful than it appears, but the dangers are hidden from sight like the forgotten memories of the Kyrian. The very land in Maldraxxus is made of skin and bone and hair, like the corpse of some gigantic creature. Ardenweald is full of swirls and circles, hinting at the cycle of death and rebirth that it serves. In Revendreth different stories about a corrupt elite and the gnawing discontent from below play out at the higher and lower levels of the of the zone. There is a tighter connection between story and design in Shadowlands than we have seen in most previous expansions. (I’d cite Drustvar from Battle for Azeroth as another excellent example.) I hope we see more of that in Dragonflight, zones that are not only beautiful to play through but where the art and the story inform one another so deeply.

Eppu: Yes! It would be great if the story and art supported each other. So far it’s impossible to say, but I’m cautiously optimistic. The expansions certainly have gotten better and better over the years. Incidentally, my all-time favorite is Battle for Azeroth. Do you have a favorite expansion?

Erik: Hard to say, but I think Legion. I enjoyed the class storylines, and we got a whole new kind of Tauren to play! But there are things I’ve loved in every expansion, and I look forward to finding out what those will be in Dragonflight.

Image: Screenshot from World of Warcraft

Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.

Random Thoughts on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Erik

Thoughts in no particular order but grouped thematically. Spoiler warnings in effect!

IMDB Wakanda Forever Wright Huerta Underwater

Characters

Erik’s thoughts:

  • Angela Basset as Queen Ramonda gives a devastatingly powerful performance. She conveys so much grief, love, and determination with very spare acting choices. She commands the scene every time she is on screen.
  • One of the things I have always appreciated about the world of Black Panther is how much room it makes for characters to listen, learn, and grow. We saw it with T’Challa and Nakia in the first movie; here Shuri and M’Baku show it best.
  • Another wonderful thing about Black Panther has been how much room the movies make for women to have stories that aren’t about relationships—romantic or familial—with men. T’Challa’s death naturally hangs heavily over Wakanda Forever, but the movie also balances that with incredibly important relationships among women.

Eppu’s thoughts:

  • Tenoch Huerta was great as an all-powerful, unhinged Namor. He rotated through cracked, creepy, companionable, and perhaps even a little lonely. (After all, we didn’t see him connect with anyone else other than Shuri.) The way he tried to physically intimidate Ramonda by leaning way, way, WAY too close during their beach conversation still gives me the chills.
  • LOVED the amount of women again: women with real agency, and lives and goals of their own. Like real people, imagine that! (Well, perhaps not Director de Fontaine—she smells like a future baddie, and a hammy one at that like Rumlow / Crossbones was—but to be fair we didn’t see much of her yet.)
  • I knew to expect tributes to Chadwick Boseman, but wouldn’t have guessed how much there was. And the opening credit where the letters spelling Marvel Studios were all filled with images of T’Challa—that was perfect. The usual Marvel theme would’ve sounded garish, too. RIP.

Story

Eppu’s thoughts:

  • I found that the pacing worked for me; I didn’t feel bored nor overwhelmed. It was really nice that the characters were given time to process, to just sit for a bit instead of rushing headlong at a breakneck speed. (I’ve long loathed the old rule of there-must-be-an-action-scene-every-7-minutes or whatever; that means you don’t have a story strong enough to hold the audience’s attention.)
  • It was really nice that Ramonda and Shuri had a moment when they left their high tech behind and just sat in the bush at a campfire, talking. It felt true—we Finns certainly detach from the city life and go enjoy nature from time to time.

Erik’s thoughts:

  • The movie felt like it was pulled in too may different directions. It was strongest when it stayed focused on Shuri and her relationships with her mother and the memory of her brother. Riri Williams was fun, but felt like a distraction from Shuri’s story and didn’t have enough time or focus to develop on her own. Nakia’s story was underdeveloped. Everett Ross and Director De Fontaine felt like they had wandered onto the wrong set while filming something else.
  • There is a beautiful echoing of T’Challa’s story in Civil War. Like T’Challa before her, Shuri’s early days as Black Panther are driven by grief and anger as she turns outward the rage and self-hatred that she feels for failing to save the life of someone she loved. T’Challa ultimately learned that revenge is self-destructive by watching Tony Stark and Steve Rogers fight. Shuri arrives at the same point after seeing the spirit of Killmonger, fighting Namor, and hearing her mother’s voice one last time.

Visuals

Erik’s thoughts:

  • Talokan is beautifully designed. It doesn’t look like a surface city built underwater but like a place built by and for people who live and think in three dimensions.
  • I love getting to go back to Wakanda and see more of the visual design. From clothing to technology to architecture, there is so much to see, so many layers and textures.

Eppu’s thoughts:

  • Superhero movies have a tendency for really flashy environments, so I was surprised how, well, watery they made the Talokan design. It felt more realistic (like The Abyss) instead of ostentatious (like Aquaman).
  • I loved seeing so much of Mesoamerican designs and colors! Granted, it’s not my strong suit, but it looked authentic enough.

Concepts

Eppu’s thoughts:

  • Shuri’s bucking against the traditions felt completely in character, and her coming round didn’t feel rushed. (For once—in my experience, mainstream movies and tv series have a tendency to rush the reversal, while artsy movies wallow in it.)
  • It was fantastic to have so many languages on screen! I don’t care that I don’t know them all—although it is very neat when I do, don’t get me wrong—because the main thing is it’s showing an international world, not just telling us the characters live in one. (Captain America: The First Avenger, I’m looking at you and the horrible fake German accent you gave poor Hugo Weaving and Toby Jones to do.)
  • The ship battle at the end was a disappointment, given how awesomely it started (the Dora Milaje jumping over the side supported by Jabari). You could argue that the sloppy Wakandan preparation is due to not having had fair fights in a long time, but Shuri at least used to care about the lives of her fellow citizens. It’s like she dragged people off to a suicide mission. Then, when the Wakandans decided to leave, no-one though to look down the sides of the Sea Leopard, or to safeguard their sonic weapon pointing underwater? Smacks of more arrogance.

Erik’s thoughts:

  • There is a long history in pseudoarchaeology circles of using the idea of a lost civilization as a way of denying the creativity of indigenous peoples. In particular, claims that Mesoamerican cultures were founded or taught by visitors from Atlantis are part of a narrative that feeds into white supremacism. I was worried about what we would see in this movie, but I’m happy that they turned that narrative around: Talokan was not a lost civilization from which the Maya drew their culture but a new civilization created by Mayan people themselves in response to the horror of colonization. I’m also glad that the name “Atlantis” was never even mentioned.
  • I wish we had gotten a standalone Talokan movie before this one. If this movie didn’t have to do the work of introducing us to Talokan and Namor, it would have had more time to develop its other elements and characters.
  • We’ve been rewatching some older Marvel movies lately. It’s interesting to see how the end credits scene has evolved from an Easter egg to a marketing ploy for upcoming movies to a chance for comic relief to an integral part of the storytelling.

Nitpicks

Erik’s thoughts:

  • Talokan was really dark. Realistic for a deep underwater city, but frustrating in a visual medium.
  • Ms. CIA bugged Shuri’s kimoyo beads? Really? Where did she get the technology to do that?
  • Why did we never see the Wakandans trying to rip off the Talokanis’ water breathing masks when fighting in air? That seems like such an obvious vulnerability to attack, especially when they’ve already talked about trying to dry out Namor.

Eppu’s thoughts:

  • Just the one stinger? Come on!
  • It seriously rubs me the wrong way how many people mispronounced Namor’s name. Even Shuri did it right after he told her the name’s origins and she had the chance to hear it. Nay, it’s not NAY-more. Na-MOR. (You don’t even have to speak Spanish to get it right; compare to the first vowel and stress in a-LIVE.)
  • Everett Ross and the CIA infighting felt disconnected, yes, but I did appreciate knowing what’s happened to him. Clearly Marvel is laying the groundwork for something here. (Reminds me of that random stinger with one of Zeus’ sons being given a mission of some kind at the end of Thor: Love and Thunder.)

Image via IMDB

In Seen on Screen, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Shadowlands, A Year in the Land of Death

Erik

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands released a year ago today. Can you believe we’ve been adventuring in the after life for a whole year? For only a year? What is time even?

We thought we’d mark the occasion by looking back at our experiences with the expansion so far and talking about what it’s been like to play in WoW‘s eighth expansion.

New systems

Eppu: The new mission table seems hardly to have changed from its previous iterations, but since my playing time has been very limited during this expansion, I can’t say I’ve really understood all of the mechanics of leveling and missions. I can say, however, that accumulating companions is surprisingly speedy. However, the animated-by-default battle at the conclusion annoys me—considering what a minuscule part of the game it is, that’s a waste of processing power and having to always bypass it with a click is a waste of time.

Soulbinds is a more interesting case. Essentially, they’re a version of the old talent trees, with the exception that you can have three separate ones and that switching between them is easy. Accumulating a good smattering of basic conduits via world quests is simple, too.

Anima, unfortunately, is where Blizzard over-corrected in this expansion. The system is clunky and complex and not intuitive. For example, gathering anima for X purpose is added to the quest tally when you complete a quest that grants anima rewards, as opposed to Y purpose it’s counted when you empty the anima rewards from your inventory into the reservoir.

Erik: Anima really seems like a step back. We’re getting a lot of clutter in our bags this expansion after Battle for Azeroth did a much better job of streamlining its power-accumulation systems. Conduits are another piece of bag clutter I could do without, but the overall soulbind system works pretty well. It allows a fair amount of flexibility in customizing your character’s play style with some interesting trade-offs to think about.

Blizzard keeps tweaking the mission table, but it’s never been particularly interesting. I do it because it’s a low-effort way of getting small amounts of anima and reputation, but it’s never been a compelling part of gameplay. After four expansions, I still don’t understand why I am sending other people off to have adventures instead of having them for myself.

I have to say that after a year of playing in this expansion, I still don’t feel like I really know what I’m doing with a lot of my covenant sanctum things. It’s at least partly because anima has been so hard to get that I haven’t activated or upgraded most of what’s offered. I supposed that fits the theme of the “anima drought,” but it also makes anima a really unwieldy game mechanic.

The one new system I like the best is renown. It feels much more accessible and rewarding to build renown levels with a covenant than to grind out reputation.

Eppu: Renown is a nice change from grinding rep, you’re quite right. For such a long time, everything used to be a grind; it’s nice to have some variety.

What do you think about the transport networks within covenant zones?

Erik: I like them, and I also like that they are thematic to the zones they’re in. It’s a good combination of artistic and practical designs. (And we get to hang out with a cheerful old mushroom guy.)

Torghast

Erik: One new system that stands out from the rest is Torghast, the randomized, size-flexible dungeon. I have to say that Torghast is one of the best things in Shadowlands for me. I really like that there is content that is so replayable, with so much flexibility for difficulty level and group size. I’ve done a lot of solo running through Torghast, and we’ve done plenty of it together. For such a long time I have wished that there was content in WoW of a comparable challenge level to running a dungeon but tuned for two players instead of five, so that we could do something challenging but doable together. Torghast is finally that. I hope this is a system they keep developing for future expansions.

I also love how adaptable Torghast is. If I just want to go squish monsters and get fun new powers, I can set it low and crash through; if I want something that pushes me to use my skills an abilities to their fullest, I can set it high and enjoy the tactical challenge.

The one thing I wish were different about Torghast is that I wish there were some reward to running it beyond gathering materials for the legendary system. As fun as Torghast can be, it doesn’t really feel worthwhile to play when I know I won’t get any gear or new transmog appearances at the end, or much else to reward me for my time and effort.

Eppu: You’re right; for me, too, just about the only major flaw in Torghast is the lack of any fun transmog gear. (Otherwise, I still stand by my previous opinion.)

New zones

Eppu: I quite like the design of three new zones: Ardenweald, Bastion, and Revendreth. The really fascinating feature about the Shadowlands landscapes is how aggressively height differences—ledges, ridges, ginormous trees, stupendously tall buildings, levitating platforms—are used to squeeze questing areas side by side in order to keep the whole zone from ballooning out to an uncontrollable size. Blizzard has used the same principle before; in Shadowlands it’s really matured, but I don’t think you could take it any further without land shapes turning ludicrous. (Then again, this is fantasy, perhaps they could do it and make it work!)

It’s an interesting choice to tweak each zone’s color scheme so far, though—it’s not unheard of to have a subtle overall color in zones (e.g. Icecrown, Suramar, or Drustvar)—but this time Blizzard really pushed it. There have been times when I’ve switched zones after a while, because I’ve wanted more variation in the colors around my toon.

Lastly, I’m irritated that moving between covenant zones only can take place via Oribos. (Forced hub-centered travel is one of my pet peeves in the real world, too.)

Erik: I agree about wishing for ways to get between zones that don’t rely on Oribos. I understand the idea of Oribos as a central point, but we’ve seen individuals travel directly between zones in the questing experience, and I see no reason we as players couldn’t have gotten some options for that, too.

The artistic design of the zones is really strong this expansion. Each zone feels very different not just in terms of color palette but landforms and buildings. There are some that I like (Bastion, Ardenweald) and some I don’t (Revendreth, Maldraxxus), but every zone feels like a deeply concentrated expression of an idea. I find that Bastion and Maldraxxus feel small, while Ardenweald and Revendreth feel big. I wonder if that’s intentional, or just an effect of how I experience the zones.

And then there’s the Maw. All I can say is that they did such a good job designing the zone to feel like a bad place to be that I spend as little time there as possible. If the Maw was supposed to be what kept our characters occupied once they got to max level, it missed the mark.

Although my favorite covenant is the Night Fae, I think my favorite zone to spend time in is Bastion. Do you have a favorite?

Eppu: Hm. Ardenweald or Bastion, for both have strong pros and some cons. Although I have to say none of the areas feel quite right for hanging out with my numerous female Dwarves.

WoW Shadowlands Bastion Near Heros Rest

Story

Erik: I’ve enjoyed the story of Shadowlands on the whole. It’s interesting to go to a new place we’ve never known about before and start figuring out just how it all works. We have met a lot of compelling characters and seen some great moments along the way. They’ve done a lot with the characters we interact with to help us understand the nature of the different realms of the Shadowlands, from the earnest soul-searching of the Kyrian aspirants to the gung-ho warmongering in Maldraxxus, the intertwining of despair and hope in Ardenweald, and the crumbling ancien regime in Revendreth.

The parts of the story that haven’t worked for me have been the overarching plot involving the Jailer and the Maw. I know some people really enjoy digging up secrets and spinning tin-foil-hat theories about the nefarious motives of cosmic powers, but I’m not among them. The Jailer is just one more generic villain to me. I am also utterly uninterested in Tyrande’s super-powered vengeance rampage or the emotional life of Sylvanas. As so often in expansions past, I find the little, ground-level stories in Shadowlands much more interesting than the big story of the overarching plot. Give me more Kyrian buddy cops and Night Fae drama nerds, not another giant villain vaguebooking about their plans to conquer reality.

Eppu: I’m trying to figure out just why I felt that playing through the zones differed from previous expansions. The basic progression through all of the covenant zones is surprisingly similar from area to area—until you hit Maldraxxus. There we get an item with runes periodically slapped on along with the story reveal, which felt more drastic to me than reveals elsewhere. The other areas felt more or less like the usual quest grind. Combined with the utterly unique landscape design ethos, Maldraxxus really stands out to me.

Have a take of your own? Do chime in!

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.