It really, really hurts to have a cool thing you designed summarily cut from the game.

Now here’s the problem: it is well known that designers love to sit there and beat their chest in woe when their ideas are removed from their games by producers. It is, in fact, stereotypical behavior to protest such cuts. So much so that it galls me when I see it, and it galls me even more when I do it.

But, man, sometimes it really stings.

It seems to be largely in the presentation. Producers take note: there is a great deal of difference between saying, “We’re thinking about cutting that boss fight and replacing it with something simpler; what do you think about that?” and saying, “Yeah, we cut that. Thank god, too, it didn’t make any sense.”

Don’t get me wrong. When a producer comes to me and asks me what I think about a proposed cut, I’m well aware that they aren’t actually looking for my opinion on the matter. It’s been settled all ready, generally long before the question made its way to my desk. That said, even the slightest courtesy in these matters often makes the difference between a kind of resigned acceptance of the inevitable and sitting there stewing in frustration and confusion (and then blogging about it).

But still, one is presented with the dilemma: the way such things get handled often really fucking stings, but if I make any noise about that fact, I have to overcome the initial assumption that I’m just complaining about my work getting cut. Which I’d like to do. Which of course is something that wants to invade any conversation I have about the topic, and takes some reasonable amount of restraint to prevent. Which makes convincing people that I really don’t just want to grouse all the more difficult.

Sigh.

Needless to say, they cut something today. It happens. I fantasize sometimes about ways to handle the urgent necessity of game development in such a way as to not require me to sit and take it unflinchingly. There ought to be a better way, dammit.

None jump to mind, though. Other than just being kind to one another.

All goddamn weekend, what did I do. What. I ask you.

I mean, did I clean the house? No. Did I save the known universe from a Farkithxyian attack? No. Did I, say, leave the house?

No. In fact, here is what my weekend contained:
Friday:

1. World of Warcraft
2. Sleep

Saturday:

1. World of Warcraft
2. 2 Warhammer Fantasy games
3. World of Warcraft
4. Sleep

Sunday:

1. Take child to airport, wave goodbye nervously
2. World of Warcraft
3. Sleep
4. World of Warcraft (new character! Warlock! woohoo!)
5. Put flock (fake grass) on my wargaming trees (yaay! trees are done!)
6. World of Warcraft
7. Sleep

Notice anything? It’s subtle, so I’ll give you a second to go back and look again.

There, you see it?

Goddamn game is destroying my ability to think. And the really sick part is that this is the seventh time it’s done this to me. SAME GAME. Same game. Same!

I have actually entered the end game now, and, contrary to the experience I was expecting, there is in fact more content in this game for the level 60 folks than there is for the other kin. It’s strange, realizing that for the past several months you’ve been playing the little game. The baby game, the one they have for the wittle kids who just want to goof around. But when you get all growed up there’s this whole other thing waiting for you.

It’s called “Dungeons”.

In the past two levels of play, I have come across and been pointed to no less than four completely new dungeons (huge, monstrous things) that you have absolutely no business presenting yourself to if you are less than58th level. I am aware of at least two more out there that I haven’t been pointed to yet, and both of these are what I understand to be the hardest dungeons in the game.

Now, for those of you who, perhaps, have been wise enough to not dump your entire life into the exploration of virtual crawly monster holes, let me give you some idea of the scope of the experience we are talking about here.

The very first dungeon one is introduced to (in Alliance lands, anyway) is the Deadmines. In the deadmines, you must:

1. Fight your way through a sprawling mine, battling at least twenty miners, overseers, and wizards, on your way to the entrance to the dungeon.
2. Once inside, you have another large mine section to pass through, containing a plethora of miners(say, 30) , but the problems here are the elite fire wizards. Fight them. Many of them.
3. You come to a large door, guarded by a VERY fat Ogre. He is a badass. He kills everyone who fights him the first time, as they are completely unprepared for the challenge level.
4. Okay, he’s dead. Open the door. You’ve got another (shorter) section of mine to fight through.
5. Be advised that a patrol has spawned behind you, and is about to come waltzing up on your rear quarters.
6. Next: door that opens into a square room; Sneed is here, with his goblin miners, piloting his giant mining robot. Defeat it. Open the door.
7. Another (short) mine section. Kill fifteen hapless miners.
8. Door opens into the Forge. This is a long, circular ramp that winds down to the bottom of this cylindrical chamber. Here, you must fight goblin inventors, who summon little helper robots, who are not, in fact, very little. Don’t die.
9. At the bottom, fight Gilnid, the head goblin. Other than having a large head, he’s not that interesting.
10. Open the door, another small mine section. More innocent miners meet their demise.
11. Get the keg o’ gunpowder, us it to BLOW OPEN THE DOOR! BOOM! What I want to know is, who put that cannon in front of that door, who aimed it at the (closed, locked, and sealed) door, and who left the keg o’ gunpowder lying around. That’s what I want to know.
12. Okay, big… check that, huge chamber. This chamber contains a pirate Battleship. I know how that sounds, but trust me. Planked docks wind over an underground lake, taking you to the three-story high pirate ship with no sails and very large guns. It’s a battleship, and it’s underground.
13. Fight more pirates than you can really handle. There’s a lot of them. By a lot I mean like 50.
14. Get to the top. Kill Mr. Smite, the second in command. He’ll probably kill you the first time you get up here, because he’s a badass.
15. Okay, you’re at the top of the ship. Step forward, and Edwin Van Cleef comes out, bringing his elite bodyguard with him. Fight, fight and try not to die.
16. Got him? Good; hop down the other side of the boat, kill the ship’s cook (a Murloc, ewwwwww), pick off one or ten more pirates along the way, find the back tunnel, sprint out, and you’re free!

*whew*

I went through this excercise to make a point, and here it is: this Deadmines that I speak of is actually one of the smallest dungeons in the game. Remember way up there when I was talking about extra content for the high-level crowd?

Six more. That I know of. And, I can’t realistically set foot inside these places for another three levels.

The scale of this game boggles me. Game designers, take note: Blizzard has done it right, and it was a lot of fucking work.

[ random emotional outburst ]

I’m getting tired of myself.

Before I go on, I should explain something. I have absolutely no patience for insufferable artist folk who go on and on and on about how terrible their life is, and how it’s all a big fucking tragedy. Because it isn’t, see. So, take this post in that context: I’m engaging in behavior that I find abhorrent.

So, here’s the deal: I’m paid to think. It’s pretty much my whole gig. That, and talking. The way it works, generally, is that someone with their hands on the wheel of whatever project I’m on points me at some problem, and goes, “Explain!” I go trundling off, dissect the poor creature with my talons and mandibles, and bring back a rather detailed explanation of what made it tick prior to my arrival. Often it is no longer “ticking” per se by the time I am done with it, but those are the risks you take.

My masters then go “Hmm. Okay. Then we should do is…” and kinda wander off talking amongst themselves, holding the information I brought back between them like a medical specimen, or a rare artiface. Sometimes I engage in the conversation about what we are going to do about what I found, and sometimes I don’t.

I like this gig. I like it a lot. And, I’m pretty good at it, if the reports on my progress and my continued deployment against expensive problems are any indication of the quality of my work. Figure they are.

So then why is it, do you suppose, that over and over I find myself in a room full of people who don’t want to hear what I have to say? And here is where the random emotional outburst actually begins: it’s so frustrating to be hired for a given strength (say, one’s analytical abilities), and then to be constantly ignored when attempting to apply that strength to problems other than the specific problems that one’s masters are aware of. This situation is bizarre to the extent that my outspoken nature and foresight are often the very reason I have been brought in. To be ignored in such a case is surreal at best.

And yet, it happens again, and again, and again… and again… and again… until I have to step back and say, “What in the fuck am I doing wrong that is creating this situation?” Because clearly I can’t have simply ended up in the same situation in every professional role I’ve had to date by coincidence.

I think the answer lies in what I am willing to settle for. For, of course, what you will settle for is what the world will give you. So, then, it follows that the solution to this dilemma is to change what I am willing to settle for.

This will be difficult.

But, as a wise man once said, “What the fuck else have you got to do?”

I thought I had escaped. I really did.

I hit level 52 with my Paladin, see, and it all kinda petered out. My Warcraft buddy & I started playing other games again, my kids got all into it (so, see, I couldn’t be on the account as much), and my life generally returned to focus.

Well… I’m level 54 now, and I’m a mere 1.5 bubbles from 55. I’m so close to the peak, the end, that glorious pillar known as Level 60, that I can taste it.

(For those of you with little or no World of Warcraft knowledge, level 60 is the highest level you can reach. A “bubble” is a piece of your experience bar, for reasons that become clear when you see the interface. And know that the internal counter they provide for you to track the level of your addiction reports my time logged on this one character as nearing 400 hours of gameplay.)

So I want to talk about two things today. 1) Yetis, and 2) Being level 54.

1) Yetis

I can now speak with some authority on the topic of Yetis. In particular, the Yetis that make their home (or, made, anyway) in the snowy Winterspring hills near Everlook are of some passing familiarity to me.

See, there’s this goblin woman in Everlook, who (get this) wants to make a Yeti Robot of some kind. It’s a hair-brained scheme at best, but heck, she’s payin’ for Yeti pelts & horns, so off we go.

See, though, it’s the horns. She wants “Pristine Yeti Horns”. Not “Dented Yeti Horns”, or even “Roughly Handled Yeti Horns”. Nope. “Pristine”.

Which is all good! I mean, I’m all for hiring my sword out to the utter decimation of an entire species for the recovery of a few pelts & horns. (The fact that they respawn like mad alleviates my guilt some.) But, MAN!

We two, Paladins both, killed, oh, I don’t know… 400 Yetis? Something like that. That might be an exaggeration (I wasn’t exactly keeping track). We got into this zone where the Yetis were falling left and right, one after the other, with hardly a pause between fights, so it is all rather blurry in my mind… all white ice, fur, horns, and snow.

We didn’t get our horns. We’re going back, I fear.

2) Being Level 54

The game has opened, in some funny way. I went to the Eastern Plaguelands on a whim last night, and had this strange sort of feeling come over me. Understand that the Eastern Plaguelands are, in many ways, the End of the Game. It’s pretty much where the game stops adding new map sections to explore. All the monsters are 50th-60th level, there’s this HUGE dungeon at the far end of it… so I came in, and pretty much everything I saw I could reasonably fight. Or, would be able to in like 2 levels.

Contrast this to the experience of going into every other new section of land. Which is: you walk in, enjoy the scenery, and then immediately start seeing creatures that you have no business fighting. “Ahhh,” you say, “I’ll be fighting those in a few levels.” You chuckle, and, sure enough, are soon stomping them into the ground with abandon.

I feel as though I’ve come around a corner, and quite suddenly can see the end. It’s exactly 6 levels ahead, and has lots and lots of dungeons in it. After so many hours of gameplay, it was a moment I wasn’t quite expecting. I suppose one imagines that the end of a great road will be filled with fanfare. It seems that this one is more filled with a gentle familiarity.

We’re coming up on two months of blogging here. This is interesting to me, since it is easily the longest any form of journaling or writing has held my interest. Here’s what we know so far:

• http://www.blogger.com/ makes this task as goddamn straightforward as it likely can be. In order to be easier or more flexible, it would literally have to follow me around begging to be updated, and use Adobe Illustrator as the authoring interface or something. It’s stupid how well-thought-out it is.
• I tend to forget do to things once everything is all set up and I’ve done them once. It’s like some little planning dude in my Head Office is going, “Okay, I’ve demonstrated that I can do the laundry successfully. The system is in place. Therefore, I need never do it again. Our work here is done!” And then I wonder why the laundry hasn’t been done. If anyone knows what patch I can install to my firmware to fix this problem, please send help.
• After my first few weeks, the need to blog diminished some, as if the waters that had been building up over time had been bled off by my first few weeks of skree’ing. What has emerged is a gentle sensation of wanting to write. It’s strange; I’ve been writing for a long time, and only recently have I discovered that when you get to a certain skill level, it is, as some have warned, actually pleasurable to organize your thoughts through words. Surprises abound, it seems.
• I think I’m funny from time to time. I hope you do too. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if you didn’t, as I’m also obtuse. Maybe a bit dry. Like a fine martini, perhaps.
• People don’t like it when you say, “oh yeah! I wrote about that in my blog!” when something comes up in conversation. It leads to this really unpleasant five seconds where:

• The topic of the conversation has suddenly become your blog, instead of whatever it was that we were talking about. It’s the same reaction I would get if I said, “oh yeah! I was in a movie about that!”;
• Then, everyone in the conversation is suddenly, uncomfortably aware that you write a blog. Opinions vary on whether this is a socially acceptable form of behavior, so reactions vary from a sort of confused smile to actual distaste;
• Immediately after that, some kind of recovery attempt is made, and the conversation either rebounds, or collapses entirely.

Even with all its warts, I begin to see why people engage in this bizarre ritual. Venting one’s spleen in the public discourse is often enormously enjoyable, sometimes embarassing, potentially damaging, and, above all, an excellent attention-getting scheme. Even if, ultimately, I’m the one paying attention to me.