The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Ponies, Pop Culture, and Games

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There is no cow level.

There is, however, a pony level in Diablo 3, if the datamining is correct.

The blog's official response.

Now our initial idea with this post was to semi-jokingly rescind any previous doubts we’ve expressed regarding this game, and leave it at that, but I actually think I can turn this into a more in-depth blog post, so here we go:

I’ve heard some people express dismay at developers who throw too many knowing pop culture references into otherwise immersive games. Blizzard is a good example here; most of us played Cataclysm when it first came out, even if you quit directly after reaching level 85 the way Mister Adequate and I did.

Mister Adequate actually rerolled entirely and leveled to 85 from scratch rather than playing his existing level 80 draenei, presumably because he breaks out in hives when he is not playing a tauren warrior. Picture is related.

Cataclysm, as I’m sure you’re all aware, is chock-full of references, jabs, and full-on homages to pop culture. Uldum is pretty much entirely dedicated to it, between the Indiana Jones storyline, the Katamari Damacy quest, the Hackers references, and anything else I’ve forgotten. Actually, I’m pretty certain that there were more playful pokes at culture than there weren’t.

There were a lot of people who weren’t exactly fond of this, feeling that an MMORPG should be more immersive and that what WoW was doing here was purposefully pulling players out of the world that they had so carefully crafted. Others thought it was all in good fun and point out that, come on, Blizzard has pretty much always had their tongue firmly in cheek.

This isn't Warcraft in Space!

I tend to sit somewhere in the middle; I like my games full of rich lore but it doesn’t always have to be super-serious business. It might say something about me that Uldum was my favorite zone in Cataclysm by far. And ultimately, for me, it comes down to the gameplay. Civilization isn’t exactly the world’s most accurate history simulator– in the game Mister Adequate and I are currently playing, my civ just discovered an ancient manuscript containing the secrets of nuclear fission– but it’s sure as heck fun.

What do you guys think?

Written by: Pike on September 7, 2011.

10 thoughts on “Ponies, Pop Culture, and Games”

  2. I bought hon in beta when it was still pay-to-play and found it good fun. That was until they jumped on the bandwagon and turned into a f2p “buy skins and other useless shit” model. Now i’ve got trolls with display pictures referencing every meme since 08 and people laughing at them all the while.
    In short i would like to kill whoever introduced this idea into gameplay. Slowly. With lots of sharp things.

    1. The F2P trend is somewhat disturbing, not so much because there’s anything wrong with F2P in and of itself but it seems like it’s extending to pretty much EVERY game now…

  3. I could not stand Uldum. I still do not have an 85; I get to Uldum and just give up. It’s like Blizzard’s design goal was to make sure you play your character as little as possible, and just watch an Indiana Jones movies instead.

    1. Yeah, it was kind of a polarizing, “love it or hate it” sort of zone. And there were an awful lot of cutscenes from out of nowhere. It’s like they had an entirely different team work on that zone.

    2. You can do all of the Tol’Vir quests without any of the Harrison Jones stuff. On all my alts, when Mack tries to give me a quest I tell him to piss off and go on my merry way doing quests for the cat people.

  4. I have mixed feelings about Uldum. While it was funny (and I must admit the biplane quest was fun), it got old pretty fast. I really would have liked to see more of the Tol’Vir sphinx people, and if the whole zone had been the Tol’Vir, instead of splitting it off so half of it was Tol’Vir and half of it was Indiana Jones, then I think it would have ultimately been more satisfying, and we could have gotten more good lore.

    I realize Blizzard knows its good to make a joke now and then, and Harrison Jones was a good joke…but I think they just took it a little too far on this one.

    I think the principle is that the funny quests should be somewhat incidental to the game, rather than part of it. You’ll notice that “This isn’t Warcraft in Space” and other funny one liners are only accessed after you click on that same unit a million times, and most of the pop culture references are found in quest names, NPC names, and quest text, things that don’t really affect anything and are easily ignored if you don’t like the joke/don’t get it. Humor can be tricky, and not everybody thinks the same things are funny. Turning half a zone into one big movie reference kind of cuts against the grain on that one. Blizz has but a lot of humor into their games (like the Arthas rockstar ending in Warcraft 3), and it’s hilarious, i just think they overdid it on this one.

    More Tol’Vir lore!

    1. I think I agree with you to a great extent, but like you I really like the Tol’Vir. It was unfortunate that they chose to put in the big reference stuff in there, because I wanted more of them.

      That said, if it had been yet another Troll tribe or something, I doubt I’d care at all that half the zone was sacrificed.

    2. You do bring a valid point. There’s a careful balance to maintain with this sort of thing and Blizz was really tipping the balance with much of Cataclysm, I think.

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