Thinking on Mount Hyjal

After having explored and written about Vashj’ir experiences, it seemed pretty natural to follow on with the other Cataclysm leveling zones.  There are, after all, only five.  How hard could it be?

Welcome to Mount Hyjal

What I didn’t consider was the rather dull sameness of Mount Hyjal.  After the underwater splendor of Vashj’ir, which for all its issues in both design and bugs, is a unique and beautiful location, Mount Hyjal feels like a bottle episode, something you do with the available assets on the cheap because your focus is elsewhere but you need something to fill in a gap.

Which is, no doubt, an extremely unfair view of the zone.  But you also start in “Elven building 6” or whatever it is called, which has been repeated in so many zones over every expansion so far that it sets a tone of sameness that the zone has some trouble shaking.

Elven Building Number 6, now with portals out front

Now, I get that the location of Mount Hyjal in the midst of Kalimdor requires that adhere to some level of geographical continuity.  I mean, we can’t just have dramatic changes in scenery and color palette just because you wander over a zone line… because that never happens in Azeroth… or Outland… *cough*

Still, Uldum theoretically has the same issue, being tied into the existing zones of Kalimdor as well, yet it manages a unique feel… even when re-using its share of assets and having too much Harrison Jones going on.  But we’ll get to Uldum in a post down the road.  I have to finish it first.

It is more than the look that conspires to make Mount Hyjal feel.  The quest line there represents a further refinement of the spoon feeding of two or three quests at a time that link together into a single brittle chain of events that bring the story of the zone together… brittle, because if something goes wrong, which is not completely uncommon still in Cata Classic, you are kind of stuck.  You either have to drop and re-start the quest or move on to the next area where you should be able to pick up the chain later down the line.

This is less noticeable if you’re one and done, but if you’re like me and hauling alts through or like Potshot who is dual boxing through content, you may very well run into couple of “well, that didn’t work out the way it did last time” moments.

In some ways I guess Mount Hyjal and its sameness could be viewed as an attempt at continuity, a feeling that the zone is part of something you already know and are presumably invested in.  And there is nothing really wrong with the zone within the parameters above… except for that one quest where you have to pick up critters that are zipping around the landscape, that one can die in the fire where it lives… and it does get some of the quest cliches that must appear in every expansion out of the way.

You know which quests I mean…

So I want to cut the zone some slack.  I mean, *I* liked the Joust quest line, once I got the controls in hand.

Prepare to Joust… insert 25 cents

It really looks a lot more hazardous than it is.  I suspect it has been nerfed somehow because when I landed in the lava it had no effect.

When you forget to flap and dive right into the lava

And, I will say as somebody who played a lot of Joust as a teen, as I was still a teen when it appeared, and then later on when we had a Joust console at the office, the simulation within Mount Hyjal is pretty spot on when it comes to the frustration of hitting the button to flap at just the wrong moment and ending up totally overshooting your target.

If this were EVE Online that one control would be mapped to F1

And hey, you get a companion pet for the effort!  What is not to like?

But overall the zone doesn’t feel all that memorable and, in some ways, suffers from being the first zone on the list for most people.  It has a sameness to it that makes it drag a bit, and it is put hard up against some of the Cataclysm design choices.  I know that the whole “NPCs battling so you don’t have to fight everybody on the field” thing was big in Northrend, but it feels like it was dialed up a notch… or maybe down a notch… in Mount Hyjal, where you can walk around fighting NPCs to pick up what you need.

Just mining in the middle of the battle, don’t mind me…

There is a lot of zone to cover, but it is a very linear path around the horn and back to south of where you started.

The story path through Mount Hyjal

It is also a zone where they don’t re-use a lot of locations for follow on quests.  A couple of hubs repeat, but most seem to move you on to the next destination after a task or two, so you cover a lot of ground without feeling invested in anything.  Not as bad as some later expansions, but it feels like it is really starting to come to the surface here.

And the horseshoe shape means that, because you have flying from day one, you can skip over or fly directly two where your next quest destination is located.  Is Cataclysm the only expansion where you have flying out of the gate?  Anyway, you breeze over the landscape.  I think this is something that Blizz rolled the dice on… the fact that there are enough flight points around to cover an all ground approach to the zone seems to suggest that they were at least toying with the idea of not having flight available instantly.

Mount Hyjal feels oddly like it shouldn’t have flying.  It isn’t like Vashj’ir, which effectively avoids flying… you can surface and fly around, but it isn’t all that useful most of the time… nor like Deepholm or Uldum, which are built so that you need flying to get around.  I will have to see how this feels when I get to Twilight Highlands.

And, of course, Blizzard drew a lesson from this and they have been trying to put flying back in the bottle ever since… until Dragonflight at least.

Meanwhile, I ended up getting the achievement for doing the quests in the zone about 80% of the way into the zone.

My Mount Hyjal quest achievements so far

There was quite a bit of story left to be covered after I got the main quest line achievement.  I compare this again to Northrend where I had to scrounge in a couple of zones… Zul’drak especially… to get those final quests for the loremaster achievement.  Here I had an easy dozen or more quests ahead of me to wrap up, which I did.

So it goes.  It isn’t a bad zone.  I could name worse.  But it isn’t very memorable.  Even though I sidestepped a lot of the content in Cataclysm back in the day, I can remember running a some of Mount Hyjal… for some reason that quests where you have to kill the ogres and collect the packs being dragged when the followers fleet comes to mind… most of it felt, if not completely new, only vaguely familiar at best.  And I have no memory at all of the Joust quests.  Glad I found those this time.