Blog Azeroth Shared Topic: Flavours of WoW

The Blog Azeroth shared topic for August 20 - 26 was suggested by Cymre from Bubbles of Mischief:

It would not be uncommon to hear about the initial release of World of Warcraft as Vanilla or Classic. In terms of ice cream or gelato (which is my preference), Vanilla was once considered the most popular flavour of it’s time. So if Vanilla represents Classic WoW, what flavours could represent the following expansions?

Since Wow 1.0/Vanilla/Classic we have 4 expansions. The first was of course The Burning Crusade, the second expansion was Wrath of the Lich King, the current expansion is Cataclysm and soon to be released is Mists of Pandaria. So 4 expansion s means 4 flavours.

The easiest expansion to assign a flavour to is definitely The Burning Crusade. Throughout the new world, we were presented landscapes of bright and vivid colours. Blizzard even saw fit to reward us with items that matched the landscapes colour schemes and by the end of our questing in Hellfire Peninsula we looked rather fetching in our brightly coloured outfits that clashed horribly with each other.

It was almost as if the design team was using colours on the roll of a dice, or more likely a pair of D10's. And the best flavour of ice cream that matches tha is definitely a tutti-frutti, with hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top and doused in raspberry and chocolate sauces for good measure.

Next in the time line is Wrath, and the the frozen wastes of the north. The barren landscape was a far cry from Outland, there was a dark cloud looming and the mood was very different. Thankfully, so was the colour palette used by the arty types in Irvine, Ca.

Unfortunately for us the had replaced the dice with a coin that had a dark brown side and a less dark brown side. The content was cool enough though even if we did have to spend half the expansion inside the Ice Cream Citadel (see what I did there?) chasing down by and chasing the Lich King himself. Overall the expansion was really good but sometimes too much of a good thing can make you sick, a bit like my choice of flavour for Wrath, chocolate. 

Onto the current expansion. The theme of the expansion was a bit lost in my opinion we had the 1-60 zone revamp and 5 rather disjointed zones with very individual themes surrounding the elements of earth wind fire and of curse water which just left the Twilight Highlands all alone with no theme, although you could argue that it's theme was shadow even though that not a traditional element here on planet earth it IS one that recurs throughout Azeroth.

Of the three expansions this is most definitely the difficult one to assign a single flavour to. I did consider a scoop of every flavour but just realised that was an act of fence sitting. There was an awful lot of fire in the expansion which really goes against the ice cream thing (is there a chili ice cream?) but then I realised that this expansion has been very reminiscent of the original incarnation of WoW, a lot of focus on Azeroth, Ragnaros, Nefarian and even Zul'Gurub which really meant that Cataclysm only really has one true option for a flavour.....vanilla but this time as it is the second time around we get a "99 Flake" in it!

Now all that remains is to lose the hunger from all thsi talk of ice cream and convince my workmates I am not obsessed with ice cream!