World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Zone Preview

The guys at WarCry have put together a preview of Vashj’ir, the underwater city we’ll be exploring in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion pack.

After a (completely awesome) introduction to the zone which sees you abandoning ship, you just have to do one short little quest, and then get a buff called “Sea Legs.” The buff increases your speed underwater by a good amount and gives you infinite breath, essentially just making it like the world above – only with free swimming, where you can be running along the ground and then just jump off and start swimming around.

The zone is gorgeous from what I’ve seen of it – the Kelp Forest seen here is wonderful to look at – though the full-3D exploration can make it harder to orient oneself in finding quests at first. Vashj’ir uses the phasing technology introduced in Wrath to great effect as you battle evil naga and help set up underwater outposts. Of particular note is a quest chain that has you searching for an underwater mount: Nagas are too hard to break (and sentient albeit evil, so there’s a bit of an ethical dilemma there), and sea turtles are too slow. What’s next? Who knows, I haven’t gotten that far yet.