In my early look post about Season 2 of The War Within and the content of patch 11.1, one thing, or rather two, that I neglected to mention was my opinions on the zone of Undermine and the new mount system, DRIVE. I felt like these needed to be split into their own post, because there is a lot to discuss.

Undermine

I really like Undermine. As a zone, it captures the essence of the post-Cataclysm Goblin race exceptionally well and feels wholly distinct from anything else in WoW. As the closest WoW gets to modern real-life architecture and technological progress, Undermine is a funhouse lens (not the inexplicably good world content trinket!) of our reality bounced back at us. Like, if the encroaching horrors of late-stage capitalism and fascism enabled and supported by corporate entities was fun and whimsical, it would be Undermine, instead of…uh, looking around, all of this. Undermine is pretty cleanly split into neighborhoods that you can follow with some time in the zone and has a road network that serves to connect the main 4 quadrants of the zone together with smooth, higher-speed transit lanes.

Undermine feels Goblin-appropriate in terms of size and scale, but that is also problematic sometimes (my Tauren Retribution Paladin gets camera-snagged walking into any of the buildings except the main Incontinental Hotel). You can tell it is a modern WoW zone because it uses a lot of verticality, which means you’re often stuck dismounting and running up fire escape stairs and through buildings to complete quest objectives. That’s not inherently bad, but it is a stark reminder of the design choices that increasingly pissed players off during the no-flight/Pathfinder first era of the game.

The zone’s aesthetic often makes up for most of the irritation that navigating it can bring, though, since it so thoroughly captures the Goblin mythology of current WoW while also trying to reconcile the differences (older pre-Cata Goblins seemed to be beachy folk so while Undermine itself is kind of confusing in that context, there’s a marina and beach that feel like they fit the idea). The zone looks weird in a way that fully fits the story being told and the foundational ideas in the current narrative – it’s obvious why Gazlowe would revile it and why Renzik would want to return, and that is something I expected would be hard to pull off.

To tee up talking about DRIVE, let me dive into this topic as my end of discussion for Undermine – why no flying? Blizzard has made the claim in interviews that Undermine just couldn’t be executed how they wanted with flight, and I think I disagree for a simple reason – they tell on themselves with multiple quests. Argus made some sense as a hostile place and technically with the way it handled skybox rendering with 3D objects that would not work from an airborne perspective, and Timeless Isle was understandable because it was quite obviously a small zone. Undermine, it seems, is small for the modern game (it’s not exactly small but it is obvious that Blizzard added the new areas to Ringing Deeps and Zuldazar as a part of creating a total questable area that felt major-patch appropriate) and flight would kind of shatter the illusion that being locked to the ground provides, but it also doesn’t have the skybox problem like Argus (like most TWW zones underground, it has a fully modeled 3D ceiling). It’s baffling because there are quests that actually give you flight in the zone on a temporary basis, like the rocketpack races and the photography quest – and those are things that Blizzard willingly provides that also kind of reveal that the technical difficulties might not be present or at least, to be fair, not what we would think them to be. Player investigation has shown that the zone is indeed what we would expect of a flyable zone, albeit with a very low invisible ceiling, which tells me the most likely thing is missing geometric detail in models up high a la Classic.

So since we can’t fly but Blizzard also didn’t want to just say use ground mounts, we get a compromise solution.

Enter DRIVE

DRIVE is a system for using the new mount G-99 Breakneck, a car-like mount that has dynamic gameplay options similar to Skyriding. This new mount modality allows players a peak maximum movement speed slightly higher than Skyriding and introduces car mechanics like drifting and honking to World of Warcraft.

DRIVE, firstly, comes with the problems that adding cars to games often has – modeling what makes driving a car satisfying is difficult. Racing games are an entire genre unto themselves because of that – just getting the basics right takes insanely high-level mathematics and understanding of how a car functions, and making a car game fun often means veering either into hyperrealism or pushing to arcade-style gameplay where the car is made a bit faster and floatier in a way that still feels fun to play and close enough to the real thing. Grand Theft Auto, an entire franchise built on stealing cars, has notoriously iffy car controls and gameplay, and WoW is pretty far off of even that. At times, steering the car and moving around can feel bad, and the first day or two of the patch, I hated it.

When you get used to it, it does get better. You can customize the car to have new engines and tires in a way that makes it easier to handle, mostly by either reducing the top speed or acceleration so that you have a more gradual curve to top speed or more control in exchange for a little bit of power. When I added the lower-speed engine to my car, it made it a lot easier to use and thus more fun. It still feels a little weird and not well implemented, but better.

The top-speed argument Blizzard posed is a bit silly however, as the only place that top speed applies is in a boost scenario. Using boost requires building it, which means either collecting Kaja’cola cans in the streets or drifting to charge it. Drifting is my second major problem with DRIVE. Drift is mapped to jump by default, and as far as I can tell, there’s not a way to change that, which means that sometimes you hit your jump key ready to drift and the car, well, jumps instead. Yes, sure, this is the Mario Kart way of controlling drift, but Mario Kart handles it much more smoothly while something in WoW’s handling of that input is really bad and often doesn’t lead to good outcomes. I might want to just jump my car for fun and end up accidentally drifting, or want to drift and end up with a sweet jump that destroys my navigation.

As an idea, I like DRIVE, but I think to tie this post together, we need to discuss the problem at the root of things.

DRIVE and Undermine Together Are a Bad Mix

DRIVE was made because it conceptually fit the Undermine idea well, and it does. Undermine is a cool zone that fits the Goblin theme, the car is a cool idea that fits the theme and would be a good mount system…anywhere else in the game. Undermine’s flavorful, Gobin-appropiate city is made up of dead-ends, narrow alleyway passages, and changes in elevation that absolutely destroy the ability to enjoy driving the car in the zone for prolonged periods of time. If you can stay on the main streets of Undermine, the car isn’t bad, but the second you need to do anything in the actual bulk of the map, the car quickly becomes a nuisance.

In a lot of places in WoW, this wouldn’t be the case. In the Barrens, DRIVE would be incredible! In a lot of places in Khaz Algar, it would be amazing! In Undermine, it feels awful! Drifting being finicky to activate wouldn’t be as noticeable if you had more room to drive and thus time to correct the navigation, the boost top speed wouldn’t feel like a hindrance if you could actually leverage it to go fast more often, and the overall idea of the car wouldn’t feel as constrained in a zone that is, well, less constrained. The problem isn’t that Undermine is a bad zone or that DRIVE is a bad system, but that marrying the two at the hip makes both feel lesser for it.

DRIVE has more problems than Skyriding, which logically makes sense given that Skyriding has fewer innate design constraints to consider. WoW’s airspace is generally pretty clear, its zones are well-signposted even from above, and the gameplay motivation of Skyriding encouraging exploration works because you only have to account for it as a player at a basic level (managing changes in elevation while maintaining Vigor). Doing the same idea on the ground means accounting for a lot more variables, and Blizzard has accounted for them pretty poorly in my opinion. While bouncing off of walls seems ideal instead of dead stopping, it doesn’t feel that good in practice, while the numerous little props and decorative touches in Undermine become hard snags that pull your speed to zero and generally become confounding obstacles. DRIVE, like Skyriding, also runs afoul of something in the game (maybe anti-movement-hacking code?) so that if you get stuck in a particular way, the game just hard disconnects you, which means that playing with the upper limits of DRIVE in Undermine often results in disruption to your play.

All of these things combine to make DRIVE feel bad, but I think the real problem isn’t DRIVE itself, but that implementing it within Undermine severely limits our ability to actually use this new mount in a fun and engaging way. For me, that’s the real missed potential of this patch – a system that could be so much cooler if our first exposure to it was literally anywhere else in the game.