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Nthing comments about the voice acting. It's really good for an RTS. Hell, I still try to spam the human warcries whenever possible. ("FOR LORDEROOOOON"  )
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Feb 23, 2018 18:44
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Poil posted:You can tell the barracks to rally all new units directly to Arthas. But just having the barracks assigned to a hotkey means you can double tap it to zoom to its location and drastically cut down on the time it takes to move the camera back and forth (provided you have the army hotkeyed as well). Wait, you can set a unit as a rally point? I have been playing so wrong......
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Feb 23, 2018 19:07
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Cythereal posted:In the End Times dungeon where you visit the future the Infinites desire and confront their leader, among the bosses you encounter along the way is an insane, time-warped Jaina Proudmoore, too powerful a mage to have perished when Azeroth died but lost her sanity as the flow of time was torn asunder. She just cannot catch a break, can she?
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Feb 23, 2018 19:31
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Tenebrais posted:She just cannot catch a break, can she? Nope. She's one of four major leaders who can show up in the End Times as an insane, time-lost shadow of their former self trapped on a dead world of broken time. The other leaders who can show up are Tyrande Whisperwind, Sylvanas Windrunner, and Baine Bloodhoof. We'll meet the former two in this LP in due time, and the last is the son of a character we'll meet in WC3. But yeah, Jaina's life sucks. Hard. First boyfriend? Arthas. Second guy who had a major crush on her? Insane, joined the Legion, and now dead. Second actual boyfriend? Broke up with her just recently in WoW. Father? Dead. Mentor and father figure? We'll see (spoiler: doesn't end well). Mother? Disowns and exiles her in the new WoW expansion. Apprentice? Dead. City that followed her to Kalimdor? Nuked so hard the timeline broke. Second homeland? Seceded from the Alliance, rejoined the Alliance with her as its leader, then voted her out and seceded from the Alliance again. Jaina's life sucks.
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Feb 23, 2018 19:36
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Yeah, that's why I generally stay away from WoW. Too many depressing stories and characters. Nice to shake my head as I see them confirmed, though. I can only wonder what Azzur's human WC2 LP characters would have made of Arthas. Fan retcon now that I think about it- They would have stayed with him to the end and then one or all of the gang would have attempted something truly heroic to stop him. Too bad it wouldn't be canon for it to succeed. 
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Feb 23, 2018 19:51
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Xenocides posted:Wait, you can set a unit as a rally point? I have been playing so wrong...... You can set rally points on anything. I haven't really touched on it in the LP, but it's something I've been abusing to set up bases quickly. New resource base? Set rally point on the goldmine, build 5 peasants. Need lumber? Rally point on trees, build several peasants. I've tried rally points on in-progress buildings, but the peasants just stand around slack jawed instead of helping build it. They have to be told to do that manually. About the only thing you can't do with rally points is force units to join specific groups. I think. If there's a way, I haven't found it yet! (And not for lack of trying)
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Feb 23, 2018 20:03
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achtungnight posted:Yeah, that's why I generally stay away from WoW. Too many depressing stories and characters. Nice to shake my head as I see them confirmed, though. I can only wonder what Azzur's human WC2 LP characters would have made of Arthas. Fan retcon now that I think about it- They would have stayed with him to the end and then one or all of the gang would have attempted something truly heroic to stop him. Too bad it wouldn't be canon for it to succeed. I’ve found WoW’s writing isn’t far removed from WC3 when they can get new characters and settings to work with, but the staff suffers when they try to do anything with their long standing characters. I feel like they don’t really have an institutional memory, so characters are picked for needs of the story and mechanics, rather than letting them play out. This gets compounded because they seem committed with always raising stakes. WC3 already has topics of world shaking proportions, with the fate of nations hanging in the balance. WoW just keeps trying to up the stakes from there, and it loses a lot of its humanity in the process.
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Feb 23, 2018 20:29
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DoubleNegative posted:You can set rally points on anything. I haven't really touched on it in the LP, but it's something I've been abusing to set up bases quickly. New resource base? Set rally point on the goldmine, build 5 peasants. Need lumber? Rally point on trees, build several peasants. I've tried rally points on in-progress buildings, but the peasants just stand around slack jawed instead of helping build it. They have to be told to do that manually. I knew you could set gold mines and lumber but never even thought to try to set it on a unit. Now I want to see if, with that timesaver, I can beat the missions in the expansion I struggled with on Hard because unit management was a pain, specifically the final mission of the expansion. On Normal, that mission drove me to near insanity and I remember the first time I won it took about three hours.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:47
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Kith posted:There are a variety of unused audio files for The Culling. Nearly all of them were deemed "too disturbing" and were cut as a result. Actually, I believe the Mal'Ganis line does get used. It's the line that plays if Mal'Ganis gets 100 zombies before you do. As for the way he makes them disappear, he actually uses a spell to make it happen, they don't just use triggers and play the casting animation. The spell even has a tooltip, which talks about storing the zombie in some sort of pocket dimension or something for later use.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:54
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Xenocides posted:Wait, you can set a unit as a rally point? I have been playing so wrong...... 1. Left click barracks. 2. Right click hero portrait in upper left corner of the screen. 3. Train units.
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Feb 23, 2018 22:12
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Cythereal posted:(...) Then voted her out(...) You keep saying this but this isn't what happened. She got Out-voted on the matter of turning Dalaran into a neutral state (like Sweden) and then she got pissy and left. She wasn't thrown out, she left by her own accord.
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Feb 23, 2018 23:27
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It’s funny, though, because Dalaran is lead by the Council of Six... and her boyfriend, also a member, was conspicuously absent from that scene, presumably so they wouldn’t have to deal with writing a scene about a tie (since one other member of the council also voted against).
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Feb 23, 2018 23:38
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Siegkrow posted:You keep saying this but this isn't what happened. She got Out-voted on the matter of turning Dalaran into a neutral state (like Sweden) and then she got pissy and left. She wasn't thrown out, she left by her own accord. 
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Feb 23, 2018 23:38
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Regalingualius posted:It’s funny, though, because Dalaran is lead by the Council of Six... and her boyfriend, also a member, was conspicuously absent from that scene, presumably so they wouldn’t have to deal with writing a scene about a tie (since one other member of the council also voted against). Though I feel like a dragon who is neutral and not aligned with either faction would not vote for Dalaran remaining partisan in the face of a major threat.
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Feb 23, 2018 23:46
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Y'all are pretending anyone's motivations are consistent in WoW. Azeroth is so hosed up that causality is officially out for lunch. Putting this in spoilers in case anyone genuinely isn't familiar with WC3's story because it spoils a couple of events. And bear in mind, this only goes up to the beginning of the Warlords of Draenor expansion - it doesn't cover at all what happens in Warlords, or the Legion expansion, and Battle for Azeroth starts this year.
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Feb 24, 2018 00:00
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To be fair, a significant chunk of that is simply a case of "Blizzard doesn't update old content to current lore". For good reasons. If they did, there would probably no longer be content there to do.
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Feb 24, 2018 00:50
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Cythereal posted:Y'all are pretending anyone's motivations are consistent in WoW. Azeroth is so hosed up that causality is officially out for lunch. Putting this in spoilers in case anyone genuinely isn't familiar with WC3's story because it spoils a couple of events. And bear in mind, this only goes up to the beginning of the Warlords of Draenor expansion - it doesn't cover at all what happens in Warlords, or the Legion expansion, and Battle for Azeroth starts this year.
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Feb 24, 2018 00:59
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That graph is silly because it's acting like it's reasonable for Blizzard to completely update every old continent every time a new race is added to the game. The actual big canon case of time fuckery is equally as silly from both a narrative and metanarrative standpoint, but not really relevant to WC3.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:28
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I mean, the hero class introduced in the second expac has their starting area act as a direct leadup into the second expansion's area, but after swearing vengeance they immediately all go fart around in the first expac's zones.
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Feb 24, 2018 02:02
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Yeah on the whole Warcraft is actually pretty light-hearted. Only certain story lines and characters are all that awful and they usually still tell a somewhat interesting story, bar Jaina’s life of misery which is more the writers using her as a plot device over a character. Arthas’ story is well done and thought out, I think he actually has the best plot line in Warcraft 3. The best overall story is probably Lei Shen The Thunder King though.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:12
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I prefer Thrall’s story to Arthas’s. Maybe I just like Noble Orcs better than Corrupted Humans.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:35
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Lord_Magmar posted:Arthas’ story is well done and thought out, I think he actually has the best plot line in Warcraft 3. The best overall story is probably Lei Shen The Thunder King though. Well... Okay, so I do like Arthas' story, but I like how it's written, not the plot itself. This is, y'know, Fallen Hero 101. But the way it's written is really good, and the way it's acted (and directed, let's not forget, there must have been a voice director in there) makes it really epic. So far as Thrall's story goes... well, we'll see when we get to it. The ending cinematic for that one is probably my second favourite, though I think that Thrall will have to share awesome points with Grom Hellscream.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:47
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achtungnight posted:I prefer Thrall’s story to Arthas’s. Maybe I just like Noble Orcs better than Corrupted Humans. For me, it's very hard to separate Warcraft 3 Thrall from Green Jesus as he's portrayed in WoW. Thrall has made numerous, catastrophic fuckups over the years and anyone who tries to hold him accountable for them is told to pound sand. He's frustrating for that very reason.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:59
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Arthas' story is basically a better written version of Anakin Skywalker though that's damning with faint praise.
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Feb 24, 2018 06:09
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Lord_Magmar posted:Arthas’ story is well done and thought out, I think he actually has the best plot line in Warcraft 3. The best overall story is probably Lei Shen The Thunder King though. SLAYERS OF KINGS AND GODS! Somebody put up something about Lei When, I'm pretty sure he doesn't spoil anything about WC3
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Feb 24, 2018 06:19
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Siegkrow posted:SLAYERS OF KINGS AND GODS! I mean, you can start with the fact that Lei Shen beat up what was effectively his god and master Ra-Den and stole his powers over lightning because said Ra-Den was no longer doing his job due to depression caused by the slaying of the Titan Pantheon, intergalactic planet people who find planets and re-forge them for life. Ra-Den was made to watch over Azeroth and lead the Stone Mogu, Lei-Shen being one of them. This is how Lei-Shen becomes the first emperor of the Mogu and enslaves all of Pandaria. He only gets more ridiculous from there. Probably most impressive is his death, specifically he was hit by a giant beam that is intended to re-originate Azeroth, as in return it to how the Titans forged it. This beam did not actually kill him, just weaken him enough that he died of old age some years later, having slain or fought off every assassination attempt even as he dies from an unnatural sickness and aging.
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Feb 24, 2018 06:31
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Lei mothafuckin Shen. The guy was a living metal album cover. And we kill him for his spare change, and his cool hat.
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Feb 24, 2018 06:40
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kramers into the thread DID SOMEBODY SAY LEI SHEN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q51B6M70QBs edit:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLFc4WufJuQ&t=31s SirSamVimes fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 08:57
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I just browsed through the WoW wiki, and - not even touching whatever has actually happened post WC3 - just the lore and backstory on their own, the easiest part of any worldbuilding, are an amazingly dumb huge pileup of
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Feb 24, 2018 09:20
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Xander77 posted:I just browsed through the WoW wiki, and - not even touching whatever has actually happened post WC3 - just the lore and backstory on their own, the easiest part of any worldbuilding, are an amazingly dumb huge pileup of At some point, when you realize that Azeroth is home to at least a dozen different eldritch deities, vengeful gods, and insane abominations each with their own plan to cause the end of the world, you have to wonder: "What the gently caress is wrong with this planet!?" Or: "Just loving take it, we'll move somewhere else. I think Mar Sara would be a less hostile environment by comparison."
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Feb 24, 2018 11:09
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Dr. Snark posted:At some point, when you realize that Azeroth is home to at least a dozen different eldritch deities, vengeful gods, and insane abominations each with their own plan to cause the end of the world, you have to wonder: The answer is that the planet is a Titan, the strongest Titan, and everyone wants a piece of that Titan Pie.
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Feb 24, 2018 11:24
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Xander77 posted:I just browsed through the WoW wiki, and - not even touching whatever has actually happened post WC3 - just the lore and backstory on their own, the easiest part of any worldbuilding, are an amazingly dumb huge pileup of Well, yeah, of course. The game they've maintained for the last 14 years requires 1.5 big bads/year and form follows function. Blizzard's writing has always been pretty ... inorganic, I guess, in the sense that they're very much a "gameplay first" crew and their narratives reflect that. Major story beats are sometimes dictated by the structure they want for the game itself than what's true to their characters, or what makes sense ("We want to bring the old orc chieftans from warcraft 1 and 2 back, so let's have Orc Hitler time travel to an alternate pre-warcraft 1 dimension, teach the warcraft 1 orcs to make bombs and guns, then invade our universe, then players counterinvade! Yeah!"). The characterization and incidental writing between the thus mandated plot points is sometimes bad, sometimes good, and sometimes great but the plot usually has to undermine the narrative every now and then for gameplay reasons. Arthas can't just go "there's a zombie plague in the grain, let's go kill the vampire demon guy and quarantine each house" like a sensible person because then there's no game.
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Feb 24, 2018 12:55
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I feel like quarantining an entire city full of zombies would be kinda difficult.
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Feb 24, 2018 20:16
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And citizens were already starting to zombify shortly after Arthas arrived, and that was after he’d run himself ragged to get there. Who knows how hosed the kingdom would be if he’d arrived even an hour later?
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Feb 24, 2018 20:56
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Given how undead seems to work, it's a drat if you do, drat if you don't situation - the problem is Arthas being too bullheaded to explain the situation, resorting to throwing his status around to try to force Uther to heed. Uther still views Arthas as a rash greenhorn (which is true...) and chafes at being ordered around - that combined makes it looked like that Arthas has completely lost his god drat mind to Uther.
Robindaybird fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 21:18
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Alright, alright, Arthas did the best he could do. Fine. But that's in part because his development was forced in a certain direction. I think what I dislike here is the forced nature of the mission and how you pretty much have to commit a feel-bad massacre to win. It's one thing to choose to be Evil- upon reflection I am not that disturbed by doing stuff like killing random pedestrians for money and gun skill in GTA games or playing an Evil Priest who practices human sacrifice in CoG's Lost Heir series- but that is mitigated a little because I know it is just one way to play the game and I am choosing the way I play. If I want to challenge myself, or play a Good character, in games like GTA and LH, I can avoid doing Evil stuff and still win, it's just harder and/or gives a different experience. I can only shoot enemies and in self-defense in GTA. I can play a Good Priest or Paladin in LH instead of an Evil Priest or Dark Knight and get the Triumphant Hero Ending either way. I know that, and I can play the game either way if I want to do it that way. But in the Mission of WC3 "The Culling", the only way to win, really, is to kill the Peasants before Mal'Ganis gets to them. You have to be Evil to win, and that just offends me as a person who tries to be Good IRL. It would have been better IMHO to set up the Mission with multiple ways to win. My idea to do that and still have a Mission is as follows- The Mission is still to stop Mal'Ganis from gathering Zombies. However, it unfolds in multiple Stages. Each Stage lasts a certain amount of time, we still have the thirty minute timer but it unfolds in a different way. Instead of stopping Mal'Ganis from touching Zombies-to-be and teleporting them away, we have a meter of "Undead Power" to slow down and make sure does not fill before the timer runs out and Uther's reinforcements arrive. If that meter fills, his reinforcements won't matter, the Scourge will be too big to stop here. But if we keep it down... we think maybe we can still win once Uther arrives. Killing Peasants is only one way to stop the meter, but it's not the only one. There are more challenging ways if you want to act Good and Arthas going corrupt can still come in later Missions where it's shown off better that nothing he does can stop the Scourge and he gets more and more desperate as he tries. Stage 1- Wagons full of contaminated grain are approaching the City. You can destroy them before arrival, but there are many and they are guarded by Undead on approach. Once they get near the city, there is a brief window where the Undead leave the wagon and it has no defenses. This is when the Peasants who will become Zombies approach the wagons to take and eat the grain inside. Every Wagon you destroy slows the Undead Power Meter's growth. Killing Peasants also slows the Meter, but maybe not as much. Meanwhile the Peasants get progressively more desperate to get to the Wagons- they are starving from famine and high taxes or some such situation and this, not the fact that they must be killed, is the source of tension between Arthas & Uther. As they get desperate, their movement speed increases and the amount of time it takes them to transform once they eat the grain decreases (the contaminated Food works faster when wolfed down). Maybe this desperation can be taken out if it's too much, but the Peasants still whine when killed or when they see the Wagons destroyed by Arthas and his troops before they can take grain to eat. Stage 2 comes at a certain time or when a lot of Peasants have eaten grain (high Power Meter). In this stage, Mal'Ganis starts sending Undead units to kill the Peasants in addition to Wagons to contaminate them. Every Peasant the Undead kill rises as a Zombie. The whole "destroy their house, they rise as Zombies" thing is gone. Instead they only become Zombies if they eat Grain (and then it takes a few seconds) or if the Undead kill them (shorter window). You kill the Peasants first, they don't become Zombies. You can also stop Zombie creation by quickly taking out Undead units before they kill Peasants, taking out Grain Wagons before Peasants eat the grain, or kill Zombies after they are created. Any of these methods slows the Undead Power Meter's growth. Stage 3- Mal'Ganis is desperate and takes the field himself. He can pretty much one-shot a Peasant and make them a Zombie, then he teleports them away if they want to make it really challenging. But if we can keep the Meter down by killing Zombies, Peasants, Grain Wagons, and Undead units before Mal'Ganis arrives on the field, there's only so much he can do. And of course we can kill Mal'Ganis temporarily too if we want to slow him down further. As long as the Meter does not get to maximum, we win. I can hear some people thinking this sounds really complicated to set up. Yeah, it would be. But I've seen a lot of games do similar things, so it can't be that hard to implement. IMO it'd be a better story than one that forces the player to be Evil to win, and that would have made WC3 a better game. This way, we are still trying to stop the Scourge, and when we can't, as the story dictates, it's all the more tragic. Later Missions show off just how bad it gets, if I recall correctly, and we can save the desperate actions for then if they are still necessary. Maybe when they are shown off in updates and I am reminded of them, I will again think of ways things could have been done better. Captain Hindsight Away! 
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Feb 24, 2018 21:48
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If you wait until the peasants turn to zombies (a few seconds) you are just killing mindless undead. Of course you are still destroying their homes with mortar fire and whatnot but not a single living person will be purged.
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Feb 24, 2018 22:03
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achtungnight posted:Alright, alright, Arthas did the best he could do. Fine. But that's in part because his development was forced in a certain direction. I disagree that giving the option to completely derail Arthas' character arc would have made Warcraft III a better game.
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Feb 24, 2018 23:49
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Yeah, Arthas not culling Stratholme means the Warcraft story is completely different. DoubleNegative wasn't exaggerating when he said this was one of the most important moments in the setting's history. Almost everything that happens in WC3 and loads of WoW is a direct or indirect consequence of what Arthas did here.
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Feb 24, 2018 23:57
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It's shown that Arthas made the decision to cull, right at the start. He never tried to consider another way, and immediately overruled Uther when he suggested they look for one. Between two paladins (one a seasoned veteran and leader of their order), a mage from Dalaran sent to research the plague, and any number of elven priests, sorceresses and whatever other support their army had... they might have been able to do something for the infected. Would it have worked? Probably not, but Arthas didn't waste even a second trying to find another way than to kill his own people. The player might not have got the choice, but Arthas did. You have to see his plan through.
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Feb 25, 2018 00:09
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