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Kudos on not giving our impaired heroine cliche magic talent, or is that planned for later? I look forward to watching her strategic moves. And if you don’t think a nickname like “the Lame” sounds intimidating, Google Timur Gurkani. You’ll change your tune. achtungnight fucked around with this message at 22:19 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 22:16
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Cythereal posted:In particular Danuser has shown himself to be a fan of obscuring information from players and readers by presenting lore from the perspective of what are acknowledged to be unreliable narrators, and by making characters in-setting astonishingly incurious about their world and events that are happening. Danuser seems to be a storyteller partial to the "You'll never guess what happens next!" vein, at least he aspires to be so - he's been known to insist that players have no idea what's going to happen when in fact players overwhelmingly guessed exactly what would happen. And when players are wrong about things Danuser is hinting at, it tends to be because of poo poo coming out of left field that either were not hinted at or just flatly contradict how certain characters or lore notions had been established.
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May 11, 2022 22:16
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MShadowy posted:Seems more like parallel development to me, arising out of laziness. Building a bigger Bad Guy is an easy way to escalate the plot, and having the new villain be the old ones boss/manager/whatever is a similarly low effort way to integrate them into the plot. I was joking  GI Joe for example did the same thing at least twice: the first time demoting Cobra Commander for various frankly well founded reasons for a vat-grown superhuman who shared DNA with history's greatest military minds (plus Dracula.) Serpentor remained a bad boss, kind of like Elon Musk with a flying golden throne, swooping in, screaming some commands, then flying off. The second time they did this they yeeted the entire franchise into a wood chipper, and is only remembered for a cool opening, and a surreal scene where Roadblock and Cobra Commander (transformed literally into a talking snake) survive a blizzard while the snake mutters "useless, all useless! I was once a man!"
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May 11, 2022 22:17
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achtungnight posted:Kudos on not giving our impaired heroine cliche magic talent, or is that planned for later? I look forward to watching her strategic moves. Nope, no magic at all. If it comes up, and I don't know if it will, as I've outlined her her background is in the cavalry. She could still take the field, but it's rather hard to read a map and order around a military force from horseback.
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May 11, 2022 22:20
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Cythereal posted:The Horde The Horde Series One S.  GiantRockFromSpace posted:But I find it really easy to follow?? The one responsible for the war is the Blizzard writers who keep adding a new culprit on every expansion. Activision. 
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May 11, 2022 22:51
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PurpleXVI posted:Also just gonna pour one out for Azzur's LP which we'll probably never see finished.
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May 11, 2022 22:56
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Cythereal posted:Nope, no magic at all. Read Book 5 of the Belgariad by David& Leigh Eddings for one example of a handicapped king kicking rear end in the cavalry.
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May 11, 2022 23:04
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achtungnight posted:Read Book 5 of the Belgariad by David& Leigh Eddings for one example of a handicapped king kicking rear end in the cavalry. I'd rather not. I loved the Belgariad as a kid. Then I found out that David & Leigh Eddings spent time in jail for child abuse.
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May 11, 2022 23:07
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Cythereal posted:I'd rather not. I loved the Belgariad as a kid. Did not know that.  Apologies for the reminder.
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May 11, 2022 23:22
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Cythereal posted:As it turns out, there is no barracks and I'm wondering if there was just a pre-set population of human units slowly trickling into the base or whether the attacks came from off-map for the specific purpose. We're still firmly in training wheels mode either way, it seems: unless you just don't build more units, ever, none of the attacks will do enough damage to cause you any problems and you can easily replace all the losses you suffer. I don't think anyone else addressed this so I will. I played a lot of WC1 back in the day and can confirm that this map (and the human equivalent) just have passive enemy units scattered around that will periodically become active and wander toward the player's base. This is quite clear if you use cheats to reveal the entire map. Add me to the group going  over the lore. I never played beyond base Warcraft 2, so almost all of this is new to me.
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May 11, 2022 23:57
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Xander77 posted:Same but for the other Warcraft 3 LP, the one that wasn't trying to be funny but was in fact interesting. Sadly my interest in Warcraft in general died with that LP. So while I have at times considered going back to it, I don't actually have enough respect for the setting to take the narrative serious anymore. And, as the OP has shown quite well in this thread already, the setting no longer deserves someone doing that.
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May 12, 2022 00:30
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I dunno, having a dragon girlfriend seems kinda awesome quote:In 2005, the Chinese government told Blizzard that if they went ahead with their plan to add a race of anthropomorphic panda bears to the game as the Alliance's first new playable race in WoW's first expansion, the government would no longer let the game be sold or played in China. The Chinese government would walk back this decision five years later, but by then one of the series' more dramatic retcons was an entrenched part of the setting. Was the Chinese government full of massive Horde fans?
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May 12, 2022 00:49
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Was the Chinese government full of massive Horde fans? They felt that the pandaren - yes, for those unaware, pandaren are real, I'll get to them at some point - were an offensively racist portrayal of faux-Chinese culture and civilization.
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May 12, 2022 01:17
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Can we go back to the part where orcs get guns and tanks? What the gently caress?
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May 12, 2022 07:14
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Something to note with all the Horde variants/splinters is that the word wasn't a proper noun until Warcraft 2. This game exclusively (IIRC) uses "hordes" - plural and uncapitalized. If you think about it that's a kind of strange thing to be the official name of a political organization.
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May 12, 2022 07:25
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Can we go back to the part where orcs get guns and tanks? What the gently caress? It's an alternate timeline that has nothing to do with the RTS games (and barely anything to do with the MMO for that matter), don't worry about it. I might do a filler lore update about it at some point.
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May 12, 2022 11:53
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Dwarves have guns and tanks in WC3, it would be weirder if the Horde didn't have them too
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May 12, 2022 12:15
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Can we go back to the part where orcs get guns and tanks? What the gently caress?
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May 12, 2022 12:28
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I'm starting to feel any franchise that uses time travel, unless that is specifically the main thing about the franchise is ruining everything. Compare and contrast how despite much fuckery the Terminator series went through its still about robot impostors travelling back in time vs how the Warcraft series just keeps getting redefined and cannot be properly summarised into a sweet elevator pitch.
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May 12, 2022 12:46
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Some series don't need an elevator pitch, or they get a terribly vague one that doesn't really help. "The history of an entire fantasy world, with myths and cultures and languages." That's pretty generic and could stand in for a lot of things. It's just that the quality of execution in Warcraft is pretty bad, and the ideas and plots are rarely good themselves, I'm sure you could give it to someone who could salvage as much as "some" of this, but it'll be hard.
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May 12, 2022 13:08
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I hate time travel as a concept, just so lazy to me.
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May 12, 2022 13:25
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MagusofStars posted:Wasn't there a rumor about a plot twist in Shadowlands that players actually correctly predicted it far enough in advance of a patch that Danuser actually changed the storyline specifically because he wanted it to be a "surprise"? There's been rumors, yes. It's hard to assess their validity, though, given how much Danuser and Ion - Ian Hazzitakas, sorry if I misspelled the name - have lied to the public's face about Shadowlands. Ion has claimed that Shadowlands was always only meant to be two major patches long, a claim that's almost certainly bullshit, for example. We also know that there's a lot of push-and-pull between developers and writers at Blizzard, and it shows pretty well in both design of game mechanics and writing. For a particularly bad example of this, much of the lore I'm explaining in these lore posts pulls from a couple of rather gorgeous books Blizzard published called Warcraft Chronicles. These were Chris Metzen's last major project with Blizzard, and they were intended to provide a concrete setting bible for Warcraft and the World thereof, establishing once and for all what had happened and how the world worked as an objective source. They were lovingly illustrated, fairly well written, and didn't raise more questions than they answered. They were well received by the community. Then Metzen left, Danuser took over, and a year later a new big lore book was published with Danuser as the lead writer that immediately dismissed the Chronicles books as no actually they were biased and incomplete works written by in-setting authors working from a limited understanding of how the world works and everyone who thinks they were a complete and objective account of the world is a big dumb-dumb. This is the poo poo I have to work with when writing lore posts for this thread.
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May 12, 2022 13:47
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Chris Metzen
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May 12, 2022 14:41
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dervinosdoom posted:I hate time travel as a concept, just so lazy to me. This Is How You Lose The Time War is probably the best story I've read that really leans into the concept, rather than being lazy about it.
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May 12, 2022 16:02
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tithin posted:Chris Metzen We never appreciated Chris Metzen enough before he left Blizz.
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May 12, 2022 16:34
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silvergoose posted:This Is How You Lose The Time War is probably the best story I've read that really leans into the concept, rather than being lazy about it. Hell, first thing that came to mind for me as well. Its essential story could be told without time travel, but it's still written to be more than just a backdrop or plot device.
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May 12, 2022 16:52
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Siegkrow posted:We never appreciated Chris Metzen enough before he left Blizz. Metzen was never the most original mind in the world and he had a serious boner for CORRUPTION. HA HA, YES, THEY DRANK THE EVIL JUICE. THEY TOUCHED THE EVIL BOX. THEY LOOKED AT THE EVIL THING. NOW THEY'RE CORRUPTED WHICH MEANS THEY HAVE A FUNNY COLOUR AND ARE REALLY ANGRY. But his writing never felt mean, if that makes sense. Like it felt like this was genuinely what he thought was cool, like his brain was just perpetually stuck at appreciating the sort of thing we all thought were totally wild and awesome when we were 15, and he was happy with that.
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May 12, 2022 17:27
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PurpleXVI posted:Metzen was never the most original mind in the world and he had a serious boner for CORRUPTION. HA HA, YES, THEY DRANK THE EVIL JUICE. THEY TOUCHED THE EVIL BOX. THEY LOOKED AT THE EVIL THING. NOW THEY'RE CORRUPTED WHICH MEANS THEY HAVE A FUNNY COLOUR AND ARE REALLY ANGRY. But his writing never felt mean, if that makes sense. Like it felt like this was genuinely what he thought was cool, like his brain was just perpetually stuck at appreciating the sort of thing we all thought were totally wild and awesome when we were 15, and he was happy with that. I can see this. While I will continue to mock Starcraft 2, there was nothing wrong with the plot as a clothesline for RTS levels, and while the theme of "freedom, freedom, freedom, oy!" is simplistic, the story theme fits in two of the three campaigns. Considering how much video game writing (especially going back to the mid 1990s) just painted from the spectrum of toxic masculinity, actually being focused on "awesome things when you were fifteen" is definitely better. To say nothing of marketing...
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May 12, 2022 19:32
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In my eyes, Metzen whatever his faults had passion for Warcraft and other games, and he was sincere about it. And it showed. He was a goofball, yes, and could be pretty horribly misogynistic (shout to the female character whose backstory prominently features being a sex slave who wears a sheer thong bikini with visible rear end crack and thigh-highs in-game), but Metzen had legitimate stage presence and charisma. Stage presence, charisma, sincerity, and passion are not things I associate with Blizzard's current leadership, the Warcraft team in particular.
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May 12, 2022 20:15
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Cythereal posted:In my eyes, Metzen whatever his faults had passion for Warcraft and other games, and he was sincere about it. And it showed. He was a goofball, yes, and could be pretty horribly misogynistic (shout to the female character whose backstory prominently features being a sex slave who wears a sheer thong bikini with visible rear end crack and thigh-highs in-game), but Metzen had legitimate stage presence and charisma. Do we know who was responsible for "Hush Tyrande"? Was it Metzen. I think you already addressed the main issue with his writing. It's just always been 'Corruption all the way down', which actually means that none of 'bad' characters really ever have any agency. Phrosphor fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 22:20
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Phrosphor posted:Do we know who was responsible for "Hush Tyrande"? Was it Metzen. Dialogue in a dungeon so, unlikely?
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May 12, 2022 23:42
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Phrosphor posted:Do we know who was responsible for "Hush Tyrande"? Was it Metzen. We don't know, but there's a very good chance that it was not. The way Blizzard is known to work with WoW is that executives make decisions about what will happen in expansions - major plot points, characters, themes, etc - and tell the writing teams to do it. If it doesn't make sense, then that's the writers' problem to solve. Then when writers have written quests/scenes/etc, they're submitted for approval. The more story-critical the scene, the more layers of management and editing a scene passes through. Relatively unimportant scenes, quests, and zones just pass through one or two layers of review. This process is in fact how most of WoW's LGBT representation, explicit and implied, have crept into the game. An employee is told to write a quest that takes 6-8 minutes and take players to this place over yonder hill, the employee writes whatever they want for the quest and submits it to their boss. And if the employee wants to make it, say, a gay marriage proposal, that's on them and if their manager doesn't demand a revision. We know very little about who actually writes any given part of WoW due to strict NDAs, so it's almost impossible to say who actually conceived and wrote that or any other egregious moment in the game. Likewise, we know very little about how much power Metzen may or may not have actually had over WoW's writing. He was known to be a very active part of the game's creation from launch through Cataclysm, the game's third expansion, but past that it becomes much murkier. quote:I think you already addressed the main issue with his writing. It's just always been 'Corruption all the way down', which actually means that none of 'bad' characters really ever have any agency. How Metzen explained it is that he really dislikes "This person is evil because they are evil." He feels like characters should always have a *reason* that they are evil. And because writing compelling motivations and character arcs is hard, we get this.
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May 12, 2022 23:46
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Cythereal posted:How Metzen explained it is that he really dislikes "This person is evil because they are evil." He feels like characters should always have a *reason* that they are evil. Chris Metzen
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May 13, 2022 00:09
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tithin posted:Chris Metzen I hear this in my head now like "Matt Damon" in Team America.
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May 13, 2022 02:51
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Chris Metzen just made WoW his LitRPG (one of the successful ones that get actually bought on amazon, mind) the current writing direction is basically fanfiction of said work, with everything that implies
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May 13, 2022 10:16
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TitanG posted:Chris Metzen just made WoW his LitRPG (one of the successful ones that get actually bought on amazon, mind) Hey do me a favour https://twitter.com/Warchief/status/1380568895505887234?s=20&t=dE1u7wQFEXDtDXzzfDxzfw Look at this map, what does it look like to you. Deadmeat5150 posted:I hear this in my head now like "Matt Damon" in Team America. Chris Metzen
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May 13, 2022 10:25
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A bit late but can't you hold control to drag a box and select units in Warcraft 1? But it is highly likely I've got it mixed up with another game.tithin posted:Look at this map, what does it look like to you.
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May 13, 2022 10:37
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Second laziest fantasy map.
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May 13, 2022 10:44
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Mount Zac Efron and the Cannabis hills.
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May 13, 2022 12:22
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Poil posted:A bit late but can't you hold control to drag a box and select units in Warcraft 1? Nope! It's one of three parts of the UI that have been really bugging me: 1. Can't drag-select. 2. No hotkey control groups. 3. No contextual right click - have to manually press M every time you want to move, or A every time you want to attack. At any rate, Human 2 has been recorded. Went rather faster than Orc 2 now that I know how strong ranged units are.
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May 13, 2022 13:08
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