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Ah, I had forgotten that mention of Black Rock Spire earlier. My bad. And yeah, I guess that many years would make a difference. I do have a feeling more serious retcons are ahead, however. achtungnight fucked around with this message at 14:05 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 13:36
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The world map is kind of weird to me in how much empty space there is in the center. Also is Azeroth a globe and can you reach Kalimdor by going east instead of west? 
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May 14, 2022 14:10
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PurpleXVI posted:The world map is kind of weird to me in how much empty space there is in the center. Also is Azeroth a globe and can you reach Kalimdor by going east instead of west? Yes and yes.
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May 14, 2022 14:27
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One of the many things that irritate me is complete laziness when it comes to naming places and cities. Darkshire is fine, Pandaren is dumb but acceptable, but all the rest being a randomized soup of letters and apostrophes with no real rhyme or reason behind it makes the world look like it was designed by a 12-year-old or a 1980s' fantasy author.
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May 14, 2022 14:43
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so..... chris metzen
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May 14, 2022 14:47
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:One of the many things that irritate me is complete laziness when it comes to naming places and cities. Darkshire is fine, Pandaren is dumb but acceptable, but all the rest being a randomized soup of letters and apostrophes with no real rhyme or reason behind it makes the world look like it was designed by a 12-year-old or a 1980s' fantasy author. Naming things is really goddamn hard though.
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May 14, 2022 15:48
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silvergoose posted:Naming things is really goddamn hard though. Is it really? Like half the towns in England derivate their names for words that mean "River" or "Town" or "Town next to the river" or "Rainy place". My parents are from a place called Riverbed. I know of a small village literally named Slavery of all things. If anything fantasy authors tend to overthink their names.
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May 14, 2022 15:59
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silvergoose posted:Naming things is really goddamn hard though. Making up poo poo is fine, if there was any kind of consistency to how it was done...which there isn't.
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May 14, 2022 16:04
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PurpleXVI posted:The world map is kind of weird to me in how much empty space there is in the center. Also is Azeroth a globe and can you reach Kalimdor by going east instead of west? The reason for the big empty space in the center is that the big explosion that tore up the previous super-continent happened at that location.
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May 14, 2022 16:09
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Isidora is the Azerothian version of the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade. A political appointee suddenly accruing victory after victory when nobody expected her to succeed, serving under an overly cautious ruler who doesn't understand the basic cornerstones of strategy. Now all we need is Llane stripping her of command for making him look incompetent.
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May 14, 2022 16:33
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Anyone casting shade on WoW's use of Darkshire/Lakeshire/Goldshire etc. has never been to Leicester, Worcester or Gloucester
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May 14, 2022 16:48
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DoubleNegative posted:Isidora is the Azerothian version of the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade. A political appointee suddenly accruing victory after victory when nobody expected her to succeed, serving under an overly cautious ruler who doesn't understand the basic cornerstones of strategy. Now all we need is Llane stripping her of command for making him look incompetent. It's a curious thing I noticed when looking at a list of the WC1 campaigns. The orc campaign, which is canon, never once has the orcs on the defensive. Every mission is framed as being on the attack. The human campaign on the other hand bounces back and forth between defensive rallies and counterattacks into orc territory.
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May 14, 2022 17:01
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Cythereal posted:It's a curious thing I noticed when looking at a list of the WC1 campaigns. The orc campaign, which is canon, never once has the orcs on the defensive. Every mission is framed as being on the attack. The orcs simply have a better PR department. "We're not being attacked, they are simply pre-emptively defending themselves against our planned attack." Rarity posted:Anyone casting shade on WoW's use of Darkshire/Lakeshire/Goldshire etc. has never been to Leicester, Worcester or Gloucester It's pretty common in most European countries, at least, that town names evolved from descriptions of where they were located. Like when a Danish town ends in "rød," that's a corruption of "rydning," a clearing. So "Birkerød" is "Birch" + "Clearing," i.e. a clearing among the birch trees. So you have a lot of repeating prefixes or suffixes. I feel like most town names older than a hundred years or so you can track back to something of that sort if you're willing to do the linguistic legwork. What's worse is when fantasy names are just random piles of apostrophes and syllables, without having established any sort of linguistic "backing" for it. Not to say that every setting needs to be Middle Earth, which is an excuse to talk about elf linguistics disguised as a story, but it helps keep the naming believable, because even if you can't consciously put a finger on it, I believe our brains subconsciously pick up on when naming is just jumbled bullshit.
PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 17:09
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Rarity posted:Anyone casting shade on WoW's use of Darkshire/Lakeshire/Goldshire etc. has never been to Leicester, Worcester or Gloucester Or the four sexes of britain: West sex, east sex, south sex AND middle sex.
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May 14, 2022 17:16
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To elaborate a little more, I'll clarify now something that I was going to leave for later: The entirety of the First War, between the orcs' first arrival on Azeroth and the destruction of Stormwind, lasted five years. This is at odds with Warcraft 1's presentation to say the least. The commander of Stormwind's army for most of the First War was a guy we'll meet later named Anduin Lothar. But he's spent almost two years of that time as a prisoner of war, and indeed the human campaign rescues him later in the story. In this alternate timeline, Isidora was given command at some point in the interim. Frankly, things have already diverged notably from canon by Isidora managing to save Grand Hamlet (spoiler alert, the next orc mission is going to be destroying Grand Hamlet). While you could say that Orc 3 happens sequentially after Human 2, maintaining this sort of juggling is going to get harder and harder in the future and I had decided to simply not bother. Also, fun fact: according to Chronicles, the Blackrock was merely the largest of the Horde clans present in the First War. There's good odds that Blackhand won't be the only notable name who wasn't supposed to die at Isidora's hands...
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May 14, 2022 17:36
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Cythereal posted:The entirety of the First War, between the orcs' first arrival on Azeroth and the destruction of Stormwind, lasted five years. This is at odds with Warcraft 1's presentation to say the least. I hope you touch upon my favourite series of retcons: the timespan between first contact and the First War. 1994: There was a twenty year gap between first contact and the events of Warcraft 1. 2002: It was actually more like twenty months. 2007: Months? We meant days. Twenty days between the Orcs first coming through the portal and starting their attack on the humans of Stormwind. 2016: First contact and the First War are the exact same thing. 2024: First contact happened about twenty years after the First War.
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May 14, 2022 18:01
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We've always been at war with the pandas BTW can't wait to find out why a setting with this much convoluted grimdark bullshit has Pixar talking Pandas as a major part of its world
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May 14, 2022 18:11
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steinrokkan posted:BTW can't wait to find out why a setting with this much convoluted grimdark bullshit has Pixar talking Pandas as a major part of its world One of Blizzard's artists liked to draw them. Also, the panda expansion was one of the more morally murky and bleak in the setting's history without resorting to war crimes'o'clock nonsense.
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May 14, 2022 18:19
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Cythereal, I like your explanation for the troll's history "Everything was going good until some MF used an atomic bomb" Cythereal posted:Then a bunch of drug-addicted mutant trolls blew up the world because their queen wanted to gently caress space robot Satan and a bunch of hillbillies launched a revolution. This event is known as the Great Sundering, and we will be revisiting this little event in the future. A More Accurate description of that particular event that brief cannot be found I think
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May 14, 2022 18:24
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I miss when I thought Warcraft lore was just weird and stupid. Good OC, though. Fun way to handle an explicitly non-canon campaign.
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May 14, 2022 18:32
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Okay, since a few people have bugged me about this on discord: This alternate timeline narrative is only for the human campaign of Warcraft 1. The campaigns in WC2 are so tightly interwoven, and both are mostly canon, that I'm just going to present both out of character. Neither are going to follow on from the human campaign in WC1, at all. Furthermore, I can't write a better or more coherent mostly-canon narrative LP of the games than Azzur did and I'm not going to try. Nor do I think Warcraft deserves the effort. I'm indulging myself with the non-canon WC1 human campaign, that's all.
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May 14, 2022 19:23
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FrenchBen posted:The "funny" thing is that R.A Salvatore tried doing it about a decade ago with the Drizzt books - Orc king becomes chosen of Gruumsh, much warring ensues, which ends with Many-Arrows (Orc Kingdom) and the other realms aroound the land signing a peace treaty. And for many years it went quite well actually! Trade was flowing, orcs and humans married, it was seen as a sign of things to come... Then a Spellplague/timeskip combo later and Bruenor decides he shouldn't have signed this treaty, that he should have chosen the good old fashioned way of bashing everyone's brains in. Nevermind they were mostly losing. Oh, and his human daughter who used to be cool and kind is now full on the "kill the savages' children" train, much to Drizzt's displeasure. Then of course there's the Drow portrayal in general. Few people would call Warcraft progressive, but in the context of other fantasy settings, it might have been the least bad around there was about this - Quite a low bar, I know. I hint at it a bunch but Warcraft ends up influencing the sorta "popular image" of orcs eventually, and raising a bar that was in the center of the planet is one of the things it does. Warcraft does *whole loving heaps* wrong, but that bar is low enough that it still does better at times, and the reason it does really boils down to a single thing: "What if I was positive racist, because I think they're badass?" Gygax was an insane rear end in a top hat libertarian from the 70's and thought orcs-as-natives were something to exterminate. Metzen and Samwise, on the other hand, are largely teens of the 80's and young adults of the 90's, and think orcs-as-natives are badass and cool, in the same way they think bikers, heavy metal, and 90's comics are badass and cool. So you end up with tooons of god awful racial stereotypes...but then they end up being more interesting and having more character, and are noted as exemplary and good people, with valuable and important traditions that should be respected. It's not the greatest, but it's still better then Gary "nits make lice" Gygax. Which is also why humans are so boring and bland. They're directly ripped from D&D and warhams fantasy...and that's dumb nerd poo poo. WoW absolutely never figures out how it wants to write the Horde, but the one main advantage the Horde have over the Alliance in terms of developer care is that at least Blizz thinks the Horde is cool. Of course, that whole "bikers, heavy metal, and 90's comics are badass and cool" thing is going to be informing incredibly large swaths of these games as we go on, and that's going to start connected to OTHER terrible things.
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May 14, 2022 21:54
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Blizzard has this weird ability to bring out several feelings, such as "This is some of the most shockingly, mindbogglingly, stupid poo poo I have ever heard of, also it doesn't make sense mechanically as a story." and "This is incredibly bland." and then "This is incredibly tasteless." and then fuse them together as only a truly bad artwork can manage. Oh, yeah, while we're talking about Tolkien orcs and Gygax orcs and so on, Tolkien orcs have some moments of humanity such as those two past Cirith Ungol who have a chat about how hosed and bad their situation and society is, and then participate in some infighting and die, because their situation and society is bad, for them if not for their boss. I don't think Gygax orcs have ever been granted that self reflection ability.
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May 14, 2022 22:08
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SIGSEGV posted:Oh, yeah, while we're talking about Tolkien orcs and Gygax orcs and so on, Tolkien orcs have some moments of humanity such as those two past Cirith Ungol who have a chat about how hosed and bad their situation and society is, and then participate in some infighting and die, because their situation and society is bad, for them if not for their boss. Yeah, that part always stuck with me as the most humanizing bit about the orcs. Like they clearly sound like they do not want to be involved in the war, but they are, not unreasonably, convinced that if they run away then either Sauron's enforcers will hunt them down or some elf will kill them for fun. If they had their choice they'd just want to find a nice cozy cave somewhere far away from all the bullshit. Going through a few more revisions it's not hard to imagine a version where the elves have a thing or two to learn about not killing orcs on sight, to give them a chance to check out of the conflict or be on a side other than Sauron's.
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May 14, 2022 22:15
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Yeah, while the Lord of the Rings took a very, very significant amount of time to plan and write, I got the feeling rereading it lately that it would have benefited from a couple more passes in that direction.
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May 14, 2022 22:21
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Cythereal posted:One of Blizzard's artists liked to draw them. also, the literal panda people are one of the more respectful treatments of non-european cultures this game has to offer, and the expansion centred on them is generally well regarded by people that didn't bounce off it based entirely on "kung fu panda???" it even had a good thematic throughline in its story and would have worked well as a denouement (or at least a turning point) for the primary Warcraft plot if they didn't decide to literally travel back in time so they could put more war in warcraft
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May 15, 2022 00:36
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My favorite alternate interpretation of LotR is that it's been, in universe, historical-revisioned, and any time the giant eagles show up, it was actually a rival or even rebel faction of orcs. Instead of them being some monolithic horde, they were just as capable of deciding "no, actually, I'm not serving the Dark Lord any more" as anyone else, the ones that did were just treated as politically inconvenient. (To bring it back to Tolkien definitely not doing WW1 or WW2 allegories, no siree, it'd be like how the French Resistance got lauded as heroes, but the Resistenza italiana was quietly brushed under the rug.) It bumps into some problems once you start factoring in Silmarillion stuff, but it's not like Middle Earth lore isn't already self-contradictory.
girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 02:28 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 02:22
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PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, that part always stuck with me as the most humanizing bit about the orcs. Like they clearly sound like they do not want to be involved in the war, but they are, not unreasonably, convinced that if they run away then either Sauron's enforcers will hunt them down or some elf will kill them for fun. If they had their choice they'd just want to find a nice cozy cave somewhere far away from all the bullshit. clearly Rankin and Bass knew what was up when they wrote this banger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y
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May 15, 2022 02:29
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Aces High posted:clearly Rankin and Bass knew what was up when they wrote this banger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERo2BYdVnY
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May 15, 2022 02:30
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:One of the many things that irritate me is complete laziness when it comes to naming places and cities. Darkshire is fine, Pandaren is dumb but acceptable, but all the rest being a randomized soup of letters and apostrophes with no real rhyme or reason behind it makes the world look like it was designed by a 12-year-old or a 1980s' fantasy author. Basically anything that starts with a Zul is a troll settlement, anything that starts with a Ul is a Titan vault, and the vaguely Egyptian sounding places that start with As are spider people. As for a lot of the other things named on the map? Blame the devs for trying to make them sound vaguely like something Elves would use, I guess.
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May 15, 2022 04:58
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Zul or Zan Warcraft trolls are a proud noble people who have better technology than the other people
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May 15, 2022 05:11
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For those whom it may concern, I have updated the gameplay updates with estimated locations of each mission on Warcraft 1's map. Series veterans... please try to not think too hard about this map compared to later maps of the region. 
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May 15, 2022 14:49
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You can tell it's age, just from the fact that Stormwind is Stonewind.
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May 15, 2022 14:55
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Ok we have 'Stonard', now we need another name. How about Rockard! Genius! snorts rail of coke
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May 15, 2022 15:11
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At the time I don't think Blizzard had the income for drugs. Of any sort.
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May 15, 2022 15:49
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Apologies in advance but there were mishaps while recording Orc 3. Turns out that the GOG copy of the game does not like it if you minimize the game, say by accidentally hitting the windows key on your keyboard, and you can't save or load mid-mission.
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May 15, 2022 19:19
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Bloodly posted:You can tell it's age, just from the fact that Stormwind is Stonewind. The funny part is, that's the map that appeared in the manual. In-game, it's actually called Stormwind. I also have a comment to make on Blackrock Spire, but first I'll wait to see if Cythereal discusses it later in the campaign when it comes up. Also, sidenote about Rockard and Stonard: In WoW, Stonard has existed since Vanilla, located in the Swamp of Sorrows, but Rockard has been nowhere to be found. Turns out, the location in the Blasted Lands known as "Dreadmaul Hold" is actually the former site of Rockard, according to some easily overlooked quest text. BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 19:58 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 19:53
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Siegkrow posted:Or Dragon quest. Dragon Quest Orcs look like Pig men cause of that piece of art.
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May 15, 2022 23:00
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Cythereal posted:For those whom it may concern, I have updated the gameplay updates with estimated locations of each mission on Warcraft 1's map. I don't know if the GOG version of the game does this or not, but on my CD copy before each mission there's a little pre-rendered cutscene with a relief of the mission area popping up against the rest of the map.
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May 15, 2022 23:02
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Meaty Ore posted:I don't know if the GOG version of the game does this or not, but on my CD copy before each mission there's a little pre-rendered cutscene with a relief of the mission area popping up against the rest of the map. Mine has this, but on the resolution I get with the game these moments are so blurry and poorly lit that I haven't been including them.
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May 15, 2022 23:03
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