|
I've only ever played WC3, but I always felt bad that WoW had several principal characters from that game die at the hands of player characters with no prewritten personality or relationships to the setting. Little did I know how terrible things would get. Warcraft's overarching plot is bad, but this thread has been good reading.
|
#
?
May 22, 2022 03:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
SIGSEGV posted:You could also use them as talking heads for the worst timeline commentary. This is a pretty cool idea if you are up for it!
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2022 00:24
|
|
|
That is a possibility. But I also have my own ideas.quote:
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2022 01:20
|
|
What are you doing to those men?! 
I abhor waste, Sergeant. You may tell your warchief that I am doing exactly what I was hired to do: win this war for him.
|
Unfortunately, I had planned to post the next update this morning but my flash drive where I store, among other things, all my LP work and fantasy art is now dying.  I was able to save all my personal data that's really important to me but my folders for LP work and art are among the 'corrupt file paths.' Luckily all my screenshots are already uploaded to lpix so I should be able to reconstruct the update, but that may not happen until tonight or tomorrow. Sorry y'all.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2022 12:12
|
|
|
The important part is saving the personal stuff and your art.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2022 13:17
|
|
|
The LP curse strikes again. Sorry about your drive, but it sounds like at least the really important stuff is okay.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2022 14:21
|
|
|
On the bright side, at least the LP Curse only hit a flash drive instead of nuking a full computer?
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2022 18:16
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:The LP curse strikes again. Sorry about your drive, but it sounds like at least the really important stuff is okay. Yeah, everything I actually need is safe and I've already backed up on both drives on my computer and emailed to myself. I also still have almost the full lore update saved courtesy of me checking my drafts with other lore grogs before I post them, I'm just going to need to reconstruct the gameplay update when I get home from work tonight. The loss of my art collection is what annoys me more than anything, really, but I think I've uploaded a lot of it to lpix and imgur over the years so I should be able to recover at least some of it. I've confirmed that I still have the full art for Isidora, Validormi, Taria, and my currently planned WC2 protagonists (if I do indeed decide to play those narratively), at least. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
May 24, 2022 18:20
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Unfortunately, I had planned to post the next update this morning but my flash drive where I store, among other things, all my LP work and fantasy art is now dying. Blizzard's corruption fetish strikes in new and exciting ways!
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 06:40
|
|
|
Aw, no! Losing collections of art is horrible! It's the worst part of data corruption.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 10:45
|
|
|
Orc 4: They Shall Not Grow Old While Warcraft has generally shied away from outright stating it, there's a lot of implications that traditional orc culture, prior to World of Warcraft, is intensely patriarchal and misogynistic. There has never, as far as I'm aware, been a woman clan chief, and only one known case where a chief's wife was portrayed as an active leader within the clan in her own right. Come World of Warcraft, one Horde side quest explicitly states that among Thrall's reforms of the Horde include gender equality, with women now receiving full rights in Horde civil society and the military.  A contingent of ogres within the Horde have gone rogue and set up shop in a vast human mining complex, now abandoned in the face of the Horde invasion, known as the Dead Mines. Blackhand's daughter has run off to join them, and this mission's objective is to assassinate her.  The Dead Mines should be a familiar location to WoW players. Looking at this map now, I wonder if the Borderlands are supposed to be the forested region in the southwest, around the 'Orc Camp' label, which would have put us somewhere in northern Stranglethorn Vale, possibly around Kurzen's Compound in WoW.  Welcome to the first limited force mission in Warcraft 1. At my disposal are four raiders, four spearmen, three grunts, and two necrolytes. The necrolytes come with Raise Dead already researched, which is going to prove less helpful than you might expect.  Raiders are new. They're fast, durable, hard-hitting melee units.  I make a serious mistake right from the start: I go south instead of west.  Ogres are meaty. They're a slow melee unit somewhere between a grunt and a raider in damage and durability. Your force has enough firepower to gun a lone ogre down before they get more than one or two swings off, and you really want to keep your force bunched up so you can do this. There is no conventional way to replenish your forces on this mission. Also, it turns out that necrolytes can't use Raise Dead on ogres. They explode into pools of gore when slain, nothing for a necrolyte to reanimate.  This map taught me an important lesson: spearmen have a small vision range while moving, but see much further if they come to a stop. As this game has no fog of war, revealed map is permanent. I'd noticed this in previous maps but never internalized it into a conscious element of my scouting until this mission.  Most of this map wound up being slowly scouting ahead with a spearman until I aggro an ogre, then pulling it back for the slaughter.  Well this is new.  Slimes, I discover, have a ton of HP to chew through but deal very little damage themselves. That necrolyte who accidentally wound up in front lived through this whole battle, and indeed this whole map.  As it happens, this little roadblock is a sign that I'm going the right way.  Oh ho, what's this?  Just a dead end as it turns out. I'm sure in a later game that treasure chest could be clicked for some kind of prize, but here it's strictly cosmetic. The door does block movement, though.  Moving further south reveals another ogre base, this one with a swanky red carpet.  I experience the first casualty of this attempt as my trusty scout absorbs his last ogre club to the head.  But his scouting duties aren't over yet. This is what the necrolytes' Raise Dead does: it targets an orc or human skeleton to make into a minion. Skeletons are jokes in combat and the vision range is small, but the magic bar representing the duration of the summoning is surprisingly generous. Waste not, want not.  Now this has the looks of a final area for the dungeon.  I sure hope it is. The entire force is pretty worn down at this point, only one spearman has fallen but almost everyone is in the yellow or red.  I failed my first couple of attempts at this map because I was too aggressive and got worn down too quickly to make it to the end. Moving much more cautiously paid off handsomely, and I think it's a mark of good game design that playing the intended way got me to this point with a severely worn down - but only somewhat actually diminished - force.  There's the target. When I did some research on Griselda after playing this mission, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Warcraft has a serious thing for magical rapid aging in the RTS and early WoW eras, and in one of the earlier Warcraft novels it was revealed that Griselda, along with her brothers, were tortured as children and magically aged up. When Griselda then proved less competent at fighting than her brothers, she was thrown aside and forbidden from drinking Mannoroth's blood as a mark of shame. So... yeah. I'm here to kill a young woman who's at best a teenager, at worst an outright child, forced into the body of an adult woman, on the run from her abusive father in an alien world, and now soon to be assassinated by her father's men for her disobedience. And Griselda will never be mentioned again in Warcraft except for this mission and a novelization of the Horde's backstory. You know, the more I think about it, the more I think Griselda could have been a great addition to Isidora's story my narrative of the human campaign but I think three characters playing off each other in that story is enough.  Mission...  Complete? At this point I have a sinking feeling about what the mission wants me to do, and I turn on the cheat to give full map vision.  I never went west at the start and missed these two ogres. Welp.  Both ogres aggro as I start making my way back, though I'm not sure why. One obligingly marches to his death.  The other gets confused and turns around.  My best guess is that his pathfinding messed up. He kept reaching this bend in the tunnel and turning around. I'm calling this one a mercy killing.   Fun little mission, though I do hope this game gets better at communicating map objectives in the future.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 11:51
|
|
|
Power Ogrewhelming Ogres, in Warcraft, are primarily a vector for Blizzard to make fart jokes and jokes about overweight people, but they have a surprisingly rich history that Blizzard's done little with over the years.  Don't be fooled by their appearance or reputation for stupidity, ogres are by all indication just as intelligent on average as any other race, even if they have trouble speaking Common and Orcish. They're another race native to Draenor, and in fact the immediate antecedent race to orcs in the lineage of devolution from Grondr. The ogres of Draenor are an ancient people, and were at one time a vast and sophisticated empire with a rich culture and a great tradition in the arcane. Of all of Grondr's descendant races, the ogres have consistently shown by far the greatest aptitude for arcane magic, and if today ogre 'civilization' seem like barbarian tribes even less advanced than the orcs, that is a measure of how far they've fallen as a civilization, something that had occasionally been hinted at in Warcraft but only detailed fully in Warlords of Draenor. Don't feel too bad, though, the downfall of the Gorian Empire was when, just like the vrykul on Azeroth, families started giving birth to tiny, deformed offspring, apparently mutants of some kind - the orcs. Where the vrykul mostly attempted to exterminate this aberrant new generation, the Gorian Empire smoothly integrated their new offspring into the empire's social structure... as a slave caste. The orc rebellion against their overlords included not just the orcs, but other enslaved races of Draenor and even ogres themselves who had been enslaved.  Show of hands - who was expecting Warcraft's thinly veiled analogue for the Roman Empire to be the ogres? The war between the Gorian Empire and the orc clans was devastating, and culminated in a series of magical WMD exchanges - the ogres unleashed magical plagues, and the orcs summoned the elements to cause earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tidal waves. In the end, the Gorian Empire was destroyed and most of the survivors fell into stone age barbarism even more primitive than the orcs. Many of these ogre barbarian tribes became loosely subservient to the orc clans, and the Horde of this era includes a substantial contingent of ogres, mainly as soldiers. Some ogres didn't lose their knack for magic despite the fall of their empire, though, and one clan of the Horde during WC1 and WC2 not only consists heavily of ogres but is lead by what is, at this time, an aberration: an ogre with two heads and a vast talent for magic. These so-called ogre magi had been a rare mutation during the time of the Gorian Empire, and eventually the sorcerer-kings of the Empire learned to induce this mutation with a ritual, but by the time of Warcraft 1 this arcane lore has been lost. Cho'Gall, Chieftain of the Twilight's Hammer, is at this time one of the greatest sorcerers on Azeroth or Draenor alike. Chronicles, when it reestablished the lore of the First War, established that Cho'Gall had been an active part of the First War alongside his clan.  With faces like that, who could possibly believe this fellow is an apocalypse cultist bent on consigning reality to oblivion? Cho'Gall doesn't have the extra eyes or the spikes at this time, but the Twilight's Hammer and the ogre mages under Cho'Gall's command represent one of the Horde's greatest magical weapons, and train most of the Horde's necrolytes. At this time, Cho'Gall is widely believed within the Horde to be subservient to Gul'dan, but in truth Cho'Gall and the Twilight's Hammer have quite different loyalties and desires than either the Shadow Council or the warchief of the Horde. They have their own agenda on Azeroth, and the modern-day Twilight's Hammer in World of Warcraft bears very little resemblance to the clan of fanatical ogres and orcs that wears the name at this time. Outside of the Twilight's Hammer, ogres are relatively few in number as part of the Horde expeditionary force in Azeroth, and many of them went rogue as bandits and self-styled warlords in Azeroth, independent of and hostile to both the humans and orcs. After the destruction of Stormwind, Gul'dan and Doomhammer would start to bring in ogres specifically to act as military police of sorts for the Horde, charged with keeping old rivalries and grudges between orc clans from getting out of hand, Gul'dan will also eventually steal elven magic to resurrect the art of creating ogre magi, but that's a tale for Warcraft 2. There's little else to say about ogres past this point. They've always been around in Warcraft, but they've almost never been a focus in the story. They are far and away the oldest and most continually present race in Warcraft that has never been made playable in World of Warcraft. Perhaps because no one at Blizzard wants to take responsibility for making a model for ogre women.  Behold the only official artwork of an ogre woman in all of Warcraft.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 11:52
|
|
|
I love how the deeper Warcraft lore takes Griselda from "example of how the guy you're working for is a real controlling prick and probably needs a stabbing" to "bordering on someone's weird fetish."
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 12:13
|
|
|
Shout out to Glubtok, an Ogre Magi who's also the very first boss of the very first WoW dungeon most Alliance players are going to experience. Behold, the great two-headed ogre mage, tank-and-spanked by five nobodies who're still on the free trial and don't even know how to ride a horse.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 12:16
|
|
|
But was there ever a one headed ogre who disguised as a two headed ogre by getting really good at ventriloquism? Feels like a really good story idea.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 12:18
|
|
|
It took until WOW for the overt misogyny in a race to be squashed a bit? In my Blizzavision? I'm shocked. Shocked!
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 12:31
|
|
|
I think my favourite April Fools joke Blizzard ever did was announcing that two-headed ogres would become playable, where two players would play it as once and each would control one half of the body. They ended up basically doing it for real in Heroes of the Storm with Cho'gall, with one player controlling the body and the other being a caster with lots of aimable spells. poo poo ruled.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 13:53
|
|
|
“We’re ready, Master!” “I’m not ready!”
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 14:35
|
|
|
Slaan posted:It took until WOW for the overt misogyny in a race to be squashed a bit? In my Blizzavision? Fun fact: WoW originally had gender-locked classes! That didn't make it out of alpha, though. Also, Kul Tirans (a separate and distinct race from humans, for reasons I'll get into later) originally couldn't be mages. Despite, as WC3 fans probably know, one of the two really prominent characters from Kul Tiras - neither of whom are the distinct Kul Tiran race - being a mage.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 17:02
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Fun fact: WoW originally had gender-locked classes! That didn't make it out of alpha, though. I think the reasons are obvious
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 17:05
|
|
|
AtomikKrab posted:I think the reasons are obvious What reasons? Oh, that Blizzard just makes this poo poo up as they go along and that's why all the notable characters from Kul Tiras who aren't evil traitors are slim, pale, racially pure humans instead of heavyset eight foot tall halfbreeds? Steve Danuser, just admit that none of this poo poo was planned back in the WC3 days and there were never any retcons or lore backtracking. You're not fooling anyone who won't already believe anything you say.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 17:07
|
|
|
“We’re not brainless anymore!” “I’ve got the brain!” “Nuh uh!” For me, two headed ogres were always comedy gold.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 18:27
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:What reasons? Oh, that Blizzard just makes this poo poo up as they go along and that's why all the notable characters from Kul Tiras who aren't evil traitors are slim, pale, racially pure humans instead of heavyset eight foot tall halfbreeds? Nah, its the fact that the WoW devs make boss models bigger than normal so players can target and hit them easier.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2022 20:28
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Also, Kul Tirans (a separate and distinct race from humans, for reasons I'll get into later) originally couldn't be mages. Despite, as WC3 fans probably know, one of the two really prominent characters from Kul Tiras - neither of whom are the distinct Kul Tiran race - being a mage. wait, what? Is this sort of like how they needed something special for Gilneas so they made everyone there werewolves?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 00:20
|
|
|
Aces High posted:wait, what? Is this sort of like how they needed something special for Gilneas so they made everyone there werewolves? It is pretty much an rear end pull so that they could us the kul tirans as an "allied" race because they gave the trolls the Zandalari (who are also incidently taller than your bog standard troll.)
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 00:24
|
|
|
Aces High posted:wait, what? Is this sort of like how they needed something special for Gilneas so they made everyone there werewolves? Yup. When Blizzard decided that they wanted Kul Tirans to be an unlockable race, they decided that actually a lot of Kul Tirans - but not any named character we previously knew - are a completely different subrace who are quite distinctive from regular humans courtesy of centuries of intermixing between the humans who colonized the islands of Kul Tiras and another race that already lived there.   I'll discuss this in more detail when I do my discussion of half-breeds in Warcraft, but 'Kul Tirans' average seven to eight feet tall, are very heavyset compared to the human norm, and far more muscular. Blizzard actually did a very good job, in my opinion, of making Kul Tiras feel like a really distinct nation and culture from the other human nations.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 00:30
|
|
|
I think the Kul Tirans' appearance has less to do with wow's already outrageously bizarre racial politics and more to do with wanting to create a 'human' race for gameplay purposes that has a totally different body build from the standard humans. I say this because most of the 'allied races' are just somewhat more detailed appearance options for existing races that were arbitrarily made their own so that they could be advertised as such - and in the particular case of the class options available, several of them have deliberate omissions so that they don't overlap with their closest counterpart (or in the case of two of the first allied races, they have next to no class options at all). This isn't even getting into the weirdness where both the Alliance and Horde 'needed' an equal number of allied races and this lead to a whole bunch of really questionable decision-making, both in terms of storytelling and in terms of the implementation of said allied races. We've seen what WoW thinks of the indigenous people of Kul Tiras, and it's way worse...
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 02:29
|
|
|
I was very sad we never got the mysterious 'Ogre Continent' content expansion in Warlords of Draenor. Instead we got an awkward ogre city raid. It would have been pretty cool so see what had happened to their culture, especially as the unexplored fungal growth stuff would have probably been heavily involved. Speaking of classes not being represented by specific races. When the Blood Elves were originally introduced weren't they incapable of being warriors? I thought that was a pretty cool restriction but it got rolled back pretty quick - or maybe never even made it live. I seem to remember the male model being quite weedy as well but they got changed to have six packs.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 02:33
|
|
|
Phrosphor posted:When the Blood Elves were originally introduced weren't they incapable of being warriors? I thought that was a pretty cool restriction but it got rolled back pretty quick - or maybe never even made it live. I seem to remember the male model being quite weedy as well but they got changed to have six packs. Blood Elves were not originally capable of being warriors, no. They gained Warrior in the Cataclysm expansion in the big rollout of new race/class options. Male blood elves originally had a very short and slim model in Burning Crusade alpha. In response to fan outcry that it was 'too effeminate' and 'gay' it was changed to the more bulked up release version, which the model update in Warlords kept.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 02:39
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:In response to fan outcry that it was 'too effeminate' and 'gay' it was changed to the more bulked up release version, which the model update in Warlords kept. This makes me so sad.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 02:49
|
|
|
The only thing sadder than the fact that of course Gamers (tm) would ask for that is that Blizzard agreed with them and gave in. Then again, well, with all the recent revelations about Blizzard... quelle surprise.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 02:57
|
|
|
The Blood Elves not having Warrior as an option was solely so people would play Paladins with them, since Paladins were new to the Horde in that expansion and also got buffed to be real actual tanks instead of just healers. At least that's what I've heard. It's all very silly because Blood Elf Spellbreakers were a thing?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 03:14
|
|
|
Admiral Joeslop posted:The Blood Elves not having Warrior as an option was solely so people would play Paladins with them, since Paladins were new to the Horde in that expansion and also got buffed to be real actual tanks instead of just healers. At least that's what I've heard. And also basic elf swordsmen where in some of the WC3 campaigns.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 03:31
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:fan outcry that it was 'too effeminate' and 'gay' My guy you're playing an elf, what else were you expecting?
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 07:58
|
|
|
weren't the proudmoores in WC2 all from kul tiras and an option for human faction in multiplayer? I think they were the purple nation
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 08:31
|
|
|
They should have given the elves NO HOMO shirts to make it extra obvious.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 09:03
|
|
|
Admiral Joeslop posted:The Blood Elves not having Warrior as an option was solely so people would play Paladins with them, since Paladins were new to the Horde in that expansion and also got buffed to be real actual tanks instead of just healers. At least that's what I've heard. Iirc, the idea was that they were addicted to magic, and originally could only play classes with a mana bar for that reason.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 11:22
|
|
|
Dirk the Average posted:Iirc, the idea was that they were addicted to magic, and originally could only play classes with a mana bar for that reason. Just require that non-magical classes occasionally do a /toke emote and smoke a mana blunt.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 11:35
|
|
|
The anti drug gamers like myself would have problems with that.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 11:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 14:16 |
|
|
ilmucche posted:weren't the proudmoores in WC2 all from kul tiras and an option for human faction in multiplayer? I think they were the purple nation Green, but yes. I'll cover this more in WC2.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2022 11:55
|
|