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That's ART! An autonomous Rock Thrower. Where is the crew Warcraft?
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Jun 4, 2022 13:29
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Who? *googles* Oh. Huh. Y'know, the book her father (Daval) was one of the three I read as a kid, and I didn't remember anything about him or that plot point, at all. quote:While we’re on the topic of books, we need to remember that Blizzard released a novel accompaniment to every expansion. Sometimes they were decent, and sometimes they were written by Richard A Knaak.
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Jun 4, 2022 14:17
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I think the WotA trilogy by Knaak was serviceable, even if he did push his favorite characters into them for no reason.
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Jun 4, 2022 14:28
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I'm actually not quite as down on Knaak as some people. He is terrible at writing characters, and started the whole 'Every Windrunner sister has a hunky human boyfriend' thing, but in my opinion he's actually pretty good at painting pictures of a weird, wild world full of magic and monsters and mysteries, and he really did do a lot to establish a lot of the feel of modern Warcraft as a place. Good world building, awful character writing. In his way, I kind of respect him more than Christie Golden's focus group driven, committee approved novels where she's charged with trying to make some kind of sense out of the utter garbage that modern WoW keeps shoving out. She's without question a more talented writer than Knaak, but she lacks that certain shameless, all-out weirdness I associate with Warcraft. On the other hand, she gave us Anduin Wrynn who was interesting in the first book featuring him and Mists of Pandaria. Then he was made King of Stormwind and it all went to poo poo.
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Jun 4, 2022 14:32
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Really? I read one of her books (I think it was the Arthas one?) and the whole thing was incredibly boring, Knaak at least knows how to do an action romp.
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Jun 4, 2022 20:10
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The only one of Golden's that I've read was Lord of the Clans, the novelization of the canceled adventure game. Also read several Knaak books as well. But the only Warcraft book that I can remember in any real detail is Jeff Grubb's The Last Guardian. Same way with Magic novels, actually. I read a shitload of them but the only ones that have stuck with me at all are Grubb's.
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Jun 4, 2022 22:07
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disposablewords posted:Same way with Magic novels, actually. I read a shitload of them but the only ones that have stuck with me at all are Grubb's. The things I've learned about how WotC handles their creative process - and there's a non-zero chance Blizzard does the same thing - explain a lot about how terrible some of the tie-in fiction is; things are so heavily NDA'd that authors literally can't talk to each other, so, like, if you've been assigned the fiction for one block, you can't talk to the writers of the previous block to see, for instance, whether or not the characters you want to use will still be alive at the beginning of your story. The booming business in spoilers - especially relevant for Magic fiction, as spoiled content can have a demonstrable effect on the secondary market for cards, but probably pretty important for MMOs too - has left a lot of companies so afraid of leaks that they'll kneecap their own creatives to avoid them
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Jun 4, 2022 22:22
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achtungnight posted:Don’t you mean catapults? Ah, I love the old Azzur throwbacks. Everyone here who isn’t familiar will soon know the proper name and power of the good old Death Wagon. As for Christine Golden, in a time where I consumed a whole lot of tie in literature to series I enjoyed (and Warcraft definitely counted at the time, I also remember reading a shitton of Star Wars Legends books in middle school and I also had the MtG and Starcraft tie in novels, and remember reading the Halo ones in a Barnes and Noble as well), I cannot remember reading any of her books that tied into that series. I had probably dropped out of interest in Warcraft lore at the time, that’s the only explanation I can come up with. I do remember her from writing part of one of the last Star Wars Legends book series before Disney blew up the old canon, and though she was a competent writer, but no where near as interesting as the books in the series written by Aaron Allston (RIP), but leagues better than Karen Traviss and a bit more engaging that stuff by Troy Denning. I can’t remember having read Knaak either, even though his main books in the Warcraft milleu were out in the time before I was just starting to play vanilla WoW, IIRC, and would’ve been right up my alley. Probably because high school was picking up and I didn’t have as much opportunity to read for fun back then, maybe. GhostStalker fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 22:33
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Moktaro posted:Actually I don't recall there being anything specifying the former race(s?) of the Night Fae couple, certainly nothing tying them to Azeroth in life. And well, they certainly aren't Night elves now. I was on team vampire before I quit due to the lawsuit revelations, so I'm more than a bit hazy on the specifics. Just goes to show how pigeonholed the rep was, eh?
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Jun 4, 2022 22:47
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I respect Golden in her own right, but in her capacity as a writer for Blizzard she's in the situation of being given the utter goddamn mess that is modern Warcraft's story and being asked to make sense of it. She generally does a commendable job of this, but she's often polishing a turd, especially anything from Afrasiabi's and Danuser's tenures as creative leads for Warcraft (yes, that Afrasiabi was briefly Metzen's successor before he got fired and replaced by Danuser). There's only so much any author can do with garbage like that, especially since Blizzard seems unwilling to give her freedom to go completely batshit like the Crysis and Halo franchises have done (Greg Bear, I love you as an author but I don't know how I escaped not being damaged even worse after reading a bunch of your books as a kid). I cannot stress enough how much contempt I hold Afrasiabi and Danuser in as writers (and Afrasiabi for quite a lot of other reasons). At least Metzen's big love story he shoehorned into WoW (in part because he hated people shipping Thrall and Jaina and specifically wanted to torpedo that) ended up being relatively inoffensive in my eyes. Aggra didn't show up much after Cataclysm and had no discernable personality or story role, and she certainly didn't make any impact on Thrall's character. Yes, the in-game wedding was dull, badly written, and I resented doing it as an Alliance player by that point, but I would take a million Thrall/Aggra weddings over ever seeing Nathanos Blightcaller again.
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Jun 5, 2022 00:15
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I liked Nathanos back when he was a relatively inoffensive dude who was chilling out in the EPL with his dogs, he was like the welcome bear for alliance, but with dogs and a bow. When they turned him into what he became, substantially less likeable.
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Jun 5, 2022 01:23
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He was always offensive and insulting. The difference is, back then it was funny because we didn't hate him yet.
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Jun 5, 2022 02:19
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Cythereal posted:At least Metzen's big love story he shoehorned into WoW (in part because he hated people shipping Thrall and Jaina and specifically wanted to torpedo that) ended up being relatively inoffensive in my eyes. Aggra didn't show up much after Cataclysm and had no discernable personality or story role, and she certainly didn't make any impact on Thrall's character. Yes, the in-game wedding was dull, badly written, and I resented doing it as an Alliance player by that point, but I would take a million Thrall/Aggra weddings over ever seeing Nathanos Blightcaller again. This is imho a general WoW problem. Horde players weren't pleased with the enormous prominence that Alliance characters had in Shadowlands, either. There are few truly neutral characters that are universally liked. Khadgar is the prime example, I think.
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Jun 5, 2022 07:25
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DoubleNegative posted:Yeah that line had me doing an immediate [googles 'Katrana Prestor'] 
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Jun 5, 2022 09:56
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Torrannor posted:This is imho a general WoW problem. Horde players weren't pleased with the enormous prominence that Alliance characters had in Shadowlands, either. There are few truly neutral characters that are universally liked. Khadgar is the prime example, I think. Khadgar irks me for one reason: an archmage leading Dalaran who's friends with and respected by both the Alliance and Horde, with a snarky sense of humor and a history with some of the biggest bads in the setting? It should have been Jaina. As for Nathanos, he is blatantly Steve Danuser's self-insert (complete with beating two Alliance leaders one on one, after one had become the embodiment of a goddess's rage and vengeance) and all about how Danuser wants to gently caress Sylvanas Windrunner. Hell, the title of this thread is a joke about it. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 13:01
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BlazetheInferno posted:He was always offensive and insulting. The difference is, back then it was funny because we didn't hate him yet. Also you didn't have to spend that much time with him back then compared to a whole expansion of having to put up with his crap. Cythereal posted:Khadgar irks me for one reason: an archmage leading Dalaran who's friends with and respected by both the Alliance and Horde, with a snarky sense of humor and a history with some of the biggest bads in the setting? Unfortunately they put her in charge right in the middle of torpedoing her character and didn't get around to fixing that until after she left Dalaran. Rhonne fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 13:20
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I've never touched WoW, so all I know is that Warcraft 3 kinda hinted at a thing between her and Thrall. Did Actiblizz not want to piss off its fanbase with fantasy miscegenation or something, because that seems like something Actiblizz would do. That, or decide to ruin Jaina so that they could do their One Female Villain Plot (TM) with her.
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Jun 5, 2022 15:15
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Fivemarks posted:I've never touched WoW, so all I know is that Warcraft 3 kinda hinted at a thing between her and Thrall. They had no idea what to do with Jaina, to be honest. She has been all over the place since War 3.
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Jun 5, 2022 15:28
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Fivemarks posted:I've never touched WoW, so all I know is that Warcraft 3 kinda hinted at a thing between her and Thrall. As far as anyone's ever learned, it's because of two things. One, Metzen had always conceived of Thrall and Jaina as a big brother and little sister, not lovers, and he was not happy about how many people interpreted their relationship as romantic. First WoW mocked that interpretation regularly, then Metzen finally torpedoed it completely. Two, Jaina before she went crazy was a far more popular character with the Alliance fanbase than the Alliance leaders whom Blizzard was trying to push on the player base. Starting with WoW's second expansion, Blizzard really went for reviving the faction war rather than the two powers being basically friendly, and Blizzard introduced Varian Wrynn and later Genn Greymane as hawkish leaders (WoW's second expansion is also when the factions started committing random war crimes against each other). The reaction from the Alliance fanbase was intensely negative, the prevailing mood was that the faction war was stupid and Jaina (and later Anduin) were right to seek peace. So Blizzard [fairly literally] nuked Jaina's character, starting a long derail that would last from Cataclysm until Battle for Azeroth slightly mollified her character (Horde players still got to beat her up for purples in a raid). But at the same time that they dialed Jaina back down, they brought back Turalyon to replace her as the Alliance's new psychopath leader, this time in PURGE IT IN THE NAME OF THE LIGHT! CLEANSE! PURGE! KILL! flavor. As for miscegnation, I do plan to do a lore post about half-breeds in Warcraft. There's actually one right from the start in Warcraft 1, and another plays a notable role in Warcraft 3's expansion. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 15:35
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Cythereal posted:As far as anyone's ever learned, it's because of two things. Boy oh boy I am confident in Blizzard not loving this up. And by not loving this up, I mean my expectation for them is to go straight into racism and never manage to get out of it.
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Jun 5, 2022 16:40
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Torrannor posted:This is imho a general WoW problem. Horde players weren't pleased with the enormous prominence that Alliance characters had in Shadowlands, either. There are few truly neutral characters that are universally liked. Khadgar is the prime example, I think. Unsurprisingly, the playerbase did not view the guy who literally founded the Horde and was in charge of it until right before the expansion as a "neutral" character.
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Jun 5, 2022 16:40
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Jaina's run as leader of Dalaran was kind of hilarious in hindsight because she was put in charge because of some dragon prophecy that said she would lead them to greatness or something and then all she did was kick the Horde out of the city and then eventually quit in anger when the rest of the council voted to let them back in in Legion. Never trust prophecies or dragons is what I'm getting at here.
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Jun 5, 2022 17:25
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The Alliance did, for the longest time, simply not have a leader they could easily unite behind, so I could see why players would have wanted Jaina to be more active. The humans had Bolvar, who... wasn't really a king. Muradin was around, but I don't believe he ever did much. Tyrande and the Nelves were busy off in Kalimdor doing whatever, and the gnome's leader, uh, yeah :V Varian was introduced in a comic, and I always felt the stuff they made him go through was basically matching Thrall's backstory somewhat and then being Super Angry About The Horde. It DID succeed in giving the Alliance a "main" leader, I suppose! On the Horde side, well, say what you want about Thrall, but he was THE Warchief, and none of the others that followed quite managed the role. Garrosh did All The Warcrimes, poor Vol'jin didn't get to shine, and Sylvanas... oh boy.
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Jun 5, 2022 17:57
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From vanilla to wrath you could argue that the horde was weaker in numbers, but it was certainly more united than the alliance was at the time. Tauren, Orcs and Trolls were pretty united all through kalimdor questing, while in EK the alliance had human lands and short people lands, and each were taking care of their own, mostly.
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Jun 5, 2022 18:21
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A big problem that Varian had is that in vanilla WoW, on Alliance side, player did a number of quests across the levelling experience on alliance side. The problem is the comic then retconned everything the player did as stuff Varian did instead. Given that he was intended to be the Alliance leader, telling all the Alliance players "You didn't do this, instead this super cool guy you're meat to like did it!" wasn't a great way of ingratiating him to the playerbase.
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Jun 5, 2022 19:21
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Ironforge was also very much the main city for Alliance players for a lot of early WoW until they started adding all the important things to Stormwind in order to force players there. That probably also added to resentment against Varian.
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Jun 5, 2022 19:46
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I think when you get down to it the problem initially was that Warcraft 3's Alliance campaign depicts the fall of Lordaeron while its Horde campaign depicts the rise of Durotar. Once it's all over, The Horde has a ready familiar set of characters and politics to jump right into with WoW - the Forsaken being part of it is new, but Thrall, Cairne, Sylvanas and even Vol'jin are all familiar charaters from the last game. The Alliance, meanwhile, was building up from scratch - Lordaeron (along with most of the rest of the northern kingdoms) fell in WC3, Stormwind fell in WC1, and the dwarf and gnome kingdoms had never really appeared before. The only part of it that really had anything familiar to work with was the night elves, and since just before WoW they were a faction of their own unrelated the alliance/horde split it would be weird to make them the main representative figure for the Alliance. Possibly this is why they made a new character the night elves' leader rather than Tyrande or Furion. They just didn't have anyone with story weight to rally the Alliance behind until they started shaking up the general order with Garrosh and Varian to get the two sides conflicting more. Which I think ties back to the Thrall/Jaina stuff - there's not actually a lot in the story to base the idea they might have a romance on, other than them being a man and a woman in the same general vicinity. But it would have meant a lot for general peace and co-operation between Alliance and Horde, and I think that appealed to a lot of people. Blizzard always seemed a lot more keen on keeping "Orcs vs Humans" central to Warcraft's narrative than its fanbase ever did, especially since they usually didn't have the writing chops to get the two sides fighting each other without at least one of them being the bad guy. I wonder if WoW ultimately suffered for its general gimmick of having two separate factions that can't interact except through violence. At least in the writing - I assume plenty of people enjoyed the threat of open world PvP. But every expansion ultimately boiled down to some big bad guy that wasn't on either side, because why would you give the two factions different raid content, that's doubling your work. So the core story could never be about the two sides actually fighting, and everything that pushed for it felt like a transparent attempt to just justify PvP mechanics.
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Jun 5, 2022 19:47
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Rhonne posted:Jaina's run as leader of Dalaran was kind of hilarious in hindsight because she was put in charge because of some dragon prophecy that said she would lead them to greatness or something and then all she did was kick the Horde out of the city and then eventually quit in anger when the rest of the council voted to let them back in in Legion. So you're saying she was dragon her feet? 
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Jun 5, 2022 20:55
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Tenebrais posted:I wonder if WoW ultimately suffered for its general gimmick of having two separate factions that can't interact except through violence. At least in the writing - I assume plenty of people enjoyed the threat of open world PvP. But every expansion ultimately boiled down to some big bad guy that wasn't on either side, because why would you give the two factions different raid content, that's doubling your work. So the core story could never be about the two sides actually fighting, and everything that pushed for it felt like a transparent attempt to just justify PvP mechanics. Based on all available evidence, the answer to your question is a resounding "yes".
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Jun 5, 2022 20:56
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To clarify my own stance on the faction war poo poo: I started as a Horde main. My friends played Horde and I liked the tauren from WC3. By Cataclysm, my raid guild had collapsed and I hated Garrosh and the goblins (I'm a big nature lover and cannot loving stand Warcraft goblins), so I switched to the Alliance. I hate the faction war, because I hate being made to feel like a bad guy and I hate committing war crimes during the story. I just want a story to relax with where I can be a good person doing good things and making the world a better place. My power fantasy is helping people. The grimdark faction war poo poo, and the particular depths to which Blizzard subjected my favorite race, are why I abandoned WoW even before the lawsuits started. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 21:16
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One of the things that made the alliance in vanilla a lot more disjointed is it being.. well.. an alliance. I. E. a group of allied kingdoms and such, versus the horde being a singular political organization. Frankly all attempts to make it more centralized to match the horde having singular leadership were counterproductive but let's not accuse blizzard of knowing what they were doing.
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Jun 5, 2022 21:28
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Actually wait, speaking of goblins, are they also Orc homeworld natives or are they originally from Azeroth? Because I certainly remember at times feeling like the goblins were already in a ton of places where the rest of the Horde were just arriving for the first time. This might've just been gameplay reasons, but it could also be deep lore(tm).
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Jun 5, 2022 22:03
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PurpleXVI posted:Actually wait, speaking of goblins, are they also Orc homeworld natives or are they originally from Azeroth? Gobbos are Azeroth natives.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:31
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Speaking of goblins - you gonna talk about various thinly-veiled racial stereotypes in the franchise/blizzard games in general?
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Jun 5, 2022 22:32
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Gun Jam posted:Speaking of goblins - you gonna talk about various thinly-veiled racial stereotypes in the franchise/blizzard games in general? Let me put it this way, in my planning file for this LP I have a list of tentative update names, for both gameplay and lore. Among the entries in the latter: This Might be Uncomfortably Racist This is Definitely Uncomfortably Racist You Have Not Yet Reckoned With Blizzard's Racism Goblins, trolls, and tauren in that order.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:37
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Personally, I've always enjoyed the fantasy RPG worlds where heroes of different factions & races (orcs, dwarves, elves, humans, etc) cooperate against a threat, with some understandable early plot tension and friendly competition over time. What you see in a typical D&D game world or fantasy Multi User Dungeon. Making it so Status Quo is two (or more) factions constantly at each other's throats and committing war crimes in the name of hatred dressed up as political ideals is a serious turn off for me. I don't like it from Blizzard, Republicans (or Democrats), Christians, or any of the other groups I've seen doing it in my life. Nor do I understand why some hold it as a good thing. It's counter-productive if not outright damaging to quality of life in general. Why do people not understand this and support it? And indulging in it just to make a fanbase accept your warped idea of how your story should be is IMHO even worse. No profit is worth the costs of doing that, and no organization that does it will ever have my support.
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Jun 5, 2022 22:50
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Cythereal posted:Let me put it this way, in my planning file for this LP I have a list of tentative update names, for both gameplay and lore. Among the entries in the latter: And then there's What The Actual gently caress This Is Incredibly Racist pygmy gnomes
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Jun 5, 2022 23:31
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Fivemarks posted:And by not loving this up, I mean my expectation for them is to go straight into racism and never manage to get out of it. If the warcraft 3 bit is who I think it was (diablo campaign?), it's actually done pretty tastefully. It's shocking, I know. Now the one introduced in this game....
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Jun 5, 2022 23:39
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Also, if it helps guide further 'are you going to cover X or Y?' questions, here are the remaining lore posts I have scheduled for WC1, in no particular order: You Face Bearassus, Bearedar Lord of the Bearning Legion! As Opposed to the New Gods Blackrock Down Every Day I'm Panda-ren My Garona Getting Medivhal Give an Orc a Gun Mendel's Lament Spiders-Men Hammer Time Canon Edit: Both slots have been filled. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Jun 6, 2022 |
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Jun 6, 2022 00:05
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Do a post on the slimes from the Dead Mines. Clearly they must have deep and fascinating lore.
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Jun 6, 2022 00:10
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