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Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk6swO2qtWU

recompilation of the Burdens of Shaohao shorts. Some of the best artistic stuff the WoW team does.

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Another pandaren bit, here's one of Didier's drafts during the concept art stage for playable pandaren:



The Chinese government told him to knock it off with the Japanese samurai poo poo, and this was Didier's accepted revision after he did some actual research:

Regallion
Nov 11, 2012

Remind me, why are we giving even the slightest poo poo about the theming of magic drunken panda bear people not being sufficiently Chinese? Why does the Chinese government even get any gosh darn say in this.

Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



Regallion posted:

Remind me, why are we giving even the slightest poo poo about the theming of magic drunken panda bear people not being sufficiently Chinese? Why does the Chinese government even get any gosh darn say in this.

Cultural Appropiation?

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

Regallion posted:

Remind me, why are we giving even the slightest poo poo about the theming of magic drunken panda bear people not being sufficiently Chinese? Why does the Chinese government even get any gosh darn say in this.

Because banning the sale of the game in China would have been a huge monetary loss for blizzard.

DoubleNegative
Jan 27, 2010

The most virtuous child in the entire world.
Because for the better part of the past two decades, China was one of the largest and fastest growing markets in the world. On top of that, land in rural China was extremely valuable, and companies that wanted to expand operations over there were willing to pay premium prices to make it happen. So you had a rapidly expanding middle class and a ballooning rich class that were eager to spend newfound money. It was a gold rush for companies wanting to get their products on Chinese shelves. And in the PRC, if you want that to happen, you have to play by their rules however arbitrary they are. So if they don't want panda men, then nobody gets panda men.

The Chinese market is also why a lot of movies that failed domestically weren't complete flops, including 2016's Warcraft, to bring the point back home again.

goatface
Dec 5, 2007

I had a video of that when I was about 6.

I remember it being shit.


Grimey Drawer
The Chinese govt really wants to assert that all giant pandas are theirs and their opinion on panda matters must be respected. Diplomatic problems can result in pandas being removed from national zoos because all pandas are property of the Chinese state and are only loaned out. They're a meaningful part of China's relationship with the world.

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

Cythereal posted:

But no one did walk away, and now we have an official short story about a priestess in a city burning to the ground spending her final moments in life praying to her goddess that all the babies in the nursery be sent to a dreamless sleep so they won't have to feel themselves burning alive.

:psyduck:

Listen in the far future there is only war, in the world of warcraft there has to be war and craft

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Considering all the absurdly racist bullshit that Blizzard pulls, and how often east Asian cultures get conflated in video games in general (and not just by Western companies, witness the controversy about FF14: Stormblood and Anet for most of GW2's run trying to pretend that Cantha had never happened, to the point of literally replacing the Canthan district from GW2's alpha with a hole in the ground), I for one am perfectly okay with Blizzard deciding to be relatively accurate in their drawing on real-world cultures for once in their existence, even if it takes the Chinese government grabbing Blizzard by the purse strings to do it.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
Still, maybe there's a future for a post detailing how Blizzard's relationship with China reflects in the game?

life_source
May 11, 2008

i got tired of looking at your edgy baby avatar that a 14-year old would be proud of

Cythereal posted:

the orc PC in WC2 is Saurfang

WHAT

EDIT: vvvvv you cannot image how happy i am to have learned this where was any of this stuff when i was lore diving years ago saurfang owns

life_source fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 6, 2022

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Yup. While the last two or three missions of the Horde campaign in WC2 are not canon, Saurfang the Elder from WoW was hinted at in WoW, and then confirmed in Chronicles, to have been Doomhammer's right hand man throughout the Second War and the Horde's primary field commander.


anilEhilated posted:

Still, maybe there's a future for a post detailing how Blizzard's relationship with China reflects in the game?

I dunno. Aside from the pandaren, and the Chinese client scrubbing all mention of LGBT characters from WoW, I don't know if there's much to talk about. I've heard that reception of Mists of Pandaria was mixed but generally positive in China, but I am not Chinese so I can't say with any real knowledge.

Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



The Chinese also scrubbed all skeletons from the game and replaced skulls with loaves of bread

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Cythereal posted:

Considering all the absurdly racist bullshit that Blizzard pulls, and how often east Asian cultures get conflated in video games in general (and not just by Western companies, witness the controversy about FF14: Stormblood and Anet for most of GW2's run trying to pretend that Cantha had never happened, to the point of literally replacing the Canthan district from GW2's alpha with a hole in the ground), I for one am perfectly okay with Blizzard deciding to be relatively accurate in their drawing on real-world cultures for once in their existence, even if it takes the Chinese government grabbing Blizzard by the purse strings to do it.

Wait, what? GW2 tried to un-continent Cantha?

What a bunch of morons, Factions had some of the best environment design for Guild Wars 1, and was generally pretty fun to play besides. What a shitshow.

DoubleNegative
Jan 27, 2010

The most virtuous child in the entire world.

anilEhilated posted:

Still, maybe there's a future for a post detailing how Blizzard's relationship with China reflects in the game?

Whatever relationship Blizzard had with China, it's probably all but dead and buried now. It's much too complex to get into with a simple post, and trying to would lack a lot of nuance. So instead I urge anyone interested to Look at this wikipedia article.

The short version is: children can't play games nearly at all, any games that are intended to come into the country must adhere to extremely strict rules regarding what is and is not permissible to the point of basically having to create entirely new games that follow the Party's rules.

On the other hand, the Chinese wow client gave us this:



As a replacement for this:

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

PurpleXVI posted:

Wait, what? GW2 tried to un-continent Cantha?

What a bunch of morons, Factions had some of the best environment design for Guild Wars 1, and was generally pretty fun to play besides. What a shitshow.

They changed their minds eventually - the current GW2 expansion is set in Cantha. I'm told (I do not have End of Dragons myself, I got bored of GW2 and quit during Path of Fire) that Anet decided to mostly scrub Cantha of the Chinese and Japanese influences to make it very emphatically fantasy Korea.

DoubleNegative posted:

Whatever relationship Blizzard had with China, it's probably all but dead and buried now.

Don't be so sure. Diablo Immortal was made by a Chinese company on license from Blizzard.


Tbh, given the thread chat today, I'm now almost regretting the first idea I had for the human campaign narrative I'm doing for WC1: making the PC a pandaren and play with the idea of this being a timeline where things have gone that wildly off the rails already that a wandering pandaren had established herself in Stormwind got put in charge of the First War because Stormwind's running that low on qualified leaders.

Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jun 6, 2022

achtungnight
Oct 5, 2014
I get my fun here. Enjoy!
Pandaren PC for WC2!

RelentlessImp
Mar 15, 2011

Cythereal posted:

Tbh, given the thread chat today, I'm now almost regretting the first idea I had for the human campaign narrative I'm doing for WC1: making the PC a pandaren and play with the idea of this being a timeline where things have gone that wildly off the rails already that a wandering pandaren had established herself in Stormwind got put in charge of the First War because Stormwind's running that low on qualified leaders.

Making a gay Panda protagonist of a non-canon narrative LP would have sent thousands of Chinese cultural bureaucrats into fits of apoplexy.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

achtungnight posted:

Pandaren PC for WC2!

RelentlessImp posted:

Making a gay Panda protagonist of a non-canon narrative LP would have sent thousands of Chinese cultural bureaucrats into fits of apoplexy.

I already have plans for WC2 protagonists, if I do indeed go about them in a narrative style, but finding art of pandaren women that doesn't drastically slim them down and isn't NSFW is rather difficult.

Only artwork of a pandaren woman I've found that I really like is a canon character. For anyone who ever wondered what a Triad who is one of the most feared people in the world's criminal underground would look like if she was a pandaren:

Zil
Jun 4, 2011

Satanically Summoned Citrus


Is that supposed to be Madam Goya?

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Zil posted:

Is that supposed to be Madam Goya?

Yup. Official art of her from Hearthstone.

Quackles
Aug 11, 2018

Pixels of Light.


goatface posted:

But what does the giant turtle eat?

People!

Phrosphor
Feb 25, 2007

Urbanisation

Cythereal posted:

Orc 6: Terminus




This reads so much like a Dungeon Keeper 1 mission briefing that I even heard 'Sunnyglade' in the smug voice of the narrator from that game.

Ouch this mission looked horrendous, I would have given up long before you did. It's not worth bashing your head against terrible rts mechanics like this. you did the right thing!


I won't lie, Mists was a really cool expansion to just be in. Story aside, themes aside. It was just cool to exist, fight Sha, hang with my apocalypse cult insect friend and tend my little farm. Check in on Anduin and Wrathion and generally have a cool time. Great music, great art, great zones. I could leave the race war, genocide and drafting of local cultures to fight proxy wars behind though.

radintorov
Feb 18, 2011

PurpleXVI posted:

Wait, what? GW2 tried to un-continent Cantha?

What a bunch of morons, Factions had some of the best environment design for Guild Wars 1, and was generally pretty fun to play besides. What a shitshow.
If I remember correctly, it was mandated by NCSoft, which owns ANet, probably because they also didn't want to anger the PRC or something.
But yeah, as Cyth said, the latest expansion is set in Cantha and it is for the most part very Korean-inspired. It's a pretty good expansion overall if a bit short. You also get to unlock and ride giant turtles equipped with magic artillery cannons.

RelentlessImp
Mar 15, 2011
Reading through these lore posts, I can't help but draw contrasts and comparisons between World of Warcraft and Shadowrun. Not in the lore, but in the design phase. Hear me out:

Once upon a time, a company called FASA produced a little tabletop game based loosely on William Gibson's Neuromancer with a bit of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings thrown in. In the early days, it was a shockingly coherent setting despite all the disparate elements; it had firmly established metaphysics to handle the magic, and the Matrix (future internet) while being mechanically poo poo (spoiler: all editions of the Matrix have been completely unplayable as written) evoked a wonderful mysticism on par with the magic. It went through three iterations under FASA, and during that time, it held together remarkably well, rarely if ever contradicting its own lore or retconning things (except to make things worse in-universe; remember Bug Spirits?). There was a setting bible, and nobody was allowed to change the metaphysical underpinnings.

And then, in 2001, FASA folded for various reasons. In 2003, Topps, Inc. acquired FASA's Battletech and Shadowrun properties, who then licensed it out to Catalyst Game Labs, under InMediaRes Productions, LLC., to produce a fourth edition that closely adhered to Shadowrun's established lore, though now they had the arduous process of 'updating' it to get rid of the 'dystopian future of the 80s' feel to make it line up with modern technology. (A bullshit move, if you ask me.)

However, not all was well under Catalyst Game Labs. The metaphysics began to change as they put out more books. According to various freelancers (Bobby Darin (AncientHistory) and Frank K. Trollman) CGL wasn't paying their freelancers, who were producing 90% of the content. There was no setting bible. There was, in fact, nothing; just a bunch of shitlords at the top demanding product and not even going so far as to edit them. (See: The Ghoul Plague of Shadowrun 4E, in which Bobby Darin, who has apologized several times, gave the disease that turned people into ghouls, vampires, et. al., an effective power so high that 99% of the world should be Ghouls and then died off due to lack of food supply. A competent editor would have caught that.) The point is, 4E was, by and large, staffed by freelancers who loved the universe, understood the world and its underlying systems, and wrote things both in line of What Came Before and What Came After, aside from a few outliers (War! in its entirety, the Slow spell in particular...)

So they lost the majority of their freelancers and, regretfully, weren't sued into the dirt for non-payment; some freelancers never got everything they were owed. After the max exodus, CGL immediately hired a new pool of freelancers and churned out Shadowrun 5th Edition - which immediately showed they didn't hire people who gave two shits about the world of Shadowrun, as the metaphysics began to change. Magic bullets started appearing, something that was previously impossible. What magic users could do and could not do began to become a much, much narrower gap. The Matrix became heavily policed in an impossible manner, and they even called the cops "GOD" (Grid Overwatch Division). And today, Shadowrun stands a shadow of its former self, though CGL continues to pump out shovelware books that poo poo all over a once-beloved franchise and its once well-established universe. And I haven't even touched on the continual "greater threats", though never as egregious as what Activision-Blizzard have done, since they tended to be pretty self-contained to one part of the setting or another. (And that's not getting into the Earthdawn-Shadowrun connections, the Horrors, and the way CGL kept hinting at them but being completely unable to follow through due to the fact that FASA's Earthdawn belonged to Living Room Games then RedBrick, and now belongs again to the reformed FASA Games.)

Anyways, the parallels to Activision-Blizzard and the expansions and retcons are pretty clear: a complete shell of something that was once easily digestible, continually paid for by people who can't break free of thinking of the license/company being "good", and a continually retconned piece of mess. After all, Shadowrun is on its Sixth Edition these days, and World of Warcraft is onto its ninth expansion.

GhostStalker
Mar 26, 2010

Guys, find a woman who looks at you the way GhostStalker looks at every bald, obese, single 58 year old accountant from Tulsa who managed to win $4,000 by not wagering on a Final Jeopardy triple stumper.

RelentlessImp posted:

Reading through these lore posts, I can't help but draw contrasts and comparisons between World of Warcraft and Shadowrun. Not in the lore, but in the design phase. Hear me out:
*snip*

So Shadowrun was one of my later obsessions in high school when I had a friend introduce me to the setting (we played 3rd edition) in my freshman year. I didn’t get really heavy into Warcraft until maybe a year later when WC3 came out in like my sophomore year, (even though I had played WC2 in middle school, but wasn’t all that into the lore of the franchise back then until I read the backstory expanding manual of that game, because I never took a look at the detailed manual of WC2 since I borrowed a copy from a friend).

I remember reading Shadowrun splat books at a couple of FLGSs during high school and early college years, and noticing the quality of the writing go down. I learned about the drama going on in the background with a new license and using freelancers that weren’t getting paid years after the fact, and things started making a lot more sense about how the game seemed to lose direction when 5th Edition rolled around and got worse since then (but as you say, War! was a fairly big red flag about the quality starting to dip quite a bit). It’s a shame, since I chatted with a couple of the Shadowrun devs at PAX East 2015 and even then I felt that things were starting to go down the tubes.

So yeah, the comparisons aren’t all that out there, especially since I got real lore heavy into both series, and can still recall a bunch of random trivia about the backstories of both.

RelentlessImp
Mar 15, 2011

GhostStalker posted:

(but as you say, War! was a fairly big red flag about the quality starting to dip quite a bit).

It's interesting to note that huge swaths of War! had to be rewritten from the ground up specifically because freelancers began withholding copyright due to issues of non-payment, thus keeping CGL from legally using the material they had submitted (they used a lot of it, anyway, with bare minimum changes, and denied they had). The Arbeit macht frei section, in particular, was written by one of the new freelancers, and showed not only immense tone-deafness (raid Auschwitz II-Birkenau, kill Jewish ghosts, reclaim Nazi scalpel used to experiment on them) but also a complete loving misunderstanding about the metaphysics in particular. (Said author then defended his writing choices and CGL remained silent on the matter. This is only eclipsed by Rein-Hagen writing diatribes about vampires orchestrating the Chechyan Gay Massacre in the newest Vampire edition and then doubling down on it in the resulting shitfest.)

I'm starting to wonder if we may see something similar with Activision-Blizzard in the newest expansion, given the number of people who have reportedly left the company in the last few years since Shadowlands launched. Probably not as egregious on real-world topics (coughfurryunionbustingcough) but similar.

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

I had a look back at Azzur's LP of this game, and he said that this mission is where the game starts to get hard, just as a bit of forewarning.

Torrannor
Apr 27, 2013

---FAGNER---
TEAM-MATE

Cythereal posted:

I already have plans for WC2 protagonists, if I do indeed go about them in a narrative style, but finding art of pandaren women that doesn't drastically slim them down and isn't NSFW is rather difficult.

Only artwork of a pandaren woman I've found that I really like is a canon character. For anyone who ever wondered what a Triad who is one of the most feared people in the world's criminal underground would look like if she was a pandaren:



You have great taste, Hearthstone has some really cool characters and little stories. It's a shame we never got MSoG's Gadgetzan in WoW.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

radintorov posted:

If I remember correctly, it was mandated by NCSoft, which owns ANet, probably because they also didn't want to anger the PRC or something.
But yeah, as Cyth said, the latest expansion is set in Cantha and it is for the most part very Korean-inspired. It's a pretty good expansion overall if a bit short. You also get to unlock and ride giant turtles equipped with magic artillery cannons.

Now if only they had these cool things in a good game.

I miss wandering the Jade Sea in Guild Wars 1... only MMO-ish game to ever really catch me, and I still maintain it's a really great and underappreciated game.

SIGSEGV
Nov 4, 2010



There's a lot of stuff, what I actually believe must be termed art, even if bad art, in many, many videogames, that is unintentionally laughable and / or despicable, profoundly self serious, profoundly unserious drek, sudden teenly flashes of insight that somehow end up being themes for entire series, "people equals poo poo", "blood and war is cool" "no, not just as a setting, or a justification for mechanics, as an actual serious political statement". This is one of those pieces of Ur-drek.

Help me, I can't stop giggling.


E: I will say for Shadowrun that while the newer editions are p bad in various ways, there were also some parts that would definitely have been able to use more thought in the earlier editions, in particular in the implications of the embarrassingly granola stuff. (IIRC early implant and cyber rules had things like regular non wired implants, so, you know, breast implants, or metal plates holding broken bones, or a pacemaker, rip out pieces of your soul, which had delightful, but entirely unthought, implications.)

SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jun 8, 2022

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

SIGSEGV posted:

There's a lot of stuff, what I actually believe must be termed art, even if bad art, in many, many videogames, that is unintentionally laughable and / or despicable, profoundly self serious, profoundly unserious drek, sudden teenly flashes of insight that somehow end up being themes for entire series, "people equals poo poo", "blood and war is cool" "no, not just as a setting, or a justification for mechanics, as an actual serious political statement". This is one of those pieces of Ur-drek.

Help me, I can't stop giggling.

Fun fact: Alliance players literally can't see this! There is an Alliance world quest involving vulpera and fire, though. Vulpera scavengers and thieves have been raiding Alliance supply lines, so you're given a bunch of firecrackers to scare them off with, because they're a primitive and superstitious people.

Yeah.

The purge squads are Horde-only and hidden by phasing from the Alliance, just like the Horde massacring towns in Kul Tiras, complete with children weeping at the sight of their parents impaled on pikes and one zone event being a Horde assassin sent to slaughter a hospital full of dying villagers and a single unarmed doctor is Alliance only and hidden from the Horde by phasing.


Folks, there's a reason why I called it quits on WoW during Battle for Azeroth (I only played Shadowlands because a well-intentioned family member bought it for my birthday thinking I still played WoW).


achtungnight posted:

Pandaren PC for WC2!

RelentlessImp posted:

Making a gay Panda protagonist of a non-canon narrative LP would have sent thousands of Chinese cultural bureaucrats into fits of apoplexy.

I am choosing to blame the two of you for why I spent a while last night finding a valid piece of art and figuring out how to work a pandaren into WC2 if I do indeed decide to go that route.

t3isukone
Dec 18, 2020

13km away

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

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

...Huh. That's why Warhammer tiein books are...they're not good, but they're like, notably better than most game tieins I've seen! (Well, that and that they've got some genuinely good authors.) The literal bare minimum of 'the authors can talk to each other'.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
To be fair about the phasing, would I be correct in assuming that it's a temporary thing for Alliance/Horde where the war crimes are being committed during a quest/sequence of events and then removed later so that both factions are present in the "default" state of the zone once the event is over?

It's still poo poo, and you should be able to see (and stop!) your own faction from doing warcrimes in a similar quest, or at least be made aware of it in a separate way.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Dirk the Average posted:

To be fair about the phasing, would I be correct in assuming that it's a temporary thing for Alliance/Horde where the war crimes are being committed during a quest/sequence of events and then removed later so that both factions are present in the "default" state of the zone once the event is over?

It's still poo poo, and you should be able to see (and stop!) your own faction from doing warcrimes in a similar quest, or at least be made aware of it in a separate way.

You would not be correct. You only find out about a lot of each faction's poo poo if you talk to someone on the other side or play a character on both factions - did you know the Horde stages a prison break in Stormwind and burns down half the city? Alliance players sure don't! Not unless they also have a Horde character or talked to someone who does!

Battle for Azeroth is where Blizzard really started to lean on the two factions getting told completely different stories. There's a raid where the Alliance assaults a Horde city, and the second half of it is split into two chunks, one covering the Alliance's actions and one covering the Horde's. You play through both, in an in-game disguise as the other faction as an NPC tells you what happened during the other faction's part.

And they're impossible to reconcile. When Alliance players confront King Rastakhan alongside Genn Greymane, Genn is courteous and polite to his defeated adversary, promising to spare his citizens and give his soldiers fair treatment under the protocols of war, begging Rastakhan to stand down before more people have to die.

When Horde players see Genn confronting Rastakhan, Genn is a bloodthirsty warmonger calling the Zandalari savages and demanding that Rastakahan kiss his boots and surrender his daughter to the Alliance as a hostage.

When called on this garbage, Danuser replied that the fog of war is a precarious thing and who can say what the truth is, really?


Edit: My God I loving hate catapults. I look away for a second and oops there goes my army because that red dot I wasn't looking at was armed with a nuke.

Cythereal fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jun 7, 2022

ungulateman
Apr 18, 2012

pretentious fuckwit who isn't half as literate or insightful or clever as he thinks he is
An interesting note I feel like bringing up while we're still on pandaren: Quite a few of the more conspicuously problematic parts of WoW got scrubbed relatively recently, either as people who were uncomfortable with them finally got a say, or management decided to change them as a distraction, depending on who you ask. Almost none of these are an issue to me, since they're mostly casual sexism of the 'this oil painting is a woman with HUGE dobonhonkeros' variety.

But there is one retcon that I think ends up making the characters in question worse: The Twin Empyreans, formerly known as the Twin Consorts, the second-to-last boss of Throne of Thunder.


Their character models didn't change at all with the rename, which frankly makes the designs worse imo.


The original description of the raid encounter, along with commentary by Ion Hazzikostas.

The mogu don't really get how living creatures work. They're all animated statues that are fairly unambiguously 'male', and they have more pressing concerns than understanding the biology or sociology of what they view as lesser creatures.

But the Thunder King was an emperor, alive in a time when other mighty empires existed across Azeroth like the Zandalari. He wanted to look and act the part, and that meant having consorts. The end result is a pair of 'female' mogu that are also incredibly deadly warrior mages, because Lei Shen doesn't really get what a consort is. It's a great bit of insight into what he's like as a character.

The Twins themselves are fairly simple characters, with their designs flowing out of the boss encounter rather than the boss encounter being designed to express who they are. The rename and its associated minor changes end up making them simpler, by strengthening their thematic association with the sun and moon, while not doing anything about the part where they're still the only 'female' mogu we know about, let alone their now extremely inappropriate outfits.

It's hardly a huge blow to the story - the Thunder King is merely the most popular of a host of minor antagonists, and the Twins are little more than his lieutenants either way - but it's an interesting case where the well-meaning changes ended up missing the forest for the trees.

SirSamVimes
Jul 21, 2008

~* Challenge *~


It also gets very perplexing that one of the rare mobs in Throne of Thunder is the ghost of a Mogu empress.

Qwertycoatl
Dec 31, 2008

Cythereal posted:

When called on this garbage, Danuser replied that the fog of war is a precarious thing and who can say what the truth is, really?

This sounds completely insane. People argue enough about lore in games where everyone has seen the same story. Although I guess it's nice to know that the plot you're experiencing is probably non-canon right away rather than having to wait for a retcon

TitanG
May 10, 2015

Cythereal posted:



When called on this garbage, Danuser replied that the fog of war is a precarious thing and who can say what the truth is, really?

haha
I mean on one hand, it's genious - check out what has the best feedback and least plot holes after the expansion is over and make it canon, saves the work of test audiences and editing

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Qwertycoatl posted:

This sounds completely insane. People argue enough about lore in games where everyone has seen the same story. Although I guess it's nice to know that the plot you're experiencing is probably non-canon right away rather than having to wait for a retcon

Steve Danuser reminds me very much of a certain strain of DM in tabletop RPGs. He has an elaborate plot built up in his head and is really fond of going "Ha ha! You think you know what's going on but you don't! You won't believe what happens next!" even when the group is visibly not into it. He even has a gratuitous self-insert DMPC whose primary character traits are that He's Cooler Than You and he's banging the hot goth elf chick around whom the plot turns. The PCs are an irrelevant afterthought next to his elaborate railroaded plot.

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