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Tenebrais posted:WoW is no stranger to sci-fi stuff at this point - I think really the only reason psions (and for that matter bards) aren't classes is they're pretty set in the aesthetics of their magic system. The monk is the only class that isn't doing stuff that units and heroes in Warcraft 3 were able to do. The Elementals are the native original inhabitants, the old gods are invading colonizers out to corrupt the planetsoul, the titanforged races are literally a medical repair system made by the siblings of the planetsoul, and the newest races (draenai, orcs etc) are refugees
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Jun 10, 2022 20:44
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PoptartsNinja posted:Last year, when the sexual harassment allegations started coming out. It's been only a year, I'm going to wait a bit longer before assuming that they've learned their lesson rather than assuming their lawyers explained to them in small words why what they did is costing them money. Three years or two WoW expansions with no overly negative portrayal of women (because people have different measures of what is an appropriate portrayal) sound like a decent amount to see if it actually stuck? Cythereal posted:Actually, the original art I found and used for Validormi is pretty reasonable. Okay, yeah, that's a nice piece of art. I apologize for assuming she would be looking like a fantasy stripper. In my defense, I'll just point to Blizzard's track record.
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Jun 10, 2022 21:09
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Considering that  ’s response to the allegations going public was to promote a man and a woman to co-presidents, then underpay her until she announced her intention to quit… Yeah, fat loving chance that they’ve really gotten to the roots of the problems.
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Jun 10, 2022 21:18
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Yeah, it's done, if you want to enjoy it kindly, just rip out everything you like and toss it on the salvage rack, then it's either fanfic or reuse in other work. If you want to enjoy it unkindly, well, there's here.
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Jun 10, 2022 21:34
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Blizzard has designed some female characters that look cool without dressing like strippers. We’ll meet one of them in Warcraft 2. Some others appear in Diablo 3. Leah had a good look. So did the female player characters, of which I played two. My first character was a Wizard I made look like Evil- Lyn using appropriate wands and gear. Then I did a male Demon Hunter followed by a female Crusader. Always nice to see form fitting plate mail armor on women over chain mail bikinis. Far more sensible if you ask me. Following this I tried a Witch Doctor and Barbarian characters, but was too bored to finish the game with either. At least I originally got it for free thanks to a friend of my wife’s friend who worked for Blizzard. Living in Austin has its perks.
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Jun 10, 2022 23:44
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achtungnight posted:Blizzard has designed some female characters that look cool without dressing like strippers. We’ll meet one of them in Warcraft 2.
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Jun 11, 2022 00:08
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Well, maybe it's a matter of opinion.
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Jun 11, 2022 00:13
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WoW has mostly gotten better about female character designs over the years, and has redesigned many existing female characters to something less embarrassing. Take Jaina Proudmoore, for example, from her WC3 appearance: To her modern look: 
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Jun 11, 2022 00:13
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And all it took was her reaching the realization that “actually my racist dad was right all along”.
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Jun 11, 2022 00:59
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Trust me, that's pretty tame for that particular artist. It's not J. Scott Campbell though, I know them, but I can't remember the name. Can anyone fill me/us in on that?
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Jun 11, 2022 01:00
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Cythereal posted:WoW has mostly gotten better about female character designs over the years, and has redesigned many existing female characters to something less embarrassing. Take Jaina Proudmoore, for example, from her WC3 appearance: Her boobs are... not where they should be.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:02
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Look, necks and collarbones are hard and putting any effort there takes away from the important things. Excuse me while I wash my mouth out with a 9mm for even saying that.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:04
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Regalingualius posted:And all it took was her reaching the realization that “actually my racist dad was right all along”. Speaking as someone who generally still enjoys the plot, I will say that, at this point, Jaina has basically settled on a compromise between her young, naive self, and her raging hateboner of a father. She still wants to work toward peace, but is generally less naive about it and understands that it's not gonna be an overnight thing, and understands that there are elements opposed to peace on both sides of the border that she's not simply gonna talk down.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:10
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The back half of the WoW comic catches pretty much all of the (honestly, totally justified) backlash, but in retrospect, even before it introduced the character that subsequently tried to pretend never existed, there were some real dire bits that just got dwarfed by what came after. Like revealing that Thrall, the guy whose entire origin story was being a gladiatorial slave who escaped and led a revolution, wasn’t just totally fine with continuing the practice in the Horde, he was buddy-buddy with one of the most successful gladiator slavers.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:17
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I mean that would actually make for a pretty interesting character, a morally bad one, but an interesting one, it's just that it clashes with the rest of his character in a bad way, and I suspect there's zero way the games point out a dissonance and split in his ideals, behaviour, whatever.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:28
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The introduction of lazy quasi lovecraftian elements into any setting is a sure sign that it's jumped the shark or that the writers are lazy and/or chuddish.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:45
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PurpleXVI posted:I think the general reason there are no "psionic" classes in WoW or FF14 is that psionics are generally associated with science fiction more so than with fantasy. Plus, generally the sort of things that would differentiate Psionics from Magic would work fine in a single-player RPG with lots of choices and social interaction, but less so in a more linear MMO focused on combat. Stuff like mind reading, mind control, etc. and even if you fluffed those as conditions, FF14's design, I know, isn't very heavy on that, usually the only conditions you deploy are DoT ones. It's more in line with Guild Wars' very condition-heavy design where they're as important as, if not more important than, raw damage numbers. Well, at least we all know FF14 will never incorporate Sci Fi elements into it's story.
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Jun 11, 2022 02:14
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Fivemarks posted:The introduction of lazy quasi lovecraftian elements into any setting is a sure sign that it's jumped the shark or that the writers are lazy and/or chuddish. That's uh... Very broad.
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Jun 11, 2022 03:46
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Ulduar was an extremely cool raid though. Imo the Old Gods themselves were cool & good but turning them into spores launched from Older Gods was extremely lovely.
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Jun 11, 2022 04:19
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It’s basically the fatal flaw of writers overexplaining the inexplicable. They’re gods, they’re malevolent, and they’re unknowable; that’s all that really needs to be known. As soon as they started getting fleshed out, they lost so much of the mystique.
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Jun 11, 2022 04:49
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Fivemarks posted:The introduction of lazy quasi lovecraftian elements into any setting is a sure sign that it's jumped the shark or that the writers are lazy and/or chuddish. I think I'd disagree with this, but in WoW's case it does get a bit eye-rolly because it feels less like an "ah, yes, this was planned from day one and/or is a logical extension of day one elements" and more of a "hey, we need a new popular reference thing. nerds love them cthulhus, don't they?"-choice. Like it just feels like grabbing everything and shoving it in there rather than having a clear thematic focus of some sort.
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Jun 11, 2022 06:53
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Granted, I’m also a sucker for villains that go full ham, and the Old Gods definitely deliver on that front. Yogg Saron only has a couple of minutes of voiced lines, and that’s all he needed to be one of their most memorable final bosses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_n1An8buCQ
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Jun 11, 2022 07:10
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To be fair the cthulhus were present since that one mission in Frozen Throne, which I thought was pretty good. Of course, then Blizzard decided to dilute the whole thing for WoW.
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Jun 11, 2022 08:55
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Regalingualius posted:even before it introduced the character that Who is that?
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Jun 11, 2022 09:07
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Qwertycoatl posted:Who is that? Med'an.
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Jun 11, 2022 09:11
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Qwertycoatl posted:Who is that? See? It’s working! But yeah, Med’an, whose whole existence was one of the only times that lore nerds pretty universally agreed to dunk on something.
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Jun 11, 2022 15:44
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All I remember of Me'Dan was that he was the son of Medivh and Garona, and he was being groomed to be a guardian of tirisfal, and cho'gall was his sworn enemy? that's literally it
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Jun 11, 2022 16:15
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Fear not (or fear a lot, your choice), I will cover Me'dan when we meet his parents during this game.
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Jun 11, 2022 16:16
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Oh, there's fear.
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Jun 11, 2022 16:25
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Fear and Loathing
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Jun 11, 2022 16:30
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Siegkrow posted:That's uh... Very broad. And rightly so. When Star Trek did it, it was bad. When Star Wars did it, it was bad. Whenever D&D tries it, its bad. Lazily shoehorning in lovecraftian elements and themes without working at making them congruent with the existing themes and tone of the property because "people love cosmic horror" is, well, lazily shoehorning it in. Especially when its a very uncritical shoehorning in of lovecraft's stuff, so it drags in a bunch of the racism and xenophobia. WOW doesn't exactly have this problem, but at the same time, it clearly just created the Old Gods because "people will pay money for this cthulhu poo poo".
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Jun 11, 2022 17:08
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Regalingualius posted:Fear and Loathing
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Jun 11, 2022 17:09
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Regalingualius posted:Fear and Loathing Kael: “We were somewhere around Hellfire Peninsula, on the edge of the Outlands when the magics began to take hold.”
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Jun 11, 2022 17:27
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Fivemarks posted:And rightly so. When Star Trek did it, it was bad. When Star Wars did it, it was bad. Whenever D&D tries it, its bad. Lazily shoehorning in lovecraftian elements and themes without working at making them congruent with the existing themes and tone of the property because "people love cosmic horror" is, well, lazily shoehorning it in. Especially when its a very uncritical shoehorning in of lovecraft's stuff, so it drags in a bunch of the racism and xenophobia. WOW doesn't exactly have this problem, but at the same time, it clearly just created the Old Gods because "people will pay money for this cthulhu poo poo". Yeah, like the point of insanity in Lovecraftian stuff isn't "they make you mad", it's "there's being above yourself for whom you are even less than an ant, nobody will believe what you saw, it might have not even been real but you might be killed for it". But 95% of that stuff misses the point absolutely. ...I'll admit that I'm partial to the Fate franchise's interpretation that their spookiness is just that they're fictional beings trying to enter a reality that will not fit them, and also that they're not almighty and can be killed and famous Japanese painter Hokusai told Chuthullu to the face "by Buddha your vibes are rancid".
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Jun 11, 2022 17:36
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Fivemarks posted:When Star Wars did it, it was bad. The whole “embodiment of the Force as 3 persons representing it’s aspects” thing they did in a couple of episodes in the Clone Wars cartoons that was eventually used as the basis for the big bad of the last Star Wars novel series prior to Disney blowing up the Legends canon was the dumbest thing, and I was generally ok with the Vong being a thing, as well as Jacen Solo’s turn to the Dark Side. But oh no, cosmic weirdness in the form of Abeloth suddenly being a huge and subtle threat? That was a stupid place to pull your next villain from.
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Jun 11, 2022 18:19
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A lot of the problem with people trying to do cosmic horror uncritically is that it's just...not very horrific for many of us in the way it was for Lovecraft. I find some of his stories scary I guess, but mostly just in the visceral "the portrayed thing will kill or harm you, maybe in spooky ways" sense. The sort of high-concept horror of the "cosmic" part seems often to just boil down to the idea that we should be terrified that the universe is so big it doesn't care about our white privilege which, well, that's just true and many of us internalized it pretty early. So you have a concept of horror that's news to the worst people (eg ol' Lovecraft) but not all that impactful on a lot of modern audiences, which makes it really hard for it to even land as horror for most of us. (See the large number of tongue-in-cheek Cthulhu things, etc, I think.) In any case, people who want to adopt cosmic horror and keep it as at all horrific really need to do some work on rebuilding that angle, and it seems like they never really get it or want to or whatever. So you end up with, as Cyth describes, the classic "lots of tentacles and body parts where they normally aren't" which is certainly an aesthetic but really doesn't do much to invoke horror in most modern audiences.
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Jun 11, 2022 18:52
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I'm of the opinion that Cosmic Horrors are kinda wasted on horror at this point, and using them for other things is probably better. Shadows of Forbidden Gods has them as a setup for a Reverse 4X / "4X but you're Agent 47" game with heaps of cackling and that's good, I suppose someone could use them in a melancholy game, some sort of soulsbornelike where the player explored places that are no more picking at debris, the Great Alien Thing being great and alien and a thing and also, furthermore, completely uninterested in conflict, or interaction. Maybe a good use of the concept of "utterly alien nature of something" is in Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, where it's all about natures of thought and communication and sapience or non sapience, maybe you could make a thing of political philosophy about the place of gods in a society, if gods actually existed in meaningful ways, and how to treat them. Maybe it needs to be something other than the laziest possible implementation, and have if not originality, then at least thought. I do like the tentacle and eyes everywhere aesthetic, but it's true that it hasn't been scary since long before I was born.
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Jun 11, 2022 19:03
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tithin posted:son of Medivh and Garona Okay so I only know Garona from the movie and I thought there it was implied that Medivh was her father?  Or should we just not bring up the movie at all here
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Jun 11, 2022 19:04
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Yeah, cosmic horror as Lovecraft wrote it just isn't really possible any more. We live in a very different world to the one he lived in. Frankly he lived in a different world to most of his contemporaries too. Thanks to modern science, we learn how tiny and insignificant we are in the face of the universe in primary school. If you want to get the kind of existential dread he was writing you can just spend half an hour watching Kurzgesagt videos. On the flip side, I don't think there's anything wrong with borrowing the aesthetic of eyes and tentacles for the pure fantasy purposes that that reduces them to. In fantasy worlds, the home civilisation of the protagonists really is the most important thing in existence, because they're the main characters. You can use tentacle monsters to convey that they're the kind of ancient and distant being that would give characters in a setting the heebie-jeebies without necessarily wanting to invoke that in the audience. Sometimes a creepy aesthetic can just be a creepy aesthetic. Naming the old gods as direct references to Lovecraft characters does overplay their hand a bit, though. When it was just a "Forgotten One" under Azjol-Nerub in WC3 it feels a bit different to talking about C'thun and Yogg-Saron.
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Jun 11, 2022 19:12
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The book There Is No Antimemetics Division does a pretty good cosmic horror, though I found that the intensity of my reaction reduced substantially as the story went on. The short version of the concept is "there are things that resist being remembered, so almost nobody knows about them. This is mostly a good thing."
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Jun 11, 2022 19:26
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