BiggestOrangeTree posted:Okay so I only know Garona from the movie and I thought there it was implied that Medivh was her father? That’s one of the major reasons why the movie wound up being declared a separate canon altogether, IIRC. Since otherwise Garona literally could not possibly be the same character, because her father was an orc and her mother a draenei.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 19:36
|
|
Or should we just not bring up the movie at all here
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 00:22 |
|
|
BiggestOrangeTree posted:Okay so I only know Garona from the movie and I thought there it was implied that Medivh was her father? The movie is kind of its own continuity, it's probably best not to worry to much about it. That being said, Garona is one of those characters whose backstory has had so many retcons that it's hard to keep track of what's supposed to be canon anymore.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 19:40
|
|
|
As far as I'm concerned, Cosmic horror, in the way of Lovecraft, is 25% fear of minorities/the poor, 25% fear of science, and 50% "White people aren't the center of the universe and that's horrifying". Hence why I think that trying to do lovecraft more in fiction is lazy and bad.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:02
|
|
|
As a non-white person, that sounds like BS.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:04
|
|
|
Ultiville posted: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 mean you can just as easily read it as the fundamental fear of the dark, the deep and the strange and the plea of a person facing it alone. The problem with Lovecraft, and most horror in general, is that you need to allow it to work. If you don't let yourself be scared, you won't be, and his type is one of the easiest to ignore. It's like reading a stream of consciousness - you need to force your mindset into the characters, or close thereabout, or its just gibberish. There's a reason horror works best when you're alone in the silent dark. Trying to force horror that is based on isolation into an MMO where a raid generally consists of 10 friends shitposting through teamspeak and alt-tabbing into strategies during trash clears is nigh impossible, no matter how great your setpieces are, and even if they work - it's a raid, you're gonna be running it twice weekly for months, get jaded and forget the impact of the first time.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:04
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/1365776812425420800?s=21&t=_X5p7MNzuoa5pF2zUli9lA
|
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:08
|
|
|
Part of the problem with "cosmic horror" is that it more or less always translates into "ah, yes, they are inscrutable and their motives are beyond our meager understanding. also they attack on sight, roll 1d10 for initiative." It's a lazy way out of actually writing a motive and characterization for them, goals they're aiming for, by shrugging and saying "dunno man, too weird." Honestly the only good example I know of actual cosmic horror is Junji Ito. The horror is often not even embodied by a being, and it isn't necessarily evil or trying to destroy us, it's often just inimical to our continued existence. Reality has broken down in some way. Someone refuses to die, our biology changes inexplicably, space and time themselves behave weirdly, etc. it is literally the cosmos being horrifying, and at best you can hope to run from it in almost all cases.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:08
|
|
|
It should be an outside context problem, instead it's often just "these things are recognised as horrific, slot them into the story where marked" and then they get explained in detail down the line. You shouldn't be explaining these things, they're meant to be unknowable.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:27
|
|
|
Yeah, the ability to gamify that stuff is an additional issue, particularly in the context of an MMO (or RTS for that matter) where your primary mode of interaction is combat. You can tell the player that the things are so far outside your understanding that any victory is temporary at best, etc, but at the end of the day if you make it a focus antagonist you're eventually going to hit it until loot emerges, which is just fundamentally a deeply comprehensible and non-scary situation. Even before you get to the MMO problem where you then proceed to repeat doing that weekly.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 20:49
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:Yeah, the ability to gamify that stuff is an additional issue, particularly in the context of an MMO (or RTS for that matter) where your primary mode of interaction is combat. You can tell the player that the things are so far outside your understanding that any victory is temporary at best, etc, but at the end of the day if you make it a focus antagonist you're eventually going to hit it until loot emerges, which is just fundamentally a deeply comprehensible and non-scary situation. Even before you get to the MMO problem where you then proceed to repeat doing that weekly. I've held this criticism of storytelling in video games for some time now. You can say your game is anti-war all you like. You can condemn violence in the narrative, and fluff the PC as some bringer of peace and hope. But as long as the primary mechanical systems of the game revolve around combat, then your game is necessarily going to be an intensely violent one and trying to square this circle means endlessly contriving situations where either 'no, this enemy can't be reasoned with and you have to kill them, they're corrupted/tempered/brainwashed/whatever, or just innately and irredeemably evil' or 'you dropped a meteor onto their heads non-lethally.' Unless a game is going to break with convention and actually let you choose to talk an enemy down or simply decide that this fight isn't worth fighting, actually letting one player have a meaningfully different gameplay and story experience from another, then the ludonarrative dissonance is inescapable. I try to not hold it too much against Blizzard that they keep needing to come up with new big threats as a result. The primary way to interact with the world in WoW is violence, so more content necessarily has to be violent, and the game makes no bones about that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 21:04
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Unless a game is going to break with convention and actually let you choose to talk an enemy down or simply decide that this fight isn't worth fighting, actually letting one player have a meaningfully different gameplay and story experience from another, then the ludonarrative dissonance is inescapable. AKA, undertale
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 21:09
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Unless a game is going to break with convention and actually let you choose to talk an enemy down or simply decide that this fight isn't worth fighting, actually letting one player have a meaningfully different gameplay and story experience from another, then the ludonarrative dissonance is inescapable. Something, something, Disco Elysium?
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 21:36
|
|
|
I don't think Warcraft makes any attempt to be anti-war, mind. If there's one consistent thematic throughline through the whole franchise it's "there are bad guys here, we must protect ourselves through war". It even makes the various bad guys pretty consistently baby-eating monsters to make the war as justified as possible! Which of course causes plenty of its own problems when the war they're trying to focus on is Alliance vs Horde and they're still trying to hammer that peace isn't an option even while it really should be.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
About the only game I've found that actually does the "Eldritch Horror" thing well is Eternal Darkness, mostly because it actually has the "sanity mechanic" work in a way that directly messes with the player. And even then, there's still some shoehorning because that's just the nature of Eldritch Horror in writing. We can't write "things beyond our understanding and comprehension" properly because that's literally impossible to do, so we have to bullshit it. Completely alien to human thought? So long as it has internally consistent logic, we can absolutely write it. But not "beyond understanding and comprehension." Also I've never thought of Warcraft as ever being anti-war because that seems to be the solution to (and cause of) all problems. Just like fighter planes are the solution to (and cause of) all problems in the Ace Combat games.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 23:05
|
|
|
The anti-war rant, admittedly, came from personal biases. I am a committed pacifist except in self defense in real life, due to spiritual and religious conviction, and I came into Warcraft with Warcraft 3. To me, when I think of nostalgia and the message and themes that originally drew me to Warcraft, it was the idea of former enemies burying the hatchet and learning to coexist and work together to build a better future. It's been a sad and bitter disappointment to realize that this is not what most people think of when they think of Warcraft, least of all the people making Warcraft games.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2022 23:10
|
|
|
I agree with you in general, both about how themes of pacifism and mercy in games are difficult to convey, and about how Warcraft has frequently flirted with ideas about how we can get better and consistently failed to actually embrace them, to my frustration. That said: A) I think even a game about defeating enemies doesn't have to be about lethal violence if you don't want it to be; part of the issue is that people like to use the threat of death (for NPCs) as a storytelling device/crutch. But of course since the PC can't die for real in most narrative games (whether this is explained in-fiction or not), and since most are either fantasy or sci-fantasy, there's no particular reason you have to have the PC killing enemies as opposed to victory involving teleporting them into rehab or whatever. I think it's both storytelling laziness but also an indictment either of the general gaming public or decision-makers' opinion of them. I suspect people think that lethal violence is something gamers crave. Whether this is true esp with counterexamples like Undertale, who can say. B) I think the specific violence-is-the-answer nature of these games makes some concepts work better than others within them, which is the point I was trying to make about cosmic horror riffs pretty consistently failing to hit the horror part or feel genuine to the source material rather than just adopting the trappings thereof. (In the specific case of Warcraft's use of Lovecraft, I'm not sure it wants to hit more than the trappings, but a lot of games do want to and rarely succeed.) I think Tolkien licensed games often have a similar problem; for all LOTR and The Hobbit feature combat and warfare, I don't think the most meaningful parts of those works are about violence, so games set in that universe rarely manage to capture the feel very well moment-to-moment IMO.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 00:52
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:A) I think even a game about defeating enemies doesn't have to be about lethal violence if you don't want it to be; part of the issue is that people like to use the threat of death (for NPCs) as a storytelling device/crutch. But of course since the PC can't die for real in most narrative games (whether this is explained in-fiction or not), and since most are either fantasy or sci-fantasy, there's no particular reason you have to have the PC killing enemies as opposed to victory involving teleporting them into rehab or whatever. I think it's both storytelling laziness but also an indictment either of the general gaming public or decision-makers' opinion of them. I suspect people think that lethal violence is something gamers crave. Whether this is true esp with counterexamples like Undertale, who can say. There's another side of this, and that's mechanics. Most typical game genres, especially those that involve direct conflict with other characters, have all their mechanics built around doing violence. Killing your enemies isn't just a narrative crutch, it's the only way to reward good gameplay when good gameplay consists of being very good at guns. A big part of why Undertale's approach worked so well is that it had a specific set of mechanics dedicated to peaceful resolution, usually deeper than the violent option. A strategy game like Warcraft just isn't going to be able to not do war. You'd really have to reinvent the whole basis of the game to pull of an anti-war strategy game. I'm not going to call it impossible; I know there's at least some strategy games where you get domination through economics rather than combat, and I'm sure there's other ways to do it too. Not sure any of it would work for Warcraft, though. Just not that kind of series.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 01:44
|
|
|
Tenebrais posted:There's another side of this, and that's mechanics. Most typical game genres, especially those that involve direct conflict with other characters, have all their mechanics built around doing violence. Killing your enemies isn't just a narrative crutch, it's the only way to reward good gameplay when good gameplay consists of being very good at guns. A big part of why Undertale's approach worked so well is that it had a specific set of mechanics dedicated to peaceful resolution, usually deeper than the violent option. It’s something to address sure, but you have games like Splatoon where (at least as I remember) your weapon is “gun” but you’re still not killing people. And of course “phasers on stun” is an option whenever you’re fighting sapients in sci-fi, and so forth. Violent conflict is a good framework for mechanics, but not all violent conflict needs to be lethal, let alone gleefully lethal. (And of course for lots of games, where players respawn, lethality is dissonant with the mechanics.) But of course in the realm of Warcraft you’ve got expectations that mean it’d be a jarring departure to go to something like that for sure (though Hearthstone did a good job of drawing out the humorous undertones that have always been there, and a theoretical WoW or next game could have done that and focused around jousts or war games or whatever). But they could still show a lot more awareness of the issues of fighting other people than they historically have, especially with so many non-people in the setting to fight against. The issue where they vacillate back and forth between reinforcing that both Horde and Alliance are made up of people deserving of the dignity thereof, and passing off the idiot ball and warcrimes ball to make sure that no lasting detente is possible is both real and totally avoidable, even if they want lethal violence to remain the standard mechanical interaction. It’s not that I’m meaning to say that Warcraft specifically could or should not be about war, but rather that it isn’t very good at being about war in any way other than being constantly violent and isn’t very responsible about that, and that games in general could be a lot less glorifying of killing even when violent conflict is mechanically useful. Especially when virtually every game is perfectly willing to have violence be non-lethal when a character needs to survive for plot reasons or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 05:41
|
|
|
One thing I really liked about Iconoclasts is that because your character wields a stun gun, human enemies you KO have little stun stars circling over their heads. In a section where you play a character with a real gun and later one with a sword, there are no stun stars.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 08:25
|
|
|
Speaking of cosmic horror and outside-context problems, in Iconoclasts (major ending spoilers) at the end you discover that the entire game basically takes place on an unmanned gas station for alien starships, and humanity has been siphoning the fuel for its own needs for so long that there's hardly any left. While the ending does "resolve" things for the short term, it's an extremely open question what will happen in the long term.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2022 15:09
|
|
|
I looked at the world record runs for both campaigns, and have gleamed the following tips... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) Enemy Catapults seem to be easily cheesed just by sending a single melee unit to attack them. Regardless of speed, the catapult seems to hit where they ARE instead of where they're GOING to be--thus it does nothing. 2) By that same token, it seems like one of the most consistent ways of getting your own Catapults to land (apart from just allowing one of yours to die in the cross-fire) is by aggroing a pack of enemies with a lone scout. Click on the edge of your scout's sprite as it's running by, and it seems your Catapult will generally hit something. 3) Speaking of Catapults, it seems as though you want to prioritize having 3-4 of those (map-dependent), THEN move on to Archers/Spearmen. Gotta have those scouts and meatshields, after all. 4) You never seem to need more than 6 Peasants/Peons at once, in any map. The MO seems to be to rush enemy bases before they can produce anything really bad... Though I don't know how much of that is solid strategy, how much of that is luck-based, and how much is just the speedrunner trading safety for speed 5) Once you get a unit called Conjurer/Warlock, you'll want to research something called "Major Summoning" as soon as possible, then spam as many Elementals/Daemons as possible. They seem like fantastically broken units--especially the Elementals. 6) The last two maps of each campaign start having invisible units (because I guess there's a spell for that). For that reason, you want two Catapults and a throng of Archers/Spearmen to stay at the base, while your Elementals/Daemons do all the actual conquering. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hope these help! Fionordequester fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jun 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 11:05
|
|
|
I think part of the issue I have with the way the Old Gods are presented (and eldritch horrors in general nowadays) is that the original ones (not just HP Lovecraft's but his contemporary writers as well) tended to be unknowable. They were so inhuman that we can't even begin to fathom what Cthulhu wants, or why he's dead/asleep until the stars are right. The Colour Out of Space is a good movie that manages to nail that feeling. It's about a meteor that brings a living color to earth that begins to change life. We're never told why, or even if it's sentient, the closest thing we get is a quick display of sights and sounds that explain almost nothing. when you can point to something and say "This is an Eldritch Horror, here is their name, date of birth, and full writeup of their plans" , then it quits bring eldritch and is just a horror. Or at least that's how I feel, I know I'm probably in the minority about it. And yes I know the movie was an adaptation of a Lovecraft story, it doesn't change thr fact that they didn't try to explain the Colour or what it's motivations were.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 12:20
|
|
|
Randalor posted:I think part of the issue I have with the way the Old Gods are presented (and eldritch horrors in general nowadays) is that the original ones (not just HP Lovecraft's but his contemporary writers as well) tended to be unknowable. They were so inhuman that we can't even begin to fathom what Cthulhu wants, or why he's dead/asleep until the stars are right. The Colour Out of Space is a good movie that manages to nail that feeling. It's about a meteor that brings a living color to earth that begins to change life. We're never told why, or even if it's sentient, the closest thing we get is a quick display of sights and sounds that explain almost nothing. when you can point to something and say "This is an Eldritch Horror, here is their name, date of birth, and full writeup of their plans" , then it quits bring eldritch and is just a horror. This is certainly true, but it's also running up against the same "everything looks like a nail" genre limitations. Warcraft is a game about killing your enemies, that's the mechanical interaction you get. You make things worse by explaining everything about your theoretical eldritch horrors for sure, but ultimately if your interactions with them are all going to be adversarial combat (which, again, a given of the genre) you can't really get them to come across as unknowable and uncaring very well, because they behave just like Berserker Bob who hates you - they attack you to try to kill you, and you kill and loot them instead. It's the same problem a lot of tabletop cosmic horror inspired games run into, when you have combat stats for Cthulhu you've already drastically changed genre.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 17:07
|
|
|
Honestly punching Cthulhus is fine. Lovecraft storirs almost always making turning and fighting a better answer (see: Cthulhu and boats). They dont really seem threatening both to overuse and that the idea of humanity's insignificance is kind of accepted these days.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 17:27
|
|
|
Randalor posted:I think part of the issue I have with the way the Old Gods are presented (and eldritch horrors in general nowadays) is that the original ones (not just HP Lovecraft's but his contemporary writers as well) tended to be unknowable. They were so inhuman that we can't even begin to fathom what Cthulhu wants, or why he's dead/asleep until the stars are right. The Colour Out of Space is a good movie that manages to nail that feeling. It's about a meteor that brings a living color to earth that begins to change life. We're never told why, or even if it's sentient, the closest thing we get is a quick display of sights and sounds that explain almost nothing. when you can point to something and say "This is an Eldritch Horror, here is their name, date of birth, and full writeup of their plans" , then it quits bring eldritch and is just a horror. The Color Out of Space is just Lovecraft's lack of education and him not understanding radiation, and being afraid of the idea that the EM spectrum extended beyond visible light. It isn't really that scary. It's like his one story where the horror is air conditioning.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 17:44
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:This is certainly true, but it's also running up against the same "everything looks like a nail" genre limitations. Warcraft is a game about killing your enemies, that's the mechanical interaction you get. You make things worse by explaining everything about your theoretical eldritch horrors for sure, but ultimately if your interactions with them are all going to be adversarial combat (which, again, a given of the genre) you can't really get them to come across as unknowable and uncaring very well, because they behave just like Berserker Bob who hates you - they attack you to try to kill you, and you kill and loot them instead. I'm fine with "this thing we don't understand is trying to eat us, kill it until it is dead" aspects when it comes to Eldritch Horror, it's when the writers decide they need to explain everything that it goes from being "Eldritch Horror" to "Horror, maybe". The best example I can think of in recent times that best encapsulates this is Mass Effect. Mass Effect 1) There is a race of machine-like creatures called the Reapers, that sweep through the galaxy every 50,000 years and reduces all life to the stone age. No one knows why, and even the mere presence of one causes even the most strong-willed people to fall under their sway. Mass Effect 2) Reapers can be killed, great! Except that even in death they corrupt people to the Reaper's cause, they sometimes take entire species and make them into thralls to watch the galaxy, and they reproduce by taking a species and converting them into delicious mission goo and building a body for them. Mass Effect 3) Okay, so the Reapers are actually the product of an ancient race of deep-sea whales that wanted to stop robots and non-robots from killing each other that were culled by their AI that's culling the galaxy every 50,000 years to preserve life and... Or see how La Mulana's story was rather vague on the previous races of The Mother (because it's literally ancient history and Mother had a tendency of culling them when they didn't get her into space), and then La Mulana 2 decided "gently caress it" and went waaaaaaaay too far in the opposite direction.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 18:07
|
|
|
Update will go up tomorrow, and I spent some time this weekend considering WC2 now that we're officially in the back half of WC1. I'll be listening to feedback right up until I make the first WC2 post, but for now, one of my Warcraft lore consultants who wishes to remain nameless had this feedback about a draft of some dialogue for the WC2 narrative I'm contemplating.quote:That's a nightmare sentence right there.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 18:09
|
|
|
Randalor posted:I'm fine with "this thing we don't understand is trying to eat us, kill it until it is dead" aspects when it comes to Eldritch Horror, it's when the writers decide they need to explain everything that it goes from being "Eldritch Horror" to "Horror, maybe". The best example I can think of in recent times that best encapsulates this is Mass Effect. Honestly, as much as I hate lazy cosmic horror, I'll take it over "Lazy New Battlestar Galactica"
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 18:10
|
|
|
I don't think there's anything deeply wrong or bad about doing lazy fight Cthulhu stuff. It certainly doesn't even register on the scale of Blizzard's many wrongs. I just think it also rarely really lands well, and it's interesting to examine the many reasons why. Like the Old Gods aren't nearly the stupidest of Warcraft lore and are at least not reprehensible (as far as I know), but I can't think of all that many people who found them all that memorable as villains (though some of the mechanical content was good). Well, and I suppose people who played competitive Hearthstone through the Yogg-Saron meta might have experienced some horror.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 19:24
|
|
|
Oh, did someone say Yogg-Saron? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF4POd06Kwg
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 20:23
|
|
|
The only old god I had a problem with was N’zoth, who was supposed to have masterminded a lot of stuff starting in Legion, was actively feared for his mind and corrupting ability more than his power, and was supposedly freed And then we just went into his house and beat him up instead of engaging with him on a manipulative level or outplanning him or even tricking him We just got in there, smashed him, and then extra special smashed him The problem isn’t that old gods can’t work in WoW, the problem is that the writers can’t write a story capable of justifying the end solution always being “kill the raid boss” regardless of the type of threat in play
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 21:23
|
|
|
Jen X posted:The only old god I had a problem with was N’zoth, who was supposed to have masterminded a lot of stuff starting in Legion, was actively feared for his mind and corrupting ability more than his power, and was supposedly freed I mean, N'zoth did a lot of planning and corrupting and hosed up a lot of our plans. But N'zoth was always the weakest of the 4 OGs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 21:33
|
|
|
The main problem with N'zoth is that most of BfA was spent on the faction war plot, the main selling point of the expansion, until the final patch where he was suddenly the final boss. He really just didn't get much time to actually do anything. I do remember one quest where you do the typical "fly over an area dropping bombs on enemies" quests only for the ending to reveal it was an Old God illusion and you were actually dropping bombs on your own allies. That was neat, wish they did more stuff like that where you just couldn't trust your own eyes.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 00:46
|
|
|
Rhonne posted:The main problem with N'zoth is that most of BfA was spent on the faction war plot, the main selling point of the expansion, until the final patch where he was suddenly the final boss. He really just didn't get much time to actually do anything. I do remember one quest where you do the typical "fly over an area dropping bombs on enemies" quests only for the ending to reveal it was an Old God illusion and you were actually dropping bombs on your own allies. That was neat, wish they did more stuff like that where you just couldn't trust your own eyes. Once again, they could have made it its own expansion, like ended BfA with Nagaland patch and save N'zoth for another expansion pack.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 01:21
|
|
|
Ultiville posted:I don't think there's anything deeply wrong or bad about doing lazy fight Cthulhu stuff. It certainly doesn't even register on the scale of Blizzard's many wrongs. I just think it also rarely really lands well, and it's interesting to examine the many reasons why. I will say that the original build up of Ahn-Qiraj and C'thun (before the raid itself was introduced) was well paced if you were leveling in Kalimdor. If you paid attention to the environment, you notice a gradual build-up of the Silithids as a threat. The stuff to actually unlock the raid is one of those ideas that sounds neat on paper but in practice is best run on a small MUD rather than a game with thousands of simultaneous players per server.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 03:24
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:I will say that the original build up of Ahn-Qiraj and C'thun (before the raid itself was introduced) was well paced if you were leveling in Kalimdor. If you paid attention to the environment, you notice a gradual build-up of the Silithids as a threat. Yeah your first introduction was as a level 10-15 baby character in The Barrens and they were just weird insect slugs making towers (that would merk you hard if you pulled more than one at a time). Then each zone further south the hives would be a little bigger and the insects a little stronger. I think Thousand Needles is the first time you find a hive you can go inside and it is crawling with bugs that respawn really quickly. Then you get to Tanaris and the desert has three huge hives that look like they are alive. Ung'oro crater has some big hives hidden under the surface and then finally you get to Silithus and the hives move and there are bugs everywhere. It was a cool build up that the NPCs didn't really talk about that much until the threat became real. One of the few times the game really did a 'Show don't tell'. Pretty certain Silithus was added after release as well, I am sure I remember the zone getting added in a patch.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 04:00
|
|
|
Phrosphor posted:Pretty certain Silithus was added after release as well, I am sure I remember the zone getting added in a patch. I do know that the original WoW Atlas has a map of Silithus that is very much truncated compared to the later versions (the southern edge of the map is at the Gates).
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 05:21
|
|
|
The thing the original vanilla World of Warcraft did that I really adored, which was abandoned with the first expansion at the latest, and with the final few patches of it at the earliest, was that it was in terms of narrative, kind of a sandbox. Yeah, you had the Lich King out there as the big bad but without spoilers or getting ahead, he seemed to be busy with stuff, likewise for the Burning Legion. It was just kind of smaller stakes adventuring. It felt like you were really in the world of Warcraft, rather than playing another guided narrative with a single final boss/main antagonist to defeat.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 05:47
|
|
|
Warcraft 3 was one of my earliest video games, I think I was 9 or something when I first played it. Definitively my first RTS. My English was pretty limited at the time, but I got the gist of the plot. So yeah, while I have learned something about the preceeding games through osmosis, actually seeing what they have to offer sounds extremely worthy of my attention. Also the WOW lore that appeared after I stopped playing it. I fell off after Burning Crusade, never got a character above lvl 40-45. Quackles posted:So you're saying WoW is MMO Pokémon Reborn? Wait, does that make FF14 MMO Pokemon Rejuvenation?  Jokes aside I enjoy Rejuvenation but saying it is on the level off FF14 is a stretch, but when you mentioned it I realized some funny parallels.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 06:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 00:22 |
|
|
Yeah, you got a sense of being a bit player in a larger world, but at the time, that worked well enough for what WoW was trying to be. The problems started when they decided to start making the PC a major shaker in world events… while also still keeping them as a bit character whose most significant accomplishments were claimed by major NPCs.
|
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2022 07:06
|
|