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For better or for worse, sounds like Warcraft is Blizzard's least controversial major IP right now (which is admittedly a pretty low bar to clear). Not enough to get me to play it again though.
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May 22, 2023 13:43
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Cythereal posted:As for talk of content in Dragonflight, I'll discuss what odds and ends I hear about it, and I may do some research when I finally cover the last dragonflight in WC3 and move into dragon miscellanea, but don't expect anything consistent or in-depth on that front. Right now the second season focuses heavily on deathwing and the black dragonflight so I might bring some things up then.
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May 22, 2023 15:00
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I remember liking the Tuskarr way back when I played Wraith of the Leech King, and once you befriend them you could buy a cute little pet penguin to follow you around. 
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May 22, 2023 16:54
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ApplesandOranges posted:For better or for worse, sounds like Warcraft is Blizzard's least controversial major IP right now (which is admittedly a pretty low bar to clear). Not enough to get me to play it again though. Anything happened in Starcraft lately? (Is going about Blizzard outside of WC close enough for this thread, or should we stop?)
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May 22, 2023 17:02
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Gun Jam posted:(Is going about Blizzard outside of WC close enough for this thread, or should we stop?) Please stick to Warcraft. If anyone wants to talk about what Blizzard's loving up at any given moment that isn't specifically about Warcraft, there's a thread for that.
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May 22, 2023 18:06
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Poil posted:I remember liking the Tuskarr way back when I played Wraith of the Leech King, and once you befriend them you could buy a cute little pet penguin to follow you around. Tuskarr remain good, and you can go surfing off a tuskarr boat in dragonflight.
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May 22, 2023 18:17
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Cythereal posted:Please stick to Warcraft. If anyone wants to talk about what Blizzard's loving up at any given moment that isn't specifically about Warcraft, there's a thread for that. Please do not encourage your readers to self harm,
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May 22, 2023 18:41
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Currently playing Starcraft 2 and while it has absolutely atrocious story and dialogues, at least every mission feels different from other. Hopefully playing Warcraft 3 will be at least a little bit more pleasant for you.
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May 23, 2023 22:42
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Szarrukin posted:Currently playing Starcraft 2 and while it has absolutely atrocious story and dialogues, at least every mission feels different from other. Hopefully playing Warcraft 3 will be at least a little bit more pleasant for you. When I write up my feelings about Warcraft 2 at large when I'm finished with this leg of the LP, I suspect I'll say something to the effect of feeling that this game is just old and simply doesn't have the depth, variety, or smart enough scripting to sustain 52 missions (28 in Tides of Darkness, 24 in Beyond the Dark Portal) unless you're really, really into this game. We'll see what T-Day holds. Haven't played that game in twenty years.
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May 23, 2023 23:09
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Also, for those wondering, there's just 4 missions left in Warcraft 2. 14 missions per side in Tides of Darkness, 12 per side in Beyond the Dark Portal. Right now my plan is for one week with just an inter script post covering my overall thoughts about 2, then plowing straight into Warcraft 3 the following week. I have nothing quick and fun on hand to LP like I did Abzu, so my plan is to continue at full speed until this project's done.
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May 25, 2023 02:38
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At least Warcraft 3 should be a breath of fresh air at that point.
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May 25, 2023 02:49
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PurpleXVI posted:At least Warcraft 3 should be a breath of fresh air at that point. This, W3 missions are easier, shorter and more innovative than "kill all enemy units and buildings".
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May 25, 2023 12:57
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Szarrukin posted:This, W3 missions are easier, shorter and more innovative than "kill all enemy units and buildings". 'Kill all non-enemy units and buildings' 
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May 25, 2023 13:17
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Szarrukin posted:This, W3 missions are easier, shorter and more innovative than "kill all enemy units and buildings". Oh don't worry, Reign of Chaos has plenty of those too. At least it's not extremely difficult on top of that.
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May 25, 2023 13:22
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Despite making possibly questionable decisions with my disposable income last night, I'm hoping to not have any delays in the update schedule. Much as I harp on about wanting to play good guys, there is at times something satisfying about just playing a bunch of hammy, over-the-top villains.
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May 26, 2023 12:25
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Rhonne posted:There's also a quest involving a Tuskarr kid who just lost one of his parents in a gnoll raid trying to prove he's strong by defeating a fierce yeti. We scout ahead to keep the kid from getting himself hurt, only to find that the yeti is a peaceful creature who only wants to be left alone with his pet otters. We convince the giant to let the kid "defeat" him to give him a boost of confidence. It's really cute. There was/is indeed, it's a repeatable rep grind quest from the Tuskarr settlement in the Dragonwastes or whatever that place with the big dragon tower is called. It was you running into a forest to rescue cubs and bringing them to the Tuskarr.
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May 26, 2023 20:50
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Horde 11: Days of Fire So, we're hitting the point where the canonical order of events starts to get very hazy.  Notably, the Dark Portal on both ends seems to have been contested throughout the campaign. Characters on both sides were able to travel between worlds throughout.  Today we return to Cross Island for the final time, a location never to be seen again in any future depiction of Dalaran.  Let's get to it.  It's time for the final appearance of the snow map in WC2.  I'm attacked immediately by a Lordaeron fleet. My first attempt at this, I flat out lost the game within the first sixty seconds because I lost all my transports.  Cheats in play, this bay is ringed by Lordaeron defenses and naval facilities.  Aside from the opening naval attack, Lordaeron's main job in this map is to harass me with gryphons.  There's no particularly convenient gold mines, I'll take this one but it poses its own problems.  I sighed when I realized it was a base building mission from scratch and I have two peons and a load of troops. Of course if I wasn't cheating I wouldn't have as much supply locked up.  The terrain here is pretty cramped. I'm forced to place my hall a fair bit away from the mine in order to avoid blocking the way for peons.  Lordaeron has buildings littering the western side of the map, but seems to be entirely passive aside from the gryphons.  A stone wall divides the map cleanly in two. Lordaeron to the west, Dalaran to the east.  An alternative base site lies directly south of the first.  This is the first time in the map I accidentally block in a peon while building. It won't be the last.  Aside from Lordaeron's air force, this base will be the source of all the attacks throughout the mission.  The goal is in the northeast corner.  Cross Island is looking much smaller than it was in Tides of Darkness.  After about ten minutes, Dalaran will start to attack relentlessly. Curiously, none of these attacks include mages.  Sigh.  You know by now how I handle these things.  Cleaning out Lordaeron is optional, but I elect to do so anyway.  Dalaran's mages are weirdly passive throughout the map. They never cast any spells, even their basic attack.  Just as well, my dragons are dangerous enough to each other as it is.  For all their faults, dragons are still flying units that can attack both ground and air.  It's a very rote affair at this point.  I'm not sure how you'd deal with this if not with dragons. Maybe death knights with death and decay?  This assault would be terrifying if the mages did anything.  I'm kind of sad that this design for wizard towers, a mountainous altar before a great orb of power, will go away after WC2 in favor of something more boringly generic.  But that's the Alliance in Warcraft for you. All the interesting bits are drowned in a sea of mayonnaise.
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May 28, 2023 12:03
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Minor Race Compendium: Part Three The Ethereals were once a race of flesh and blood humanoids native to the planet K'aresh, highly advanced in both technology and magic. About a thousand years before the First War, K'aresh was assaulted by a Void Lord, the masters of the Old Gods known to Azeroth, and a host of void beings. Whether the Void Lord was drawn by the Ethereals' experiments in dimensional travel or simply attacked for reasons of its own is unknown, but the cataclysmic war that engulfed K'aresh forced the Ethereals to extraordinary lengths to survive, culminating in entirely abandoning their bodies of flesh to exist as incorporeal energy beings. While this transformation radically enhanced the Ethereals' affinity for magic, it was not enough to stem the tide and the Ethereals were ultimately forced to flee K'aresh and scatter across the cosmos as explorers, traders, thieves, and raiders eking out a nomadic existence. Azerothians came into contact with the Ethereals on Draenor in the years after the Second War, finding mutually beneficial arrangements with some bands and coming into violent conflict with others. The former deals lead to small numbers of Ethereals coming to Azeroth, where the Alliance and Horde both hired Ethereals for their expertise with magic and technology. Ethereals seem to have Arabic inspirations, at least going by the names, and they generally play the part of shifty but charming traders from afar who deal in exotic treasures. They're another very popular request to be made playable.  The They're Steve Danuser's favorite mouthpiece when he wants to taunt the viewer with how much he knows about Warcraft's cosmos that he won't tell you.  The Sethrak are a race of humanoid serpents native to the deserts of Zandalar, and have dwelled there since before a magical cataclysm turned what was once a verdant jungle into the blasted wasteland it is today. The Sethrak, believing themselves charged by their serpent loa to defend the land, endured and continued to thrive where other races abandoned the region - this is where the Vulpera are from, but it's unclear if they're actually native to the region or came along later. Religious devotion to their goddess of sky and storm continued to define the Sethrak ever since, and they're remarkably talented at the magics of wind and lightning. In general the Sethrak seem to have vaguely Mesopotamian stylings in their names and architecture, and Dragonflight has introduced a suggestion that the Sethrak might in fact be devolved Titan constructs, after introducing a new type of Titan servitor who are strikingly similar to the Sethrak in looks and use the same animations. As far as requests to be made playable go, the Sethrak are a bit of an odd duck because they're popular with both sides. For a long time in Battle for Azeroth, they were assumed to be a future Alliance race opposite the correctly presumed Horde gaining the Vulpera. The Alliance, you see, never encountered a new race in that expansion that were friendly to them except for a handful of Sethrak. The Sethrak in general were neutral to both sides, and became a flashpoint between fans of the two sides over whether the Sethrak should join the Alliance, Horde, or both. Instead the Alliance got the apocalypse cult of cyborg amputee fetish diaper gnomes and the Sethrak remain non-playable at the time of writing.  Yet another race native to Zandalar, the Tortollans are a race of turtle people who prize knowledge as the highest virtue in life. Tortollans can live for thousands of years and have wandered the breadth of Azeroth studying and learning, and somehow managing to strike every known race on the planet as friendly and harmless except for the naga. With their intense cultural devotion to learning and collecting magic artifacts, on the very rare occasions that Tortollans have been forced to fight, they've more than held their own. And yet, the Tortollans have nevertheless been virtually irrelevant to Azeroth's history. Knowledgeable and individually skilled bystanders to history, but bystanders all the same. Though friendly to both the Alliance and the Horde, the general view from the WoW player base on the Tortollans tends to range from apathy to loathing, probably owing to some of the world quests in Battle for Azeroth involving the Tortollans being infamously buggy and/or tedious.  The Saurok are not a naturally occurring race on Azeroth. During the height of the Mogu Empire in Pandaria, some Mogu had turned their skill with blood magic to the goal of altering the Mogu's subject races into more pliant forms suitable as slaves for whatever purpose they desired - we'll talk about the big result of this project in Warcraft 3. Other flesh-shapers had a different idea, and sought to create a semi-sentient slave race from base animals. Using the various reptiles native to Pandaria as base organisms, these flesh-shapers created a race of humanoid reptiles known as the Saurok. Things went wrong from the very start. The Saurok proved to fully self-aware and intelligent beings, and the Mogu's own culture of strength and brutality bled down into the Saurok, who resented their status as slaves. The ensuing attempt at purging the Saurok failed: the Saurok were intelligent, adept with magic, and expert guerrilla fighters, and after one Mogu emperor was assassinated in his command tent by Saurok, the Mogu abandoned their efforts to exterminate their creations. The Saurok have been an aggressive and predatory presence in the wildlands of Pandaria ever since, never developing beyond the tribal level but remaining extraordinarily skilled at killing and destroying, just as their makers intended. While all Saurok encountered in WoW are seemingly male, Hearthstone's artists took it upon themselves to make Saurok women with giant honkers. Hopefully they'll stay contained in that dead-end game.
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May 28, 2023 12:04
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Cythereal posted:While all Saurok encountered in WoW are seemingly male, Hearthstone's artists took it upon themselves to make Saurok women with giant honkers. Hopefully they'll stay contained in that dead-end game. lmao, that's an extremely Blizzard decision. That aside, the Sethrak are cool, I like snake people. Having both the Ethereals and the Brokers seems... one of my personal pet peeves with settings is when someone didn't know when to stop adding things, and you get all these overlapping ideas that drain rather than complement each other. Fewer, stronger concepts is always better than a ton of weak ones.
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May 28, 2023 12:15
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Tortollans look super cute. I'm glad they're not playable, keeping them out of the dangerous hands of the average WoW player.
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May 28, 2023 12:34
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PurpleXVI posted:
I dunno, man, IRL there is a lot of cultural overlap. Many ideas that develop independently in cultures far apart, but that have similar environments.
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May 28, 2023 12:34
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And for what it's worth, the Brokers are Shadowlands natives???? of a sort. It's not entirely clear, but their city is in the Shadowlands, they populate it, they leave only to pick up trade goods and otherwise spend all their lives in it. If I'm being honest, I suspect they're an afterlife for merchantile people, since we have an example of an afterlife for inventors.
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May 28, 2023 13:17
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PurpleXVI posted:Having both the Ethereals and the Brokers seems... one of my personal pet peeves with settings is when someone didn't know when to stop adding things, and you get all these overlapping ideas that drain rather than complement each other. Fewer, stronger concepts is always better than a ton of weak ones. Warcraft suffers from this in general, I think. They have absolutely no restraint about adding yet another set of intelligent people to any given environment, either to have them set up a dungeon or provide a faction neutral quest hub.
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May 28, 2023 13:32
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Tenebrais posted:Warcraft suffers from this in general, I think. They have absolutely no restraint about adding yet another set of intelligent people to any given environment, either to have them set up a dungeon or provide a faction neutral quest hub. The new race in the current expansion is an example of this, subterranean dwellers with nice hats, at least they are interesting, and well designed
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May 28, 2023 14:53
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Cythereal posted:I'm kind of sad that this design for wizard towers, a mountainous altar before a great orb of power, will go away after WC2 in favor of something more boringly generic. Just wanted to say that this was an absolutely fantastic turn of phrase.
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May 28, 2023 18:14
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Cythereal posted:
Look, I just must know. Did another turtle make it to the water?
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May 28, 2023 20:21
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Explopyro posted:Just wanted to say that this was an absolutely fantastic turn of phrase. Not even the good kinda mayo (the homemade type), but just costco-brand mayo.
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May 28, 2023 20:37
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Personally I'm actually totally fine with the Tortollans as characters. When they're just a character in the story they're great. They bicker, they're a bit senile, but then they pull some utterly weird and ancient knowledge out of their shell or show that they actually can fight (likely because some jerk interrupted their bickering party). They appreciate telling and hearing good stories. Oh and they despise the Naga.Kerzoro posted:Look, I just must know. This is the part I have issues with. That daily worldquest...which became two worldquests. 
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May 28, 2023 21:31
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The Brokers are just kind of an extension of the weird decision they made in Shadowlands to go 'ok, we're gonna introduce a higher tier of powers in the universe that are... pretty much exactly the same as the existing powers, only interdimensional instead of cosmic.'
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May 28, 2023 22:36
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Cythereal posted:Instead the Alliance got the apocalypse cult of cyborg amputee fetish diaper gnomes That sure is a sentence.
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May 29, 2023 00:07
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The playable species in Warcraft 4 should be Ethereals, Arakkoa and Tuskarr.
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May 29, 2023 00:09
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wologar posted:That sure is a sentence. I'm not joking.
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May 29, 2023 00:21
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I personally was REALLY hoping that the alliance would get the Sneeple (Sethrak), with mechagnomes just being like a gnome skin or something.
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May 29, 2023 01:25
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The Alliance had every single factional mount be a recolored horse at the start of the expansion that brought everyone the metal diaper gnomes. It wasn’t a great time for anyone on the faction, design wise.
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May 29, 2023 01:38
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Is Gnomeregan still an irradiated hellhole or has there been any effort at all to reclaim it?
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May 29, 2023 01:42
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Jen X posted:The Alliance had every single factional mount be a recolored horse at the start of the expansion that brought everyone the metal diaper gnomes. It wasn’t a great time for anyone on the faction, design wise. Counterpoint: Kul Tiran humans have some SICK designs. Especially their druids. Dirk the Average posted:Is Gnomeregan still an irradiated hellhole or has there been any effort at all to reclaim it? Yes
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May 29, 2023 01:43
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My favorite part about that stupidity was that at that point WoW had had an actual race of fully mechanical gnomes that were fairly popular and had been around for god knows how long since Wrath(I think?). But uh, I guess the people running things really wanted to prove they could do it better? Or something? Like, I'm trying really hard to come up with any explanation other than raw spite brought on by customer interaction, but somebody at Blizzard had to actually believe this was a good idea.
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May 29, 2023 05:05
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FoolyCharged posted:My favorite part about that stupidity was that at that point WoW had had an actual race of fully mechanical gnomes that were fairly popular and had been around for god knows how long since Wrath(I think?). I think they just don't want to make a fully mechanical race for whatever reason. The original mechagnomes were titan constructs programed to serve them and the only ones that ever developed free will are the ones that succumbed to the Curse of Flesh and became gnomes. A big part of the allied race mechagnome story is not giving up your humanity(gnomanity?) in the pursuit of mechanical enhancements, except that is exactly what players wanted from them. A better version of the playable mechagnomes would have to come up with a reason for them to be robots while still having free will. Like say, there was a plague or something sweeping through Mechagon and the only way to save the people living there was to use magic and science to create robot bodies to house the souls of all the gnomes living there.
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May 29, 2023 05:41
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My original thought was they probably didn't think they could give many customization options for mechanical, but then you look at kul tiran versus, say, the scalies
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May 29, 2023 06:05
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Rhonne posted:A better version of the playable mechagnomes would have to come up with a reason for them to be robots while still having free will. Like say, there was a plague or something sweeping through Mechagon and the only way to save the people living there was to use magic and science to create robot bodies to house the souls of all the gnomes living there. I mean, hell, have the justification be that using a fully robotic body allows them to survive the radiation in Gnomeregan and that they are volunteers who underwent the robotification process to clean up the city. Have their starting zone storyline be to clean up the city, and once that's done, they're now free to go out and do whatever else they want to.
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May 29, 2023 06:52
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