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Siegkrow posted:Counterpoint: Kul Tirans were not badly designed, Blizzard at least heard the call of the fans for "big beefy humans that punch good." and threw in on that "oh and their druid shapes have sick as hell designs that make them into trees... except tree form, you are just a tree still sorry."
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May 29, 2023 11:18
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Kul Tirans are impressive in that they make me want to play a human in a MMO full of 'non-human fantasy race' options. Y'know, if I ever tried the game again.
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May 29, 2023 12:16
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I watched a video of a youtuber finishing this mission by getting his forces to the east side of the map and taking over that base. No idea if it's the best option. The mages weren't quite as passive but I strongly suspect the terrible AI pathing can't actually get the mages out of the tower spiral thing. Same problem as every single freaking map with too many gryphons and dragons of course. Sure you could build and try and micro ogre mages or you could just use dragons that can't even be hit by most enemies. Paladins, ballistae and cannon towers (the biggest threat to ground I think) can't do anything other than get roasted.Dirk the Average posted: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 13:06
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If I had to guess, someone at Blizzard has a bug up their rear end about not wanting to get rid of the Gnomeregan dungeon despite any of the handwaves they could use and despite no one liking that dungeon, ever, in the twenty year history of WoW. Battle for Azeroth was a bleak time to be an Alliance fan in general. I would at least have respected Blizzard a little if there were any noteworthy Kul Tirans who used the new heavyset model instead of the one notable leader in Kul Tiras with the model being a villain. I get that they felt compelled to keep Jaina in her middle aged waifu model since she'd never once been depicted (officially) as a seven foot tall muscle lady, but you'd really think any of the big name Kul Tiran characters would, you know, actually use the Kul Tiran racial model.
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May 29, 2023 13:28
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They've revamped better and more liked dungeons before, there's no real reason not to do Gnomeregan. (Although if I had a wishlist for dungeon revamp, the top three on the list would be Maraudon, followed by fixing Stratholme so the the service entrance works again, with Gnomeregan only managing to get number 5).
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May 29, 2023 14:13
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It makes sense for the nobility if you think of the Kul Tiran nobility being Arathi offshoots who preserved their "blood purity", in contrast to the commoners who interbred with the Drust and became big. But why none of the important non-nobles are big is inexplicable. Why not have a big Flynn Fairwind? It really makes no sense that the only notable big Kul Tiran is a villain.
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May 29, 2023 14:13
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Dragonflight is every bit the magical fantasy adventure that made playing Vanilla, Wrath and Pandaria so good. I love it. Also the new mole people are my friends.
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May 29, 2023 14:52
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Gridlocked posted:Dragonflight is every bit the magical fantasy adventure that made playing Vanilla, Wrath and Pandaria so good. I love it. Until and unless they undo the genocide of the elves I don't give a gently caress whatever happy-go-lucky adventures Blizzard is writing everyone having as they skip and hop over the graves of thousands.
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May 29, 2023 15:07
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Gridlocked posted:Dragonflight is every bit the magical fantasy adventure that made playing Vanilla, Wrath and Pandaria so good. I love it. I need the mole people's hats
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May 29, 2023 15:45
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Cythereal posted:If I had to guess, someone at Blizzard has a bug up their rear end about not wanting to get rid of the Gnomeregan dungeon despite any of the handwaves they could use and despite no one liking that dungeon, ever, in the twenty year history of WoW. I dunno, it's not like they haven't literally written themselves an out about turning it into a proper city and keeping the dungeon as is even. Oh look, a helpful bronze dragon will take you back and let you relive the initial adventurer raids that helped jump start the reclamation!
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May 29, 2023 15:49
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FoolyCharged posted:I dunno, it's not like they haven't literally written themselves an out about turning it into a proper city and keeping the dungeon as is even. Oh look, a helpful bronze dragon will take you back and let you relive the initial adventurer raids that helped jump start the reclamation! Heck, lets keep going underground in the next expac, half rebuilt gnomeragon as the hub with a new megadungeon to clear out some nastier things left, another blackrock thing with dark iron dwarves, maybe they are having a civil war or something happening there, make it a zone you get to via underground drill tram. Strange occurences in Ahn Qiraji that need to be investigated, turn the raid there into a full zone for exploring the area post you know "giant stab wound" in fact due uldir as a zone as well in northrend, again just use dragonflying stuff/drill tram to get to the underground places. Underground zone with mogu/etc in Pandaria as well. There thats a hub + 4 zones, 5 if they put in exploration stuff in gnomeragon as well, for an expac where you can be a proper goon and never leave the basement. Add more mole people doing mole things in the new zone and being fun. Boom, probably something that would be more interesting that bfa or SL and not even pulling whole new lore and plot lines out of the air when you can just update old plot lines and expand on things people might enjoy. Bonus: PVP area, underground train heist, one side defends, other side robs.
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May 29, 2023 15:57
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You know, i wonder if physical size is what determines leadership-- all of the leaders are like 50% larger than regular npcs ^ Unreal Tournament train level
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May 29, 2023 17:00
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:You know, i wonder if physical size is what determines leadership-- all of the leaders are like 50% larger than regular npcs
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May 29, 2023 17:13
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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?).  ", it's definitely spite.
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May 29, 2023 17:26
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:You know, i wonder if physical size is what determines leadership-- all of the leaders are like 50% larger than regular npcs Physical size just determines if you potentially drop purple loot, dropping purple loot is the true sign of leadership
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May 29, 2023 17:43
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The truth is, I actually did play Dragonflight on this three-day weekend in the US. Blizzard was giving out 7 days of free game time for anyone who hadn't bought Dragonflight yet, including limited access to Dragonflight's opening zone and being able to make and play a dracthyr. Mainly I was taking screenshots for a few things for the WC3 part of the LP, but I also felt compelled to give it a shot and see if I was satisfied by what Blizzard is doing. I am not satisfied. What I wanted was an exploration of the story of the night elves, following the genocide of their people, Shadowlands' revelations about their goddess, and the struggles of the survivors, described in Blizzard's own short story as being too few in number to continue their civilization. Failing that I would have accepted an enraged and victorious Alliance burning the Horde to the ground to prevent something like Southshore or Gilneas or Theramore or Teldrassil from ever happening again. Instead I got cotton candy fluff where everyone acts like things are hunky-dory despite the tens of thousands of people one side murdered over the last ten years, and Blizzard's writers going "See! We put gay people in the game! Do you like us now?" My conclusion is that I would have wanted this expansion, once. Multiple expansions ago. Making this the sequel to Warlords of Draenor would have been nice. But as it stands, with Blizzard so evidently unwilling to deal with the flock of chickens that returned to Irvine and are now making GBS threads on everything from their roosts, I only feel insulted and angered. You wrote yourselves into this hole, Blizzard. Whether you get out of it, dig yourselves deeper, or just play in the mud and slap a rainbow sticker on it and ask if I'll pay money for it, is up to you. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 19:40 on May 29, 2023 |
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May 29, 2023 18:45
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Huh, I didn't get that free time offer, but I haven't signed into Battle.net for absolutely years, so that might be it. I do remember getting an email ages ago for some free game time for Cataclysm, but that was uhhh what, four expansions ago?
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May 29, 2023 19:26
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ApplesandOranges posted:Huh, I didn't get that free time offer, but I haven't signed into Battle.net for absolutely years, so that might be it. I think you just need to login to use it.
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May 29, 2023 19:29
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Cythereal posted:What I wanted was an exploration of the story of the night elves, following the genocide of their people, Shadowlands' revelations about their goddess, and the struggles of the survivors, described in Blizzard's own short story as being too few in number to continue their civilization.
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May 29, 2023 19:35
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Asehujiko posted:I don't know what you were expecting here, DF's entire premise is that all the terrible ideas from BFA and SL are getting memory holed in favour of Pandaria 2.0 and that's exactly what you got? I was expecting a load of poo poo, and that's what I got. I do silly things like get hopeful sometimes.
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May 29, 2023 19:40
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Cythereal posted:
While I would like to see what's basically 40k Eldar in Azeroth written by competent people, Blizzard has shown us many times that while they certainly do not lack in willingness to do dark and serious story, they definitely aren't capable to do it without failing miserably. (Arthas storyline before WoW was an accident). Cythereal posted:Failing that I would have accepted an enraged and victorious Alliance burning the Horde to the ground to prevent something like Southshore or Theramore or Teldrassil from ever happening again. Just do a full reset and give us World of Warcraft 2. Preferably cutting out everything after WOTLK out of canon.
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May 29, 2023 19:48
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Szarrukin posted:Just do a full reset and give us World of Warcraft 2. Preferably cutting out everything after WOTLK out of canon. I know this isn't a Blizzard thread, but after Ovevrwatch 2, I wouldn't trust them with that, either.
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May 29, 2023 20:16
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Cythereal posted:The truth is, I actually did play Dragonflight on this three-day weekend in the US. Blizzard was giving out 7 days of free game time for anyone who hadn't bought Dragonflight yet, including limited access to Dragonflight's opening zone and being able to make and play a dracthyr. More faction war? No thanks, I'll take a saccharine story over more "put the WAR back in WARcraft" every day. And Blizz are addressing the Night Elves, just not in a way you find satisfying. They planted the seed that Tyrande got in Ardenweald, and common speculation is that it will sprout into a full tree in either the 10.2 or 10.3 patches, complete with a raid. And honestly, even as a big night elf fanboy, night elves got more "screentime" than basically any other race recently. They were a focus in Legion, BfA and Shadowlands, in the latter being basically the only Azerothian race that got any real story. And now Tyrande and the night elves will get another big role in the plot. Imho, Blizzard did dig them out of the hole. And the general reception of the playerbase suggest that a lot of players think that, too. With the introduction of full cross faction guilds, I don't think we'll ever have this kind of full out war between the Horde and the Alliance again. That conflict is over, and Sylvanas was imho suitably punished for burning down Teldrassil. There's no use dwelling on the past, and the Night Elves will most likely get a proper restoration in Dragonflight. Meanwhile, the actual systems in Dragonflight are mostly good, dragon riding is genuinely amazing, and the patch cadence is great. Dragonflight is a big success in my eyes. And right now, no instance of Blizzard saying "See! We put gay people in the game! Do you like us now?" comes to mind for me.
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May 29, 2023 20:26
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Torrannor posted:More faction war? No thanks, I'll take a saccharine story over more "put the WAR back in WARcraft" every day. And Blizz are addressing the Night Elves, just not in a way you find satisfying. They planted the seed that Tyrande got in Ardenweald, and common speculation is that it will sprout into a full tree in either the 10.2 or 10.3 patches, complete with a raid. And honestly, even as a big night elf fanboy, night elves got more "screentime" than basically any other race recently. They were a focus in Legion, BfA and Shadowlands, in the latter being basically the only Azerothian race that got any real story. And now Tyrande and the night elves will get another big role in the plot. Blizzard shouldn't have written the Horde committing genocide, then. The tree was not important. The people living there were. quote:Imho, Blizzard did dig them out of the hole. And the general reception of the playerbase suggest that a lot of players think that, too. With the introduction of full cross faction guilds, I don't think we'll ever have this kind of full out war between the Horde and the Alliance again. That conflict is over, and Sylvanas was imho suitably punished for burning down Teldrassil. There's no use dwelling on the past, and the Night Elves will most likely get a proper restoration in Dragonflight. Blizzard shouldn't have written the Horde committing genocide, then. quote:Meanwhile, the actual systems in Dragonflight are mostly good, dragon riding is genuinely amazing, and the patch cadence is great. Dragonflight is a big success in my eyes. None of these things matter to me. You see, this is the problem with choosing to write the genocide of a major, playable race into your story. Either you chicken out and dismiss genocide as narratively not a big deal, or you commit to dealing with it for the rest of the story's run. Blizzard's made their choice, just as they chose to go ahead with that story in the first place seven years ago, and I have zero sympathy for the issues Blizzard has had with it since. They chose to put that in the game, and that's their lookout.
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May 29, 2023 20:35
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Cythereal posted:Failing that I would have accepted an enraged and victorious Alliance burning the Horde to the ground to prevent something like Southshore or Gilneas or Theramore or Teldrassil from ever happening again. Not the first time that "we can't have the alliance use their victorious position to start dictating terms" happen. Problem is, the whole alliance/horde system - can't have something too big to change that, even if the narrative demands it (two more problems - one, it's not supposed to be team goodies and team baddies [and failing at that], and two - the lines are based on ethnic basis, but it's unrelated to this issue). But they have that system for almost twenty years - kinda hard to change your core ideas at this stage, even if it turns out to be problematic and containing. What should be done about it? Dunno, this is a question for the more invested crowd. But NOT having events that highlight this issue is a start. in other words: Cythereal posted:Blizzard shouldn't have written the Horde committing genocide, then.
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May 29, 2023 20:57
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Gun Jam posted:Problem is, the whole alliance/horde system - can't have something too big to change that, even if the narrative demands it (two more problems - one, it's not supposed to be team goodies and team baddies [and failing at that], and two - the lines are based on ethnic basis, but it's unrelated to this issue). I mean the problem is that they did kind of make it Team Warcrimes and Team Not Warcrimes. So they hosed up the whole concept of not being Team Good and Team Evil entirely.
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May 29, 2023 21:08
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They're just gonna have Tyrande do a bunch of warcrimes now to balance things out
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May 29, 2023 21:15
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The seed they got from Shadowlands was empowered by the souls of the dead night elves, so there's a non-zero chance they'll all just come back to life(maybe as yet another new flavor of elf) when it grows.
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May 29, 2023 21:19
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Those who didn't become Mawsworn in a desperate bid to make the pain stop. And weren't consumed as fuel. And aren't completely insane from an unknown length of time in turbo-hell. If they even do come back to life. I don't really care what Blizzard does with it unless they have the courage to admit that this whole goddamn thing was a mistake and take a mulligan. I think most WoW players would be ready at this point to accept Blizzard using a retcon to eliminate the War of Thorns. They've never hesitated to retcon things people actually liked.
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May 29, 2023 21:25
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I think Blizzard just continually underestimates the gravitas of their own plot beats. There's a real vibe that the current writer's room just thinks of WoW as this dumb dragon game where you mash action figures together and nothing matters, which leads to having one side do a genocide just for some cheap heat going into the next expansion. Like I 100% believe they never planned on any of the BfA fallout lasting past the next expansion, if Shadowlands hadn't been so poorly received we'd probably be in All Cosmic All The Time mode. e: That being said I'm kind of fine with them memory-holing it. They don't have the depth on the bench to do a story like reconciling after a genocide justice anyway, so why even fuckin' bother. The stakes of dragonflight are the stakes they can handle.
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May 29, 2023 21:30
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They also made the mistake of thinking 'man, things like the march on the Sunwell was iconic in WC3! What if we did that... but in real time and made the players work for it?' was a good idea when the perspective is pretty different in WoW compared to a top-down RTS.
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May 29, 2023 22:26
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Yes, the answer to the night elf genocide is an equal and opposite genocide on the horde! (Also, hot take but genocide in a fictional setting as a plot device is fine so long as the setting remains fictional)
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May 29, 2023 23:13
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If you, as a writer, want to write about serious and heavy topics like genocide, fine. That's your choice as a writer. You do not get to follow up a story about genocide with 'And then everyone got ice cream!' and expect everyone to just go with it. It's narratively dishonest, emotionally cheap, and makes light of a profoundly awful thing. People always go 'No more faction war! We don't want another expansion about that!' after an expansion or two about that, and by funny coincidence every single one of those faction war expansions has prominently featured Horde atrocities against Alliance cities and towns like Southshore, Theramore, and Teldrassil. Sometimes against random non-Alliance places like Gilneas. The cries of 'No more WAR in WARcraft' without fail come on the heels of the Horde's war crimes being handwashed away as the fault of a few bad actors at the top and the Alliance being told that they need to be the bigger people and choose renewal over vengeance, that THIS time will be the last time the Horde does a bad thing. This poo poo is why I quit World of Warcraft and why I'm so angry and bitter about Warcraft and Blizzard to this day. It is within Blizzard's power to change this. They could tell an actual story about coping with loss and the struggle to move on. They could tell a story of catharsis and the world putting meaningful measures in place to shackle the warmaking capabilities of the side with a long history of atrocity. They could use any of the many plot devices on their shelf to declare events so abhorrent that they must be prevented. They could tell a story about the people of Azeroth coming to recognizing the signs of these things starting again and this time moving as one to put an end to it before a new catastrophe happens, with some honest and painful self-reflection from the cast. Instead they want to tell a Saturday morning cartoon, which is what they always should have done, but now have the weight of twenty years of World of Warcraft that have mostly not been that bearing down on the whole enterprise. Blizzard wrote a story where the survivors of genocide and people who lost friends and family to a massacre are going on picnics with those who were part of the army that spilled rivers of innocent blood.
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May 29, 2023 23:21
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It's also important to note the timescales involved. It's not like the genocide happened generations ago. It happened well within the lifetime of almost everyone involved in the setting, usually within a handful of years. It would be one thing if each expansion took place a human/orc generation or two apart from each other, but it rings really hollow when that's not the case.
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May 29, 2023 23:31
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Scourging an institution and breaking it down to remove its war criminal leadership from power is not the same as committing an equal and opposite genocide. The Horde can be destroyed without purging a species from the world, because the Horde is a political construct. Assuming any steps taken against them to demand accountability is another genocide is the same hellwar absolutism that causes so many writing problems, including this specific criticism of the Horde getting off with a slap on the wrist.
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May 29, 2023 23:32
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In theory it could be solved by "War Crimes 2 - This Time It's Trial Of Everyone Responsible, Not Just One Person", but we all know how it went last time.
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May 29, 2023 23:34
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Cythereal posted:If you, as a writer, want to write about serious and heavy topics like genocide, fine. That's your choice as a writer. Your verbiage is just too on the nose to not post this in reaponse. 
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May 29, 2023 23:43
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Cythereal posted:It is within Blizzard's power to change this. They could tell an actual story about coping with loss and the struggle to move on. They could tell a story of catharsis and the world putting meaningful measures in place to shackle the warmaking capabilities of the side with a long history of atrocity. They could use any of the many plot devices on their shelf to declare events so abhorrent that they must be prevented. They could tell a story about the people of Azeroth coming to recognizing the signs of these things starting again and this time moving as one to put an end to it before a new catastrophe happens, with some honest and painful self-reflection from the cast.
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May 30, 2023 00:21
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If I want trauma processing, I'll just stay in the real world. I like playing games to get away from that.
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May 30, 2023 00:28
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If you approve of the way Blizzard's handling things, then I wish you the pleasure of your confidence. Me, the first and foremost condition of me ever giving Blizzard another cent is resolving this story to my satisfaction. I'm not optimistic about ever giving Blizzard money as a result. Which is no particular loss in my eyes. Blizzard knew what they were doing when they wrote that story in Legion and put it into the game, then played it out the way that they did.
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May 30, 2023 00:40
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