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Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

Szarrukin posted:

I mean, it's kinda understandable, such slur reclaiming happens all the time IRL.

What is the Horde stand on slavery, anyways?

They didn't really say anything about it until the bad warcraft comic said that the Horde had slaves that they made fight in gladiator pits because Blizzard wanted to give Varian(the king of Stormwind) an inverted versionof Thrall's backstory.

Everyone hated it, and Blizzard doesn't really talk about it anymore, so who knows if they still have slaves or not.

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Szarrukin posted:

What is the Horde stand on slavery, anyways?

Depends on who's writing the story at any given moment, best guess in-setting is that different groups within the Horde have different positions on it.

It mainly comes up in the context of Alliance prisoners of the Horde being forced to fight in gladiatorial combat - sometimes against each other, to the death.

In the Alliance version of the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, Alliance players can liberate survivors from Theramore who were chained together and forced to fight each other to the death for the amusement of orc overseers.

quote:

...but I believe in this particular case Kul'Tirans are the colonists? This island was basically a pitstop to repair Horde's ships and Thrall had no intent to created any permanent settlement. Unlike Kul'Tirans who have established colony there. Horde's La Conquista/Manifest Destiny is yet to begin.

It's unclear whether this is meant to be a colony or just a military outpost. It's a very small outpost, and seems to be purely military in nature given that all the Kul Tirans present are described as marines.

I don't think we ever do find out why the Kul Tirans are here. Given the ogre presence - including two-headed ogres - it's plausible that the Kul Tirans came here chasing Horde remnants or some branch of the Stormreavers or Twilight's Hammer. Given the proximity to the Maelstrom, the latter feels very plausible.

We don't know and never will know. This game never seems to acknowledge the relationship between ogres and the Horde, and that almost all two-headed ogres would have been Horde veterans of the Second War.

BlazetheInferno
Jun 6, 2015
I will, at least, defend the difference in Thrall's approach to the Forest vs Jungle Trolls.

The Forest Trolls are hostile to everybody, and while they sided with the Horde in Warcraft 2, lorewise Zul'jin ditched them the instant the Horde turned away from Quel'thalas. Whereas these Jungle trolls, while yeah they spy initially, once discovered they come forward talking first. No hostility. Just wanna do their own thing.

Ogres are a similar case to the Trolls, except the Ogres largely split off to do their own thing when the Horde lost, and consider the Orcs to be weak and not worth being allied with. Ogre strong, smash puny orc, etc.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


It isn't in Warcraft 3 (Since it is Burning Crusade/Warlords of Draenor lore from WoW), but it is worth considering that non-Thrall Orcs probably are moderately aware of the fact that the Ogre Empire on Draenor used to enslave and generally brutalise Orcs up until the Horde originally formed and either crushed them or forced them into allegiance somehow.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

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

One other thing raiders have going for them is the ability you didn't buy them this mission. It's not a huge thing in the campaign (ability spoiler)because you rarely run out of gold outside of failing to play around upkeep, but works well in multi for lifting yourself up economically when you launch a quick raid on the enemies infrastructure. It can make early agression rewarded in the campaign as well, given it provides an early economic boost on top of reducing attacks and applies to lower tech units only(grunt, raider, peon). The amount of gold you get per building is also static and you get a percentage of it equal to the percentage of the buildings hp you damaged with your attack, so using demolishers drastically cuts back on how many resources pillage gives you for smacking enemy buildings because grunts will be doing very minor comparative damage.

Toss in that the raider is more durable than demolishers and doesn't trigger the ai's burning hatred of siege units(I think), and there's a decent level of argument for and against it relative to demolishers. WC3 overall does a pretty good job of giving each race a couple of different options for building shredding and giving each of them pros and cons.

E: Also on the orc slavery thing, I seem to recall an orc that had you fight through his gladiator slaves just outside of ogrimmar in a low level wow quest,

FoolyCharged fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Jun 30, 2023

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

BlazetheInferno posted:

I will, at least, defend the difference in Thrall's approach to the Forest vs Jungle Trolls.

The Forest Trolls are hostile to everybody, and while they sided with the Horde in Warcraft 2, lorewise Zul'jin ditched them the instant the Horde turned away from Quel'thalas. Whereas these Jungle trolls, while yeah they spy initially, once discovered they come forward talking first. No hostility. Just wanna do their own thing.

Ogres are a similar case to the Trolls, except the Ogres largely split off to do their own thing when the Horde lost, and consider the Orcs to be weak and not worth being allied with. Ogre strong, smash puny orc, etc.

Also worth noting that the first mission takes place in Thrall's local area, so presumably all of the diplomacy and such has been tried and ended in failure. Here he's in a new region, so diplomacy with the new people makes sense.

I also have a hard time faulting humans for being angry at orcs given that not one, but two invasions occurred very, very recently, and a lot of the people who fought the horde in those wars likely lost friends and family. And it's an even harder sell to accept orcs when they're literally extradimensional invaders. At this point in time, they don't belong on Azeroth in the same way that the native species do.

life_source
May 11, 2008

i got tired of looking at your edgy baby avatar that a 14-year old would be proud of
As more of a topic of discussion that might be too broad for the current state of the LP: what/where are the Orcs supposed to do/go? As a race they are bridging two, possibly three generations: First War/Old Draenor remembering elders, Second War/Dying Draenor veterans, and a newer generation that has only known Azeroth. They can't go back to Draenor, and even if they could there is a notable lack of viable land to live on. While there might be some amount of land somewhere in the Eastern Kingdoms that they could potentially settle in, no one wants them around and will fight to keep them from claiming it.

This is something WoW has sometimes hinted at that has fascinated me as long as I have noticed it. It comes up again later in outside of the scope of the LP but it's applicable here too. Here the conquering armies were defeated but also can't return to their homeland and are stuck (theres a term for people like this that i cant remember). The internment camps aren't a longterm solution, and while this might be edging too close to real-life parallels, even if those Orcs were freed and given some amount of land, what's to say the Humans/Alliance don't kick them off that land again and again?

EDIT: And to tie it back to the current update so as not to go too offtopic, the Orcs have left and found some "land" but are once again invaders and also this place sucks. I highly doubt the Orcs could survive here for longer than 3 or 4 missionsyears. What do they do/where can they go after this?

life_source fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 30, 2023

Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



Cythereal posted:

I don't think we ever do find out why the Kul Tirans are here. Given the ogre presence - including two-headed ogres - it's plausible that the Kul Tirans came here chasing Horde remnants or some branch of the Stormreavers or Twilight's Hammer. Given the proximity to the Maelstrom, the latter feels very plausible.

This is explained in Chronicle 3 and I thiiink BFA? The Kul Tiras armada was following the Horde fleet after they escaped in Southshore, some of the armada crashed on the same island, the rest was following Grom's part of the fleet and went off course somewhere around Kalimdor when Grom's fleet sunk and his troops ended stranded in Kalimdor. The KT Fleet returned to Kul Tiras to reorganize and REDACTED.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

life_source posted:

As more of a topic of discussion that might be too broad for the current state of the LP: what/where are the Orcs supposed to do/go? As a race they are bridging two, possibly three generations: First War/Old Draenor remembering elders, Second War/Dying Draenor veterans, and a newer generation that has only known Azeroth. They can't go back to Draenor, and even if they could there is a notable lack of viable land to live on. While there might be some amount of land somewhere in the Eastern Kingdoms that they could potentially settle in, no one wants them around and will fight to keep them from claiming it.

This is something WoW has sometimes hinted at that has fascinated me as long as I have noticed it. It comes up again later in outside of the scope of the LP but it's applicable here too. Here the conquering armies were defeated but also can't return to their homeland and are stuck (theres a term for people like this that i cant remember). The internment camps aren't a longterm solution, and while this might be edging too close to real-life parallels, even if those Orcs were freed and given some amount of land, what's to say the Humans/Alliance don't kick them off that land again and again?

EDIT: And to tie it back to the current update so as not to go too offtopic, the Orcs have left and found some "land" but are once again invaders and also this place sucks. I highly doubt the Orcs could survive here for longer than 3 or 4 missionsyears. What do they do/where can they go after this?

My answer: look to X-COM: Chimera Squad as an example. The defeated invaders are integrated into native society and the world in the wake of the invasion is far more multicultural and multiracial than it was before.

I think Warcraft's commitment to racially homogenous ethnostates badly hurts the setting's storytelling potential. Mixed-species characters are vanishingly rare, and almost no attention is given to cultural bleedover and exchange.

By my lights, the Horde of Warcraft 3 and early WoW fundamentally does not have a legitimate right to exist as a nation. The Horde was a tool invented by Ner'zhul and Gul'dan as a tool to seize control of a previously diverse and divided orc race where each clan had their own politics, culture, and national identity. Thrall has explicitly chosen to lay claim to this legacy: he wears the armor and weapon of the Warchief who lead the Horde during the Second War, and his new Horde proudly displays the same insignia used throughout the First and Second Wars. He disputes and disavows the deeds and beliefs of the previous Horde governments, but maintains their iconography, government (insofar as the Horde even has a government beyond the office of Warchief), and tools. If Thrall and company wanted to present the case to the world that they were not the Horde of old and act and think nothing like them, a good start would have been to not dress exactly like the Horde of old, display the old Horde's banners, and claim the same offices and structure as the old Horde.

In my eyes, a far more optimistic way to take the orcs' story would have been to abandon the title of the Horde and instead seek to build something new.


It's what Theramore could have been, what I thought Warcraft 3 was ending on the promise of: neither Horde nor Alliance, neither orc nor human, former enemies now working hand in hand towards a hopeful if uncertain future, united not by race or history or government but by creed that we can build a better tomorrow.

But we'll get to the tragedy of Theramore eventually.

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

On the other hand, as of this game the Alliance has spent a generation as a slave state (or collection of states, whatever) actively oppressing his people. Thrall never saw the destruction the Horde wrought, but he did see the abuse the Alliance levied on him and his peers. From his perspective, taking on the symbolism of the Horde is simply proclaiming that his people have a right to exist. In that context I can entirely understand the Horde not wanting to coexist with the Alliance in the eastern kingdoms, there is very justified bad blood in both directions.

It's no surprise they were so keen to leave as soon as they learned there was anywhere else to go. Frankly all Medivh would have needed to say was that there's a whole continent without any humans on it, maybe you can find a place there. If his interactions with Sen'jin are anything to go by, he does want to find the Horde a home through diplomacy and coexistence rather than conquest and war, just not with slavers.

Of course, that's just Thrall's perspective. I can't imagine all that many young orcs were born in the internment camps - at this point you could be forgiven for believing there's no surviving orc women on Azeroth at all. Most of his Horde literally are the people that slaughtered their way through the human lands and would have no qualms about killing anything that happens to exist in the lands they'll eventually settle on. Thrall is shepherding wolves and hoping he's taught them to be sheepdogs. Perhaps even deluded himself into it.

Ultiville
Jan 14, 2005

The law protects no one unless it binds everyone, binds no one unless it protects everyone.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the broad strokes of the Warcraft story thus far. (Of course a lot of the details suck, like they could have done all of it without any sexual violence.) The Horde is in a position with genuinely no good options. What the humans did to them is bad, but it's bad in an understandable and very human way, and the kind of thing we want to hope a society can come back from because, well, it's the kind of thing pretty much all of our contemporary societies need to come back from. So that's a good setup! Two groups of desperate people with deeply troubled pasts, lots of legitimate grievances against each other even within living memory, trying to recover but still at odds. Meanwhile the framing story about the coming Legion, and the revised focus on orcs as not being any more monstrous by nature than other people, meant that when I was playing Warcraft 3 at this point, I had high hopes for a story about people learning to come together, at least somewhat.

But of course since then we've had years of WoW, and it's not possible to pretend you don't know what happened there when you look back, which kind of colors everything.

M.c.P
Mar 27, 2010

Stop it.
Stop all this nonsense.

Nap Ghost
Folks have commented that Reforged looks ugly, just bad in unquantified ways.
Let's quantify them.

Today, Dirt, grass, and how they don't matter in very important ways

A couple images to start. Here's Cythereal happening across the oft-discussed Forest Trolls.


And here's those same Forest Trolls as they appeared in the original Warcraft 3.


Similar in outset, but side by side Reforged looks flatter, muddier. If your eyes are drawn to anything there, it's the neon green selection circles. The enemy troll in the center is an amorphous purple, brown, and green blob that you might mistake for a doodad if there wasn't a health bar above its head.
Contrast the original texturing. Those lumpy orc models pop right out of the grass, as do the lumpy green trolls, no health bars needed. The middle troll kinda blends in, yeah, but nobody's perfect.

The reason the units pop out more is because of a vital point when displaying game information - contrast and distinction for the things the player needs to care about.
Here's an example of this concept done well, a panel from Herge's Tintin.


It's a big, complex panel with a lot going on, but you can still pick out the characters on the left, because they are basically emoji faces on bodies. The simplicity of the character designs and clothes provide a contrast to the busy laboratory background, a technique Herge was a master of throughout his career.
But what if EVERYTHING is detailed and complex?


Lemon Sky was contracted to create the models and attached textures for units in WC3 Reforged, and they did a pretty good job, but they've come out saying that Blizzard just took their first drafts and said "thanks!". The orc on the right looks good, but would it look good from a mile in the sky, surrounded by other orcs that look exactly the same? If Blizzard had cared, a second draft might have asked for less details and larger shapes, bigger flat spaces and less straps and fiddly bits, because the grass was going to be highly contrasted and detailed but the models are the things players actually have to pay attention to.


Which is why the original WC3 ground textures were so saturated, highly contrasted, and full of lines. It has a gameplay purpose, providing an interesting background to look at that provides a contrast for the actually important gameplay - the units. When the textures were redone for Reforged, the artists zoomed way in and created beautifully handcrafted grass and dirt textures that tile well and look great when you zoom right up to it... but seen from a mile in the sky all that detail flattens out into green and brown blobs, just like the green and brown blobs that the units become.


And here's why this is important. Cythereal's red orcs are being attacked by green humans in this picture. Now, quick as you can, how many human units are there?
There's 2, a footman and a rifleman. The life bar below them is actually a friendly sentry ward! Also, you may have mistaken the black green and red blob as a human unit, but that is an Orc Raider blending in mightily with that ground stone texture beneath it.
Did you get it right? Did you get it right in less than a second? Because less than a second might be how much time you have to make important gameplay decisions. That's why simple unit textures on highly contrasted ground textures were a design point of WC3, and why it matters that they're gone.

I'll be back, there's even more about the unit models to discuss next time.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

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

That was one of the first things I noticed with the reforge models when it launched. Identifying units and owners is much more difficult with the new designs and graphics. I never considered that the ground textures themselves also had a hand in it, though.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
I'm not into this side of game design at all, so I appreciate the analysis. :)

Everything you said made sense, I just don't think I ever would have quite noticed it or known the words to talk about what I was seeing.

Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

M.c.P posted:


Lemon Sky was contracted to create the models and attached textures for units in WC3 Reforged, and they did a pretty good job, but they've come out saying that Blizzard just took their first drafts and said "thanks!". The orc on the right looks good, but would it look good from a mile in the sky, surrounded by other orcs that look exactly the same? If Blizzard had cared, a second draft might have asked for less details and larger shapes, bigger flat spaces and less straps and fiddly bits, because the grass was going to be highly contrasted and detailed but the models are the things players actually have to pay attention to.

This reminds me that Heroes Of The Storm did a map based on Alterac Valley(one of the big WoW pvp battlegrounds) and they did their own updated versions of some Horde and Alliance units and they look so much better than the Reforged ones



Man I wish Reforged had been done in this style.

Alkydere
Jun 7, 2010
Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.



It will never not be funny for me that in Azeroth many guns have bayonet axes. I understand it's part of the cartoony aesthetic that WCIII/WoW leaned into (and are honestly at their best when they lean into it) but there are so many gun models in WoW that have bayonet axes and the Heroes of the Storm rifleman has one.

I think there's even a few bayonet scythes in WoW.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Alkydere posted:

It will never not be funny for me that in Azeroth many guns have bayonet axes. I understand it's part of the cartoony aesthetic that WCIII/WoW leaned into (and are honestly at their best when they lean into it) but there are so many gun models in WoW that have bayonet axes and the Heroes of the Storm rifleman has one.

I think there's even a few bayonet scythes in WoW.

Have you tried to tell a Dwarf not to hold an Axe?

Asehujiko
Apr 6, 2011

Alkydere posted:

It will never not be funny for me that in Azeroth many guns have bayonet axes. I understand it's part of the cartoony aesthetic that WCIII/WoW leaned into (and are honestly at their best when they lean into it) but there are so many gun models in WoW that have bayonet axes and the Heroes of the Storm rifleman has one.

I think there's even a few bayonet scythes in WoW.
I'd imagine it has something to do with gun models sticking out too far in front of the character if they had a regular bayonet.

There's a few attempts at it like the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle from TBC but even with the bayonet mount 2/3rds of the way along the barrel instead of at the muzzle, it ends up being quite a long boi:

Nissin Cup Nudist
Sep 3, 2011

Sleep with one eye open

We're off to Gritty Gritty land




Azaroth is a spherical planet, right? If sailing across the Maelstrom kinda sucks, couldn't the orcs and everyone else sail the other way?

sirtommygunn
Mar 7, 2013



They were on the wrong side of the continent to go that way, and it's probably a much longer trip with no islands to stop at for repair and resupply along the way.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Azaroth is a spherical planet, right? If sailing across the Maelstrom kinda sucks, couldn't the orcs and everyone else sail the other way?

sirtommygunn posted:

They were on the wrong side of the continent to go that way, and it's probably a much longer trip with no islands to stop at for repair and resupply along the way.

This. Here's a map of the Horde's voyage, from where they started to where they are now:



There is a strait between what are officially called Northeron and Southeron, but it's small enough to have an extensive stone bridge over it under firm Alliance control. No chance of getting a fleet through there, and we have no idea what may lie between the Forbidden Sea and the Veiled Sea.

Alkydere
Jun 7, 2010
Capitol: A building or complex of buildings in which any legislature meets.
Capital: A city designated as a legislative seat by the government or some other authority, often the city in which the government is located; otherwise the most important city within a country or a subdivision of it.



Also remember, this is a world where an entire good sized continent (Pandaria) was completely hidden in mist, hiding it from the outside world for 10,000 years except for one chill island sized turtle who liked to return to the beach he hatched on/left from now and then.

Yes, Azeroth is spherical but a good 2/3 or so of its surface is unknown and even the dragons themselves will basically write on the map "Here be wyrms" if asked.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Really, this is 1/3rd of the planet? It feels like Pandaria is maybe like... I don't know, the size of Ireland and Northrend is Greenland-ish sized.

Also if I had 2/3rds of a planet left to play with I would perhaps hold off a bit on the other planets, dimensions, etc. and just finish up what was on my plate first. But maybe that's just me. wrt writing stories.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Bluntly, we have no idea how big anything on Azeroth actually is or how many people live anywhere, and Blizzard likes it that way because it frees them to invent whatever they want, whenever they want.

Even then, the whole premise of Dragonflight is that the Dragon Isles were hidden by an interdimensional cloaking device until someone turned the cloak off and bam Azeroth suddenly had a sizable island chain where there had only been empty ocean before.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Azaroth is a spherical planet, right? If sailing across the Maelstrom kinda sucks, couldn't the orcs and everyone else sail the other way?


sirtommygunn posted:

They were on the wrong side of the continent to go that way, and it's probably a much longer trip with no islands to stop at for repair and resupply along the way.

The Maelstrom makes trying to travel across the other side of the planet really difficult canonically, because it fucks up the ocean globally in terms of flow and stuff. Basically the entire ocean and its weather patterns push you towards the Maelstrom no matter where you are in the world, so the "best" way to perform ocean travel is to follow the rotation of the global seas caused by the Maelstrom. Which makes going through the middle the only option, and specifically the option that all human nations use anyway (all their ports are on the Western side of the Eastern Kingdoms without fail).

Part of Kul'Tiras' naval superiority is that they have Tidesage Shamans to help them ignore or maximise the effect of the Maelstrom on shipping lanes.

Also in terms of planetary "logic" Pandaria and the southern bits of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms come across more equatorial than antarctic, not that this matters when Magic is a thing that can modify weather patterns, but it is highly likely we're looking at the equivalent of Europe/North America/Northern Africa down to the equator in terms of actual land mass. So a quarter to a third of the planet but also only the northern part of that.

(Pandaria is very humid/hot and the only snow is up mountains, southern kalimdor is desert/rainforest, and southern Eastern Kingdoms is all Rainforest and Swamp except for the Blasted Lands where the Dark Portal damaged the ecosystem).

Edit: Basically all shipping in WoW is assuming you're using the Maelstrom's natural swirl and has since before anyone can remember, because it is a) faster and b) easier than trying anything else outside c) the chance of horrible horrible death at sea but that can happen no matter what.

Edit: Edit: Also I thought this was the Echo Isles that the Horde crashed on and met the Darkspear Trolls, which is actually just off the coast of Kalimdor, not crashing near the Maelstrom. But I'll accept being wrong on that one.

Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 1, 2023

Watermelon Daiquiri
Jul 10, 2010
I TRIED TO BAIT THE TXPOL THREAD WITH THE WORLD'S WORST POSSIBLE TAKE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS STUPID AVATAR.
just take a look at zandalar on that map cythereal posted :v: And wasn't Kul Tiras, before bfa, those islands near gilneas?

Fajita Queen
Jun 21, 2012

The only thing you really need to know about Warcraft is that the scale is absolutely hosed, everywhere, all the time.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Watermelon Daiquiri posted:

just take a look at zandalar on that map cythereal posted :v: And wasn't Kul Tiras, before bfa, those islands near gilneas?

No, those Islands near Gilneas are indeed owned by Kul Tiras. But were never intended to be the actual nation of Kul Tiras. They were hotspots for the naval combat during the Second War, and ultimately the ruined land was turned into a prison complex rather than fully repopulated by Kul Tiras, later to become part of the Cataclysm Conflict for control over the prison and any secrets its inhabitants may hold.

Tol Barad is the name of the Islands, and Baradin Hold the Prison.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.


Here's a map with some key locations from Warcraft 3 identified, if that helps people get a frame of reference for the world at large.

ungulateman
Apr 18, 2012

pretentious fuckwit who isn't half as literate or insightful or clever as he thinks he is
warcraft has some serious terra nullius issues but we'll see that in more detail as the orcs arrive on kalimdor proper

SirPhoebos
Dec 10, 2007

WELL THAT JUST HAPPENED!

Cythereal posted:

Bluntly, we have no idea how big anything on Azeroth actually is or how many people live anywhere, and Blizzard likes it that way because it frees them to invent whatever they want, whenever they want.

Even then, the whole premise of Dragonflight is that the Dragon Isles were hidden by an interdimensional cloaking device until someone turned the cloak off and bam Azeroth suddenly had a sizable island chain where there had only been empty ocean before.

I remember that one of the Titan Dungeons in WotLK (Halls of Lightning?) showed a globe of Azeroth, and all the continents were clustered on one side.

So even if there was nothing there, it'd be a long trip the other way.

EggsAisle
Dec 17, 2013

I get it! You're, uh...

M.c.P posted:

Folks have commented that Reforged looks ugly, just bad in unquantified ways.
Let's quantify them

Really interesting post! I love breakdowns like this.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


SirPhoebos posted:

I remember that one of the Titan Dungeons in WotLK (Halls of Lightning?) showed a globe of Azeroth, and all the continents were clustered on one side.

So even if there was nothing there, it'd be a long trip the other way.

That globe was made inaccurate in Mists anyway, although they may have updated it?

Rhonne
Feb 13, 2012

I feel like "the other side of Azeroth" always comes up whenever the time comes to start speculating on the next expansion location.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
And it always gets weird when someone coughs and points out that the Alliance in present-day WoW has a starship in low orbit over Azeroth that could easily see whatever's there.

NewMars
Mar 10, 2013

Rhonne posted:

I feel like "the other side of Azeroth" always comes up whenever the time comes to start speculating on the next expansion location.


Cythereal posted:

And it always gets weird when someone coughs and points out that the Alliance in present-day WoW has a starship in low orbit over Azeroth that could easily see whatever's there.

Which, mind you, creates the odd point where it's more likely for them to literally put a new expansion area on the moon than it is to expand the map eastwards or westwards.

Complications
Jun 19, 2014

Given the existence of undersea civilizations and the fact that Azeroth is apparently two thirds ocean, the rest of the ocean has to be inhabited just because the natural tendency of people and animals is to go forth and multiply. They'd also only get the stories of the idiotic surface dwellers pulling their total bullshit third or fourth hand Rome to China style from whoever trades with them. I can only imagine how those traders bringing news from the other half of the planet are treated by this point.

BlazetheInferno
Jun 6, 2015
Fun fact about the recent update, actually: in the same patch that made Hard Mode harder across the board, one of the various adjustments made to the campaigns outside of "hard mode is harder", was to rename a great number of enemy Alliance Heroes. The Archmage here was one such hero. Most of the time, enemy Alliance Heroes used generic names from the hero's Melee Map pool of random names. This Archmage however, was given a name to make him sound like a Tidesage from Kul Tiras. Fitting, considering two of the Archmage's spells.

Lord_Magmar
Feb 24, 2015

"Welcome to pound town, Slifer slacker!"


Complications posted:

Given the existence of undersea civilizations and the fact that Azeroth is apparently two thirds ocean, the rest of the ocean has to be inhabited just because the natural tendency of people and animals is to go forth and multiply. They'd also only get the stories of the idiotic surface dwellers pulling their total bullshit third or fourth hand Rome to China style from whoever trades with them. I can only imagine how those traders bringing news from the other half of the planet are treated by this point.

I would think most, if not all, undersea civilizations have been conquered by Azshara and the Naga Empire. Given that's uhhhh, her thing.

Also Naga Invasions of the land can come from any angle.

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Siegkrow
Oct 11, 2013

Arguing about Lore for 5 years and counting



I wouldn't be surprised to find naga in a landlocked lake.

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