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Tenebrais posted:I don't know about that. Thrall wasn't making any diplomatic overtures to begin with, the Alliance would have been even less likely to want to ally with them than Jaina, since the existing nations aren't led by someone too young to remember the war. Thrall would be unlikely to be in any position to stop the Scourge from summoning Archimonde and, since we know the orcs were on the demons' radar, they'd probably have been either subjugated or destroyed. Jaina was aware of the war enough considering that her own brother perished because of them.
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Sep 15, 2023 16:11
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Tenebrais posted:And then neither faction would be on Kalimdor to help resist the Legion's invasion there, but we haven't got there yet. 
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Sep 15, 2023 17:26
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Logistics and population are not real in this setting, don't worry about it.
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Sep 15, 2023 17:38
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sirtommygunn posted:Logistics and population are not real in this setting, don't worry about it. High Upkeep
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Sep 15, 2023 17:41
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sirtommygunn posted:Logistics and population are not real in this setting, don't worry about it. Except for when they want to tell a dramatic story about genocide. Then when they get tired of having written a story about genocide, they pretend everything's okay and they didn't write a faction leader ruminating about how one of the playable races' current members are going to be the last of their kind because there's too few left for their species to live on. Yes, I'm bitter.
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Sep 15, 2023 18:11
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Yeah, while it's very poorly written, the idea with Medivh is that Lordaeron and Quel'thalas is simply not set up to handle the Scourge. Like, bad news: the demons did their homework this time and found the best way to crack that shell, and they're GOING to do it. As was mentioned before, Frostmourne was going to always find someone, both Old Horde and Old Alliance aren't capable of coming together enough to fight it, and neither one is going to be capable of fighting it alone. The Scourge was more or less made specifically to break the Alliance, and the orcs as they exist at the start of WC3 really isn't a major threat to anyone at that point. So you triage - if you can't save the north end of the continent, you save who you can, retreat and fortify, and get new leaders who will be more capable of fighting the problem.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:00
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Poil posted:True, but how many orcs could possibly be left alive and uncorrupted by this point? How many humans remain after fighting their own way through the centaurs, quilboars and of course orcs? Neither have any support, reinforcements or supplies besides of what they brought along and can trade or pillage along the way. They're both very deep in, for them, unknown territory and the terrain is quite hostile and has no agriculture whatsoever. Compare that to all the night elves and their freaking demigod Cenarius who are now dead and I wouldn't be surprised if the people opposing demons were significantly weaker as a result of all of the journeys west to the forgotten lands of Kalimdor, and needless stupidity. Yeah. Realistically if the Orcs and Humans never came to Kalimdor, the Night Elves could've rallied the races/factions that the Orcs and Humans slaughtered their way through and the endgame of RoC would've changed very little.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:23
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Kith posted:Yeah. Realistically if the Orcs and Humans never came to Kalimdor, the Night Elves could've rallied the races/factions that the Orcs and Humans slaughtered their way through and the endgame of RoC would've changed very little. There's a reasonable question of whether they would have, though. The orcs arriving got them roused and on a war footing before any sign of an actual invasion of the Legion. Them arriving here cuts off a lot of potential demon strategies around surprise attacks going directly for their target before the elves can fully muster a resistance. This will be easier to discuss in the next campaign though, once we see the Night Elves' side of the whole situation. It's also possible the Alliance and Horde are bringing modern war doctrines that the Night Elves don't have. As far as we've seen they don't build much in the way of fortifications, for instance. I don't know if there's been any canon exploration of other ways this could have played out, so we really only have Medivh's belief that it was necessary to go on.
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Sep 15, 2023 19:31
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There's also absolutely nothing that hints at the nelves being able to rally the centaurs and/or quillboar and/or frankly anyone else. Or that they'd even try to. Thrall and Jaina both have one very important factor to their personality - they were both willing to listen to hear Medivh out. What we've seen so far if anything paints that if Medivh had sought out the nelves directly, they would've just filled him with arrows in response.
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Sep 15, 2023 20:56
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ProfessorCirno posted:Thrall and Jaina both have one very important factor to their personality - they were both willing to listen to hear Medivh out. What we've seen so far if anything paints that if Medivh had sought out the nelves directly, they would've just filled him with arrows in response. Considering how much of a troublemaking fuckup he is, probably not the wrong response.
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Sep 15, 2023 21:01
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We know that the night elves would have sought out the furbolg and dragons, and probably tried to reach out to the tauren as well. They also had Cenarius, who was such a concern that Archimonde refused to commence the invasion of Kalimdor while Cenarius was a threat. Had. And all the other Wild Gods that haven't yet been created for the lore at this point in time, plus the dragons and giants and all.
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Sep 15, 2023 21:02
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I dunno. "They could've used <character who literally didn't exist until after this game was made>" isn't really a solution. I'm sticking with: with what's been written so far in this game, the current set up makes sense, it's just poorly written and set up.
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Sep 15, 2023 21:12
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Cythereal posted:We know that the night elves would have sought out the furbolg and dragons, and probably tried to reach out to the tauren as well. Pffft. I never thought of that one with cenarious only being dead because he sent the orcs over. Chalk another one up for medivh's big list of gently caress ups(tm).
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Sep 15, 2023 22:08
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Wasn't the furbolg somewhat easy to be corrupted?
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Sep 15, 2023 22:42
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The Night Elves have also historically been... bad at accepting help (or that they even need help) from other races. They do have a relationship with the furbolgs, but past that they often had a veneer of arrogance towards other humanoid races (even the Tauren, who they should logically be on good terms with).
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Sep 16, 2023 01:35
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ChaosDragon posted:Wasn't the furbolg somewhat easy to be corrupted? They will go crazy if you just look at them wrong.
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Sep 16, 2023 01:41
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Rhonne posted:They will go crazy if you just look at them wrong. oh poor ol' Fuzzles, thought of demons and got corrupted
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Sep 16, 2023 03:24
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Rhonne posted:They will go crazy if you just look at them wrong.
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Sep 16, 2023 08:43
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poor ursoc, thought of ants and turned evil
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Sep 16, 2023 11:00
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Horde 7: As Above, So Below I think part of my issue with the Horde campaign is that almost half the campaign consists of dungeon missions - you start with two back to back, and now here's a third. It helps disguise the absence of a compelling villain for this campaign (in my eyes, at least), but the centaur or quilboar getting some kind of half-hearted faction treatment like the naga might have helped break things up.   Either of those caverns could stretch for miles. Perhaps we should split up? Very well. But be careful, young one. There's no telling what ancient creatures lie in the mountain's depths. I will, Cairne. Good luck!If you're a WoW fan, you might be very confused about where we are. Frankly, I am, too. Stonetalon Peaks is a zone in WoW, but it's not volcanic like this mission suggests, and there's no sprawling caverns going deep into the mountain that we've ever seen in WoW. Cairne will later explicitly identify this place as 'Stonetalon Chasm,' and imply that it's a place of tauren legend. No such place has ever been mentioned in WoW. Which also begs the question of what the Oracle even is. We of course know it's Medivh, but how did Cairne know of the Oracle? Was Medivh manipulating the tauren off-camera? Is he co-opting some local legend? And Chronicles just brushes aside how Jaina learned of the Oracle given that she doesn't appear to have made contact with the tauren. The only reference to anything like this in WoW I could find is a single quest in the zone for Horde players where a tauren shaman says that a great evil lurks beneath Stonetalon Peak. Given how desperate WoW is for plot hooks and villains, you'd really think Blizzard would remember this mission.  Keep your witch doctor alive, he's your only source of healing in this mission.  Thrall's far sight spell (that lets him see patches of the map) is disabled in this mission, so in a cute touch Blizzard provided an item that resets Thrall's skill points in the event you put points into far sight so you won't have wasted points in this mission.   I'm genuinely curious what this place is. The night elves don't like to go underground except for druid barrows, and this isn't that. Titan facility, I'd wager, fallen into disrepair and overgrown with random visitors. Another really weird bit: these people are labeled as 'Fallen Ones' and appear to be human necromancers or warlocks. Which rather begs the question of who they are, how they got here, and what they're doing here. I guess I could buy that the Cult of the Damned infiltrated Jaina's expedition and are up to something nefarious here, but that's pure speculation.  There's a lot of little side passages leading to  Do stop by this library, though, for a tome of intelligence for Thrall.   In hindsight, I think I was so much happier before I knew about Titans and dragons and the Legion and all of that. Things were much simpler when I was a general. Would it make you feel any better if I told you that I'd asked my brother to make you a drakonid when I realized the grey mists were wearing on your mind? I was a death knight later on, dear, I know I look good in black. But a monstrous half-dragon form like that? Not my style. This key unlocks a bonus treasure room.  With a very handy item!  Besides all the plot holes, this mission just isn't interesting. It's a very generic dungeon crawl.  And now we're back into the realm of retcons as I encounter and slaughter some of the few survivors who escaped Lordaeron and went on a daring mission against all odds to save the world. Who are trying to slaughter some of the few survivors who escaped Lordaeron and went on a daring mission against all odds to save the world.  There's some trolls to rescue here. How they got to be here, we can only speculate as their presence and joining go entirely unremarked upon.  Then there's this weird bit where some sheep are wandering around that turn out to be polymorphed Alliance soldiers as part of a trap set by some elves. I can only assume I just interrupted a weird sex thing.  And now for good measure Thrall is killing a red dragon, which he refers to as a wretched creature, for their treasure.  Which is the doohickey needed to advance.  My brother thought it weakness asking to turn you to our service, as it happens. Onyxia, there's a reason why I always told people that I can guarantee I had worse in-laws than they did. That's fair. I now control Cairne and a group of tauren. You'd think that there might be puzzle mechanics or complex encounters where you have to control both Thrall's and Cairne's groups to take advantage of their different compositions and help each other progress, but no, this is just padding.  Canonically, Thrall and Jaina entered this place from different entrances and their forces never encountered each other down here.  Seriously, Blizzard, you couldn't have squeezed in an advance force of Scourge on a scouting expedition or something?  Speaking of padding, this lizard slowly chows through a forest of mushrooms.  The reward for, in my case, getting up and wheeling the recycle bin to the curb for pickup while this played out, is a moderately useful item.   Hey, dragon lady. Wit dose two lovebirds doing dere ting, ya ever- I cleave not unto the likes of you, loa. Nobody loves poor Bwonsamdi 'cept old Rastakhan. I wonder why. You're trash and he's a raccoon.  I have never been so glad to be asexual. I'm cutting out a lot of fights against meaningless filler.  Just make sure to use Cairne's area effect abilities. The lack of anything besides melee units makes all of these fights extremely uninteresting.  But that is that.   Nevermind all the soldiers Thrall and Cairne had to kill to get down here.   Very perceptive, son of Durotan. I am the prophet. And now that I've lured you all here, I will tell you what destiny holds. What the hell is going on here?A badly written, atrociously paced plot, that's what.  Survivors, what are you talking about?There has to have been a more elegant way to do this, narratively. Blizzard at least sensibly decided that last mission, and half of this one, straight up didn't happen.   Unite with them? Are you mad? Have you heard nothing that I've said? The Legion comes to undo history and end all life! Thrall, your friend Hellscream has already fallen under the demons' influence. Soon, he and your whole race will be lost forever!I am deeply frustrated with this game's plot, and this scene neatly summarizes why. Thrall remains a spineless, passive excuse for a protagonist who bumbles along and stumbles into victory because the plot said so rather than because he earns anything by his actions or character. He's supposed to be some special guy with a grand destiny, but he spends two campaigns doing almost nothing but what other characters tell him to do. He even needs the off-camera approval of the spirits to decide to trust Medivh. The one unambiguous action Thrall has taken of his own initiative in the entire game to date lead directly to Grom's fall, the death of Cenarius, and a major leg up for the Burning Legion.  Then you must rescue him immediately! He is the key to the destiny I promised you. However, you will need help. Wait! This is insane! You can't possibly expect me to- Destiny is at hand, young sorceress. The time to choose has come. For the fate of all who live, humanity must join forces with the Horde. This exchange leaves such a bad taste in my mouth.  And so the Horde and Alliance join forces, not because the Horde acted any differently than they did in the First or Second Wars, not because the Alliance learned to forgive, not because anyone had any personal journey of growth and experience, but because the voice of authorial fiat said so.
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Sep 16, 2023 14:30
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What to Expect When You're Expecting the End of the World, Part Two I'm waiting to discuss Thrall and Grom more fully until the Horde campaign is done. Today's subject, more demons.  Voidwalkers were originally considered to be demons by Warcraft (see Mannoroth's 'by the endless void, you shall!' line), but after Blizzard separated the Void and the Twisting Nether into being separate planes and cosmic forces they're considered nowadays to be outsiders from the Void. Warlocks in WoW still summon them, though, so I'm noting them now. Truth be told, not much is known about them. Voidwalkers are entities of cold and rage, who subsist by draining heat and light from their environment as energy, and they radiate both cold and magical energies of pain. Left to their own devices, voidwalkers are all but mindless engines of destruction that simply seek out life and warmth and consume them to sate their own seemingly endless hunger for energy. This also makes voidwalkers remarkably easy for mortal summoners to control, as they are in fact sentient beings and easily convinced of the mutual benefits of getting energy meals in exchange for doing what comes naturally to them anyway.  Satyrs are former night elves who succumbed completely to fel corruption and were simultaneously rewarded and punished by Sargeras with a transformation into true demons. The original satyrs were the majority of the Highborne cast of the Kaldorei Empire lead by Xavius, Queen Azshara's chancellor, and in the short time represented the largest faction of the former Highborne (the others, recall, being the proto-high elves, the naga, and the loyalist Highborne who retained their integrity). Such were their numbers that after the Legion's defeat in the War of the Ancients, Xavius launched his own subsequent conflict known as the War of the Satyr, during which the satyrs were largely wiped out by the Druids of the Pack - the proto-worgen. Xavius and the satyrs have been a recurring nuisance to the world ever since, fighting a guerrilla war against their night elf cousins whom they deem to be traitors - it's possible that the night elves who found and attacked Grom were hunting for traces of fel magic in the region due to the satyrs in Grom's second mission, detected traces of fel magic in the orcs, and assumed they were the threat they'd sensed. Interestingly, Xavius himself would ultimately be overtaken by Old God corruption despite being a demon, as he sought to control the power of the Emerald Nightmare but was instead twisted into a puppet of Yogg-Saron, shortly before players killed him seemingly for good.  The Mo'arg are responsible for much of the Burning Legion's industrial and technological might. While I don't believe this is on display in Warcraft 3, the Burning Legion in WoW has a sophisticated industrial base churning out weapons and demonic constructs for their armies. Much of this is from the Mo'arg, a demonic race native to the Twisting Nether who seem to natively be small, stunted beings but often engineer themselves into much bulkier forms and often graft cybernetic implants onto themselves. They are card-carrying mad scientists and lunatic industrialists who gleefully transform planets into reeking hellscapes with burning smog and rivers of boiling acid, while sacrificing slaves by the millions to meet production quotas or enslave their souls for war machines - there's some evidence that the Mo'arg may have invented the infernals.  The Doomguard, known interchangeably as daemons, balrogs, pit fiends, and ere'druin, are officially the daemons we know from Warcraft 1 and 2. Originally, the Doomguard were in fact Titan servitors, implied to have been artificial constructs. Under Titan control, the Doomguard were engineered to detect and eliminate forms of magic that the Titans deemed aberrant, most notably fel magic. The Doomguard ranged across the universe, detecting fel magic and descending to exterminate the users. When Sargeras turned, he took the Doomguard with them and reshaped them into their present forms where their native ability to detect magic is used in a very different way. Doomguards are considered to be the finest shock troopers in the Legion, and only high-ranking officers like Archimonde and Mannoroth are capable of ordering them into battle. While very intelligent and capable of devising and carrying out complex orders, Doomguard seemingly have no free will of their own. Possibly as a contingency measure by Sargeras, Doomguards seem to only be capable of doing what others command of them.  Felguards are the rank and file soldiers of the Legion. These are the Legion's grunts and cannon fodder, by Blizzard's own admission an effort in WoW to create a demonic soldier more threatening than an imp or satyr without needing to escalate to a dreadlord or doomguard. Felguards are not a discrete species of their own, instead a creation of the Mo'arg who clone them en masse and subject them to merciless training until all that's left is a moderately intelligent soldier driven by bloodlust and a thirst for destruction. The Legion's leadership is noted to have been rather disappointed with the felguards' performance, and in fact this was one of the reasons behind the orc project - the Legion's leadership had hoped that when fully corrupted to demonhood (fel orcs are one step shy of that), the orcs would have been a suitable replacement for the felguards as the Legion's front line.  The Shivarra are a seldom-seen demonic race of unknown origin. These six-armed demonic giants are seemingly all female, and appear to act as the spiritual leaders of the Burning Legion, charging other demons with ruthless fanaticism for their masters' ends of destroying the universe. Beyond that, little is known - given their mono-gender nature, it's quite possible that the Shivarra are another race native to the Twisting Nether, or it's possible that they are the female of the species for a race like the Mo'arg, given the title of Shivarra as a mark of distinction rather than being the name of a discrete species.
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Sep 16, 2023 14:31
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This mission would be rock bottom for Warcraft writing if it weren't for all the sexual assault and genocide plots. It's just completely worthless; whenever it's not going directly against the message of the entire campaign it's just being a recreation of someone's mediocre D&D dungeon. There's nothing to even salvage here, in a properly done remake this would be replaced entirely.
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Sep 16, 2023 15:20
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I think one way they could have "fixed" this mission is to make it so the dungeon isn't real. Make it all an illusion created by Medivh to test the Horde and Alliance that vanishes after the mission ends.
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Sep 16, 2023 15:21
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Ooof, these missions just keep on getting dumber! They really needed, like, a Scourge advance force to show up or something. Anything but this endless faffing around. Medivh is somehow still the worst.
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Sep 16, 2023 15:31
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Cythereal posted:Do stop by this library, though, for a tome of intelligence for Thrall.
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Sep 16, 2023 15:56
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Jaina should've joined up with Thrall at the end of the last mission so you get a combo human and orc force for this one also last mission should've started with Thrall and Jaina trying diplomacy with Cairne as mediator, only to get interrupted by fel orcs/demons/undead. Then in the mission the humans would attack, but it would be like Terran 9 in starcraft where you can't destroy any human buildings, only defend yourself. Thrall would be going around trying to solve problems or whatever to prove himself trustworthy to Jaina.
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Sep 16, 2023 15:58
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Cythereal posted:And now for good measure Thrall is killing a red dragon, which he refers to as a wretched creature, for their treasure. Was this still during the "Most dragons are just big magic animals" era? I legitimately can't remember when all these changes happened. I also enjoy how Medivh still doesn't explain anything to anyone. He's still just screaming about destiny and the end of the world and only the PC's decide to listen and believe.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:07
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The Horde campaign's overabundance of dungeon missions is most likely a consequence of their original campaign set in Lordearon's outskirts being scrapped fairly late; dungeon missions are a lot quicker to develop and test than base building missions. This mission, and the one before it that's a stripped down version of Orc 3 with Grom's and half the human bases missing bear the strongest evidence of being extremely late additions; being absent from World of Warcraft. Warcraft 3 and WoW were developed concurrently and have for the most part attempted to keep some form of parity in terms of locations depicted(albeit often heavily reworked and/or scrapped during WoW's development) until the end of Reign of Chaos, until it diverged somewhat when some of the The Frozen Throne campaigns began adding a bunch of new places that wouldn't begin appearing to WoW until later expansion. Nothing of the sort is present here however, the name "Stonetalon" is most likely is a holdover of the scrapped concept these missions replaced as it does appear in WoW, but they evidently weren't far along in development because the WoW zone is almost completely devoid of notable quests, personalities or landmarks.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:19
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life_source posted:I also enjoy how Medivh still doesn't explain anything to anyone. He's still just screaming about destiny and the end of the world and only the PC's decide to listen and believe. There's an interesting technique here - if you can call it that - where every time he's talked Jaina into something the cutscene cuts off before she actually agrees to it, so they don't have to show you how he actually convinced her.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:26
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Compare that to his interaction with Antonidas here where he presumably WAS explaining everything and Antonidas still decided that his combination of weird smells (powerful magic, bad magic, wet feathers) didn't warrant consideration. Poor Jaina. Poor everything. This all sucks. its great im having a fun time thisd lp owns
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Sep 16, 2023 16:37
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He just says "I told you so"
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Sep 16, 2023 16:38
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About what though? Jaina still hasn't seen any Demonic involvement if she even knows what Demons are other than academically that's next mission. Thrall has no idea what has happened in Lordaeron to warrant a high ranking (she has a different outfit) Alliance Archmage being here. He just gives his best Mafia goon "you got it boss" when Medivh tells him to do something.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:42
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Maybe Aran was just REALLY bad at teaching him how to socialize. I mean, he's an introvert.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:43
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life_source posted:Compare that to his interaction with Antonidas here where he presumably WAS explaining everything and Antonidas still decided that his combination of weird smells (powerful magic, bad magic, wet feathers) didn't warrant consideration. If so, there's no reason for Medivh to try and hide his identity to Antonidas who can just recognize him by his badge of office, if he wasn't already familiar with him from knowing Nielas Aran and the events of the First War. This would also make it entirely reasonable for him to consider the possibility that Medivh is still possessed and that anything he says might be Legion disinformation.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:26
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Asehujiko posted:The wiki is a bit hazy on whether the story about the Guardian's role was decided on before the WC3 human campaign was made but the presence of Atiesh as a cut item icon in the game assets makes me believe it was. The Last Guardian was published in 2001 and WC3 was released in 2002.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:37
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ApplesandOranges posted:The Last Guardian was published in 2001 and WC3 was released in 2002.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:54
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This part of the LP makes me a little sad because this part of the Warcraft 3 campaign really hasn't held up at all. Even independent of the mess of retcons and nonsense added on later, the orc campaign is just kind of put together really badly. I suppose this resembles WoW a lot in that respect, where the human quests have this interesting underlying connecting plot, and the horde side is thrown-together masses of filler.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:59
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Asehujiko posted:I've seen a lot more places list it as 2002 than 2001 so I believe the latter is an error. Even so, unlike the Orc campaign that ended up shipping, the Human campaign wasn't made at the last minute so you'd have to take that into account when it comes to development chronology too. I went back and checked my own copies and it looks like you're right, they do have it listed as December 2002. Lord of the Clans and Day of the Dragon were 2001, which might be where the confusion may have come in. This also means the whole 'oh yeah dragons besides Deathwing are sentient' is canon before WC3 was released. What was kinda interesting is that Blood and Honor is technically the oldest novel since it was copyright 2000, predating Thrall's actual origin novel. ApplesandOranges fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Sep 16, 2023 |
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Sep 16, 2023 18:23
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Why's Medivh hiding in the bottom of a dungeon anyway? This meeting could have been a prophetic vision.
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Sep 16, 2023 18:35
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Qwertycoatl posted:Why's Medivh hiding in the bottom of a dungeon anyway? This meeting could have been a prophetic vision. Well, he's trying to set up a truce between the Alliance and the Horde. From that perspective it makes sense to get their leaders to meet in a place where they can't bring their armies.
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Sep 16, 2023 18:56
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