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Who ever suggested that deathless playthrough of WC3 video series: thanks I love classic game challenge runs and its been really fun to watch.
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Sep 18, 2023 08:32
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Cythereal posted:Hoo boy it's going to be an effort to keep my end of campaign analysis from devolving into unhinged rambling. Why contain it? Let it spill over the schools and churches, let the opinions pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them.
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Sep 18, 2023 10:29
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PurpleXVI posted:Why contain it? Let it spill over the schools and churches, let the opinions pile up in the streets. In the end they'll beg us to save them. Is it just me or does Bob Page not even sound as evil anymore these days compared with anything else we got?
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Sep 18, 2023 11:40
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Mr.Misfit posted:Is it just me or does Bob Page not even sound as evil anymore these days compared with anything else we got? Nah he's just as evil, it's just that real life is catching up to him 
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Sep 18, 2023 11:50
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Mr.Misfit posted:Is it just me or does Bob Page not even sound as evil anymore these days compared with anything else we got? Just look at Robocop and a lot of other 1980s dystopian sci fi. Turned out the future was so horrible we literally couldn't even imagine it lmao.
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Sep 18, 2023 12:48
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Bloody Pom posted:At least it's (mostly) up from here? We still have to talk about Sylvanus post-transformation
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Sep 18, 2023 13:48
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Bloody Pom posted:At least it's (mostly) up from here? Hah hah you loving wish. There's a few subjects I'm waiting to cover until the undead campaign in the expansion and we see what Sylvanas has been up to.
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Sep 18, 2023 13:51
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Just look at Robocop and a lot of other 1980s dystopian sci fi. a Paul Verhoeven movie from 1987 posted:Take a close look at the track record of this company. And you'll see that we have gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJBskW1o9Q&t=135s
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Sep 18, 2023 14:36
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I watched robocop again recently, and it's kind of depressing how on the nose a lot of those old dystopian sci-fi stories wound up being. It's like power-hungry shitheads watched the stuff and went, "you know, I could increase profits doing {thing beyond the pale used to show the bad guys are evil here}."
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Sep 18, 2023 14:48
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Cythereal posted:Hah hah you loving wish. Yeah there's certainly expansion garbage to cover. The vanilla night elf campaign I mostly remember as just being there. Nothing particularly glaring but not really any highlights except for the race itself.
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Sep 18, 2023 15:14
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We have to dungeon quest to unlock our heavy infantry and magic support
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Sep 18, 2023 15:17
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Horde 8: The Reaving Let's be about it.   I know, Cairne. It's just that I never thought I'd live to see the day... when I'd have to fight my own people.Bear this line in mind for later. We know drat well that the orc clans regularly fought amongst each other even before the coming of the Legion. There are a lot of orcs who were around pre-Legion.  I... appreciate your help, Miss Proudmoore. Yet another day I never thought I'd live to see.  That makes two of us. I'll return to my base and aid you as best I can. Good luck... gentlemen.Just in case you thought there might be some dramatic tension about Grom's fate, there's not. Jaina in three days created a gem that can bind the soul of a living person and a ritual that can purify someone of demonic corruption. Why yes we're only going to do this for Grom, sucks to be anyone else in the clan who was pressured into drinking Mannoroth's blood!  Hellscream is like a brother to me, Cairne. But he and his clan have fallen under the demons' influence. If I can't save him, then my people will be damned for all time.This conversation doesn't sit well with me. Obviously Grom is being used as a stand-in for the woes of the orcish people in general.  Almost all of Grom's screen time in this game has been him being a belligerent, reckless pain in the rear end who causes nothing but problems.  I think this is the first manifestation of Blizzard hoping you've played other games (in this case, WC2's expansion) or read extra materials like books to understand what's going on.  The Warsong will attack both mine and Jaina's bases, but at least on this difficulty Jaina is in no danger.  This is no natural storm! Blessed ancestors... everyone brace yourselves!The story constantly talks up how Grom is a brother to Thrall, but we only see two positive interactions between them, at the end of Prologue 2 and at the end of Horde 3. Honestly, I think half the problem with Grom's presentation in this game is that we never see him do anything good. He's constantly flying off the handle, picking unnecessary fights, getting captured, and generally being a dumb gently caress. I don't particularly want to save Grom, because honestly, why should I? He's consistently been a source of trouble.  That cutscene heralded infernals, who will now regularly drop out of the sky and attack. A lone infernal isn't too much of an issue.  Now yes, obviously Thrall isn't a self-insert for the player and he feels very differently about Grom.  But half my problem with struggling for motivation with this LP in WC3 has been that I flat out do not like the protagonists on offer, at least so far. Arthas descended into evil and then turned into an errand boy. Thrall spends his entire campaign doing whatever the last person he talked to told him to do. Grom, who we played as in a full quarter of this campaign, is a moronic shitbag.  And Medivh acts less like a character and more like the self-insert NPC of a frustrated dungeon master browbeating the player characters into following the railroad.  This was one of the two campaigns I was really curious about replaying with modern eyes.  As a kid, I was a huge fan of the Horde and of Thrall. I saw them as misunderstood outcasts fighting for the right to exist and be themselves.  It's an appealing power fantasy for a social outcast who'd been relentlessly bullied all their life.  Warcraft 3 was, after all, my introduction to Warcraft. I thought that the messages and themes of this game were central to the franchise.  I thought that one of those themes was putting aside old differences and hatreds to work together for the common good and build a better future.  Except... that isn't what happened.  Grom disobeyed direct orders and picked a fight with the Alliance for stupid [lack of] reasons and Thrall backed him up. Avoiding conflict with the Alliance in that first mission was both optional and not reflected in the story.  Then Cairne showed up yelling about pinkskins and Thrall just slaughtered a bunch of people trying to save the world, even if that entire mission has been retconned.  Until a crazy wizard showed up and yelled at everyone that they had to work together now.  Is it any wonder this peace doesn't last, when no one worked for it in the first place?  Part of the storytelling problem is that this wasn't even supposed to be Jaina until very late in development. The official Brady Games strategy guide for this game mentions her originally scripted death in the Alliance campaign. How these missions were supposed to play out without her, we can only speculate.  My nostalgia for Thrall and the Horde have been thoroughly disabused by this point.  And I truly don't know how I'd fix this campaign in a full-service remake.  Thrall is spineless and passive, Cairne barely rates the description of one note, Grom is a belligerent dumbass.   Medivh is a poorly used plot device, Jaina is a nonentity, Cenarius is a one-mission Worf.    I'd completely forgotten about this scene. I suspect Blizzard did, too.  Just click on Grom with the item in Thrall's inventory and it instantly removes Grom from the field.  Let me explain, for those who didn't grasp the implications of that exchange.   Throughout this LP, I've questioned why Thrall has continued to use the symbols and colors of the Horde of the First and Second Wars, the iconography of the Horde enslaved by the Burning Legion. Why he invokes his favor by Orgrim Doomhammer, last warchief of the Horde and usurper of Blackhand, for legitimacy to his claim to lead the orcish people.    Now we know why: because Thrall didn't know the truth about his people and their history.  Grom, Doomhammer, and every other orc in Thrall's Horde who was there for Gul'dan and Mannoroth and the founding of the Horde, lied to Thrall.  Not a single man or woman told Thrall the truth.  Why? We can only speculate.  Grom and his fellows were actively engaged in historical revisionism when teaching Thrall about his and their people.  And they were doing so beyond just jingoistically painting the humans in a bad light.  They were actively obscuring critical facts about how the corruption of the Horde happened.  As far as I can tell, they were portraying the orcs as innocent victims of the Burning Legion. Which in a very meaningful sense they absolutely were.  Maybe they just blamed everything on Gul'dan as a convenient scapegoat who's already dead, saying everything was his fault don't blame those who followed him. That would fit Warcraft's general presentation of the orcs.  Historical revisionism like this, especially whitewashing of a given nation's or culture's wrongdoing, is usually strongly associated with nationalist fervor.  There probably was an entirely understandable desire on the part of Grom and Orgrim to want Thrall to be proud to be an orc.  Personally, though, I have another theory for Grom's motives.  Shame.  I think Grom genuinely regretted his actions.  I think Grom hated himself, like many addicts do regarding what they know is an awful thing that they struggle to stop themselves from indulging.  And I think Grom saw in Thrall the potential to be the leader, to be the hope for the orcish people, that Grom knew that he himself could never be.  For all the insults and mockery I've leveled at Grom, I do not think he is an evil person.  I think Grom is a deeply messed up man who on some level knows how messed up he is.  When he's calm enough for introspection, at any rate.  I've written Grom as an OC in this LP because I do have some sympathy specifically as a result of that self-awareness he perhaps too rarely expresses.  That doesn't mean I like him as a person.  And he's stuck in a campaign full of characters I dislike.  Frankly, I hold Thrall's actions that stem from this cutscene in a much harsher light than I do Grom's actions during this campaign, probably to be the subject of the next lore post.  Thrall at least is supposed to be a wise and thoughtful character.  Honestly, I was barely paying attention to this cutscene during recording.  I was too busy grappling with the implications of Grom whitewashing the orcs' history to Thrall in the in-engine cutscene.  That, and my general lack of sympathy for the Horde, meant that this scene just did nothing for me emotionally.  That's probably very cold of me.  But I wish Grom had broken free of his own, or otherwise took some agency in his redemption beyond simply not falling again immediately.  Jaina's part in all of this, of course, will forever go unremarked upon.
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Sep 19, 2023 11:55
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Bored of the Horde So, the Horde campaign. To put it mildly, this story's been a mess.  Fundamentally, I think the primary issue with this campaign is that it was trying to do too much, narratively, with far too little time and did not make good use of that time. This campaign wants to be Thrall's adventures in Kalimdor. And the reconciliation of the Horde and Alliance. And advancing the Burning Legion plot. And introducing the night elves. And the struggle for the soul of the Horde. Not only is this the first (perhaps only? We'll find out) campaign where one - really, two - mission is explicitly made non-canon by later retcons, it's also the first campaign where our main protagonist isn't even around for a quarter of it.  Thrall is such a complete nothing of a protagonist. I noted even in the prologue how passive Thrall is, how he mostly spends his campaign doing whatever people tell him and almost never asserts a course of action himself. In another story, you could roll with Thrall being 19 and thus unwilling to ride herd on more experienced people like Grom or afraid to express himself too strongly. Have a campaign about Thrall growing into the role of leader for his people. Except that's not what we've got. Thrall is supposed to be a wise and mature leader who's already full grown and respected by everyone and chosen by destiny. And when we do get a protagonist who takes initiative, we get Grom Hellscream who's never met a bad decision he didn't take a swan dive into. This campaign is also saddled with a lot of extremely unfortunate tropes regarding the depiction of indigenous peoples of various parts of the world and the behavior of colonizing empires - and that is exactly what the Horde is. In another story, you could have Thrall playing diplomat and peacemaker who assembles a Horde of unlikely allies from the peoples of Kalimdor, rallying them to face the end of the world together. Instead Thrall just butchers most of them without ever apparently questioning it. I'm also annoyed by sausage fest on display, and how our first introduction to the female-lead race in the game was the most explicitly masculine-coded faction butchering them. We know that Garona Halforcen was at one point planned to be in WC3, and it's striking to me that we're three campaigns in and have only had two named female characters with speaking roles, Jaina and Sylvanas. Jaina is a supporting character never intended by the writers to live more than two missions. Sylvanas was an ineffectual antagonist who was murdered and enslaved by the protagonist. Jaina was playable for two missions, Sylvanas for half of one. Will the night elves fare any better in my eyes? We'll find out.  The prologue would also have you think the Alliance would be in any way an aggressive or antagonistic force in this campaign, and as we've seen, that's quite simply not the case. The Horde rolls in bearing the same iconography of the Second War Horde, and we know for a fact that the Alliance has no idea that Thrall's band are any different from the actual Second War Horde. Then Grom is Grom and starts a fight. Neither Thrall nor Cairne ever suggests trying to patch things up with the Alliance, and indeed Cairne is actively hostile to the Alliance without ever meeting them. If Blizzard wanted to portray the Alliance overtly negatively, it wouldn't have been hard. Simply show the Alliance attacking the tauren for whatever reason you want after Thrall has already made friends with Cairne in the first level. But, of course, the entire reason the Alliance is in Kalimdor is exactly the same reason as why the Horde is here, and they're both here at the behest of Medivh who doesn't seem bothered about the purported heroes of Azeroth slaughtering each other in droves. Medivh is supposed to be wise and powerful and mysterious, when in reality he's a lovely DMNPC who exists to play Cassandra and crowbar people back onto the railroad tracks when they start to stray. His identity isn't interesting, his plan isn't interesting, his actions aren't interesting. They don't have to be, but Blizzard thinks a clumsy mystery box is more compelling than a character whose actions make some kind of sense. The whole thing adds up to this campaign actively irritating and angering me. I did not care about the Alliance or Undead campaigns, because I don't like playing villains and long ago checked out of their stories with regards to WC3. I'd been invested in the Horde out of nostalgia and childhood memories of them being misunderstood good guys, though, and that's gone flying out the window. After writing this, I think what frustrates me more than anything else here is that Blizzard has presented the pieces of what could have been a fascinating story and made Thrall an incredible character. Thrall was raised by humans, despite not being one of them. He was educated in warfare, strategy, and military leadership, but held in a position of subservience, even named 'Slave.' He is primed by his own owner with tales of how the rest of the Grand Alliance is corrupt and weak, because he is being shaped into a weapon. A human woman's kindness also teaches him empathy and compassion, simultaneously showing Thrall the best and worst of humanity. Thrall is then taken in by the orcs, who feed him a sanitized version of their own history. Grom Hellscream, a charismatic veteran of the old wars, sees in Thrall the potential to build a better, brighter future than Grom ever could. Grom sees himself as too stained, too corrupt, too bloodthirsty to be the kind of leader that he realized the orcs need if they're to have a meaningful future. He tells his young new friend about the glory and dignity and pride the orcs once possessed, trying to inspire Thrall. Along the way, Grom leaves out important details, most prominently the orcs' own actions leading to their corruption and downfall. Orgrim Doomhammer agrees and is Grom's partner in educating Thrall. He feeds the young man a diet of how he should be proud to be an orc, seeing in Thrall the potential to accomplish what Orgrim never could. Like Grom, his sense of shame and dishonor leads him to teach Thrall a very selective reading of orc history. Orgrim, far more of a big picture thinker than Grom, believes that the orcs need a new [re]founding myth to rally around, inspire them to rise up and become a great and independent power again. Thrall, not knowing any better, takes these elder mentors at their word and synthesizes what they have taught him with his own upbringing. Thrall is a fundamentally decent person and wants to see the best in people, and comes to believe that the downfall of the orcs and greatest danger to them came when they were controlled by outsiders - by demons and by the internment camps. He idolizes these charismatic veterans and never questions their stories, and while there are other elders like Varok Saurfang, Eitrigg, and even Garona Halforcen with a far less rose-colored view of orc history, none of them can bring themselves to try telling Thrall another version of events. There's a number of reasons why they might choose to do so, from shame to not wanting to burden Thrall with trying to make these difficult moral choices to not wanting to ruin Thrall's relationship with his mentors. Thrall, taught all his life about the great destiny awaiting him and raised on carefully tailored stories of history from biased sources hoping to manipulate him, then makes the acquaintance of Medivh, himself one of the more massive fuckups in Azeroth's history but a man who is sincerely trying to save the world. Medivh, knowingly or otherwise, feeds into Thrall's savior complex and never properly explains what's going on because he assumes that the warchief of the Horde, of all the people in the world, would know the history of his people and understand the threat at hand. Take all of this, and enter Kalimdor where Thrall meets yet another mentor character in the form of Cairne, an unbiased outsider who understands nothing of what's going on and just tries to counsel Thrall to be a good dude. Thus you have Thrall sitting on a powder keg. His mentors past and present - except Cairne - are actively lying to him, some for selfish reasons and some for noble reasons. Thrall, being a young and idealistic man who is naturally trusting and good natured, thinks he understands everything about what is going on because he has never questioned his mentors, and then proceeds to make a series of decisions with far-reaching negative consequences: sending Grom and his clan off into a land they know nothing about, leading to war with the night elves; and joining war against the Alliance, who see the banners and colors of the Horde of the previous great wars and assume that the old threat has returned, a threat that Thrall doesn't even understand existed because of the orcs' historical revisionism. Arrayed against Thrall as enemies and allies are Grom, an old man of both great virtues and great flaws who tried to make Thrall into the leader for a new future that Grom knew that he himself never could be; the likes of Eitrigg and Saurfang and Garona, who understand deeply just how hosed up the Horde is and how deeply Thrall has been mislead, but have chosen or been persuaded not to gainsay Grom's whitewashed version of orc history; Medivh, a man in a deeply messed up situation who is sincerely trying his best to save the world but simply has no idea how to relate to people or present his knowledge in a way that won't unsettle or alarm anyone; and ultimately Jaina Proudmoore, a traumatized survivor leading a band of more such on a desperate mission to save the world, who know and understand all the truths about the orcs and their history that Thrall does not, and don't understand that Thrall is deeply ignorant and mislead by his own advisors. This could have been the makings of a dynamite story about mistakes past and present, the weight of guilt and the potential to change for the better, how historical revisionism leads to ignorance of the past and misunderstandings when faced with those who recorded history differently, and hard questions of trust and deciding the future. Would that story be suitable for a Warcraft RTS? Maybe not. These are some heavy subjects intensely relevant to real life today. Trying to cram all of this into eight levels and a few cutscenes that fundamentally have to boil down to gameplay of ordering units around to kill other units would have been an incredible challenge. And of course this whole thing also needs to introduce the night elves and advance the plot with the Burning Legion, too. I truly don't think Blizzard was up to the task of telling the story that they had assembled the pieces for in the Horde campaign, and to some degree I don't hold it against them for fumbling it so badly. Executing this story would also require Thrall to be a dynamic and proactive character who introspects, thinks about other characters and their intentions, and actually does something of his own initiative. Thrall in this game is such a bumbling, spineless, passive sack of green potatoes that he's the first of our campaign protagonists to be completely absent from a mission (two, in fact) in what's supposed to be a campaign about him. This is likewise the first campaign where one mission (drat near two of them, in fact) has been straight up retconned as having never happened. Thrall in this game just stumbles around, doing what people tell him to do and going with the flow. He's a weak protagonist, and a weak leader. The Horde follows him because Orgrim and Grom said so. Thrall went to Kalimdor because Medivh said so. Thrall joined forces with Jaina because Medivh said so. Thrall saved Grom because Medivh had to tell him that Grom was in trouble and Jaina happened to have the means to save him. Thrall, as written, is an ineffectual figurehead for other leaders in the Horde who doesn't want to rock the boat, never thinks about anyone's actions or motives including his own, refuses to take ten minutes to talk to anyone, and yet he's somehow held up as a great leader because destiny said so. Thrall could have been completely cut from this campaign and nothing at all would have changed. Thrall didn't save Grom, Jaina and the priest/shaman convocation did that. And they did so because Medivh told them to. Any orc could have bro'd out with Cairne and Grom never needed a reason to head up into the forests and decide to build a fortress there. Thrall contributed nothing to this campaign, and that's a hell of a thing to say about the protagonist of a campaign story that ultimately chooses to focus on the idea of free will and choosing your own destiny. What really offends me, as both a reader and consumer of media, and as someone who fancies myself a writer and a media producer in my own little way, is that I don't think Blizzard even realized the potential they had here. The idea that Thrall had been actively lied to and manipulated by the leaders of the old Horde to whitewash their own history and crimes is presented in a three-line exchange at the end of the campaign. Medivh acts more like the self-insert NPC of a frustrated dungeon master yelling at his players to get on with the railroaded plot than like a cogent character in his own right. Jaina is a bit part originally slated to die two campaigns ago and could have been replaced by any generic Alliance character speaking the same lines. I find all this frustrating, more than a little infuriating, and ultimately, just plain sad. Blizzard had everything they needed for what could have been an amazing story, or at least an interesting one depending on how well or poorly Blizzard executed it. And instead what we got feels more like some nerdy dudebros making a podcast of their homebrew Dungeons and Dragons game.  What a waste.
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Sep 19, 2023 11:56
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I agree with you on the campaign being garbage largely because of the sheer number of directions they tried to pull the campaign in. I think one of the things that makes RTS characters feel a bit flat is that some of their characterization is supposed to come from leading armies in the field. For all of Thrall being passive when it comes to the overarching story beats, he is leading armies and is making a name for himself in battle.
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Sep 19, 2023 12:32
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This mission is a bit of a peculiarity because Reign of Chaos goes out of it's way to avoid mirror matches and this is the closest to it there is; Orcs vs the partially developed and eventually scrapped Chaos Orcs + a few Burning Legion units because Chaos Orcs never got their Tier 3 stuff.
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Sep 19, 2023 13:00
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The idea that Thrall was consciously fed a false history of the Horde out of shame is compelling. Fits all the pieces together too. The orcs are keen to follow this young outsider because he is not only untainted by their history but sincerely believes in a more noble past that they'd much prefer is their legacy. Grom works better as a symbol than a character. He represents all of the struggles of members of the old Horde trying to fit with Thrall's. And that's why finding, protecting and saving him is so important, because by analogy he is the Horde (or at least its orc members) and if Thrall abandons him or casts him out then he's left with nothing at all. It's why no other senior orcs exist to argue with him or keep an eye on him (aside from the more direct reason of keeping the cast size down), since his problems are also their problems. It leads to some odd interactions when you consider that there's a whole clan of supposedly independent orcs following his leadership, and those other voices really should actually exist, of course. Fun little thing that doesn't get captured by screenshots - curing Grom of the demon juice consists of getting a bunch of Priests and Shamans to cast Dispel Magic and Purge on him repeatedly. I guess it's just that simple!
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Sep 19, 2023 13:03
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It's moderately funny to me that this thread and the Starcraft 2 thread both have regular spinoffs of people desperately trying to rewrite the constituent parts into a game that doesn't suck poo poo.
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Sep 19, 2023 13:44
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Cythereal posted:Thrall in this game just stumbles around, doing what people tell him to do and going with the flow. He's a weak protagonist, and a weak leader. This even carries on to how he is in World of Warcraft while he's in charge. He's just about able to hold the Horde together; he spends his time unsuccessfully trying to recruit new races*; his supposed underlings run around and do whatever they want, nearly leading to a full-blown war multiple times; and when he finally steps down, he makes the same mistakes again that he did with Grom, and appoints Grom's unstable warmongering son as leader, which immediately leads to disaster. And that's all in just a couple of years. If it weren't for how he's written around all that, and afterwards when he becomes the World Shaman and stands in for Neltharion, you might think that his being a poor leader was done on purpose, rather than just being an accident born of poor writing. *The Orcs, Trolls and Tauren drifted together during the Third War, he's only convinced to take the Forsaken by the Tauren, the Blood Elves are brought in by the Forsaken, and while he did recruit the Bilgewater Goblins on his own, it's... not a feel good story.
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Sep 19, 2023 14:34
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Cradok posted:while he did recruit the Bilgewater Goblins on his own, it's... not a feel good story. Thrall picking terrible leaders is a strangely consistent part of his character. Everyone loves a good redemption story, pretty much. We all want to believe that people can be better than what they are at their worst, that being can reflect and improve themselves, and learn from their mistakes. There's multiple characters who are antiheroes in the lore - so much about them screams villain, they come with a lot of traditional fantasy evil tropes, but there's something to hold onto, something to believe that they might turn out okay. Blizzard? They just head right on into straight-up villainy eventually and it's loving dumb as hell every time. If Blizzard were in charge of Drizz't, the cliche example of rebellion against fantasy stereotypes, it wouldn't be long before he just decided that his former sacrifice people to evil spider gods society was good, actually.
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Sep 19, 2023 15:38
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PurpleXVI posted:It's moderately funny to me that this thread and the Starcraft 2 thread both have regular spinoffs of people desperately trying to rewrite the constituent parts into a game that doesn't suck poo poo. Blizzard games : Video Games :: Beast the Primordial : Traditional Games The more terribly something misses the mark (while having a core that's at least partially engaging), the more people are desperate to salvage it. As a side note… the orcish "freedom!" war-cry never made much sense to me as a kid or now, either from the in game characters or the players. No depiction of the post-second war orcs ever has them looking like slaves or genocide victims - at worst, in both War3 and WoW, they're in POW camps. Because they're prisoners of war. It takes, well, Thrall's never-elaborated revisionist viewpoint that Cythereal has detailed, in order to see it that way. It always made the New Horde feel more cruel to me - like they have to lie about the surprisingly kind results of their genocidal wars, in order to justify another one.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:08
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the horde sucks the horde has always sucked the horde will always suck because it's written by blizzard instead of someone competent send tweet
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Sep 19, 2023 16:10
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What getting me is how boring and forgettable the Orc campaign is. I remembered most of the Human, Undead and NElves campaigns but I only really remember the Grom levels from the Orc campaign. I knew Thrall did stuff but I could not remember what.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:12
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Pieces of Peace posted:Blizzard games : Video Games :: Beast the Primordial : Traditional Games lmao, yeah, every mention of Beast in the F&F thread resulted in attempted rewrites to salvage it because people liked something about the central concept, to the point that people had to be begged to please stop trying to polish the turd.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:15
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So, Reforged didn't do anything special here aside from the usual "HELSCREAM" splicing to replace instances of "Grom" being spoken. 1.33 added a few extra towers to both your base and Jaina's, though those go away again on Hard difficulty. They also fixed issues with a few AI players, including Jaina not attempting to rebuild most of her base, and never using Gryphons despite having an Aviary. I will say, I do agree that Grom regrets his actions. He regrets what he did and his part in the corruption of the Orcs, but his own brand of stubbornness and the artificial aggression being pumped through his mind by the proximity of the demons is genuinely screwing with his ability to strategize and reason and think clearly. But even when he is thinking clearly, an attack without attempt to converse is not a challenge he can turn away from. His pride won't allow it. I remember Grom in the Lord of the Clans novel being a lot more calm and intelligent than he's presented here. There's even the slightest shade of "Intelligent Grom" in the Prologue, where the instant he's told Thrall plans to take the Orcs away from Human Lands, Grom suggests using the ships that are right here to do so. Use the resources that are available; so what if they belong to the humans, they're not interested in talking to us anyway, no matter how much we try to change. BlazetheInferno fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Sep 19, 2023 |
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Sep 19, 2023 16:17
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PurpleXVI posted:lmao, yeah, every mention of Beast in the F&F thread resulted in attempted rewrites to salvage it because people liked something about the central concept, to the point that people had to be begged to please stop trying to polish the turd. That's the key thing, really. It's not just that there's bad writing, there's tons of that in all kinds of stories all over the world. Blizzard, at least in the 2000-2015 sort of era, managed to be very good at taking an engaging core concept and then dropping the ball with it. Which makes it very appealing to try to fix so that that engaging concept gets a suitably engaging plot, even if it's just fanfiction.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:23
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This is definitely the campaign that most needed an update for reforged, it sucks that it got basically no changes instead. I never expected a total rewrite (although anything less wouldn't be enough to make this good), but they should have at least polished it up a bit.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:36
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Also it's extremely funny to me that Thrall's pride in the Horde is entirely because of revisionism and lying and after discovering that, he just... decided to do absolutely nothing about it. WoW could have been Alliance vs... idk, The Orc Friends or something, and all of the tension could have very believably sprung from the Alliance being like "you're very obviously still the Horde" and The Orc Friends being like "nuh-uh, we don't do as many war crimes" and new politics arising from that. Instead Thrall is now deliberately instead of accidentally appropriating the tradition and culture of an invading genocidal force and keeps getting confused or upset when people hold him and his people accountable for the actions that they represent and support.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:40
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Cradok posted:he makes the same mistakes again that he did with Grom, and appoints Grom's unstable warmongering son as leader, which immediately leads to disaster. The mind blowing thing about that is that even Grom's unstable warmongering son knows that's a bad idea to give him any kind of authority but it happens anyways.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:47
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Feldegast42 posted:The mind blowing thing about that is that even Grom's unstable warmongering son knows that's a bad idea to give him any kind of authority but it happens anyways. That's for different reasons, though. He felt unprepared, and didn't think he would be effective. He was - he was extremely effective in his chosen course. It was a question of methods, morals, and an utter lack of diplomacy, and the fact that other key leaders disagreed heavily with said chosen course that led to disaster.
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Sep 19, 2023 17:25
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I do think trying to draw in stuff that happens in WoW to criticize this story is the wrong tack to take. WoW doesn't exist as of when this was written. I do feel you have to judge the work based on what it is. I agree that the campaign ultimately has several things that could work, and just doesn't hit it well enough. The story of Grom at a glance is a good one; a representation of the Old Horde and all it's bad falls into temptation, but ultimately what Thrall does is give him the strength to fight back and end that curse himself. But they have too much filler and not enough actual good character moments. Likewise with Thrall; a new and inexperienced leader who's trying to push for a better world out of naivety, but in the end his trust in Grom does pay off, and Grom does break free not only of his own bloodlust but finally breaks the curse that haunted the orcs. There's a few other notes in there that have a lot of promise - Grom ultimately turning back to the demons because he not only feels it's hopeless to fight against it, but because people around him are actively saying "You will never be good. You are tainted forever. Your kind is permanently damned." There's a lot you can do with that! It's a shame it doesn't do enough. Ultimately, I think the writing falls victim to the game aspect - we know there were plans for multiple Horde missions to have non-violent solutions, but these were dropped, likely due to programming and time issues. And we have multiple maps suffering from being Yet Another Tutorial. But here's the thing - this storyline for all its flaws WAS largely beloved for its time, and I think it's the "time" part that gets left out here. For as bad as this was, this was still a much more complex storyline then, well, just about anything involving "orcs" had happened before. Grom and Thrall's storyline is basic, but as we've been saying, there's enough there that people could really run with it. The storyline of a "damned" and formerly evil people trying to find a home for themselves is one that pretty clearly resonates with a lot of people. This is where I think bringing up WoW too much is the wrong tack to take - you completely get blinded by how popular this was and why it was popular. Yeah WoW sucks poo poo, but WoW doesn't exist yet. It's 2002, every adult in your life has gone absolutely loving insane with bloodlust over 9/11, and here you have a story that is, extremely clumsily, saying that no, nobody is inherently evil, even the orcs that up to this point were in fact just mindless baddies to grind through. Also, the game is saying whole heartedly that it's good that an imprisoned people fought violently against their captors and took their freedom not because it was kindly given to them, but because they TOOK it. Also those people are very consciously non-white coded. That's an important lesson! As for Grom's confession, it's fine. While certainly you can say "oh so Thrall took all these symbols of the Horde thinking they were ultimately innocent but they WEREN'T" and from there derive the idea that they should...well, what, actually? What solution do you have after that? I find this intensely unsatisfying. I think they frankly took the right path - Grom states that the orcs were not "always evil," but also they weren't just vaguely cursed into it - they choose the horrors. That's where the inner conflict of the Horde comes from, that basically every orc roleplayer I knew in WoW really focused on - that they CHOOSE to do awful things, and they have to actively choose to not continue doing them. That Grom was a monster, and Grom also killed the demon Mannoroth and freed his people for good. The Horde trades in flawed heroes, whereas the Alliance trades in...well, boring ones. Ultimately I don't think you're ever going to be satisfied looking for perfectly good good guys who never do bad things. Most folks would feel those are not interesting characters because there's no real internal conflict there. And, I keep saying this, but again, certainly the inner conflict here was written pretty shoddily. But the solution isn't to just bulldooze over it. Lastly, Blizzard is many things but they are not subtle. The camps the orcs were put in are very intentionally made to be awful. If you are nodding and going "actually they're fine" then you need to double check why you're agreeing with actual cartoonish as hell poo poo about mass racial imprisonment. The Horde is, as has been stated, very intentionally native coded. It's not really a secret what the camps are meant to be.
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Sep 19, 2023 17:49
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the core problem of the orc campaign is that its three missions and a bunch of absolutely nothing filler, all of which star Grom. Attacked by night elves, totally outmatched by night elf attack so drinks demon blood, gets beaten back into not being evil by Thrall. if every other mission was cut this story would lose nothing.
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Sep 19, 2023 17:54
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ProfessorCirno posted:But here's the thing - this storyline for all its flaws WAS largely beloved for its time, and I think it's the "time" part that gets left out here. Was it really? I remember plenty of people praising Arthas' storyline, but I've never heard a single person say a good word about any of the other campaigns in the base game.
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Sep 19, 2023 17:59
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I remember loving (and still loving) the final cutscene facing down Mannoroth so that made an effect on me. And I also agree that despite its many flaws the campaign is ultimately in the right direction to take the orcs, despite the backsliding and lovely writing the horde got as WoW progressed.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:08
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ProfessorCirno posted:I do think trying to draw in stuff that happens in WoW to criticize this story is the wrong tack to take. WoW doesn't exist as of when this was written. I do feel you have to judge the work based on what it is. This has never been the approach I've taken in this LP, and I'm not going to start now. I'm judging this dumpster fire in full view of what the franchise is now and have been from the start. quote:But here's the thing - this storyline for all its flaws WAS largely beloved for its time, and I think it's the "time" part that gets left out here. For as bad as this was, this was still a much more complex storyline then, well, just about anything involving "orcs" had happened before. Grom and Thrall's storyline is basic, but as we've been saying, there's enough there that people could really run with it. The storyline of a "damned" and formerly evil people trying to find a home for themselves is one that pretty clearly resonates with a lot of people. This is where I think bringing up WoW too much is the wrong tack to take - you completely get blinded by how popular this was and why it was popular. Yeah WoW sucks poo poo, but WoW doesn't exist yet. It's 2002, every adult in your life has gone absolutely loving insane with bloodlust over 9/11, and here you have a story that is, extremely clumsily, saying that no, nobody is inherently evil, even the orcs that up to this point were in fact just mindless baddies to grind through. Also, the game is saying whole heartedly that it's good that an imprisoned people fought violently against their captors and took their freedom not because it was kindly given to them, but because they TOOK it. Also those people are very consciously non-white coded. That's an important lesson! Here is maybe a disconnect between us: I was barely a teenager in 2002. 9/11 was something adults talked about. Orcs only showed up as bad guys in my dad's video games and the Lord of the Rings movie that released in 2001. Blizzard's portrayal of the orcs as a 'savage and tribal race of proud warriors and mystical shamans' has been the default in my life, not something new or exceptional. The first RPGs I ever played, half-orcs were a valid player character option. I am bringing up WoW, because that is Warcraft. Warcraft 3 is a game of my childhood. WoW has been running almost three times longer at the time of writing than the time from WC1 to WC3's expansion. quote:It's not really a secret what the camps are meant to be. Then Blizzard can write them as what they were meant to be. That's on them. I do not particularly care about whatever context Warcraft 3 existed in or whatever reasons Blizzard may or may not have had for what they've written. That isn't what I'm judging, and never has been.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Was it really? I remember plenty of people praising Arthas' storyline, but I've never heard a single person say a good word about any of the other campaigns in the base game. I thought the night elf campaign was cool back when I played it! I'm a sucker for 'the ancient evil is here, time to activate all the defenses we prepared for exactly this happening, despite a few hitches it actually works' as a plotline one of my favorite Stellaris endgame crisis events is where if you roll the machine apocalypse, and the machine ancient empire is in the game, there's a chance that on the crisis' activation the doddering old machine intelligence is replaced by a much more active one whose HELLOWORLD is 'Secondary processors online. Saw you coming from a million years out you little poo poo'
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Sep 19, 2023 18:12
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Splitting this off into its own post because it's its own thought. Eons ago, a literal more then real life year, I asked: what's an orc? Let's look back at that, now that the orc campaign is over, and a very important one is soon to begin. The fantasy orc starts in Tolkien. For Tolkien, orcs are an antagonist that...he actually had a lot of troubles with. Orcs, in LotR, are at heart, a representation of industrialized war. They are the war that scars and destroys the natural land with trenches and gas and artillery shells. They're deeply impresonal war, where you and your fellows try to charge across the field and every single one of them gets cut down with machine gun fire in an instant. They're WW1, which we know was deeply traumatizing to, well, everyone involved, and that absolutely included Tolkien. LotR is rather explicit and often about how war is scarring and damaging; how you can't come back to the same world you left afterwards. That's all cool! ...Hey uh, so what do orcs LOOK like? And that's where we hit a problem. Tolkien, operating off the cultural knowledge he had at the time, made orcs what he felt would be the natural representation of a marauding specter of war and death itself, by making them...well, no easy way around it, Mongolian. He made them Asian. Well, that's not entirely fair, he also made them a bit eastern european, there were also definitely touches of fear of the Huns in there as well. He also gives the mdark skin to contrast against the very fair and light skinned cast of protagonists. Now, he did not do that out of a desire to write a white supremecist track. I think Tolkien is an at least somewhat complex person, and his hate for naziism is very well documented. But he was working with his cultural knowledge, and that cultural knowledge is, uh, not good. So, we have orcs. They're non-European coded, particuarly meant to represent nomadic / "barbarian" peoples that the English would've been culturally afraid of, but are also extremely destructive and, well, "evil," being an embodiment of the horrors of war But that's not where orcs end, because they're about to become substantially worse. It is now the 70's. LotR is real hot, and one apeshit dude in Wisconsin making new games out of his love for tactical war games. His name is Gary Gygax, and he does not think war is horrible and bad. And he has a very different cultural education then JRR Tolkien has. He takes orcs and makes them a villain in his games, but he doesn't have the somewhat Euro-centric ideas about "barbarians" that would include Mongolians or Huns. No, barbarians for him would be Native Americans. And so, orcs become waaaaay more Native coded...but they don't actually lose that whole thing of "the embodiment of the horrors of war." What you end up with, leading into Warcraft, is that the predominant view of orcs is more or less the worst of Western movies, then made worst still. They're heavily Native American coded, specifically as you'd get from popular Westerns at the time...which means they yell and have warcamps and are here to murder "innocent settlers." But they are also, despite being coded as a group that was very strongly snubbed and hated for their "pagan religious beliefs," not actually here for the natural world at all, because they're the horrors of war as it destroys the land! It's all the worst aspects of anti-Native propaganda, except now also they hate nature, somehow. This is the orc that exists when Warcraft 3 is made, and you can, I hope, see how, even as flawed as WC3 was, it was still a step up from that. We start with the (again very Native coded) orcs in literal reducation camps and reservations owned by vaguely medieval westerners, violently breaking free because words aren't going to work. They successfully fight for their freedom, unite with other Native-coded peoples, annd stand independent of all those previous white people. Its not hard to see how this is a story that appeals to a lot of people. This is also now what orcs are. It's still intensely flawed! But they are also now more then just vermin to be exterminated. Gygax when asked about orcs would literally quote real life genocidal maniacs who bragged about wanting to exterminate native peoples. Flawed as these orcs are, they're still a lot better then that. And remember, this is 2002 - orcs have been those extremely bad D&D orcs since the 70's. This is, weirdly and maybe sadly, groundbreaking! But remember what I said, about orcs still not actually being real into "nature?" That is one of the key problems with the WC3 orc. Why we get the problems with Ashenvale, why we have all this weird confusion and question about orc religion. How we have native coded groups that talk up about the "Earthmother" and the spirits of the land and your ancestors, and yet don't seem to have any actual love for the antural world or any real understanding of sacred spaces. There's one last real big thing with orcs we haven't touched on, and that's because we haven't met the reasons for that last big thing. But we will very soon. After all, the next group of peoples we look at are elves.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:13
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Racially segregated prison camps are and were back going to be read as concentration camps, unless there is some really heavy elaboration on why they're not. Blizzard doesn't provide this.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:25
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Terrible Opinions posted:Racially segregated prison camps are and were back going to be read as concentration camps, unless there is some really heavy elaboration on why they're not. Blizzard doesn't provide this. If Blizzard wants to write them as concentration camps, they can write them as concentration camps. Until then, I'm going to assume that the prisoner of war camps for the invading alien race of genocidal conquerors were precisely that. We know that some were poorly run and exploited the prisoners, and some were not and did not.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:30
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I think an important part to note alongside all of the reasonable stuff regarding the portrayal of orcs is simply put, who was this game for? And the answer is almost certainly people who played Warhammer as we've established further up the LP. Where the Gygax orcs are plainly evil, the prevailing portrayal of them at the time that I knew of came from Games Workshop. Here the orcs aren't really evil so much as a force of nature. They exist to fight and that's it. There's a reason Grom's portrayal is largely about hurling himself at the nearest enemy to beat them up. He's a warhammer orc. When he falls, he becomes a D&D orc. I agree with basically all the gameplay issues taken with the Orc campaign but the core story of orcs being more than their portrayal through all media was resonant at the time, especially with how Grom draws on the two major depictions at the time.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:35
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Cythereal posted:If Blizzard wants to write them as concentration camps, they can write them as concentration camps.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:42
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