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Terrible Opinions posted:"Camps" without further elaboration that only applies to people based on their race are going to be interpreted as concentration camps. That just is the way "camps" as shorthand works. Writing doesn't have to be done because that is the default assumption, particularly when it's a bunch of militarized white guys running the camps. 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 18:44
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All of them were poorly run and exploited prisoners. Blackmoore, the guy who was raising Thrall to be a leader of orcs in his name, was in charge of the entire system. Dalaran's main argument against the camps was that they were slowly killing the Orcs as more or less the world's most drawn out execution between the malaise (which was going unstudied as to why the Orcs were all depressed and barely active unless forced) and the poor standards under Blackmoore. Admittedly this is stuff I'm remembering, not necessarily fact checking. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Sep 19, 2023 |
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Sep 19, 2023 18:49
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Being used as gladiatoral pits, beatings, implied sexual abuse (see, Blackmoore taking a female orc to Thrall for *heavy implications*)
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Sep 19, 2023 18:51
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The game was also partually written for a very early 2000s crowd. I mean, just look at all the dumb poo poo that can rightfully be pointed at and derided. Its more a shame thay Blizzard never really got better enough to be able to fix the major problems. Maybe they should've actually reforged Warcraft 3 and claim the original was just Gnomish propaganda. Do not deny this batchall!
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Sep 19, 2023 18:57
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It's hard to criticize the Alliance/Humans too much for putting the orcs in camps because the orcs are, as Cythereal pointed out, literally alien invaders from another planet. They also waged not one, but two offensive genocidal wars against humanity. It's frankly impressive that the humans kept the orcs alive at all instead of slaughtering them in the wake of the second war.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:00
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Dirk the Average posted:It's hard to criticize the Alliance/Humans too much for putting the orcs in camps because the orcs are, as Cythereal pointed out, literally alien invaders from another planet. They also waged not one, but two offensive genocidal wars against humanity. It's frankly impressive that the humans kept the orcs alive at all instead of slaughtering them in the wake of the second war. Barely passed the vote, actually. And it kinda destroyed the great alliance down to Lordaeron, Stormwind and some lip service by the elves and dwarves
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Sep 19, 2023 19:02
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Dirk the Average posted:It's hard to criticize the Alliance/Humans too much for putting the orcs in camps because the orcs are, as Cythereal pointed out, literally alien invaders from another planet. They also waged not one, but two offensive genocidal wars against humanity. It's frankly impressive that the humans kept the orcs alive at all instead of slaughtering them in the wake of the second war. Oh I agree, that's why I brought up the Dalaran thing. The intent of the camps was imprisonment and labour (rebuilding what they had destroyed). The result was a slow execution, because the malaise happened and Blackmoore was hiding how much of a poo poo he truly was, and planning to overthrow the Alliance himself with Thrall as his Orc-Leader. As intended, the camps weren't nice (prison generally isn't) but would have been a reasonable, overly so, answer as to what to do about the orcs. As a result, they were monstrous and horrific thanks to unforeseen complications and poor choices in trust/leadership. Also yeah, at least 2 nations left the Alliance over this decision and it was one of the political choices that led to their fractured situation at the start of 3. As this disagreement exposed a lot of old political wounds that had been barely papered over in response to the existential threat at the time. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Sep 19, 2023 |
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Sep 19, 2023 19:04
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Cythereal posted:Until then, I'm going to assume that the prisoner of war camps for the invading alien race of genocidal conquerors were precisely that. So they were camps where a particular race was singled out to be…concentrated?
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Sep 19, 2023 19:08
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ulmont posted:So they were camps where a particular race was singled out to be…concentrated? It's a good shot but it doesn't work all that well when the entirety of the captured members of that specific race came out of a dark portal and were card carrying volunteer members of the 12th through 58th Genocidal Army Group. The problem is more "Oh gently caress they've been loving in jail and now we can leave the babies to be brought up by their genocidal parents or we can take them and do a nice little cultural genocide." and yeah, that's a hosed up thing, the Alliance position of just deflating and bumbling and doing nothing there was actually pretty understandable.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:23
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Dirk the Average posted:It's hard to criticize the Alliance/Humans too much for putting the orcs in camps because the orcs are, as Cythereal pointed out, literally alien invaders from another planet. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 19, 2023 19:31
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Szarrukin posted:I wonder what's your and Cythereal take on "District 9". We are not talking about District 9, we are talking about Warcraft. If Blizzard wants to change the story they've established, that is within their power. They can write whatever they want to write, and I'll judge it, as I'm doing now.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:36
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I think it is obviously true that the camps were concentration camps, even absent intent, they are massively underresourced and the orcs are essentially being used for forced labour in all of them. It can also be true that the circumstances around their creation presented the least worst option given the political climate established by Blizzard. But further it can also be true that these political circumstances are the creation of Blizzard and that a world where the political will for reforming the orcs into productive allies with their own culture was easily possible to justify.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:41
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Cythereal posted:We are not talking about District 9, we are talking about Warcraft.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:44
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Szarrukin posted:We are talking about morality of putting alien invaders - and their offspring - in definitely-not-concentration-camps. No. No, we are not doing this. This line of argument stops here.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:46
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Cythereal posted:No. when you're so concerned about fictional factions being moral that you start defending concentration camps. read what you're writing and try thinking for half a second. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 19, 2023 19:48
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I warned you.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:49
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Are y'all ready to be reasonable and not insinuate that people support real-life atrocities because of their opinions concerning video games about wizards and space aliens? Let's find out.
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Sep 19, 2023 22:03
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the things that warcraft does to brains are seriously impressive
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Sep 19, 2023 22:08
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So the Main characters of the Human and Orc campaigns had limited adult assistance. Thrall was the adult unit Caine came along while Arthas had Jania?
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Sep 19, 2023 23:18
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I think the kindest way I can put it is that the rewrite of the orcs post-WC2 is... well-meaning, but shortsighted. Which is really something we should've seen coming, though the relative novelty of it at the time covered a multitude of sins. Adding nuance to the good-vs-evil conflict of orcs versus humans requires cleaning up the bad guys some but also saw the good guys get shitted up to a greater or lesser degree. Which... fair, because no group is made entirely of saints just because they were put upon, so having assholes on the human side like Blackmoore doing some heinous poo poo is believable now that the boot's on the other foot. The problem here being actually that, but for the one pure soul we have in Thrall, the orcs we're supposed to feel bad about were all just until recently literal murderous maniacs who came into a place to kill everyone, take their homes, and make children's toys out of the dead humans' bones while looking for more people to kill. The whole demon curse aspect is supposed to help reform that idea, but then the story undercuts itself by having the only other named orc character of the campaign, Grom, talk about how they jumped into it eagerly in the first place. Whoops! Culpability's back on the menu! Should every orc be judged and damned by the crimes of their leaders? No, but we also don't have any orcs but Thrall and Grom to contend with on that. And since they're fictional characters rather than actual people, it means they do stand in for the entire rest of their people because that's what this kind of writing does and demands. The fight for Grom's soul is also literally the fight for the soul of the orcs. Meanwhile our darling pure soul Thrall just never wants to contend with the history of the Horde because that would be... depressing, I guess? Kind of a downer for him? Thrall winning the soul of the orcs means that because he's clean of guilt for any particular misdeeds, the Horde is also given a clean break from its history. Again, well-meaning but also shortsighted. The writing falls into regular "shades of gray" writing traps while trying to address topics the writers just didn't have the chops to handle along with the complications of trying to write the gameplay. The campaign is flabby and poorly plotted, while simultaneously needing to be bulked up in other areas. Having any other named Old Horde orcs around than just Grom would probably have helped a lot, adding at least one more voice to the various arguments about what the orcs should be. Cairne doesn't and can't count here, since he's not someone inside the Horde's problems and mostly he just helps Thrall feel good about doing what Thrall was going to do anyway.
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Sep 19, 2023 23:27
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I mean, part of it is also trying to handle it in an RTS where you only see combat units(and one construction unit) and the only way to deal with an enemy unit is to kill it, and most maps require you to murder everything they contain. Presumably the Horde had its share of non-combatant personnel. Orcs who brushed the wolves, hosed down the ogres, forged the swords, sharpened the javelins, spent the entire war driving caravans of gear to the front, then caravans of loot back home, and never engaged in any kind of murdering, and they got tossed into the camps alongside Killer McSkinlantern. But we don't see Grimbrush Shinymane, the wolf tender, because he's abstracted away. If it wasn't for the loving demon curse, which was a dumbshit idea in the first place, and the orcs just attacked Azeroth for political/cultural reasons and perhaps a priesthood in deep with the demons, then Grimbrush might well not have wanted to murder anyone, and felt sad whenever one of his wolves had to run off and tear a footman's throat out, and that could've made the Horde a bit more nuanced. And the "redemption of the Horde" could really just have been a younger generation, born in the prison camps, going: "holy poo poo what the older generation did was loving stupid and super evil, and most of these humans are just as decent as we are, stabbing them would be a shame." You could have Thrall and Grimbrush sailing off to Kalimdor, bringing the older guys along because they need their skills and sword-arms, and not wanting to give up the people they've been imprisoned with and known all their lives, even if they happen to be war criminals. The demons could even still corrupt some of them by showing up and going: "Nice battle you've got here, shame you're losing it terribly. Y'all want some cups of Balor Blast to give you a fighting chance?"
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Sep 20, 2023 00:04
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And so the Orc campaign ends as it started: on a wet fart. All mentions of wasted potential have already been made, so I'll just instead praise the end cinematic for being a nice one (and got a pretty good reprise come WoD), but yeah - You could conceivably cut half of the campaign and precious little would change. A shout-out for Grom however, who at the end of his life finally managed to go aggro on the right target without loving up anything further!
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Sep 20, 2023 09:26
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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. Just gonna +1 this as best take and analysis of the Orc campaign. Fully agree with it, nice write up.
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Sep 20, 2023 10:10
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From my perspective, though, the sad fact is that WC3 is more than twenty years old, and WoW has been running ever since. For me, WoW is Warcraft, and from a financial point of view and view of how long the franchise has run that's objectively true as well. I see WC1 through WC3 more as the weird early days of the franchise, before it settled into its modern shape. If you want to talk about how this game was seen back then, suit yourself, but that's never been how I've run this LP and I'm not ever going to. Because I was a child when these games were released. You're free to feel and believe what you wish about these games, but I think you're going to remain disappointed with this LP because that's simply not how I see the subject at hand. Edit: And for what it's worth, regarding orcs specifically, the first game I can think of that I ever saw with orcs in it - although they were called 'gorns' instead - was Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant.  The gorns in this game were flat-out feudal Japan, complete with ashigaru, samurai, shugenjas, and naginatas, a proud and ancient civilization sworn to defend the secrets of this world's creation. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 13:00
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World of Warcraft was being developed alongside Warcraft 3, and much of the overarching storyline was prepared well in advance. Hell, they even use (or used) the same engine. The two are intertwined whether you like it or not. If you want to draw a line in the sand between releases, the last time you can do that is after Warcraft 2, when the series stopped being a ridiculous Power Metal Saturday Morning Cartoon RTS and started trying to be something more than that.
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Sep 20, 2023 13:47
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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. 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! e: had chronology here a bit messed up in my head. Asehujiko fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 14:29
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Asehujiko posted:Now that I think about it, Reign of Chaos' utter aversion to mirror matches might've been something of a reaction to Age of Mythology having 25 of them. We know from early marketing blurbs that there was supposed to be a civil war in the Alliance originally but that entire plot has been scrapped in favour of the Scourge/Arthas stuff and the Old Horde vs New Horde was compressed into a single mission where the Old Horde doesn't even use the main Orc roster. I feel like the originally intended more RPG-y Warcraft 3 might have better carried the story they wanted, in any case.
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Sep 20, 2023 14:49
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Age of Mythology came out at about the same time as Warcraft 3, if not a little later.
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Sep 20, 2023 15:28
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Feldegast42 posted:Age of Mythology came out at about the same time as Warcraft 3, if not a little later. Asehujiko fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 15:38
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It does occur to me that the campaign structure of Warcraft 3 loosely reflects the one in Starcraft. It had the Terran campaign, (in which the human faction deals with and falls apart over an invasion of all-consuming monsters), followed by the Zerg campaign (in which you are the all-consumin monsters preparing for a full-scale invasion of the ancient warrior people), followed by the Protoss (in which you are the ancient warrior people responding to that invasion). The stories don't correspond particularly closely, but in those broadest strokes of who you're playing as in turn, Humans, Undead and Night Elves map pretty well. The expansions follow each other's pattern the same way - the Protoss then the Terran then the Zerg, with TFT having Night Elf followed by Human followed by Undead. But Orcs, of course, don't match with any of the Starcraft factions that way. Perhaps part of why their campaign is so lacking in consequences to the broader story is that they just don't have a place in the story structure that Blizzard knew how to write around. They don't even get a proper campaign in the expansion at all, although what they do get instead is a fun change of pace.
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Sep 20, 2023 15:40
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Asehujiko posted:Indeed it did, it turns out I had the July 2002 vs November 2002 release dates swapped in my head for some reasons and Blizzard decided on no mirror matches at all on their own accord it. The idea still has merit, although I think they were overcorrecting from WC2 instead, since pretty much everything aside from casters were identical there.
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Sep 20, 2023 17:25
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Kith posted:World of Warcraft was being developed alongside Warcraft 3, and much of the overarching storyline was prepared well in advance. Hell, they even use (or used) the same engine. The two are intertwined whether you like it or not. I think it should be noted. Vanilla WoW, on launch, isn't stupid. There's nothing stupid going on, y'know, apart from players being players. The Alliance have a decent throughline through 1-60 in the Defias-Missing Diplomat-Jailbreak set of quests but little else and the horde have almost nothing apart from zone questlines. Like the most egregious bit in Vanilla is probably the skirmishes in Ashenvale between the Warsong and the Night Elves still continuing. It is fair to say that there is a line of separation between what we see in WoW and what we see here because WoW's descent into madness only starts about a year into Vanilla with the Varian comics and really gets going with Burning crusade.
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Sep 20, 2023 17:51
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Asehujiko posted:In addition to this this excellent analysis, another major reason why Reign of Chaos was praised for it's story when it came out was because for most people only aware of a handful of major releases, it was the only RTS to have a character driven story at all. I would argue that Starcraft had a decent amount of character driven storytelling - the conflict between Raynor, Kerrigan, and Mengsk drove the Terran campaign, the Protoss had its own figures, and the Zerg even had cerebrates and the overmind. The units were even represented in the missions! You occasionally would run around with a hero unit. Warcraft 3 amped that up, of course, with persistent heroes and gear that could carry over from map to map, which definitely helped the game to be more cohesive when it came to having a character be present in every map and evolving in the way that you chose, with the skills and such that you found interesting.
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Sep 20, 2023 17:52
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Natural 20 posted:I think it should be noted. not really Kith posted:and much of the overarching storyline was prepared well in advance the "making poo poo up as we go along" method of storytelling didn't start until way later in WoW's lifecycle. i want to say that by the time of frozen throne, blizzard had up to cataclysm planned out and the broad strokes of mists ready to be filled in Kith fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 18:25
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Kith posted:not really edit: Like WoW was released visibly unfinished with large swaths of content just being filler and mechanics/storystructure that only existed due to being copied from everquest. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Sep 20, 2023 |
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Sep 20, 2023 18:29
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Natural 20 posted:I think it should be noted. That's not a great sell for the Alliance since that's all Human-centric; the Gnomes' storyline pretty much end around level 30, the Dwarves' pretty much drop off after their first two zones and only get one piecemeal (yet important) quest in Blackrock (and I guess some quests with the Wildhammers). Night Elves get more content since they get pretty much all of Kalimdor (other than Theramore). Horde isn't much better. The Trolls might as well not exist outside of being faced as enemies. Tauren only pretty much just get Mulgore, Stonetalon and Feralas. You would think Orcs get the rest but like you said, it's all zone questlines since the Barrens take up so much content. The Undead get a bit better since they're the rep for the Eastern Kingdoms, but less than the Night Elves' equivalent share.
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Sep 20, 2023 18:36
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ApplesandOranges posted:That's not a great sell for the Alliance since that's all Human-centric; the Gnomes' storyline pretty much end around level 30, the Dwarves' pretty much drop off after their first two zones and only get one piecemeal (yet important) quest in Blackrock (and I guess some quests with the Wildhammers). Night Elves get more content since they get pretty much all of Kalimdor (other than Theramore). In other words you agree it wasn't stupid at launch because there was gently caress all to be stupid at launch.
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Sep 20, 2023 18:38
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Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I'm getting at. Vanilla was tremendously limited at launch, so to discount the idea that Warcraft 3 was absent the influence of WoW because they were developed at the same time ignores that there isn't that much in WoW there to influence Warcraft 3.
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Sep 20, 2023 18:53
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Kith posted:the "making poo poo up as we go along" method of storytelling didn't start until way later in WoW's lifecycle. i want to say that by the time of frozen throne, blizzard had up to cataclysm planned out and the broad strokes of mists ready to be filled in Personally, I put the dividing line between WoW as a static image of Azeroth as it is post-Frozen Throne with each quest line in it's own little pocket continuity as it was originally designed in tandem with WC3 and WoW as a continuation of the story replacing a theoretical Warcraft 4 at the (simultaneously developed) patches 2.4 and 3.0. Earlier world events to celebrate a new raid(or in 2.0's case, a new continent) such as the war of the shifting sands and the scourge invasion generally didn't change the status quo of the overall setting besides activating a new instance portal somewhere. They could theoretically all happen in any order of each other without leading to major continuity clashes. Magister's Terrace and Naxxramas 10-25 changed all that with their built-in premise of being incompatible with a world state where Tempest Keep and Naxxramas 40 were still ongoing concerns. Magister's Terrace was also a blatant last minute rear end pull that everybody immediately saw though at the time so I highly doubt it was part of any TFT era design document beyond high level bullet points listing Quel Thalas as potential future expansion content.
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Sep 20, 2023 18:57
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I would argue that Vanilla WoW did a good job with environmental storytelling in building up the Sithilids. As far as I'm aware they were a previously unknown enemy with only tangential connection to stuff in Warcraft 3, but as you went through the starting zones in Kalimdor and into the 40 through 60 zones, you could see that they were A Problem.
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Sep 20, 2023 18:57
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