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M.c.P posted:And as much as we blame the RTS format for the story failings, it’s hardly impossible to tell a compelling narrative in RTS. Even WC3 is capable of telling a compelling story, they do so in the Human campaign. They just clank it on the rest of them.
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Oct 9, 2023 22:43
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IthilionTheBrave posted:Homeworld is also helped by having a lovingly crafted manual with tons of setting and background info. It wasn't required, but it helped and showed that the writers cared about the story they were making to go so far beyond what's just shown ingame. That does help but it's also not needed, someone who played it back then takes the install time reading NatGeo's Kharak edition (RIP NatGeo, I think, haven't they been hollowed out? And also it's kinda hard to say Kharak properly when you know what sound "Kh" represents.) but for someone playing it now on a recommendation, buying it on steam takes more time than installing it and it still works just as well. (And that's because, unlike with warcraft, the secondary material is actually secondary and reinforces a structure that can already support itself. WC3 is just mechanically a bad story.)
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Oct 9, 2023 23:08
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True, but I feel obligated to mention the manual for Homeworld every time it comes up. I need help, for a great variety of things.
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Oct 9, 2023 23:13
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Talking about Good Manuals needs no justification. Just an opportunity.
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Oct 9, 2023 23:17
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the manual for WC3 is notable for featuring an extremely funny gently caress-up as it relates to the origins of the Burning Legion the Nathrezim are established as a species of demons whose existence turns Sargeras from the Pantheon's noble executioner to a crazy all-destroying demon god, causing him to create demons. anyone can retcon their own work a few years down the road, it takes talent to retcon an origin story from within that very same origin story
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Oct 9, 2023 23:36
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That reminds me of some other outdated dreadlord lore that never actually made it into canon. In very early versions of the official WC3 site, before the game was released, they were described as demons who got infected by the undead plague: https://web.archive.org/web/20020126130215/http://www.blizzard.com/war3/races/dreadlord.shtml That explains why they had such a pale, deathly look in contrast to other more traditionally fire-and-brimstone demons of the Legion long before they were retconned as beings from the Shadowlands. I found the idea of the Lich King getting that far ahead in subverting the demons' control over him very cool and interesting, and was disappointed it wasn't in the final game.
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Oct 10, 2023 00:09
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In any event, I have recorded the grand finale of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. I think I'll just fold my usual end-of-game retrospective in with my retrospective on the night elf campaign. That sure was... a choice of a final mission from Blizzard. The Legion never made it past Jaina's front door the entire mission.
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Oct 10, 2023 02:21
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:the manual for WC3 is notable for featuring an extremely funny gently caress-up as it relates to the origins of the Burning Legion I also seem to recall - although I can't find the source and kid-me missed out on pre-release hype so it would have been either the manual or early websites that Blizzard didn't update, that the Eredar were the source of all magic when they blew up their planet or something like that. And yeah. The Eredar or Nathrezim were originally blamed for Sargeras with one actively corrupting him, I think the Nathrezim? And the other being a case of him falling from sheer despair upon seeing how hosed up they were in a sort of "how can anything good exist in a world that contains such assholes?" BSOD. Like as much as we dunk on WoW for all its retcons over the ages - and even more rightly for its myriad retcons never addressing the real problematic poo poo - I think that the brief period between WC3's launch and Burning Crusade's launch might have a lot more retcons than any other period of time in the franchise's history?
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Oct 10, 2023 03:54
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I also seem to recall - although I can't find the source and kid-me missed out on pre-release hype so it would have been either the manual or early websites that Blizzard didn't update, that the Eredar were the source of all magic when they blew up their planet or something like that. Burning Crusade, specifically, has a bunch of retcons. Whereas a lot of other "retcons" are less changes and more adjustments/additions that recontextualize prior lore yes.
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Oct 10, 2023 05:17
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That is, in fact, what happens when you play it on the easiest difficulty.
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Oct 10, 2023 05:28
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Kith posted:That is, in fact, what happens when you play it on the easiest difficulty. To be fair, it's incredibly easy to cheese it not that much farther down on even hard, unless the big hard mode patch fixed the scripting.
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Oct 10, 2023 05:34
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This mission was made a total joke in Reforged and I'm not sure if they ever fixed it.
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Oct 10, 2023 06:04
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FoolyCharged posted:To be fair, it's incredibly easy to cheese it not that much farther down on even hard, unless the big hard mode patch fixed the scripting. If I recall correctly (and I might not, since the holes in my brain are very real), one of the things that 1.33 was specifically intended to fix was this mission.
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Oct 10, 2023 06:41
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Did they manage to break the scripts that send $fuck_you amounts of demons in reforged? That's impressive.
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Oct 10, 2023 09:08
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Again that guy who did it with 0 deaths had a great time with that last mission.
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Oct 10, 2023 10:19
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Omobono posted:Did they manage to break the scripts that send $fuck_you amounts of demons in reforged? I was referring to: In the original game, every time the demons took over a new base, they deleted their old one and then summoned in a new one at the new location. Also, all of their units were built at said base instead of waves spawning via script. So if you let them cap Jaina and then sniped the acolytes and the necropolis quickly with archers on hippos, you could quickly reduce them to no base at all. At that point, you spent the vast majority of the mission cooking dinner or whatever while defending against the nothing at all you were being attacked with. So no, the scripting being trash was always a thing and not something reforged added.
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Oct 10, 2023 11:39
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Kith posted:That is, in fact, what happens when you play it on the easiest difficulty. Beats having to put actual effort into it.  I am, and always have been, completely serious when I've noted that if anyone who's good at RTS wants to LP this series legit and put these games through their paces, I'd read/watch that LP. Though I personally would not recommend actually buying these games.
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Oct 10, 2023 12:10
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Regarding the camp follower discussion, Triangle Strategy has a bit of that. You can always go into your camp (it's just a big tent) between missions, and there's medics, cooks and carpenters and such*. I think newer Fire Emblem games also do something similar but also that might just all be dating sim stuff idk *however, it's still very much a strategy war game - you get side missions to get to know said civilians a little, and then they're like "you know what? I really feel like helping you out on the field" and become controllable recruits in battle EDIT: Should also mention that that's not an RTS, but there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to have a (base)camp in between missions in a standard RTS where they can put optional worldbuilding, minigames, ways to get buffs for the next mission...
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Oct 10, 2023 12:40
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The correct difficulty is always the one you have the most fun on. First time I played the last NE mission I failed with a minute left so I had to redo the entire full timer thing.
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Oct 10, 2023 12:51
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Simply Simon posted:EDIT: Should also mention that that's not an RTS, but there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to have a (base)camp in between missions in a standard RTS where they can put optional worldbuilding, minigames, ways to get buffs for the next mission... I never played them, but don't the Starcraft 2 games literally do that? Or at least the Terran one?
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Oct 10, 2023 13:08
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Earth 2150 sort of did that, in the one of the expansion's campaigns. You had a base on a separate map and you could, very slowly, move units and resources to and from missions with a shuttle thing.
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Oct 10, 2023 13:32
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I never played them, but don't the Starcraft 2 games literally do that? Or at least the Terran one? Yeah, in all three campaigns you get to poke around the protagonist's capital ship, manage upgrades and talk to the named characters. That did give space for support staff, even with the Zerg where that doesn't really make sense. Starcraft was always a bit more realistic in its approach to operations, though - not a lot more realistic, but it painted the same mechanics in a way that's a bit more grounded. So instead of your army being limited by the number of farms you've built on the front line (which each consist of one building and no land), it's limited by the number of supply depots that are implicitly handling the import of ammo and rations. That sort of thing.
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Oct 10, 2023 13:47
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WoW is quite bad at a lot of the logistical parts of war, but there's also non-gameplay excuses for some of it. Mages can establish permanent portals between locations, we see that all the time, such as your garrison in Draenor and Oribos in the Shadowlands; there's various methods of healing; there's many types of unstoppable long-range reconnaissance and communication; and all that, and probably more I haven't thought of, that allows for a lot of services to be offloaded back into heartlands and cities. That doesn't include game mechanics that I'm not sure have been represented as a 'thing that exists' rather than a 'player convenience'. For example, mounts: even if you ignore the mount collection page, and go back to basics with vanilla WoW, players carried around a summonable, unkillable, tireless horse in their pocket. Is that a thing that actually exists in the world, or it it just convenience?
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Oct 10, 2023 14:06
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I like the little bit of fluff on the final mission where all the mercenary camps will give you a bunch of units for free when you first walk up to them. Gives you a sense of "everyone is coming together to fight the Legion," even if it took until the last mission to get here.
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Oct 10, 2023 15:01
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Rhonne posted:I like the little bit of fluff on the final mission where all the mercenary camps will give you a bunch of units for free when you first walk up to them. Gives you a sense of "everyone is coming together to fight the Legion," even if it took until the last mission to get here. Huh. Did not know that. The only units I produced the entire mission were wisps, archers, chimeras, and druids of the claw.
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Oct 10, 2023 15:02
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Um, the third of those is supposed to be disabled for that mission. Or at least they used to be. Probably because how overpowered they are/would be in it.
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Oct 10, 2023 16:32
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Poil posted:Um, the third of those is supposed to be disabled for that mission. Or at least they used to be. Probably because how overpowered they are/would be in it. They were enabled in 1.33. I guess they decided having a unit that's in the tech tree that just straight up never appears in the campaign was weird. It appears in the expansion campaign, but it wasn't new to the expansion, so may as well have it here. (Spoiler: it's not the only thing they did that made the mission easier!)
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Oct 10, 2023 16:45
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FoolyCharged posted:So no, the scripting being trash was always a thing and not something reforged added. Being able to beat the mission with a particular cheese strat you probably wouldn't be able to find on your own is a veeeeery different kind of "trash scripting" than the mission's difficulty being unintentionally way, WAY below what it's meant to be in Reforged. They ended up patching it to fix it, I think? To be honest, I have no idea, I haven't touched Reforged beyond it just being the default client if you want to play WC3 these days (Pumpkin TD is fun!) SoundwaveAU fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Oct 10, 2023 |
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Oct 10, 2023 17:19
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Night Elf 7: The Last Rose of Summer Welcome to the grand finale of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. It's... a choice.  The night elves...  Horde...  And Alliance are all in attendance.  If you'll recall Malfurion's single line explaining Archimonde's goal, three or four missions ago, Archimonde is intent on reaching Nordrassil, the World Tree, to drain its power. Should he succeed, Azeroth will be doomed.  The World Tree contains the power of the Well of Eternity, and through their covenant with the Dragon Aspects the night elves gained their superhuman longevity and magical power.  Chronicles explained what exactly Malfurion is planning here, and more importantly why his actions will sacrifice the power of that bargain with the Aspects.  This was a failsafe built into the World Tree by Alexstrasza when Nordrassil was planted: in the event that Nordrassil was about to fall to corruption or invasion, Alexstrasza created a way to channel Nordrassil's power in a destructive form without risk to Azeroth itself. Only Malfurion Stormrage was judged wise enough and responsible enough to be given the key to doing this, with the warning that it had been the Well of Eternity's power, channeled by the binding of the Aspects, that gave the night elves their longevity and magical power. Should this failsafe be activated, they would lose it all. Malfurion chose to keep all of this secret from the rest of the night elves, concerned that making this public knowledge would risk another civil war.  To the extent that there's a moral message running throughout Warcraft, and I feel that there is one that shows up more often than not even in Steve Danuser's tenure, it's an admonition against pride and the temptation of power.  Malfurion Stormrage is probably the closest thing to the classical idea of a priest who's ever seriously featured in Warcraft. He acts as an intermediary between mortals and what might be called divinity, the man who negotiated a sacred covenant with august beings and was charged with upholding that sacred trust. For all that Tyrande is called a priestess, she never really acts like one.  To me, at least, the idea of being a priest necessarily means a certain humility. You accept that there are beings, there are purposes, far beyond you. Malfurion's humility is why he can be the true hero of the night elf story where Tyrande cannot.  For all her qualities of leadership, Tyrande is a proud woman. Justly so, in many ways. Her tally of successes (in the lore, not so much in the games) is one she's earned the right to be proud of. But she never could have come up with this way to so thoroughly end the Legion's invasion of Kalimdor.  The execution of all this, of course, is laughable. Like Medivh's big line about being the last Guardian, Malfurion's line about having lived too long is obviously intended as a powerful and dramatic line but falls completely flat, at least in my eyes. But, like so much else about Blizzard's work, I think the idea behind it isn't bad.  Not pictured: the 25 elite adventurers who canonically did almost all the work in this battle. Yeah, this is another Caverns of Time instance from WoW, in this case a 25-man raid from The Burning Crusade.  Welcome to 45 minutes of holding the line. Malfurion picks up his ultimate, and it's a nice one. Tranquility is a very powerful thing to have in your back pocket.  There's two and a half new units in this mission. Hippogryphs are fast anti-air fliers. Archers can jump on their backs to get a potent all-purpose ranged flier. I will not produce any, it's a bit fiddly and this mission puts you under almost constant pressure.  Chimeras are little more than reskinned frost wyrms: a slow and expensive but powerful and sturdy air-to-ground flier. I will be making use of these.  This spot on the map will occupy 95% of the mission. The idea of this mission is that the Legion, consisting of both Scourge and demons, will overrun first Jaina's base, then Thrall's, in a grueling war of attrition where you're being slowly pushed back. Leaving aside certain cheese strats that break the AI, however, on Story difficulty it's quite possible to never lose Jaina's base. There's good reasons to hold here if you can manage it. First, Jaina makes a fair few priests who will happily pitch in and heal your units. Second, Jaina herself is a level 10 archmage with a fully leveled brilliance aura that affects your units since you're allies. As the mission goes on, I'll end up parking a group of druids of the claw near Jaina specifically to act as healers for my army between waves, using her aura to rapidly recharge their mana.  I won't sugar coat it: like the undead and Horde campaigns, the night elf campaign is a poorly written, poorly paced mess.  His name is blanked out for some reason, but meet Rage Winterchill. Of the three respawning Legion heroes that accompany their waves, he's by far the least dangerous. Liches just kind of suck.  Awakening the druids took up three missions out of a campaign of seven missions. It could, and perhaps should, have taken one. Just say that as the big cheese Malfurion is ready to take names and heads right away but the other druids need time to get up to speed and filter into the army.  The dreadlord, unnamed here, is Anetheron. He's probably the most dangerous of the heroes, I'll prioritize using Tyrande's starfall to hit Anetheron's waves.  And this is Azgalor, providing a sneak peek at the pit lord hero unit in the expansion. Since we're still in Reign of Chaos, though, Azgalor instead has a custom kit of abilities - most concerningly he has Reincarnation, allowing him to come back from the dead each time he shows up.  Another reason why Jaina is so useful: she lets Malfurion and Tyrande use their ultimates, which are normally very mana-intensive, on cooldown. I have one or the other available for almost every wave.  I have no idea if waves are randomly generated or pre-set, but they'll always include doomguard and meat wagons, then a grab bag of infernals, fel hounds, and every undead unit on the menu except ghouls.  And... that's all there is to this mission. If you can build a force that consistently stops enemy waves, they don't really escalate in intensity or frequency. Once I hit on a mix of chimeras to tank along with the heroes, archers for damage, and druids of the claw hanging back with Jaina to heal between waves, using Tyrande's and Malfurion's ultimates on cooldown, this mission ceased to be interesting or challenging.  I think it's painfully obvious that even in this game, Blizzard didn't know what to do with the night elves. As thread posters have noted, they have a lot going on with their backstory and characters, all invented for this game, and they exist in near-total isolation from every other race and plot.  They desperately needed more time than they got to effectively sell the climax of the entire games' plot on the night elves sacrificing their immortality and magic to end the Legion invasion.  To me, at least, nothing about what makes Tyrande an interesting character comes through in this game. I feel that Malfurion gets a glimmer of being a compelling character here at the end, and Illidan I believe has the least screen time of any named character in this game who appears more than once by name - and I'm counting the likes of Mannoroth and Antonidas.  To me, the night elf campaign is a disappointing final arc to a disappointing game.  I'm not even angry with it. There's nothing to be angry about.  Archimonde shows up with fifteen seconds left on the clock and is unkillable. He never even makes it out of the walls of Jaina's base as he sprints for the finish.  When I started this project, I was really curious how this part of the game, more than any other campaign in the Warcraft series, would hold up.  Never try to revisit childhood nostalgia, I guess might be the lesson.  I was also rather curious why every attempt to LP Warcraft 3 here on SA petered out before the night elf campaign.  I think the course of the game has spoken for itself on that question.  Folks, this has been Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos.  Archimonde is presumably preparing to drain Nordrassil's power.  But Malfurion has broken the proverbial glass.  Wisps - the souls of the night elf dead - emerge from the forest.  A lot of wisps.  I never mentioned this, but wisps in the game have an ability to detonate themselves to, among other things, damage summoned units.  According to Chronicles, the wisps are acting as a channel for Nordrassil's power, discharging the World Tree's power in a controlled fashion.  All these wisps are the souls of night elves slain by the Burning Legion during both this invasion and the War of the Ancients, come to avenge themselves.  And so, Archimonde is dragged under by the raging souls of the dead.  Giving their existence, and that of Nordrassil, to end the invasion.  Medivh speaks up to deliver Warcraft 3's denoument.  Shame that he's wrong.  Nordrassil itself will return in time (minus the Aspects' blessings and covenant with the night elves), but Azeroth's darkest days are in fact in the coming twenty years. The damage wrought by the Legion and their Scourge minions will never truly heal.  Canonically it's been about a year since Thrall's vision of Medivh, but I'm went back and ran the math on all the campaigns based on their loading screens, trying to see how long the game seems to take by its own internal logic. The answer is about 122 days, and half of that is Arthas' trips to and from Northrend, with the game stating that it takes a month to sail between Lordaeron and Northrend.  I bring that up because of this line: what old hatreds, when it comes to the night elves? As presented in-game, the night elves first met the orcs thirteen days ago, back in the Horde campaign. They've known about the Alliance for presumably less time than that.  It's a wonderful sentiment from Medivh here, clearly intended to be the closing message of the game and one child me took as the central message of Warcraft.  There's just one problem: that isn't what happened.  The Alliance, Horde, and night elves were all quite happily piling into each other with gusto and barely two lines of characters wondering if this is the best idea, until Medivh showed up to yell at them.  No one showed a single moment of contrition or forgiveness or any sign of learning a goddamn thing or developing as a character.  What Medivh is telling us happened, and what the game showed us happened, are impossible to reconcile.  I wish we'd gotten the story that Medivh is talking about.  But he ends as he began: rambling about poo poo with a tenuous connection to the actual story without explaining himself.  Good riddance you useless prick.  And now for a confession: I've never played The Frozen Throne. While I am of course familiar with many parts of its story, this expansion will be one last new experience for me from this LP.
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Oct 11, 2023 11:50
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Inter Script: Into the Forest I Go So, Warcraft 3 was the part of this LP I was really interested in getting to, a year and a half ago when I started this project. I was curious to see how well this beloved game from my childhood held up. The question, then: did it?  I'll start with the positive. Warcraft 3 smartly puts its best foot forward with the initial two Horde prologue missions, then the Alliance campaign (I'll disregard the TFT prologue missions for the moment). These are good, well-crafted missions fitting into a smartly plotted, excellently paced, well-written story elevated by some excellent voice acting. I may not care for Arthas as a character, but every mission in the Alliance campaign moves the plot forward, has *stuff* going on, and there's some justly famed plot twists. The Culling of Stratholme is probably the single most famous RTS mission Blizzard has ever produced, maybe the most famous in any RTS yet made. A well-written plot, excellent voice acting, memorable gameplay that ties into the quandary posed by the plot, and the sheer, shocking swerve of the plot stand out for reasons that I will still hold up as a triumph of video game design. Besides the common love of Arthas' character - which as I've established I do not share - I think the writing and voice of Mal'Ganis also deserve some note. He oozes the kind of smug contempt that makes you excited to beat his face in, even I smirked when Arthas finally ran him through with Frostmourne. He's not a complicated villain but he doesn't need to be, he's genuinely threatening but also clearly overconfident and out of his depth in ways that make his end both satisfying and feel earned. I will also once again praise the writing of Jaina. Blizzard drat near pulled the trigger on the classic treatment of female characters in a story like this (famously to the point that the original official strategy guide for WC3 talked about her death) but wisely backed off and somehow managed to write who I feel is one of the most compelling characters the franchise has ever had. She is smart, principled, emotional without being ruled by those emotions, has an iron will, and kicks rear end whenever she's on the field. She is neither a simpering love interest nor a bitchy ice queen nor a moronic 'action girl.' Tyrande and Sylvanas should have been so lucky.  While I don't talk very much about the core RTS gameplay experience, both because I don't care very much about it and because I feel I'm not qualified to dissect the gameplay in any detail, I think that the moment to moment gameplay of Warcraft 3 is legitimately fun, and an enormous improvement over the previous Warcraft games. I've played a fair few skirmish games against the AI because I was having fun (for the record, my favorite race to play in skirmish is the undead). It's not one of my all-time favorite RTS games, but it works well. A lot of the missions are also pretty fun in general. Warcraft 3 is decently clever with its scenario design and has a good mix of mission types, unit variety, and mission objectives. Warcraft 3 is also, in general, an enormous improvement over Warcraft 2 as a gameplay experience in my eyes. Things were a hell of a lot less samey across the board in particular. I sincerely want to highlight the inclusion of a Story difficulty setting in Reforged. I am bad at video games in general and RTS in particular. I have poor reflexes, poor situational awareness, and my ability to multitask is not good. And I'm getting worse as I get older. I adore games that include a sincerely easy difficulty setting (or just cheat codes! I miss cheat codes being standard in games!) for the trash-tier scrubs like me. I'm sure that many of my readers will scoff at me for this, but there's few better ways to get me to quit a game (or install cheat mods) than to make a game simply too difficult for me to enjoy. I really do appreciate this simple inclusion from Reforged.  Unfortunately, that's about all the good things I can say about Warcraft 3. On the simplest side, I was absolutely not expecting Warcraft 3 of all the parts of this LP to pose the biggest technical difficulties. Figuring out how to take screenshots in WC1 was a chore, yes, but the game itself ran fine. WC2 ran flawlessly and was easy to work with. Warcraft 3 has been extremely unstable. I've had regular crashing issues, and enormous problems simply getting the game to boot up and run properly. For the moment I seem to have a solution in the form of deleting one of the game's files every time I want to boot up the game, but I consider that borderline unacceptable in a video game. The technical issues alone mean that when this LP is over, I'm probably never going to play WC3 again. There are other RTS games I enjoy as much or more that actually boot up reliably and rarely crash. Funny how 'Blizzard polish' used to be an affectionate term rather than a phrase dripping with disdain. And the story, well.  Once you get past the Alliance campaign, Warcraft 3's story is a goddamn mess and one single character sums up most of the problems I have with it. I've compared Medivh to a poorly played DMNPC in a tabletop game before, and I maintain the sentiment. Blizzard clearly wants a Gandalf sort of figure in their story, a man ignored by fools and listened to by the wise, a man who knows more than he's letting on because he'd be deemed mad if he told the whole truth even as he directs the heroes for the good of all. Blizzard, unfortunately, simply cannot write that sort of character convincingly. A Gandalf figure needs buy-in from the viewer to work, and I've never heard of anyone who's played this game as an adult who has any investment in Medivh. As I've also noted before, I think Blizzard's decision to preserve the mystery of who the Prophet is was a poor narrative choice. Medivh is potentially a fascinating character, and Blizzard simply uses him as a plot device to move characters in directions they couldn't come up with more organic reasons to have do what Blizzard wants. Blizzard's use of Medivh undercuts Medivh's own closing narration that concludes the game, and robs supposedly intelligent and wise characters the chance to act so because it all has to come down to a speech by Medivh about how we all need to work together. I feel that in a better written game, Medivh would probably appear only once, maybe twice in the entire game to give characters a little prod. His introduction with Thrall in the prologue is a good example. The rest of the time he may as well be holding up a cardboard sign reading REPENT! THE END IS NIGH! He's hardly the only character in this game whom I feel is horribly misused, but my gut reaction when I finished Reign of Chaos was that I sure was glad that Medivh has never properly appeared in WoW because he just sucks.  So much of this game can be summed up as faffing around with extra murder. Reforged added in the three new prologue missions from TFT, and I kind of wish they hadn't. Getting an explanation for why there are trolls hanging out with the orcs again (after Thrall's comments about the forest trolls in the first mission) is nice, but I don't think we needed three missions of that. The Alliance campaign is pretty well plotted, but then almost half of the undead campaign is the invasion of Quel'thalas. A similar amount of the Horde campaign is spent on sitcom misunderstandings with the Alliance, and the night elf campaign on awakening the druids. We've been over this at great length as the missions happen, so I won't gild the lily too much, but the sheer amount of time that Warcraft 3 wastes in its campaigns when it has so much story and events it needs to tell staggers me. I think it goes hand in hand with how the only characters who show any kind of complexity to them are Arthas, Uther, Jaina, Grom, maybe Malfurion. Only one of these characters is a protagonist of their campaign. By all rights, Thrall should have been an interesting and compelling character dealing with some heavy subjects laden with a deep moral complexity and ambiguity. Tyrande, well, she's the leader of a race that Blizzard introduced without having any idea how to introduce them to the player, everything potentially interesting about her is drowned beneath Blizzard's decision to have this game about the invasion of Azeroth by demonic legions barely feature any demonic legions.  I think the Legion falls flat for me where a comparable sort of foe, the Zerg in Starcraft, did not for the simple fact that we never truly see things from the Legion's point of view. The Scourge are basically just the Legion's temps, we never even see Ner'zhul in Reign of Chaos or hear him talk. Tichondrius is an errand boy, Mannoroth is an idiot for the sake of explaining the plot to viewers, and Archimonde gets one memorable scene in the entire game. Yes, I highlighted Mal'Ganis as a villain I felt was compelling and memorable, but he's tied up in the Alliance campaign, the best written and most memorable of the lot. Beyond that, I counted: if you don't count the satyrs, actual Legion forces show up in a whopping five missions out of thirty-seven (and they were under player control for one of them, the final Scourge mission). I think Blizzard's approach might still have worked had the whole game taken place in the Eastern Kingdoms and the Horde and elf campaigns were spent dealing with the immediate fallout of the Alliance and undead campaigns, similar to how the Protoss wrapped things up in Starcraft, but Blizzard instead effectively changed settings by taking us to a whole new part of the world. I've honestly never cared for the Legion as bad guys in Warcraft, and this game does nothing to change that view. To my question of whether I feel Warcraft 3 holds up, I must personally answer with a resounding and emphatic no. I think that for a lot of people, their memories of Reign of Chaos stop with the Alliance campaign. I don't blame them one bit, the difference in quality of execution between the Alliance campaign and what follows is immense. I like a lot of the ideas present in Warcraft 3, having interesting ideas was never Blizzard's problem. I feel that those ideas, however, are not realized or executed well, and marred by awful pacing, severe technical issues with the game itself, and an unsatisfying ending. That's how I see Reign of Chaos at any rate, a game with a strong start and a lot of promise but I must in the balance rate as a below average game. Too much work went into this, even Reforged, for me to call Warcraft 3 a bad game in my eyes. There are parts that I enjoy, but only parts. The expansion has quite a hole to dig itself out of in my book. See y'all in The Frozen Throne.
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Oct 11, 2023 11:51
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Gonna be curious how you tackle the Horde campaign in TFT. It's completely separate from the other three factions and it's much longer. First? Last? In between?
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Oct 11, 2023 12:08
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One of my issues with the Night Elves is that they don't, I dunno... feel as old as the plot says, would be a good term for it? Like, Illidan was stuck in a 4x4 cell for 10,000 years, and he hops out like he's just been in the drunk tank for the weekend.
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Oct 11, 2023 12:17
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Hmm, I'm guessing the Reforged version of this mission is still broken? I'm pretty sure at regular intervals Archimonde is supposed to join a huge attack wave to overwhelm the current base, forcing you to back up unless you're that aggressively on top of things and/or using cheat codes. That's why the attacks aren't really escalating, they're just keeping you busy until the big pushes.BisbyWorl posted:Like, Illidan was stuck in a 4x4 cell for 10,000 years, and he hops out like he's just been in the drunk tank for the weekend. Fantasy writers have no sense of scale, ever. Ten thousand years sounds like a cool big number, about as long as recorded human history! Which also means you have no idea what life would actually be like for someone who lived that long and Blizzard didn't really bother to try. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 12:48
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BisbyWorl posted:One of my issues with the Night Elves is that they don't, I dunno... feel as old as the plot says, would be a good term for it? Yeah, you'd figure that a species used to living for that long would be more... patient, contemplative. Like the Ents from Lord of the Rings, really. You could even do something similar where Jaina and Thrall bump into them and try to encourage them to pick up their bows and do something, but they want to hold an elf-moot and talk about it, to consider whether it really impacts them. Jaina and Thrall probably wouldn't know about the Legion involvement, they'd just know it was a bunch of angry skeletons. Then Arthas could bust into the meeting and go "mwa ha ha! my lords of the EVIL DEMON LEGION will be here any moment now!" before running off. Which would tip the night elves into going "the legion? The loving LEGION is back? we're in." which of course would be Arthas' intention. He can't actively fight the Legion, but he can make sure that others do. If you had the post-human campaigns "mixed," so there might, say, be an Undead mission in between the Night Elf missions or whatever, you could even have Arthas and Kel'thuzad be the ones who bust Illidan out of jail.
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Oct 11, 2023 12:54
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ApplesandOranges posted:Gonna be curious how you tackle the Horde campaign in TFT. It's completely separate from the other three factions and it's much longer. First? Last? In between? I will play the TFT campaigns in the order presented by the game. Tenebrais posted:Hmm, I'm guessing the Reforged version of this mission is still broken? I'm pretty sure at regular intervals Archimonde is supposed to join a huge attack wave to overwhelm the current base, forcing you to back up unless you're that aggressively on top of things and/or using cheat codes. That's why the attacks aren't really escalating, they're just keeping you busy until the big pushes. I was wondering if something was broken! I had vague memories of that happening as a kid, but wrote off that not happening here as me remembering wrong.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:13
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Yeah, Archimonde is supposed to roll up with his Divine Armor, Chaos Damage attacks, spammable instant death ability, and Rain of Chaos to wipe out each base at regular intervals, letting the invasion progress and showing cutscenes of Jaina then Thrall heroically defying the all powerful demon. There's a fundamental reason it broke, which you can tell from a quick parse of the mission using the map editor. It all has to do with the Frozen Throne unit changes. So, Felhounds. A campaign only unit in RoC, melee unit, has mana burn. In Frozen Throne, Felhounds renamed Fel Stalkers for some reason, but they were also added as a unit you can hire as a mercenary or summon with a special item in certain multiplayer maps. That change didn't come with many stat changes for the unit, except one. They now had a food cost There are actually two enemy groups in Twilight of the Gods, purple and orange. Purple is mostly undead, and they work fine with building up and sending attack forces. Orange is supposed to be the demons involved, but they hardly send anything except a couple heroes that never show up again. Because back at Orange base, the map spawned a dozen Fel Stalkers to guard the base and prevent the player from going on the offensive too easily. Except because those free units have a food cost, Orange is supply blocked. They can't build anything, not even revive their heroes after they die. Archimonde's timer to attack is based on hero deaths in the Orange faction, with one last failsafe to get a hustle on at the last minute of the game. Except Orange can't make heroes to die, so Archimonde sits in his base for 24 minutes until the failsafe triggers. And I suppose when the devs looked at it for 1.33, they didn't fix it because that would mean programming a food-free campaign only unit, or messing with the demon spawning triggers. So yeah, that's Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos: Reforged.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:18
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M.c.P posted:lmao That's incredible. Mind you, considering that base Warcraft 3 happily supported unit differences from map to map, like UMS stuff, I'm surprised that the campaign would not also be able to handle "this unit is different in this one map"-differences.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:21
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Something like language staying same enough to be perfectly comprehensible over such a period is just laughable to the extreme. 19th century English is different but still intelligible, 18th century English gets even more odd to the modern ear, and more so for 17th century English. That's just Modern English, Middle English takes actual study to understand, and that's just one language from one geographical area over a period of 400-500 years. Furthermore, present day languages took the resources and apparatus of a nation-state to standardize and enforce to begin with, so the idea of insular cultures maintaining a mutually intelligible language over such a period of time is just... silly.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:27
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Just Winging It posted:Something like language staying same enough to be perfectly comprehensible over such a period is just laughable to the extreme. 19th century English is different but still intelligible, 18th century English gets even more odd to the modern ear, and more so for 17th century English. That's just Modern English, Middle English takes actual study to understand, and that's just one language from one geographical area over a period of 400-500 years. Furthermore, present day languages took the resources and apparatus of a nation-state to standardize and enforce to begin with, so the idea of insular cultures maintaining a mutually intelligible language over such a period of time is just... silly. Illidan walking out of the vault and using slang from 10000 years ago that are incomprehensibly foul slurs today.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:30
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M.c.P posted:And I suppose when the devs looked at it for 1.33, they didn't fix it because that would mean programming a food-free campaign only unit, or messing with the demon spawning triggers. Couldn't they have just given Orange more supply so it had room to run the felhounds and also build things? Just Winging It posted:Something like language staying same enough to be perfectly comprehensible over such a period is just laughable to the extreme. 19th century English is different but still intelligible, 18th century English gets even more odd to the modern ear, and more so for 17th century English. That's just Modern English, Middle English takes actual study to understand, and that's just one language from one geographical area over a period of 400-500 years. Furthermore, present day languages took the resources and apparatus of a nation-state to standardize and enforce to begin with, so the idea of insular cultures maintaining a mutually intelligible language over such a period of time is just... silly. To be fair, the elves are immortal, so it's the same individuals speaking the same language over time. (As to how they're comprehensible to the orcs and humans...)
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Oct 11, 2023 13:34
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