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Warcraft is kinda weird about languages. Everyone is perfectly capable of talking to each other* regardless of their origin. The english everyone speaks is apparently spoken all over the world for all of history. But also several races have their own languages that they bark out in sometimes. Lok'tar ogar, Shin'du fallah na, Ishnu dal dieb. They probably have apostrophes. This isn't unique to Warcraft of course, it's all part of general fantasy cargo-culting Lord of the Rings, which has excessively well-thought-out linguistics but then got filtered through a series of uneducated nerds into a general "nonsense words with apostrophes is good worldbuilding". *at least, you know, once they get round to trying Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 13:35
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First and foremost, thanks for the LP up to this point. It is definitely making me rethink a lot of my heavily nostalgia-tinted thoughts - about WC3 in particular - in a good way. I remember feeling this map was so "epic" when I was a dumb teen... I agree with a lot of your closing statements. To focus on the negative, Medivh is...pointless. I don't think kid me even really understood who he was beyond vague mystic wizard-y person, and adult me sees him as even less then that. He's just a vague traveling macguffin, he exists to deliver dumb exposition, and then everyone around goes "Ah I see" after he says very little. Every time he's shown up I end up thinking "ok but you could easily write this without him existing." The storyline has atrocious pacing, and they do so very little with characters they want you to care about. I suppose given the time, having the "hero" units in the first place was a big departure for the time, and I was probably a lot more forgiving as a high schooler, happy to fill in the blanks, then I am as an adult. I will fully admit that I've never been a big fan of night elves, and my own experiences in WoW turned me off even harder to them, but I think a lot of it comes from how sloppy their campaign is, and how little Tyrande's personality comes out. You make a good point about Malfurion being the closest thing to an actual "priest," and it's kinda silly Thrall has...almost no actual religious signifiers or beliefs beyond the same extreme vagueness that covers all orc religion. Also, maybe it's just me, but this final map also feels just completely divorced from everything we've been doing in the night elf missions. Breaking out Illidan doesn't matter. Waking up the druids doesn't actually matter to the plotline itself, aside from us waking Malfurion specifically. We spent six maps doing very little, and then the last mission doesn't care. This being specifically the night elf finale also denies what could've been cool moments for both the orcs AND the humans. There's nothing here about Thrall breaking the orcs free from their servitude towards the demons, even if they signed that pact themselves. No point where the demons say...anything about it, either. And Jaina has even less writing then that - she has basically no connection to the demons at all, other then a need to have humans also be here. Then again, we've seen what happens when Blizzard decides to add more writing to their female characters. Maybe it's for the best. One thing that's surprising me a lot here at the end is how little I give a poo poo about the demons. Again, child me thought the destruction of Dalaran, while not actually that much of a visual spectacle, showed a cool power, and that the demons would be super dangerous and awesome. Adult me can't help but notice they barely show up, and mostly just get chumped on every time they do. As for positives...that's a lot harder. But not impossible! I think a lot of the positives WC3 had, at least non-gameplay wise (since I haven't been, you know, playing it), are strongly linked to it coming out in 2002. And a lot of those things have been copied now, a whole bunch, and very often done much better. I suppose it's cool to see where a whole lot of those now very common tropes and stereotypes come from, but you really can never go back. Also you probably don't want to go back. The aughts were a miserable decade. Still, the bits with Arthas are very well done, and it's frankly shocking Blizzard managed a corruption storyline where you play BECOMING corrupted and had it work well; by the end of the human campaign it entirely makes sense what is happening to Arthas, and you were helping fuel it all the while! The Horde have aged extremely poorly, but I also weirdly think a lot of the fighting against the bad stereotypes that exist in WC3 wouldn't be fought if WC3 hadn't at least nudged the ball forward a bit, if that makes sense; the stereotypes on display for the Horde are not good, but I do still think WC3 holds a very strange place in the climb to make things better. It's not a solid rung, and it's not that high off the ground, but we sure stepped on it on the way up. I haven't really talked a lot about the good parts of night elves, but I actually like their design more then I maybe should; the very greco-roman classical architecture mixed with vague fantasy druidism and overrun nature is a very fun look. There's a lot of fantastic potential with Tyrande and Malfurion as characters, and while Blizzard does it extremely poorly by making them, you know, bikini amazon ladies, having a faction where the women are culturally the brave warriors and leaders and the men are culturally the peaceful religious types, is also a somewhat fun take on things. Also, while I'm sure someone thought they were being clever by giving the orcs, the most stereotypically masculine faction, dog-mounts, and the nelves cat-mounts, I gotta say - I still think the priestess of the moon design is pretty baller. I'm looking forward to TFT. I also have a lot of fond memories of that storyline, so it'll be fun to see how dumb they are. Also as a former Forsaken main you can believe I have opinions about them and the direction Blizzard decided to take our Banshee Queen. RIP in peace to anyone who thought my pointlessly long posts were done. EDIT: M.c.P posted: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. Holy poo poo lmao.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:43
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If I’m not mistaken, Rage Winterchill and Anetheron have the aptly named Finger of Death which essentially annihilates one unit off the face of the earth, making them far more dangerous than their usual counterparts for this mission.
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Oct 11, 2023 13:59
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PurpleXVI posted: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. idonotlikepeas posted:Couldn't they have just given Orange more supply so it had room to run the felhounds and also build things? Yeah, they could have done these too. The WC3 Reforged team is not... terribly sophisticated at using the map editor. Or their map designs. You can really see it in their Reforged Original maps. In Stratholme, if you use Arthas to revive enemy units and take them on the attack, they will be grabbed by unit triggers and told to attack move back to your base. Siege of Dalaran gives you a base, but has no scripting for enemy attacks. There's hardly any scripting at all, save for some basic unit spawn things when you fight Antonidas. It's also ugly as sin, with sight blocking doodads all over the place, and the edges of the map are terribly lazy, literally flat grass. M.c.P fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Oct 11, 2023 |
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Oct 11, 2023 14:02
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M.c.P posted:So yeah, that's Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos: Reforged. 
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Oct 11, 2023 14:05
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Cythereal posted:Beats having to put actual effort into it. Jayborino is a fairly good player who goes through the campaign on hard on patch 1.31, the last version version before Reforged messed everything up. GiantGrantGames has been linked here before, he is probably the most knowledgeable person in the world for the mechanical side of Blizzard campaigns and completed the Reforged campaigs(as well as all the Starcraft 2 campaigns) without losing a unit. Prodigious quantities of cheese involved. Grubby is a former world champion Warcraft 3 esports player that played through Reforged on release. There's a lot of THANK YOU FOR YOUR RESUB twitch vod cruft but this is probably the most APM/micro anyone is going to do in a single player campaign for a two decades old game. Needless to say, spoilers abound for TFT in all these playlists. They all skip over the Horde campaign because that's mostly a showcase of all the revolutionary(for 2003) new possibilities in the enhanced editor with the actual gameplay consisting mostly of A-moving a hero squad in the direction of the quest marker.
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Oct 11, 2023 14:06
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Noted but that wasn't the point of my post you quoted. I've received a fair bit of criticism for how I've played, written, and generally handled this LP. Some of that criticism I think is fair and valid, some I do not. I was saying that if anyone wants to present an alternative view, I'm sure there's room on this forum for more than one crack at this series.
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Oct 11, 2023 14:11
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PurpleXVI posted:Illidan walking out of the vault and using slang from 10000 years ago that are incomprehensibly foul slurs today. He kickflips out of the time out zone and starts talking like a 90's radical dude. Everyone just groans and says that was the trend 10000 years ago.
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Oct 11, 2023 14:37
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They actually managed to break the scripts that send $fuck_you amounts of demons in reforged. That's impressive. The fix is incredibly easy too: option 1) open the map and override the food cost of the fel puppies for the map. It's quite easy IIRC option 2) open the map and spawn more overlords via editor to cover the fel puppies' supply.  I guess
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Oct 11, 2023 15:29
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It also makes it counter-intuitive that if you attack your enemies base, you run a risk of making your mission much harder. Kill the fel puppies and then your enemy can respond their heroes
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Oct 11, 2023 15:33
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I don't know if they fixed it later on, but on Reforge's release, Archimonde was also Level 1. He's meant to be Level 10, with access to all of his skills (summoning a bunch of Doom Guards/Fel Hounds, summoning a bunch of Infernals, and a massive damage nuke on a single target), but uh oh, Reforged happens and he can't use any of them. Speaking of Doom Guards and Infernals, I believe they are also subject to the supply cost changes which breaks the map. Blizzard used to leave the campaign unpatched for a reason (they did SOME things, like changing stats tomes to be pick-ups and not usable items) and Reforged hosed everything up in classic Reforged fashion. The original version of this map absolutely rules. The "Hold out for X amount of time." is an RTS staple, and as wonderful as walls of bunkers and siege tanks are in StarCraft, I think this mission does it better than any others.
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Oct 11, 2023 15:59
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A small note about the original map: If the human/orc bases fall, there is a short cutscene of Archimonde trashtalking Jaina/Thrall before they teleport away. Now Thrall is supposed to cast chain lightning at Archimonde as a final parting shot, but in 1.33 this stopped happening. The reason for this is that in order for the chain lightning to look more visually impressive, Archimonde is surrounded by floating invisible units for the chain lightning to bounce off, and Thrall is technically targeting them. The problem is that the map uses the child unit for this purpose, and since those were changed to be invulnerable and untargetable, Thrall ends up not casting aything, and instead hitting Archimone with a single regular attack. M.c.P posted: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. I don't remember Archimonde moving out of his base until 2 minutes left on the clock. Unless the orc base has fallen by that point, he can't make it to the gate in time even without opposition.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:25
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Nostalgamus posted:The problem is that the map uses the child unit for this purpose, and since those were changed to be invulnerable and untargetable, Thrall ends up not casting aything, and instead hitting Archimone with a single regular attack. ...why would they use invisible children for this purpose.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:31
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Edgelord humor + you gotta use something. WoW famously used invisible rabbits instead.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:50
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So, a few things to go over. One thing I will point out: I am calling BS on the claim that Archimonde is supposed to personally join the fray to push out the early bases. Even in the original unpatched versions of the game, he has never done that. Not in one single version of the game, if that has been intended, has that feature ever functioned, and frankly I do not believe that that is actually a thing, unless I am shown proof. The bit about the rest of the Heroes not reviving due to a supply-block in Reforged is completely true, though. Past a certain number of waves, nearly every wave is supposed to contain at least one, if not TWO of the three non-Archimonde heroes. The attack waves are, however, pre-programmed, and after a certain point it simply begins cycling through the strongest waves until the base you're on falls, and given the intensity of the attack waves plus the heroes that are SUPPOSED to be a continuous presence, should frankly be an inevitability unless you're seriously going hardcore serious mode with real skill. Reforged's only real contribution was the mechanics and stats being backported from the Frozen Throne changes into the Reign of Chaos campaigns, and thus creating the problem with the heroes. Various patches also introduced a few minor bugs like certain names being mislabeled or missing. 1.33, however, made a few changes that further lessened the difficulty of this mission. Primarily among those changes, was allowing player to at last build Chimeras in this mission. As I've stated before, in the original Warcraft 3, Night Elf Chimeras were the one and only melee tech tree unit (not counting heroes) that was never, at any point, controllable by the Player in campaigns. Frozen Throne eventually allowed Chimeras in a campaign setting, but this Night Elf Campaign we've just finished never allowed it until 1.33. 1.33 also had the minor touch of adding Halford Wyrmbane, notable Alliance NPC from WoW, to Jaina's base in the form of a named Captain, while also adding Nazgrel and Gar'thok, a pair of Orc NPCs that otherwise make their first gameplay appearance in the rather unique Orc Campaign in Frozen Throne. But there's one more detail about 1.33. Before 1.33, the two allied bases, Alliance and Horde, would not rebuild as they took losses. Buildings, units, none of it would be replaced when lost, except for the small squad of units that accompanied the Hero. This was changed in 1.33. They will actively attempt to maintain the defense on their base, and replace lost defenders. Fun detail about the enemy heroes, by the way: Rage Winterchill, the Lich? In addition to all the standard Lich hero abilities, he also has Finger of Death, an instant 500 damage to a single target. Anetheron has Carrion Swarm, Sleep, and Rain of Chaos - the multi-Infernal spell I mentioned a bit ago that Tichondrius had. Azgalor has the Mountain King's Thunderclap, the Tauren Chieftain's Shockwave, Reincarnate as noted, and Earthquake. Brutal power.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:56
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Archimonde sitting in Legion base raises another point that bothers me: Only reason good guys won is that Archimonde was too lazy to get off his butt and spearhead his army to victory.
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Oct 11, 2023 17:10
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Incredible that 1.33 makes this mission easier without even fixing the thing making it too easy. I wonder, at least in Story mode, if you even need to reinforce the other bases.
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Oct 11, 2023 17:27
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Banemaster posted:Archimonde sitting in Legion base raises another point that bothers me: Only reason good guys won is that Archimonde was too lazy to get off his butt and spearhead his army to victory. It's worse than that. The timer on the last mission means gently caress all in story and doesn't mean anything. Malfurion isn't prepping the super powerful wisp army. Archimonde always cuts through the defenders' forces and reaches the tree. The only thing that playing the mission changes is whether or not he fails or succeeds upon reaching the tree
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Oct 11, 2023 17:56
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FoolyCharged posted:It's worse than that. The timer on the last mission means gently caress all in story and doesn't mean anything. Malfurion isn't prepping the super powerful wisp army. Archimonde always cuts through the defenders' forces and reaches the tree. The only thing that playing the mission changes is whether or not he fails or succeeds upon reaching the tree It does if you look back in the top right corner of the map during gameplay, you might notice that a huge chunk of the map revealing itself for seemingly no reason about.... 15 minutes in, I want to say, until you realize that the Wisps are actually readying themselves for the ambush in the final cutscene, which was apparently what Malfurion's preparations were about before the mission started to get them in motion+setting up the defensive line. I think this works in the narrative because Archimonde's tunnel visioning on having another big epic fight with the night elves and is being overly cautious with them, which allows the otherwise harmless wisps to set themselves in position out of his notice. I could be entirely wrong about this, of course!
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Oct 11, 2023 18:16
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Yeah, basically the idea is the timer is there to give Malfurion enough time to set up his trap. It's not about stopping Archimonde entirely, they hold no delusions about being able to do that. It's about buying time to prepare for his arrival.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:19
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I think in the original WC3 you can see more and more wisps arriving at the world tree part of the map as the clock ticks on. Can't wait until the TFT bits I wish to complain about shows up.  Still, a nice job slogging through this broken mess.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:21
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Poil posted:I think in the original WC3 you can see more and more wisps arriving at the world tree part of the map as the clock ticks on. You can, an entire big section of the map in the top right is devoted to the World Tree in my pre-Reforged copy which I noticed because overtime that revealed section becomes bigger and bigger from all the Wisps coming in.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:23
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bladeworksmaster posted:It does if you look back in the top right corner of the map during gameplay, you might notice that a huge chunk of the map revealing itself for seemingly no reason about.... 15 minutes in, I want to say, until you realize that the Wisps are actually readying themselves for the ambush in the final cutscene, which was apparently what Malfurion's preparations were about before the mission started to get them in motion+setting up the defensive line. Since we didn't see it in this playthrough due the scenario being semi-broken: Archimonde goes "This is almost TOO easy!" after having destroyed both the human and orc bases.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:25
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I didn't realize Reforged hosed up this mission so badly, even after the fix. That's incredible. Fun fact that nobody's mentioned: Archimonde has a Blight Aura similarly to Scourge structures. However, unlike Scourge structures, Archimonde can move. It's a very neat little detail watching him gently caress up the earth with every step.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:59
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Kith posted:I didn't realize Reforged hosed up this mission so badly, even after the fix. That's incredible. Yeah if you take away the Fog of War and watch after each taunting the leader cutscene, Archimonde’s blighting effectively paves the way for the acolytes in his base to set up the base ahead of each new siege, giving the player time to setup. He also gets a light version of the speed building cheat so he can start sending things your way.
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Oct 11, 2023 19:48
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I remember in the original version, this was the one defensive holdout mission which didn't end early if you were able to destroy the enemy bases before the timer expired. So if you used the invincibility cheat and razed it immediately, that left about 40 in-game minutes of just waiting around. It's pretty funny in the first of those missions, going immediately from Arthas and co. totally wiping out the undead to getting overwhelmed by them.
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Oct 12, 2023 01:11
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The Legion has a lot of Scourge off-map supplying the offensive summoning demons and so on (the bugged orange color I'd say), so breaking their forward outpost only delays the assault and not by much since they mostly have it in place already, as when playing the mission as intended Archimonde's decisive push comes right as Malf's ritual is almost prepared. They probably didn't want to program and voice a brief alternate branch on the line of Malf: "first attack decisively repealed, by the time they reorganize we'll be ready" then update the victory timer down to half a minute and spawn Archimonde's gently caress you wave.
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Oct 12, 2023 10:44
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Independently, I think the last mission is actually a good idea. It's trying to be a big ole climax with the factions coming together to try to do a last ditch defense and cap off Reign of Chaos. Lots of potential there. Mechanically, the execution already has all those problems that the posters above have gone into in great detail. The bit about the felhounds supply locking their faction is hilarious. However, even in the original release, the fact that they're trying to have the climax, but then don't let you use the full set of units in the night elf faction just feels off. Narratively, the setup to get to this point is just awful. Padding and Medivh is a killer combo that completely fucks up the stakes. I'll admit though that as a teenager, the problematic portions didn't register that deeply to me.
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Oct 12, 2023 11:52
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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? I mean it's a problem in a lot of fantasy and fiction in general. I often think of Mortal Kombat. People point out the silliness of like Liu Kang being able to defeat literal gods and poo poo, but look at Kitana. She's older than human civilization. She should have forgotten more martial arts than we as a species have ever produced/learned. She was a master of martial arts when our ancestors were working out farming. Like your average Night Elf is similarly older by twice than IRL civilization. No one can really say what a being that is older than any civilization we as a species have ever produced would act like. But yeah, I think either much more stoic and wise and reserved than what we see, or else much more impulsive and 'gently caress it, all is fleeting! yolo bitches!' than we see. The Night Elves are written, at the end of the day, as basically the same as humans. But yeah. Writers tend to be bad with scale, and when it comes to elves you're generally in most settings dealing with scales that are more common in geology than in history.
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Oct 12, 2023 12:29
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So there doesn't appear to be any fancy intro cinematic for the entire expansion. As such, I'll be rolling right into The Frozen Throne with the next update rather than starting with any kind of detailed analysis. The end of this project is finally in sight.
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Oct 12, 2023 13:46
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I mean it's a problem in a lot of fantasy and fiction in general. I often think of Mortal Kombat. People point out the silliness of like Liu Kang being able to defeat literal gods and poo poo, but look at Kitana. She's older than human civilization. She should have forgotten more martial arts than we as a species have ever produced/learned. She was a master of martial arts when our ancestors were working out farming. Yeah, I've grown to hate long-lived races in fantasy and sci-fi because most writers are so bad at actually making that matter, especially with player races. If you want to make a race live long, but not write them all that different from humans, then I think the oldest you can reasonably make them is around the 150-200 area.
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Oct 12, 2023 13:58
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Cythereal posted:So there doesn't appear to be any fancy intro cinematic for the entire expansion. As such, I'll be rolling right into The Frozen Throne with the next update rather than starting with any kind of detailed analysis. Though it apparently wasn't reworked for Reforged.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:25
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Cythereal posted:So there doesn't appear to be any fancy intro cinematic for the entire expansion. As such, I'll be rolling right into The Frozen Throne with the next update rather than starting with any kind of detailed analysis. 
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Oct 12, 2023 14:27
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Chris Metzen.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:33
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DTurtle posted:Intro cinematic on Youtube? I was under the impression that was the *ending* cinematic for the first campaign. Certainly nothing played when I first messed around. I'll give it another look, I suppose, maybe there's a cinematic that was supposed to fire but didn't, ala the one at the start of the prologue in RoC. And for those wondering about the new thread title, back when the lawsuits started, Chris Metzen made (and deleted) this tweet: 
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Oct 12, 2023 14:36
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Rhonne posted:Yeah, I've grown to hate long-lived races in fantasy and sci-fi because most writers are so bad at actually making that matter, especially with player races. If you want to make a race live long, but not write them all that different from humans, then I think the oldest you can reasonably make them is around the 150-200 area. I think it's perfectly possible to write that even with a couple thousand years, the problem is that you need a writer who isn't a hack and who actually has the time and will to sort out a mix of someone both full of eternal youthful vigor or whatever with thousands of years of experience and reflection on that experience, pride of having seen and known so much, the humility born of inevitably having been dead wrong more than a few times (or more deluded pride but hey, we can dream) and an enormous collection of knowledge, languages over time and space, personal and societal warning signs, relevant expertise in whatever the magic and or technology around is, and so on. You can wind up with something really interesting, you just have to put in the effort and most of the time the effort is put in threadbare justification for elf babes in threadbare elf bikinis. I personally liked the night elves, they weren't steeped in any of the other factions' brands of bullshit and had their own slightly less generic thing going on, rising at least a full centimeter above a Red Sonja poster.
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Oct 12, 2023 14:41
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We all know he was trying to search his name to see what people were saying about him in the light of these revelations, but I always enjoyed the theory that he's a pokemon and this is just his normal form of communication.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:06
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Cythereal posted:I was under the impression that was the *ending* cinematic for the first campaign. Certainly nothing played when I first messed around. Something's definitely wonky with the cinematics on modern systems, all I got on my recent playthrough of the non-Reforged version was black screens with music for all the cinematics.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:18
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I get half a second of a silent black screen and then the game resumes.
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Oct 12, 2023 15:21
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The cinematic with the Naga rising from the sea is the intro cinematic for the TFT Night Elf campaign. Though the new campaign menu has apparently decided that the cinematics should go before all the scenarios, regardless of whether they are intro or ending cinematics.
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Oct 12, 2023 16:00
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