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MagusofStars posted:FTFY, because in the past couple expansions (especially Shadowlands), Blizzard has put more and more of the important storylines in the book rather than, y'know, the game itself.
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May 19, 2022 00:43
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SirSamVimes posted:The sith protoss (specifically Alarak) are the best thing about LotV imo I can't help but interpret their portrayal in Covert Ops as a retaliation against people ignoring all of LotV's big epic heroes chosen by destiny or whatever in favour of a side character.
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May 27, 2022 10:11
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Cythereal posted:As for my joke about Lothar and this fellow named Uther Lightbringer being lovers? There is not, of course, anything to suggest that either Anduin Lothar or Uther Lightbringer is queer, but by the same measure, there’s nothing to suggest that they’re not. Both men lived long and accomplished lives, and without ever marrying, having children, or even dating as far as the lore has ever established. Am I inventing a Turkish bathhouse where none exists? Probably. There’s just as much evidence for that, though, as there is for positing that there’s a dog who isn’t barking. So I say, why not?
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May 28, 2022 13:42
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The side sails on the juggernaut could reasonably assist in turning if it doesn't have a separate axle for each paddle wheel and a weak rudder due to being very wide for it's length, which was a real problem for Novgorod. The upper deck is also too crowded with guns to put up much rigging there and not have to deal with blocking the traverse on the central turrets and/or having to replace everything due to muzzle blast damage after every engagement. But they're probably on the sides to not obscure the graphical representation of role of the ship from a top down view.
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Aug 11, 2022 01:22
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If you want a game representing the medieval era outside western Europe, it's worth revisiting Age of Empires 2, the current development team adores medieval eastern Europe/Caucasus history and they went from just the Mongols and arguably the Huns to also having campaigns for Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Cumans and Tatars in the region since the most recent re-release.
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Oct 27, 2022 11:34
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Tenebrais posted:I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard's designers don't actually know how a bow works and just assume the bowstring is elastic. The models for bows in wow flex realistically, at least the ones made back when I played did so: https://www.wowhead.com/item=2504/worn-shortbow#modelviewer. Of course, the 3d modellers in 2003 might not have necessarily communicated that knowledge to the people hired to do big 2d paintings a decade+ later.
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Jan 16, 2023 20:55
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Strategy games are probably the hardest games in which to implement granular difficulty to any meaningful degree because they are so deeply systems driven, second only to puzzle games and it's incredibly hard to even quantify what difficulty means for them. The big three RTS series all have bespoke map scripts for each map on each difficulty level and parametrizing those into user operable sliders would be an unenviable task for the designer(and QA staff!) As an example, here's 15 questions about gold mines that could all make this part of the game either a complete non-issue or a major obstacle. How many starting resources does the player have? Are there avenues for the enemy to raid the player's economy? What does the enemy send in these raiding parties? When does the enemy send them? Are they coordinated with other attack waves? Do they ramp up over time? With more units or stronger compositions? How many resources are there on the rest of the map? Are they guarded? By what? Are they in defensible positions? Are they in the path of other attack waves? Will the enemy attempt to retake them? With what? Does resource availability push players towards a specific unit composition? How does that composition interact with incoming attack waves? etc...
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Apr 10, 2023 00:48
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PurpleXVI posted:I would disagree. Simply add sliders for... Just to pick something from your list at random and how much of a headache it is to actually implement; Enemies moving at 0.x speed will mess up attack timings so all of those need to be evaluated to make sure there's no situations where two bases that are supposed to send alternating waves end up having arrivals at the same time because one is further away and delayed more. Or the initial attack wave that's supposed to be fought by the player's starting army right after the opening cutscene ends up delayed enough that the player has time to move out and start clearing outposts so the wave hits an undefended base. And perhaps there's an in-game cutscene that expects enemy units to be somewhere at a certain point in time and ends up softlocking the game when they aren't. Bazam indeed. There's a reason that every strategy game that does numerical difficulty has a tiny handful of known good* presets and the major games with the budget to do so switch to custom scripting per difficulty/map. And it's not because they want to gatekeep people in the gaps between difficulty levels. The existing model of cheat codes that provide specific on-demand advantages to players is the best you're going to see for an RTS in the forseeable future. *may or may not actually be any good on higher difficulties because high skill players for games that aren't even out yet aren't exactly common so small studios can end up with none on their QA staff.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:13
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Tenebrais posted:There is one very granular change you can comfortably make and indeed games in this era did offer (including WC2 I think?) - simulation speed. By universally slowing down everything you don't impact any of the balance, but you do give the player much more time to think about their plans and react to things happening. It's also a very straightforward choice between a more difficult game and a more boring one, since you're also waiting longer for everything to happen, which isn't ideal but is a very reasonable concession to make. Running the whole game in slow motion does indeed run into the problem of it making everything but micro-intensive fights incredibly boring. IIRC it was one of the Gemcraft devblogs where it was mentioned that the players that shared their metrics had played about 70% of the game on normal, 30% on fast forward and <1% on slow motion.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:54
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PurpleXVI posted:Also with regards to your issues with BtDP "not being the game's fault," I kind of think that they absolutely are. In my memory most RTS expansions from this era very much catered to the "elite" players who wanted to test their skill, often with blatantly unfair setups. So while yeah, some things are a product of the time, like the missions being same-ish because there's stuff the engine can't handle, I think a lot of the bullshit was absolutely part of the design document.
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May 7, 2023 03:36
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Cythereal posted:For reasons unknown to me, murlocs have become wildly popular with the fanbase of WoW to the point of becoming something of a mascot for the franchise. There is so much murloc merchandise, and they keep turning up in silly places like an alternate timeline where murlocs became Azeroth's dominant lifeform. They also appear often in mechanical discussions as a result of being a bit of an early game difficulty spike due to the density of their camps, bunched up against the shoreline where a single murloc fleeing at 20% health can easily aggro the rest. Their abilities also trend towards frost magic for their casters and hunter/rogue poisons for their melee fighters, which means a lot of slows and freezes, making it hard to both prevent and escape an aggro cascade, which is associated with their distinctive aggro noise.
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May 14, 2023 16:24
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FoolyCharged posted:My favorite part about that stupidity was that at that point WoW had had an actual race of fully mechanical gnomes that were fairly popular and had been around for god knows how long since Wrath(I think?).  ", it's definitely spite.
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May 29, 2023 17:26
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Cythereal posted:What I wanted was an exploration of the story of the night elves, following the genocide of their people, Shadowlands' revelations about their goddess, and the struggles of the survivors, described in Blizzard's own short story as being too few in number to continue their civilization.
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May 29, 2023 19:35
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Cythereal posted:It is within Blizzard's power to change this. They could tell an actual story about coping with loss and the struggle to move on. They could tell a story of catharsis and the world putting meaningful measures in place to shackle the warmaking capabilities of the side with a long history of atrocity. They could use any of the many plot devices on their shelf to declare events so abhorrent that they must be prevented. They could tell a story about the people of Azeroth coming to recognizing the signs of these things starting again and this time moving as one to put an end to it before a new catastrophe happens, with some honest and painful self-reflection from the cast.
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May 30, 2023 00:21
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As of two weeks ago, the time that the BFA prepatch event has been removed from the game is a hundred times longer than the three weeks that it existed. I think it's time to let go of that grudge over it.
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May 30, 2023 02:20
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ApplesandOranges posted:Nobody stays dead in WoW. Or I mean some stay dead, but still get to interact with the world and such.
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Jun 13, 2023 08:54
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:the most fascinating part is that Blizzard (and WoW in specific) are no strangers to "well that was a dumb idea, never mind, please forget we set that up, thanks" I believe a part of it is that some ideas ended up being so bad, such as the elf genocide, the three(?) instances of dragon rape dungeons or pygmies that keep getting brought up in contexts of "what were they thinking?!?!?!" that writers feel like they should do something about it while not having the skills and sensitivity to handle any of those topics, so they just end up sticking both their feet into their mouth once more.
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Jun 14, 2023 10:47
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Alkydere posted:It will never not be funny for me that in Azeroth many guns have bayonet axes. I understand it's part of the cartoony aesthetic that WCIII/WoW leaned into (and are honestly at their best when they lean into it) but there are so many gun models in WoW that have bayonet axes and the Heroes of the Storm rifleman has one. There's a few attempts at it like the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle from TBC but even with the bayonet mount 2/3rds of the way along the barrel instead of at the muzzle, it ends up being quite a long boi: 
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Jul 1, 2023 00:39
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Siegkrow posted:I wouldn't be surprised to find naga in a landlocked lake.
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Jul 1, 2023 10:13
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Medivh might've been coming from a position where the Guardian taking thirty seconds off their super important apocalypse-preventing work to deliver some basic instructions along the lines of "big stuff happening in the background, I need all of you to pack your poo poo and get on a boat, quick" would've been seen as an immediate cause to action. Aegwynn's name used to carry enough weight that she could return from being missing for centuries, hand king Landen Wrynn a baby with the news that she had seduced his court mage and got him to sire her heir for Guardian reasons, his name's Medivh, he's to be raised in Stormwind under the tutelage of his dad, that he will be the new Guardian once he's an adult, and have those orders to be followed without questions. Medivh's problem here is that the office of the Guardian has lost a lot of it's standing since the time his mother magically imprinted all knowledge of his job into his mind, and all of that happened while he was in a coma and/or possessed so he might not have internalized that he can't roll up to monarchs and tell them what to do any more.
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Jul 7, 2023 11:34
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I'm fairly sure that's Zul'Aman: -Pine trees -Grey/blue buildings -Big palisade gate -Those stone claw... things? Last one looks like it might be from the Azshara Warbringer short too.
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Jul 27, 2023 19:08
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ChaosDragon posted:Who had the time and opportunity to bury Terenas?
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Aug 5, 2023 20:21
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The narrative in the undead campaign feels a bit dull because the Scourge is on the offensive for 7/8 missions and the one time they're not it's by their own choice. Every single mission is a variation on "the dreadlords have an errand for you": Arthas, go find the cultists Arthas, go collect the dead necromancer Arthas, go resurrect the necromancer(x3) Arthas, go talk to your boss' boss Arthas, go find the manual to summon your boss' boss Arthas, go summon your boss' boss It would've been nice if there was SOMETHING with higher stakes than Tichondrius whining that you're too slow(which he does anyway). Personally, I'd do a little more with the rift between the Legion and the Lich King, have a mission or two where the Scourge works towards their own goals when the dreadlords aren't looking, possibly subbing it in for one of the elf missions and have there be some kind of credible threat against the Scourge like reworking the Ashbringer timeline a bit into Mograine showing up to avenge Uther with his sword that can actually permanently kill the undead leadership.
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Aug 23, 2023 22:58
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The Horde campaign feels a lot closer to the biblical story of Exodus than either the conquests of European colonial powers or the US westward expansion to me. A prophetic figure leads his persecuted people The tauren design influences are obvious but in my opinion it's too much of a reach to extend their themes to the whole narrative, given that their nemesis have an equally clear design lineage to Mongolians and everybody else being purely Gygaxian and mostly detached from their real world inspirations. The prologue campaign even explicitly namedrops Exodus in it's title and I'd attribute Thrall's moniker of "green Jesus" more to people knowing precisely one biblical figure even when they're thinking of Moses. ProfessorCirno posted:comparing the long and connecting Defias Brotherhood and Onyxia questline with "Kill some boars...for the Horde!" "Ok, now kill some bears...for the Horde!" Of course, the median wow player played to level 10 or something like that so most people never noticed that the story poofs out of existence for most of the levelling experience.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:04
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NameHurtBrain posted:It goes back to the lazy 'people are a monolith' trope that Blizzard worships ultimately. That there aren't more rear end in a top hat Tauren causing problems is just as lazy writing as them all being chill - and putting the few rear end in a top hat tauren there are in one specific clan of them certainly doesn't help things. Ethic groups in this game are monolithic because the amount of screen time is already cramped with a strictly enforced limit of between zero and one culture per set of models. There are 8 maps per campaign with about 300 words of spoken dialogue in each one, which is shared with the main plot and stuff like characters calling out attack waves. As a result, most extraneous world building is going to get shunted off to the manual, tie-in books or design docs for future games and fall afoul of "show, don't tell".
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Aug 31, 2023 00:31
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Cythereal posted:Not my problem. Blizzard made their choices, and the knock-on effects are a result of their choices. My purpose with this LP is to present and criticize the end product that Blizzard created. If someone at Blizzard doesn't like what they're seeing here, everything about Warcraft is within Blizzard's power to change if they wish it. Blizzard could have fixed many of these issues with Reforged, and they chose not to (I do mean Blizzard at large, not Reforged's team specifically).
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Aug 31, 2023 18:41
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Sanguinia posted:I personally think there's a lot of interesting push-and-pull in the question of context, especially for long-running legacy franchises and brands. It's 100% worth critiquing things that are gross or horrible even if they were normal for their time, but there is also some merit in acknowledging intent, like if what was written was awful by our standards but was an earnest attempt at being progressive from the writer's perspective. There is equal merit in applying a read that deliberately refuses to acknowledge intent, to apply the personal lens and see how a narrative might resonate with a group that it wasn't intended for. And there's merit in speculating about intent when said intent is an unknown Diablo 4, the most recent Blizzard release, has 9169 people listed in the credits, of which only twelve are credited as either narrative lead, writer or creative development writer. I'll be ignoring the two technical writers as technical writing means things like installation booklets that have no bearing on the narrative. Even assuming the most generous working environment where everybody puts in the exact same hours and no such thing as continuous 80 hour crunch in the QA departments(as if...) , the game's writing represents 0.13% of the total development effort. The most up to date version of Dragonflight's credits that I could find show a writer's room of one lead narrative designer, seven narrative designers, four creative development writers and one lead cinematic narrative designer but nobody has tallied up the total number so I can't give an exact ratio. For comparison, Disco Elysium is a famously wordy game, with a full 6 out of it's 271 listed contributors doing the writing, about 2.2%. They're still outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by their 33 playtesters alone. As such, I see analyses that treat the rest of the development team as purely as extensions of the writers to be misguided at best and dehumanizing towards everybody else on the team at worst. A great many ideas that sound clever on paper end up not being practical to implement, hard to balance, taking too much time and effort to implement within a release deadline, leading to all kinds of compromises to be made, in both gameplay and story. Of the part of the game that's been shown in the LP, I'd like to point out the fourth undead map as fairly obvious filler standing in for an idea that either never materialized or was cut. Did Metzen originally intend for 1/8th of the undead campaign's story to be nothing but Arthas grumbling about elven resilience, something that also happens in both the levels before and after it? Clearly not, but there was a gap in the map list that needed filling urgently and no time or resources for coming up with something better.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:02
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:yyyep
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Sep 2, 2023 12:38
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Lord_Magmar posted:The only possible issue is if somehow an Orc time travelled back to the War of the Ancients and allied with them so they would know that these are Orcs and not the first wave of a new demonic invasion force.
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Sep 5, 2023 10:48
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Dirk the Average posted:To bring things back around to Warcraft, I'm surprised at how disappointed I am with the campaign from an RTS perspective in retrospect. Starcraft has 3 factions, and you go up against your own faction and the other two factions during the course of each respective campaign. Warcraft 3 doesn't do a good job of this - the human campaign never interacts with the night elves, and really only fights the Scourge. The Scourge fights humans, similarly. The Orcs are fighting humans and night elves. And we have yet to see who the night elves fight. As for fighting the other factions and acting as an MP tutorial, going from 3 to 4 factions is what messed this one up. the Grom maps are clear late additions too; they're fairly plain in terms of layout and looks, the one we've just seen is one of the most basic ones possible in terms of objectives and the one coming up is almost a direct copy of a map we've seen before. If these had been vs undead, all 3 factions would've faced each other. The need for a 4th campaign likewise forced the remaining three to be truncated in order to meet the shipping date and that meant there's much less space for units to be introduced in places where they make sense (or be introduced at all in one case). Another factor is that Warcraft 3 has oodles of scrapped faction concepts hanging around as creeps and they end up taking up a good deal of screen time too. Thrall so far has fought Humans in Prologue 2 and 3, and Orc 3 but creeps in Prologue 1, 4*, 5 and Orc 1 and 2. *there's a handful of hostile Footmen but it's very much not a vs Humans map. anilEhilated posted:That being said, WC3 is a poo poo strategy game. Units are only really relevant as damage/armor type counters and all the tactics ultimately devolves into smacking your blob of unit into the opponents'.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:12
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The Horde campaign's overabundance of dungeon missions is most likely a consequence of their original campaign set in Lordearon's outskirts being scrapped fairly late; dungeon missions are a lot quicker to develop and test than base building missions. This mission, and the one before it that's a stripped down version of Orc 3 with Grom's and half the human bases missing bear the strongest evidence of being extremely late additions; being absent from World of Warcraft. Warcraft 3 and WoW were developed concurrently and have for the most part attempted to keep some form of parity in terms of locations depicted(albeit often heavily reworked and/or scrapped during WoW's development) until the end of Reign of Chaos, until it diverged somewhat when some of the The Frozen Throne campaigns began adding a bunch of new places that wouldn't begin appearing to WoW until later expansion. Nothing of the sort is present here however, the name "Stonetalon" is most likely is a holdover of the scrapped concept these missions replaced as it does appear in WoW, but they evidently weren't far along in development because the WoW zone is almost completely devoid of notable quests, personalities or landmarks.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:19
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life_source posted:Compare that to his interaction with Antonidas here where he presumably WAS explaining everything and Antonidas still decided that his combination of weird smells (powerful magic, bad magic, wet feathers) didn't warrant consideration. If so, there's no reason for Medivh to try and hide his identity to Antonidas who can just recognize him by his badge of office, if he wasn't already familiar with him from knowing Nielas Aran and the events of the First War. This would also make it entirely reasonable for him to consider the possibility that Medivh is still possessed and that anything he says might be Legion disinformation.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:26
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ApplesandOranges posted:The Last Guardian was published in 2001 and WC3 was released in 2002.
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Sep 16, 2023 17:54
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This mission is a bit of a peculiarity because Reign of Chaos goes out of it's way to avoid mirror matches and this is the closest to it there is; Orcs vs the partially developed and eventually scrapped Chaos Orcs + a few Burning Legion units because Chaos Orcs never got their Tier 3 stuff.
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Sep 19, 2023 13:00
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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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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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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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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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sirtommygunn posted:I know you probably aren't interested in searching the map, but the Night Elf campaign has a lot of goodies to reward exploration with Maiev's Blink, at least for the first four missions. Such a stark contrast to Starcraft 2 where Zeratul and Protoss Stalkers have the same ability but it never gets used for anything but teleporting over holes in terrain as pseudo checkpoints in fixed force missions.
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Oct 17, 2023 22:58
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anilEhilated posted:Stalker blink is really important in multiplayer and involves predicting enemy movement; I'd say that is a pretty good use. Feldegast42 posted:To my knowledge this is the first appearance of a blink skill in an RTS (keep in mind this campaign obviously came out before DOTA and League) and they obviously had a lot of fun hiding goodies everywhere.
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Oct 18, 2023 00:00
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