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We're one update in and already there are train wrecks everywhere. I love it. This is going to go places. It's been a very long time since I've played a Warcraft game. I played WC3 back in the day, and lost a year of my life to WoW before coming to my senses, but I don't think I ever looked into the lore much beyond what I encountered in the course of playing the games. Even then, there was a lot of weird stuff; I can only imagine how much stranger it's gotten since. This is going to be fun.
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May 8, 2022 00:17
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The only thing sadder than the fact that of course Gamers (tm) would ask for that is that Blizzard agreed with them and gave in. Then again, well, with all the recent revelations about Blizzard... quelle surprise.
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May 26, 2022 02:57
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It's a huge pet peeve of mine when stories fail to maintain the sense that there's some kind of underlying reality or shared set of facts behind the choices players are making and the events that are happening. It feels almost like a kind of narrative gaslighting ("what you saw happen isn't actually what happened, who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"). Blizzard seems to really like doing this, too. Wasn't there some kind of Schrodinger's traitor plotline in Starcraft 2 where the player's choice to believe or disbelieve the accusation retroactively decided what happened (and set up so that whatever the player chose they would be right)? It's a completely false choice set up to flatter the player's ego that they got it right regardless of the choice they make, and for me that completely ruins anything that might have been interesting about that narrative. I think the idea that shock and surprise are equivalent to good storytelling has a lot to do with this, too. If you want to keep milking that factor and shocking people, the constant retcons make sense (you don't actually want to set things up! you want to change the past suddenly so that the big shocking thing is justifiable in "retrospect", but players couldn't have seen it coming since they'd have a "false" context that wasn't building to it). I am very, very glad I checked out of this franchise years ago. This thread is just an endless cavalcade of  and I can't wait to see how much worse it all gets.
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Jun 8, 2022 22:25
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I think my favourite name like this I've personally encountered was a plumber named John Flood.
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Jun 30, 2022 01:01
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The unfinished point-and-click adventure has been covered here before, actually. It's really weird. https://lparchive.org/Warcraft-Adventures-Lord-of-the-Clans/
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Aug 4, 2022 00:46
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The whole Katrana-Onyxia thing is really hilarious to me because I played WoW back in the day and had absolutely no idea it was a thing. I played for a year or so in the early days of the game, and the extent of my knowledge of this character was "big black dragon what lays eggs and lives in a cave". I remember her being notorious because for a long time nobody could figure out how to kill her (she was one of the first big endgame raid bosses, I think?), but the only motivation I ever knew of for why we were fighting her was big dragon with big numbers what is here and probably has loot. I suspect my ignorance of this plotline was at least partially due to playing Horde (the friends who convinced me to join the game were already established on that side so I didn't really get a choice), but even then, I suspect this wasn't all that unusual an experience. Given what I've seen from this thread, I think the game was probably a better experience for having paid only tangential attention to the lore.
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Aug 18, 2022 23:28
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Cythereal posted:I'm kind of sad that this design for wizard towers, a mountainous altar before a great orb of power, will go away after WC2 in favor of something more boringly generic. Just wanted to say that this was an absolutely fantastic turn of phrase.
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May 28, 2023 18:14
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I was going to say, I've never encountered "phylactery" for tefillin either, outside the Wikipedia article. It's a Greek word that may have been historically used for them at one time, but it's certainly not in common usage among modern Jews (and while I can't be certain, I don't think it was much used at the time D&D was being written either). I'm never going to discount possible antisemitism because it's everywhere, but this particular one always feels like a stretch to me, and the reliquary angle makes more sense as a possible origin. (For context if it matters, I'm Jewish and I even own a set of tefillin. That said, I'm not at all observant, and I think I've worn them maybe twice in my life and don't remember how to tie them.) If we're going to talk about antisemitism in fantasy works, I think golems are far higher up the list than phylacteries. While it doesn't bother me personally, I've known a fair number of Jews who legitimately find the way fantasy literature uses the golem offensive. (In the original myth it was very specifically a defender of the Jewish people, and animated by the divine name.) Antisemitism in fantasy is a complicated issue. I certainly don't want to downplay it, but I also don't necessarily blame authors for using antisemetic tropes unless they're really blatant and obviously deliberate, because this stuff is the background radiation of the culture we've been living in for centuries if not millennia. Goblins and dwarves and such often stumble into being antisemitic caricatures without necessarily being intended that way, because the memetic mutation's been going on so long that most people have legitimately forgotten the origin. (That said, I'm certainly not going to forgive Warcraft or JK Rowling for their money-obsessed big-nosed goblins secretly running the economy. There comes a point where it's so blatant that the intentions don't matter.) Edit: all this said, Cythereal, I appreciate you calling it out regardless. You're doing good work here.
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Aug 20, 2023 22:07
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I barely remember the TFT campaign and I don’t think I ever finished it, but Maiev was one of those characters who stuck with me and I can still hear her voice lines. That said, I remember thinking she felt a bit off as a character when I first played this. A lot of that comes down to one of her voiced lines when you issue her orders, “Illidan must be around here somewhere” or whatever it was. She’s just constantly talking about Illidan while she’s doing anything. I didn’t know the term “Bechdel test” as a kid, but today that feels like the elephant in the room here… you’ve got this powerful, driven female leader with a majority-female faction and she just never stops talking about some dude. Granted that dude is a legitimate threat and she’s trying to stop him, but still.
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Oct 17, 2023 14:15
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 17:09 |
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Congratulations on finishing this project, and thank you for this weird psychically-damaging trip down memory lane.
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Feb 4, 2024 15:25
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