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PurpleXVI posted:I genuinely am tired of the model of gameplay where every single mission introduces a new unit or mechanic until only the very last couple of missions are playing with the full complement. I always found that to be one of the most tiresome design decisions and almost every RTS rolls with it, it feels like.
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Sep 8, 2023 20:46
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FoolyCharged posted:Screw the mentality that an rts campaign is a tutorial for the skirmish mode and has to teach faction match ups. That said, even viewing the campaign alone all of those match-ups being absent is a ton of variety and interesting interactions just left completely out. Hell, there's an entire units that don't see any play in the campaign, friendly or enemy. Part of why we're still getting extreme tutorialization for each race this far in is that we've only fought orcs a handful of times so there hasn't been much learning through exposure on what these units do. An RTS campaign that doesn't show you the factions in full isn't exactly much of a campaign, in my opinion. I'm totally in agreement that the slow tutorialization is a mistake, but the campaign should absolutely contrive to set you up against each of the other factions and your own faction. That way you actually get to see the different units and how they interact.
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Sep 8, 2023 21:01
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I like getting units bit by bit, I really hate jumping into an RTS and being given dozens of buildings and units and being left to learn everything by myself, but I'm not a fan of how Blizzard tend to do it, which is 'here's your new unit, here's a mission specifically tuned to make that unit unbeatable, this will not help you at all for the rest of the game'. Give me the new stuff and make me work out how it fits into what I'm already doing.
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Sep 8, 2023 21:12
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Cradok posted:I like getting units bit by bit, I really hate jumping into an RTS and being given dozens of buildings and units and being left to learn everything by myself, but I'm not a fan of how Blizzard tend to do it, which is 'here's your new unit, here's a mission specifically tuned to make that unit unbeatable, this will not help you at all for the rest of the game'. Give me the new stuff and make me work out how it fits into what I'm already doing. Yeah, this. I get drip feeding you units so you don’t feel overwhelmed by choice and tech trees and the like, and also for the campaign to build up narrative weight, but introducing units via gimmick missions that play towards their strengths and then making it so that they’re much less useful in future missions barring specific units is what made me dislike a lot of the progression of SC2’s Terran campaign so much. Then again, the only RTS I remember that didn’t gate unit composition in single player behind campaign progression was the very poorly received (and disowned by fans) C&C4, which besides throwing out everything iconic about the series that made it an RTS in the first place, linked unit progression to a leveling system that could be progressed in skirmish or multiplayer both, which is a very nonsensical choice IMO.
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Sep 8, 2023 21:21
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GhostStalker posted:Then again, the only RTS I remember that didn’t gate unit composition in single player behind campaign progression was the very poorly received (and disowned by fans) C&C4, which besides throwing out everything iconic about the series that made it an RTS in the first place, linked unit progression to a leveling system that could be progressed in skirmish or multiplayer both, which is a very nonsensical choice IMO. Progression was also "balanced" so that just playing through the, rather short, campaign once, would give you almost nothing, and you had to go back and grind missions over and over to unlock the full tech tree. Nothing about C&C 4 was good. It was a horrible abomination in all senses of the word.
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Sep 8, 2023 21:27
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PurpleXVI posted:Progression was also "balanced" so that just playing through the, rather short, campaign once, would give you almost nothing, and you had to go back and grind missions over and over to unlock the full tech tree. I had forgotten about that, but maybe it’s better to forget a lot of the things about C&C4. There’s a reason why the fan community has practically disowned that game. What the hell EA was smoking changing the mechanics up like that I’ll never know, but it can’t have been the good stuff to lead to a nightmare of progression like that. To bring it back to previous discussion, WC3 parceling out units like the standard RTS apparently doesn’t work with the excessive tutorialization going on, but I guess that fits the trend of games in a genre dumbing down their mechanics and putting in more tutorials in an attempt to capture more market share or whatever by appealing to more people, some who are unfamiliar with how RTS usually plays or whatever. I have said before that I was rear end at RTS growing up and still don’t consider myself the best at it, but I didn’t feel that the drip feeding of units in the WC3 campaign was anything out the ordinary when I played it in high school decades ago. I do agree with the person that previously said that the framing of a single player campaign as merely a tutorial for multiplayer is wrong though, speaking as someone who would rather do straight up comp stomps rather than competitive online skirmishes or whatever if I’m playing the game “straight” and not in a use map settings type game or whatever. I guess that makes me not the preferred market of RTS (or FPS for that matter) for the past couple of decades now, since I don’t see single player as an appendage to be sacrificed for the be all end all that is the online multiplayer experience or whatever.
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Sep 8, 2023 21:52
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There's nothing wrong with an RTS introducing you to its units gradually - it makes you think up uses for low-tier units and feels rewarding when you unlock the high tier ones. 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'. (I'm fairly sure I already said that here but it bears repeating - WC3 has absolutely nothing to do with strategy; multiplayer matches are extremely gamified contests of "who can creep faster" and "who can micro better"). Also why pro WC3 is incredibly boring to watch.
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Sep 8, 2023 22:19
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They should probably take advantage of the campaigns being sequential to speed up the tutorialisation on the later campaigns. At this point you should know how the game works, and if the missions were more varied you'd have an idea of what it's like to fight against the race you're playing now, so they could introduce new units much more quickly than the human campaign did
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Sep 8, 2023 22:30
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GhostStalker posted:I do agree with the person that previously said that the framing of a single player campaign as merely a tutorial for multiplayer is wrong though, speaking as someone who would rather do straight up comp stomps rather than competitive online skirmishes or whatever if I’m playing the game “straight” and not in a use map settings type game or whatever. I guess that makes me not the preferred market of RTS (or FPS for that matter) for the past couple of decades now, since I don’t see single player as an appendage to be sacrificed for the be all end all that is the online multiplayer experience or whatever. RTS games have for a while really suffered from an excessive MP focus and in particular an excessive Ladder MP focus, leaving the rest of the game behind, you can look up steam achievements for, I don't know, ash of the singularity and something like less than 3% of players who have completed the tutorial have the achievement for playing as many as a single MP games. Don't get me wrong, a good MP is good to have, like many other things, but the core of RTS games is scenarios and campaigns. And mods, also. anilEhilated posted:There's nothing wrong with an RTS introducing you to its units gradually - it makes you think up uses for low-tier units and feels rewarding when you unlock the high tier ones. A Warcraft 3 of damage and armor types has become a warning sign for me that, if the devs aren't being simulationists, they don't know what they are doing and are just throwing complexity at the wall and hoping it works.
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Sep 8, 2023 22:34
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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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Asehujiko posted:This isn't anything to do with WC3, any old game with a mostly solved meta will eventually converge on contests of who can perform the known optimal strategies the best.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:34
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All this talk of how to steadily unlock the tech tree in strategy games makes me think of Homeworld, and how it was a fairly logical progression of your people developing, stealing/buying, reverse engineering, and innovating on encountered tech as you shifted from a colony ship to a war fleet. Cataclysm/Emergence was also a very logical progression of the tech tree alongside story.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:46
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Asehujiko posted:This isn't anything to do with WC3, any old game with a mostly solved meta will eventually converge on contests of who can perform the known optimal strategies the best. Total Annihilation and Starcraft, from 1997 and 1998 respectively, still have thriving metagames and in TA in particular, while the balance is widely considered "somewhat busted" and a good number of units never see the light of day, you will get murked by greybeards in their sixties because they saw what you didn't and genuinely surprised you. Also maps worth a drat, those help too. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 00:00
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anilEhilated posted:In most RTS games you get flanking, chokepoints, using elevation, hiding armies in the fog of war, multi-pronged attacks. Warcraft 3 has nothing of that due the one-blob-army playstyle forced by the existence of heroes. Alright this I do have to argue with, pro level WC3 is micro based primarily and the fact that the Blade harass exist proves that there are quite a few different strategies. The smaller number of units forces you to micromanage your units and play around your opponents placement. Warcraft 3 has piles of faults, but a complete reliance on heroes and blobs is not at all how the game works. I just love mashing all my poo poo together. I never look at each individual units skills, mp, or placement and I just smash my poo poo at the other person. I always win! Unless the other person has more blob or more invincible heroes! That's all the game is about! Heroes are definitively invincible and need no babysitting, it's best to never use consumables and fog of war doesn't exist. It's what I love about the game!
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Sep 9, 2023 03:23
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GhostStalker posted:I had forgotten about that, but maybe it’s better to forget a lot of the things about C&C4. There’s a reason why the fan community has practically disowned that game. What the hell EA was smoking changing the mechanics up like that I’ll never know, but it can’t have been the good stuff to lead to a nightmare of progression like that. It was literally a recycled MP only title intended for Asia. Anyways back to WC3. The mission design in general isn't that great in hindsight. Once in a while you have a fun gimmick mission but the game is weirdly at its worse on the more straightforward ones.
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Sep 9, 2023 03:49
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A page or two back now but missed my chance with the locking. But regarding Elf longevity, I thought this game was explicit that they are bodily immortal unless killed? I could have sworn several of the named Night Elf characters have quadruple digit ages in the manual, plus some other stuff I can't get into yet, plus WoW having a dude who was a veteran of the Ahn'qiraj war unless I'm misremembering. Like I seem to recall WoW being very much that unless killed, an Elf will live forever and also generally stop physically aging sometime in their 20s or early 30s - unless you're Malfurion who gets to be middle aged.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:11
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:A page or two back now but missed my chance with the locking. But regarding Elf longevity, I thought this game was explicit that they are bodily immortal unless killed? I could have sworn several of the named Night Elf characters have quadruple digit ages in the manual, plus some other stuff I can't get into yet, plus WoW having a dude who was a veteran of the Ahn'qiraj war unless I'm misremembering. Night elves, yes, because of tree-related reasons. The high elves shouldn't have anything near the same lifespan, except Blizzard writers seem to have forgotten/retconned that as of BfA.
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Sep 9, 2023 07:56
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:A page or two back now but missed my chance with the locking. But regarding Elf longevity, I thought this game was explicit that they are bodily immortal unless killed? I could have sworn several of the named Night Elf characters have quadruple digit ages in the manual, plus some other stuff I can't get into yet, plus WoW having a dude who was a veteran of the Ahn'qiraj war unless I'm misremembering. Quintuple digits actually, it was 10'000 years from the Reckoning until present day and obviously some of the big names were several hundred to a couple thousand years old at that time.
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Sep 9, 2023 09:37
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Ahhh, okay, yeah. Like many people, I imagine, my entry into Warcraft was 3, not 2 - Starcraft was my first Blizzard game - so I didn't know much about the High Elves and I generally assumed given the stuff I saw in 3 that they were basically identical to the Night Elves in that regards and it was just phenotypical/ethnic and cultural differences that set them apart from the Night Elves, not anything as substantial as having a radically different innate lifespan. Plus I thought the Sunwell filled in for the Tree Stuff well enough? But yeah, off hand, WoW's latter expansions that moved away from the 'old world' stuff of Azeroth/Lordaeron/Kalimdor/Draenor may have changed some things, but speaking of War in Warcraft, I don't think there's any classic secondary/tertiary named characters who died of old age. Like if you have a name in Warcraft you are either alive or you died a violent death.
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Sep 9, 2023 10:54
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TGG posted:I just love mashing all my poo poo together. I never look at each individual units skills, mp, or placement and I just smash my poo poo at the other person. I always win! Unless the other person has more blob or more invincible heroes! That's all the game is about! Heroes are definitively invincible and need no babysitting, it's best to never use consumables and fog of war doesn't exist. It's what I love about the game! TGG posted:Alright this I do have to argue with, pro level WC3 is micro based primarily and the fact that the Blade harass exist proves that there are quite a few different strategies. The smaller number of units forces you to micromanage your units and play around your opponents placement. Warcraft 3 has piles of faults, but a complete reliance on heroes and blobs is not at all how the game works.
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Sep 9, 2023 11:43
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Ahhh, okay, yeah. Like many people, I imagine, my entry into Warcraft was 3, not 2 - Starcraft was my first Blizzard game - so I didn't know much about the High Elves and I generally assumed given the stuff I saw in 3 that they were basically identical to the Night Elves in that regards and it was just phenotypical/ethnic and cultural differences that set them apart from the Night Elves, not anything as substantial as having a radically different innate lifespan. Plus I thought the Sunwell filled in for the Tree Stuff well enough? Offhand there's Alonsus Faol - his death cause is never specified but given the lack of information and it happening during a time of peace, is presumed to be of old age (until he got raised as an undead). I'm honestly surprised Drek'Thar is still alive, he's probably one of the characters that's clearly in his twillight years at this point.
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Sep 9, 2023 14:05
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Horde 5: Vexed to Nightmare  Hmmm. Where did Grom go? To get another drink, I'd assume. He knows what's coming next. (Mannoroth appears and slaughters a group of furbolg guarding a fountain)   Yes, Lord Archimonde demands that Cenarius be destroyed before we launch our invasion of Kalimdor. I would relish the chance to face him again, but he is crafty and rarely appears in the open.Sadly, Mannoroth is stuck being the dude for Tichondrius to explain the plot to for the benefit of the player, so despite supposedly being very intelligent and a canny strategist, Mannoroth comes off as very dim-witted. This is one place where I think the creaky joints in Warcraft 3's structure are very obvious, the story struggles to tell the player what the Legion's plans are in an organic way. My first thought is that maybe there should have been just one massive, intertwined campaign where you're regularly hopping between characters and perspectives as events play out, but that approach to storytelling always has a bad chance of overwhelming and losing players with too many names and characters to keep track of.  They would have little chance against Cenarius. If memory serves, his powers were quite formidable. Yes, but so are yours. The blood pact you made with the orcs so long ago still binds them to you. You need only recharge their energies. Just what are you suggesting, dreadlord?So yeah, if you didn't read the manual, here's the first time Warcraft properly establishes the retcon about the orcs' corruption and how it happened. Personally, I think a more organic way to do this would have been to open the Horde prologue with Thrall fighting the Old Horde, showing from the start how Thrall is different (if you believe he and his Horde are meaningfully different from the Old Horde at all, mind). Thrall's ignorance of orc history even would have been the perfect excuse for NPCs to teach the player about the new history for the orcs.    The sad fact is, I think Mannoroth comes across as just too stupid to be a threatening arc villain. People have been comparing Grom and Arthas in the thread, and even though Arthas' story didn't work for me, I think his story was executed leaps and bounds better than Grom's.  And a big part of that is that everyone in the human and undead campaigns simply felt far more intelligent than the cast of this campaign.  Which itself is in large part, I think, due to the far more compressed timeline of Grom's story. This is only the third mission we've seen him in, and one of those three was in the prologue where he only appeared in the closing cutscene.  I feel that the Horde campaign is simply trying to do much with too little time and too little narrative space.  Blizzard wants to do Thrall's Adventures in Kalimdor, the Struggle for the Soul of the Orcs, and Oh Yeah the Burning Legion Invasion.  While simultaneously establishing the first truly massive retcons in Warcraft's history (God knows the prologue wasted the chance to establish what makes Thrall and his Horde so different from the old) and also introducing the night elves.  And they're trying to cram all of that into eight missions and two cutscenes. If you want, you could make that thirteen missions and three cutscenes by counting the prologue, but frankly I don't think that makes things any better because that shows how much Blizzard desperately needed the time they'd allocated to following Thrall and Grom (oh yeah and Cairne and the tauren) around, and how badly they squandered that time.  If you've played Starcraft, you know what kind of map this is: your outlying bases are doomed and you need to evacuate everything you can back to the main base immediately.  The night elves are playing with almost their full tech tree now, and that includes those two-headed dragon-like things. Chimeras are flying siege weapons that can wreck a base very quickly, though they're helpless against flying units (though the night elves don't typically struggle with anti-air given the ranged preference of the race).   When all the outlying bases are wiped out, Cenarius magically regrows the forest.  You know, I'm really curious what Tichondrius' plan B for taking out Cenarius was if Grom hadn't come along. Maybe transporting the Scourge over?  There are regular night elf attacks throughout the mission.  Wait, it was a troll who suggested this? Me and dat one had a long talk when he made it to De Other Side. Now, you're not really expected to be able to do this.  But if you bring enough firepower, it's possible to level the southern and northern bases before Cenarius patrols in. Doing so stops that base from launching attacks against you.  This is why you need to be quick: Cenarius is both immortal and deals huge amounts of damage. Also, he's absolutely correct about the Horde being here doing what the Burning Legion wants them to do.  ...Though Cenarius does not do the best job of making his case. In an absolute sense, he is fundamentally correct. Even speaking as a night elf fangirl, though? He's being a real dick about it.  Not that Grom can muster a cogent counter-argument. Indeed, when he speaks this line, he's looking a little different...  Now back to what you're actually supposed to do in this mission.  To the north are more furbolgs and goblins. Again, I really question how the goblins manage to be here in night elf territory.  Crossing the river to the north, I meet a new race of creeps: satyrs. I'll talk about satyrs in the next Burning Legion demon roundup, but in short satyrs are former night elves who have been completely corrupted by the Legion and become demons. Almost all satyrs are either former Highborne who succumbed to corruption before or during the War of the Ancients, or descended from same. They've been fighting a guerrilla war against their cousins ever since the Sundering.  Grom? Are you okay? What do you loving think? Interesting, satyrs can in fact be uncorrupted. One of the first official LGBT couples in Warcraft involved a satyr woman whose wife had been slain by Queen Azshara during the destruction of Azsuna, so she gave in to despair. There was a side quest chain in the Legion expansion for players with the Enchanting profession to help them reunite. With just a little nudge from the PC's work, the power of love between them broke both Azshara's curse on the Azsunan ghost and redeemed the satyr, freeing both women to travel into the afterlife together. ...Here's hoping we didn't unwittingly whack them at any point in Shadowlands!  I can only assume that this is reverse psychology from Mannoroth and Tichondrius, expecting even Grom to get suspicious if the fountain was unguarded or the satyrs welcomed him.   I am cursed already! If I must drink from these waters to defeat Cenarius, then I will! Er, the troll specifically said a well of dark power. They knew they were going for something nasty from the start of this errand. Why quail now? No, warrior, we must embrace it as never before! We must become the vessels of destruction that we were meant to be! That Warsong grunt is the smartest orc I've ever heard of. I got that a lot. I gave the Temple of Humility fits when they brought forth memories of my life and it was mostly my time as Grom's aide. What took Arthas nine missions to build up to, Grom's done in one and a half.  So yeah. Welcome to the... Well, this isn't the Old Horde. Or the Dark Horde. Or the True Horde. Or the Fel Horde. Or the Iron Horde. Or the Fel Iron Horde.  It's funny to think of how big a wrench Grom would have thrown into the Legion's plans if he had, at any point in the last couple of missions, decided to retreat. Thrall's a forgiving dude (quite arguably *too* forgiving), I don't think he would have been upset with Grom for seeing he was in over his head and pulling back. But if Grom was capable of backing down, he wouldn't be Grom.  Cenarius is now vulnerable and spends the rest of his life running back and forth summoning treants.  It's a short life.   Mannoroth! It can't be... I've come to bring you and your brethren back into the fold. Though you orcs failed the Burning Legion once before, you will now serve us once again!For the record, this red-and-spiky state of demonic corruption among orcs is known as fel orc status, a step beyond the green version. Fel orcs have done fel juice straight and uncut, or been saturated in the Twisting Nether over a long period of time, and are on the cusp of turning into fully fledged demons.  Stupid, pitiful creature. I am the rage in your heart. I am the fury of your thoughts. I alone empowered you to bring chaos to this world, and by the endless void you shall!As events in WoW would later go on to show, and I intend to talk about later, leaving anyone named Hellscream without adult supervision never fails to be a bad idea in Warcraft.  ...It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 14:40
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Where the Wild Gods Are Meeting the night elves has finally uncorked a whole lot of subjects I've been avoiding, they're probably the single most dramatic addition to Warcraft's corpus of lore from this game in terms of everything they bring with them. Today's subject, the Wild Gods.  When the Titans set to work ordering Azeroth and creating an ecology for the planet, the figure responsible for creating Azeroth's new ecosystems was Freya, the Keeper of Life. From her facilities where she prototyped and released the plant and animal species that now dominate the world, the primordial energies of the slumbering Titan within the planet periodically bubbled to the surface and interacted with Freya's gaian engines, creating nature spirits of immense power. Most of these spirits, but not all, took the form of an animal creature that Freya had designed to inhabit Azeroth, only vastly larger and more powerful. In some cases, the baseline creature had not yet been released to the surface, leaving a few of these primeval entities as unique creations - notably Nespirah, pictured above. While the peoples of Azeroth would later come to call these beings the Wild Gods, and many cultures including the night elves and trolls would come to worship them as divine beings, they are in truth strictly limited to Azeroth (or other worlds, Wild Gods are not a uniquely Azerothian phenomenon, they are standard on all Titan-ordered worlds). There's too many Wild Gods to go over in detail, so here's a sampling of some of the most important ones to Warcraft lore. Note that Wild Gods are known interchangably as 'Ancients.'  The August Celestials are a conclave of four Wild Gods created within the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and are based on the Four Heavenly Beasts of East Asian folklore and mythology. They consist of Yu'lon, the Jade Serpent; Chi-Ji, the Red Crane; Xuen, the White Tiger; and Niuzao, the Black Ox. They became fast friends soon after they emerged into Azeroth, and chose to stay in what would become Pandaria. Insofar as pandaren religion has ever been described beyond 'I dunno, kinda Buddhist?' the August Celestials hold a special place of reverence as the embodiments of wisdom, grace, harmony, and strength. The monk tradition developed by the pandaren was heavily inspired by the August Celestials, and each of the major orders claims one of the August Celestials as the being who originally taught them. All other races in Pandaria treat the August Celestials with a healthy degree of respect, though none regularly cross the line into outright worship as the pandaren do. Except for the mogu and mantid, of course, who both made efforts to subdue or outright kill the August Celestials and drat near succeeded a few times. Yet, the August Celestials have always endured and returned to continue to teach and guide any who wish to learn. It is extremely likely that if and when the pandaren in WoW ever receive druid as a class option (WoW has been steadily adding classes to races that didn't previously have them, and the devs have stated a long-term goal of making every class available to every race), pandaren druids will be presented as a new development of the August Celestials' teachings.  Goldrinn is the Wolf Ancient, and uniquely may have been present on both Azeroth and Draenor (it's part of some very weird old lore surrounding Goldrinn that may or may not be canon anymore). He is the epitome of savagery, tenacity, and leading by example from the front. Goldrinn was the first Wild God to join the battle against the Burning Legion during the War of the Ancients, and in truth may have slain as many innocents as demons - there is a dark edge of madness to Goldrinn, bloodlust taken too far, instincts so primal that they lose the ability to tell friend from foe. This tendency to insanity is what lead directly to the Curse of the Worgen that afflicts Gilneas. During the War of the Ancients, some night elf druids sought to draw on Goldrinn's example and teachings, becoming the Druids of the Pack. Like their patron, the Druids of the Pack were exceptional fighters during the War, but then kept fighting even after the Sundering and the Legion's retreat. The druids had become lost in rage, unable to tell friend from foe, and ultimately were subdued by their peers and laid to rest in warded barrows beneath an uninhabited peninsula on one of Azeroth's new continents, intended to sleep until one day the rage might pass from their minds. These barrows were later discovered by human settlers and what those settlers would glean from these ancient monoliths would go on to shape the culture of Gilneas, along with dark dreams that slipped out on occasion. These days, Goldrinn remains something of a patron of Gilneas, referring to the worgen as both a gift and a curse, making no apologies for what he is or what his power represents but also warning souls to only approach him if they truly believe they can handle what Goldrinn is. The orcs of Thrall's Horde also took to Goldrinn as a rare ally in Azeroth's natural world, being all too familiar with the duality of rage and madness that Goldrinn represents. Goldrinn makes no distinction between Alliance and Horde, though it is telling that his devoted on both sides tend to be the biggest instigators and perpetuators of the faction war.  Ursoc is one of the Bear Ancients alongside his brother Ursol, and his life sucked. Past tense. Ursoc emerged from Ulduar in present-day Northrend, and remained in that land as the patron and guardian of the furbolg tribes. He was your typical bear god, sleepy and preferring to just get along and be nice, but fearsome when his anger was roused. During the War of the Ancients, he embraced his role as a protector of the land and taught the Druids of the Claw, druids who learned to shapeshift into bears and would become the tank spec of the class in WoW. He ultimately perished during the war alongside his brother. Unfortunately, the night elves then planted a world tree in Northrend, Vordrassil. I've mentioned this tale before, how the tree's roots touched the body of the Old God Yogg-Saron beneath Northrend and became corrupted, starting the Emerald Nightmare (a subject for another time). One victim of this corruption was Ursoc, who became tainted with madness and rage by Yogg-Saron. Which carried over when the furbolg of Northrend faced the onslaught of the Scourge and performed a ritual meant to resurrect their great protector. Ursoc returned, but tainted by Yogg-Saron and turned into a mindless hulk of violence and rage who had to be put down by players. Then in Legion, when the heroes of Azeroth faced the Emerald Nightmare in full, they confronted the fully corrupted soul of Ursoc within the Emerald Dream and destroyed him, freeing his soul from the material plane. And then this was right before everything went to poo poo in the Shadowlands, and Ursoc's soul was destroyed never to be reborn. Some people just don't have a good existence.  Malorne is the Stag Ancient, and quite possibly the first living being created by the Titans on Azeroth. He was certainly the first of the Wild Gods, and generally accepted by both his peers and by mortals to be the most powerful of them all. In truth, not much is actually known about Malorne due to his reclusive disposition. He appears when and where he wants, never when invoked or called, does what he wants, and leaves. He always acts in defense of Azeroth and life itself, but beyond that keeps his own counsel. The legends of Kalimdor's races are filled with stories of great hunters who went chasing the great white stag of the forest and never returned, or were simply killed. During the War of the Ancients, it took Archimonde himself to finally kill Malorne, after the Wild God massacred entire regiments of demons by himself. Malorne would not be seen on Azeroth again until the Legion expansion, when the druids finally freed Malorne from the grip of the Emerald Nightmare and returned the first and greatest of the Wild Gods to the world. Oh, and he may have hosed the goddess of the moon (who may be an extradimensional robot). Which brings us to...  According to night elf and tauren myth, Cenarius was born when Elune, the goddess of the moon, took the Stag Ancient, Malorne, as a lover and gave birth to a son. Let's chalk this up to myth and poetry and move discreetly along. Cenarius is associated with the Wild Gods, but he isn't quite one of them whatever his origins may or may not be, and took a far more active role in mortal affairs than any of the true Wild Gods save the August Celestials. Like the Celestials, Cenarius was intrigued by mortal civilization and the potential of mortal races to change the world for the better. When mortals sought him out, Cenarius decided to teach the secrets of life and nature to any who had the desire to learn, regardless of race. Cenarius taught night elves, tauren, furbolg, and many others in the ways of what would come to be called druidism - all the druid traditions in WoW at first were explicitly tied to Cenarius and his teachings before Blizzard later conceived of druidism as a broader thing that didn't depend on one singular origin. During the War of the Ancients, Cenarius was one of the primary forces organizing all the might of Azeroth against the Burning Legion. Being something between a Wild God and a thing of the material world, he reached out to both mortals and immortals for aid. It was Cenarius who bestowed the blessing of the Highmountain upon that tribe of tauren, and Cenarius who defeated Mannoroth the Destructor in single combat. Cenarius did much to shape night elf civilization in the wake of the war, their fierce dedication to the natural world and the drive to eradicate any trace of the fel on sight. Cenarius, lore later established, blamed himself greatly for the War of the Ancients: he had seen the signs of corruption in the Kaldorei Empire more clearly than any of the reclusive Wild Gods, but had faith that surely mortals wouldn't do that. He was wrong, of course, and became convinced that if he and the Wild Gods had acted decisively when it first became clear that something was rotten in Zin-Azshari then they might have averted an apocalyptic tragedy. And, well. We've seen what became of his renewed dedication to vigilance and not letting evil gain a foothold in Kalimdor again. Cenarius would ultimately be resurrected in World of Warcraft to face Deathwing's assault on the world in the Cataclysm expansion, and directly challenge the might of Ragnaros the Firelord. Minus a brief bout of Old God corruption in Legion, he's none the worse for the wear. One interesting coda to Cenarius and this story we've just seen: at least some of the Horde forces fighting under Cenarius' leadership in Cataclysm explicitly identified themselves as former Warsong, determined to atone for this particular cascade of fuckups and redeem their clan's name.
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Sep 9, 2023 14:41
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Another relationship of Malorne is that he was very close to Ysera. Whether or not it was romantic is never outright confirmed, but it was enough that when she saw Malorne's corpse during the War of the Ancients, she flew into a rage and, for one of the very, very few times in history, opened her eyes. It took the reminder that Cenarius (to whom Ysera was basically an adoptive mother) still lived (barely) for her to snap out of the rage. Back to the mission, I feel like this is one of the very few times that Mannoroth scored a win (in a manner of speaking). He ends up getting chumped on more times than you'd expect (including several times during the War of the Ancients), it's honestly a surprise Sargeras still kept him around for so long. His blood being the corruption of the orcs is pretty much the only times he really achieves what he set out to do (and even then he didn't really do anything, it's Archimonde or Kil'Jaeden making use of his blood).
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Sep 9, 2023 15:05
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I've always wondered how Tichondrius and Mannoroth managed to sneak into the forest to that pool and absolutely no one noticed or saw anything at all. The latter isn't exactly small or subtle. Not even the furbolgs bothered to make a report, if any survived.
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Sep 9, 2023 15:44
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Poil posted:I've always wondered how Tichondrius and Mannoroth managed to sneak into the forest to that pool and absolutely no one noticed or saw anything at all. The latter isn't exactly small or subtle. Not even the furbolgs bothered to make a report, if any survived. The furbolgs probably went crazy minutes after seeing the demons. It does not take a lot to corrupt them.
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Sep 9, 2023 15:59
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One thing worth noting is that Mannoroth also calls him "Grommash" in the original game - the only time anyone uses that name until WoW. At the time, it came off more as a mocking twist on his real name.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:24
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To be fair to Cenarius from his point of view a bunch of weird fel tainted green people came out of nowhere and started to chop down tree and kill night elves. I doubt I would be less of a dick to the orc if I was him.
Chainrider37 fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 17:41
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About the satyrs in this mission, just like the centaurs before, Reforged added a new female satyr model as well. This is doubly notable because WoW has never had a female satyr model at any point in the game. I think the only other time one has been depicted in any of these games is in Hearthstone.
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Sep 9, 2023 19:08
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Nostalgamus posted:One thing worth noting is that Mannoroth also calls him "Grommash" in the original game - the only time anyone uses that name until WoW. True Name stuff maybe
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Sep 9, 2023 19:33
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Right, so, this is another level where nothing interesting has changed. Not in Reforged, not even in 1.33. The only thing that happened was Reforged changing a few terms around, as in actual Reign of Chaos, they were referred to as "Chaos Orcs" instead of Fel Orcs. Seeing a pattern yet? Also, important to note about Cenarius in this level. Technically, he is NOT immortal before finding the Well. The reason his health isn't showing down below his portrait is simply because the game hides that when a character is speaking for some reason. However, he has the "Divine" Armor type. Divine Armor takes only 1% damage from all damage types that are not Chaos, which deals 100% damage to all armor types, including Divine. However, it is still possible to kill him without Chaos damage. It's just one HELL of a monster task. Also, fun fact, that Witch Doctor that suggested the whole Well thing in the first place may have originally been planned to have a name. A later mission, which I will not detail as of yet, has a named, but un-used Witch Doctor in the files named Mil'janza. It is possible, though not confirmed in any way that he may be meant to be the same Witch Doctor.
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Sep 9, 2023 19:34
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So what the heck is Nespirah meant to be? Some sort of giant underwater carapaced octopus? Also one thing that always throws me for a loop is how... compressed the timeline is. I always got the feeling from Warcraft 1 and 2 that the orcish society in the state that invaded Azeroth had been around for hundreds of years in the same state, but then you've got Grom who personally met Mannoroth back in the old days, presumably juiced up, then went cold turkey, and now juiced up again. It feels like the whole thing would have made more sense if Grom and the other orcs had inherited the demon blood "infection" from their parents, and perhaps imbibed it in some sort of ritual process, but never really understood it or met the demons behind it. So that they'd be all "ah, yes, this world also has the [MAGIC JUICE] that we drank back on Draenor to become powerful! Clearly if we drink this we will be able to win! What luck!" Rather than going: "Ah yes this is the cursed ultratainted demonhell juice that it was a bad idea to drink back then and a bad idea to drink now, because of the ultrasatan demons responsible for it, that we know about and apparently personally met before."
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Sep 9, 2023 19:58
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Worth noting is that Grom & crew do not actually know that it is specifically the Same Satan Juice that Grom drank a few decades ago - only that there is some sort of Demon Curse empowering the well. And like Grom said... "gently caress it, I'm cursed already, how can this be any worse?" Turns out, it can be worse by being the Same Satan Juice you drank before, and this time it'll crank the TurboCorruption up to 11.
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Sep 9, 2023 20:04
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Cythereal posted:
One day we'll end up with as many Horde variants as there are troll variants. Orc variants for each axis of the cosmology wheel! Poil posted:I've always wondered how Tichondrius and Mannoroth managed to sneak into the forest to that pool and absolutely no one noticed or saw anything at all. The latter isn't exactly small or subtle. Not even the furbolgs bothered to make a report, if any survived. Most of the Night Elves if not all around are likely too preoccupied with the presence of Grom and company to have their sentinels pay attention to much else, and the Furbolg are... Not the most resilient to corruption, nor any match in a fight against two of the Burning Legion's top brass.
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Sep 9, 2023 20:21
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PurpleXVI posted:So what the heck is Nespirah meant to be? Some sort of giant underwater carapaced octopus? yeah this is a perennial issue with Warcraft's timeline. the Horde being something that has been around for less than a generation required them to handwave some kind of demonic fast-gro processes to explain where all the stupid generic orcs with no memory of a time before the horde came from.
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Sep 9, 2023 20:27
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Rewriting the intro for the blood well thing being Mannoroth's idea would have made him more intelligent foe. And if there is need to lore dump about Cenarius's and Mannoroth's past, Tichondrius could bring up the information with mocking tone. And explaining the mechanism of demon blood buff could be left for Grom and to the scene where Orcs drink from the well.
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Sep 9, 2023 20:53
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Cenarius' inclusion here does real dumb things for the already frayed talk about religion. Before now, religions have existed in Azeroth in only mostly vague terms. In WC1 and 2 things were kept very...medieval aesthetic. There were Evil Demons and Good Priests who prayed to a vague singular god, and while there was no Big Baby J around, it was still all very christian-themed. What else do you need. WC3 has tried to fluff things out more. Now the human religion is the Light and it's...still very christian-themed, but we know close to nothing about it's actual beliefs. Replacing Christianity's Holy Trinity with a singular deity is pretty common in fantasy, and here it mostly seems to have gone with "vague cosmic force talked about as if it were a deity" instead of just a deity. But this is still just WC3, we aren't looking at WoW in my own posts, not yet at least, and so that's all it is. It's a vague cosmic force that definitely still has churches and chivalry and holy paladins and whatnot. Also, it hasn't told poo poo to anyone through the entire game. Ok sure, we have Arthas slowly losing his powers (though that didn't exist in the original game; if anything he only became STRONGER as he leveled), but that's the only sign that the Light has any sort of intelligence or morality or anything like that. The orcs, in turn, have gone towards...vague spiritualism. There's Spirits, for sure, and sometimes they're mad, and sometimes they tell you "hey this weird dude is trustworthy," and that seems to be all it does. There's no actual worship of natural places involved here, and that's because the orcs, while again being very indigenous peoples themed, are culturally a proud warrior guy people far more so then they are noble savage, if we're trading purely in stereotypes. Also, we now have a new faction who is explicitly the Nature Worship faction, so orcs couldn't really do that anyways, since each faction is meant to be mostly unique. Remember, the Warcraft writers don't really think about religion. It...exists? And that's about it. Until the night elves! Cenarius explicitly exists. We are told he is a demi-god. So now we have a big issue where we have two religions that...maybe exist? And one that overwhelmingly does. Consider an argument between three people; one of them is a Celt (but with lots of Greek flavor), one of them is a Protestant, and one of them is a vague representation of indigenous peoples. They are debating religion. And then the Celt goes "hey you know what, gently caress you," and literally Cernunnos, the Celtic deity, shows up, and tells the other two to shut the gently caress up. The Protestant prays for help and receives no answer; in fact, he has a problem, where his king, a proper God fearing man, recently turned into a sick skeleton knight and started slaughtering the church. So, the vague representation of indigenous peoples calls the Protestant's Satan for help, and Satan smites Cernunnos. That's really loving dumb! And yet, that's more or less the current state of religious affairs in Kalimdor as of this map. EDIT: Oh god I know what happened. Cenarius got idiot ball'd into a giant antagonistic villain for no reason other then to push the storyline. He got Horde'd. EDIT 2: I like thinking about how this could've been improved, soooo...there's the glimmers of a good idea in one specific part here: Cenarius telling Grom that he could never be more then his tainted blood, and Grom turning towards "I'm already cursed, so who gives a poo poo." That's a moment with a pretty good, strong, thematic connection that could've - and should've! - been looked at far more deeper! In the idea of the Old Horde vs the New Horde it adds a new element to Grom's Bloodlust - fatalism. He drank the blood willingly, after all. He knows what awful things the Horde did. A better narrative could have explored this conflict of Thrall saying "the Horde could be better then all of this" and Grom's experiences screaming "You're hosed for good, and no struggling against that is going to help." Also I just really like narratives that push hard against horrible poo poo like "tainted bloodlines." ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 21:47
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To be fair, the Light does theoretically grant healing powers and such to paladins and priests. The orc shaman stuff where they connect to the elements lets them throw lightning around and heal people. So as vague as the faiths are, they do provide something tangible, and the practitioners of those traditions have very distinct magic from, say, an archmage/sorceress, or a warlock, or whatever.
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Sep 10, 2023 03:35
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Rhonne posted:The furbolgs probably went crazy minutes after seeing the demons. It does not take a lot to corrupt them. Ursoc being dead and/or crazy means they don't have a Wild God's blessing/are actually cursed and more likely to go crazy would actually be a throughline of value, but that really just makes the furbolgs even greater victims than they already are. Some people don't get to have good lives. FrenchBen posted:One day we'll end up with as many Horde variants as there are troll variants. Orc variants for each axis of the cosmology wheel! Unless you count the non-canon world where The entire Legion Invasion failed to kill anyone. (... Spoilers, I guess? Not sure where this one goes on the policy, I think it's fine)
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Sep 10, 2023 05:45
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Grom giving Mammoroth the surprised pikachu face still remains hilarious.
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Sep 10, 2023 14:45
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