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For whom it concerns (God forbid anyone buy WC3 Reforged because of this LP), I've spoken with some tech-heads having the same issues I've been with Reforged and how deleting that one file gets it working every time you want to play, and we've figured out what appears to be happening. Like a lot of modern games, Reforged has a utility that runs when you boot it up without a saved preferences file (meant to be the first time you boot up the game on a new computer) that scans your computer and makes the game's settings what it thinks will run best on your computer and specs, which you can then tailor to taste from there. This works fine. The problem is that the settings saved by the game upon conclusion of this utility aren't saving properly because the part of the Reforged program that reads your video drivers and records them for the file that the game uses for its settings when it first boots up isn't working on modern drivers past a certain point, particularly if you have a high DPI monitor like I do. This part of the game could read, interface, and record drivers fine for the time when the game was released and was future-proofed to an extent, but I am now past that extent and so when the game writes the preferences file, it's entering bad data about settings because it couldn't read the drivers properly. If you're really knowledgeable about code, you could in theory make your own preferences file with actually correct data for the game to read and paste that over the file the game generates each time you play the game. Or you could do what I've been doing and force the game to run the auto-scan utility each time because that part of the game works fine. It's the kind of thing that patching could fix, to update the program to read and record modern drivers properly especially on weird cases like my high DPI monitor, but, well. At least now I know what exactly is going on here.
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Dec 9, 2023 22:42
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Alas, Reforged honestly became Abandonware before it even truly released. God bless the one and a half interns that have made an honest to god effort to salvage this game, truly.
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Dec 9, 2023 23:00
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Alliance 2: Betwixt and Between Nothing for it but to play out this farce of a story.   And what is the news from that front?The emissary is back from the Alliance campaign in Reign of Chaos, still randomly wearing a Kul Tiras tabard.  That doesn't sound too difficult. Unfortunately, your forces may be a little thinned. You see, Lord Garithos has also ordered that all your foot soldiers, cavalry, and support teams report to the front lines immediately! You men, move out! This is preposterous! Am I to assault the undead with nothing but sticks and harsh language? The grand marshal has faith in your abilities. Be... creative.You'd think this would actually mean some kind of meaningful restriction on your forces, but not really.  This game doesn't have the guts to change the gameplay that much.  For one thing, despite the cutscene implying I'd have to make do with very limited forces, I in fact have new units! Dragonhawks are the second new Alliance unit in TFT, and a nasty one. Not only are they a strong combat unit themselves, they have two abilities - one disables and damages air units, one disables turrets. I also now have elven swordsmen (to replace human footmen) and elven archers (to replace dwarven riflemen), along with spellbreakers, priests, and sorceresses. Frankly, the only things I'm lacking are knights and siege weapons, and the dragonhawks' anti-turret ability compensates for the latter pretty well. Also, at least on story, everything starts with full blacksmith upgrades. The story of course will insist that I am woefully outmatched and hosed over, instead of being a mildly interesting round of 'You get a slightly different set of units to play with for this mission!'  Yeah, this is one of those Blizzard missions where you have a bunch of doomed outlying bases that will get wiped out in the opening minutes to establish the threat.  We are in fact in fully fledged blood elf subfaction mode now, complete with the idle worker icon when we see it being a blood elf this time instead of a human like I bitched about in the last mission.  There's just enough time to build a transport to rescue workers and units from the northern and southern bases, but once the outlying bases fall a cutscene triggers.  Those bases are lost. We'll just have to improvise. I've seen worse tactical situations. Albeit not often. Every building that burned was more precious sons and daughters of Quel'thalas dying. The facts didn't matter. Only how we felt did, and we felt like poo poo. Greetings, lady Vashj. I would welcome your aid gladly, but the commander I serve does not approve of your kind. I do not see him here, sharing your peril. Let me bolster your forces with my own. If not, you and your brethren will surely fall. What you say is true, but... I accept your offer, Vashj. Good. Let's get to it, then. By the way. Did Vashj not come over from Maldraxxus? She told me, and I quote, 'I remember what happened well enough. I don't need to see it again.' Hmmm. There's something to be said for that.   After fighting sea witches since the Reign of Chaos prologue, I finally get to control one in campaign. They're underwhelming. For now, Vashj has an aoe damage spell and a toggle to give her autoattacks extra damage and a slow effect. Frankly, the royal guard would eat her and Kael for breakfast.  While this map isn't one hundred percent the same as the last, it's close enough. There are three undead factions arranged in a semicircle around you: the green to the west, orange to the north, and purple to the south. All three will launch regular air and drop attacks against your base. Purple and orange both consist of two bases, and both are connected by land to green. Your ultimate objective is to wipe out green. I elect to start by moving south and taking on purple. As the above images noted, there's no gold mine in the central base.  Back home, green teaches me that not only is the observatory from last mission now vulnerable to damage, it can't be repaired, either, and so needs defenses.   I rescued enough units from the outlying bases to comfortably split my forces into a defense group at the observatory and my attack group.  I was telling myself, I will be king of Quel'thalas one day, if it survives. Will I be the king who did what needed to be done to save our people in our darkest hour, or will I be the king who choked on my own pride? I did not envy you the choice when I heard about this, Kael. The ironic thing is, they were both prideful in their way. There was no right or wrong choice to make, only a choice of consequences.  Good to know we've beaten that lesson into your skull by now. 'I did what I had to do' might as well be wrought in iron over the gates of Revendreth. Sometimes, life just fucks you over. I'LL DRINK TO THAT! Alas, Lordaeron. The same spirit that drove them to excommunicate me from the Church of the Light and strip me of my rank as paladin for daring to acknowledge an orc as a good man. Crisis truly did bring out the worst in you. Why didn't you leave Lordaeron with the Horde, paladin? I couldn't leave the hope that my son would come back to me, Prince Sunstrider. Did he? Yes. Yes, he did. Don't forget to fortify any expansions you take. The AI will attack them, though not as aggressively as the central base.   Me, I was gloating when I heard word of all this. I thought it was proof of how my father taught me to see the world, the noble ideals of the Alliance collapsing around them. Onyxia... Then my parents and my brother were nowhere to be seen when I died. There were no armies of naga rushing to father's aid at the Maelstrom, or anubisaths marching in the defense of Yogg-Saron. And all that was just because of a handful of adventurers, tanks, and warships. It took the Scourge to shatter your peoples. Would that I was thinking so far ahead during any of this. All I was thinking was, what was our best chance at survival right here, right now? It's the nature of being dead, Kael. Gives you lots of time to think. YO! BLACKHAND! HOW BOUT THAT ARM-WRESTLING CONTEST YOU PROMISED ON DRAENOR! ...If you are so inclined, at any rate. It's been a while since we've seen non-dreadlord demons stiffening an undead battalion. Also note the turret with a blue crystal, that's a new undead tower in TFT I'll likely talk more about in the undead campaign.  At least on story difficulty the AI doesn't rebuild their bases in this mission, so I can pull back and let the priests heal everyone up as needed before returning to the fight.  Doing this without siege weapons or the sheer power of the naga units would have been tricky, but probably doable. But no, there's no secret alternative ending if you win this mission without actually using the naga.  The human you serve trusts no race but his own. His sense of honor runs no deeper than his tolerance. It is loyalty and duty that bind me to him and to this... failing Alliance. But now those tenets seem as distant as our ruined homeland. All I know is that my brethren and I hunger for something... more. Then perhaps, young Kael, it is time to find a new path... to power and glory.Looking back, it's interesting. I really do get the feeling that Blizzard at the time of TFT may have been angling to ditch both the Alliance and the Horde as banners.  There is a hunger now that has... hardened our hearts. I know this hunger, Kael. Like us, your people are addicted to magic! It flowed through our veins for over ten thousand years. And now, with the corruption of your land and the Sunwell that has empowered you...I'll talk about this in more detail in the lore post below.  There are other fonts of power in this world, Kael. Demons, for instance. You speak of madness, my lady. We will never be that desperate. Your aversion is understandable. But still-I strongly suspect at this point that Blizzard hadn't decided that the naga were tied to the Old Gods, or Vashj would have tried tempting Kael in that direction instead. I'm rather curious what Blizzard originally envisioned for the naga.  drat! Vashj, you'd best leave. I cannot guarantee your people's safety.Crack, meet wedge.   Forget about them!For the record, I don't believe it's ever stated anywhere how Garithos even knows what the naga are. I'm guessing that Illidan and his forces, who would never inflict collateral damage or cause an unnecessary fight by refusing to explain their goals and are renowned diplomats, came to Garithos' attention for perfectly legitimate reasons on their way to Dalaran where they set up and tried to perform their ritual.  Please, milord, spare my men! It was my decision to- Save your breath! I never trusted you vainglorious elves. It was a mistake to accept you into the Alliance in the first place. Now, at long last, you'll be dealt with appropriately. Take them away!I do find it kind of funny that, as I discovered when researching Garithos' backstory for last week's update, as a unit in this game Garithos can in fact use the Light. Chronicles seems to have retconned this, asserting that he was rejected as a paladin candidate and the kindest thing anyone ever said about him was that he was a better than average swordsman.  Next time, yes I know about the secret mission.
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Dec 10, 2023 14:50
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Storm of Blood Today's subject, the blood elves. Not Kael's specific followers, though, those who stay behind in Quel'thalas and are playable in WoW.  Concept art for Eversong Woods, the blood elf starting zone in WoW If you make a blood elf in WoW and start in their racial zone, Eversong Woods, you'll find yourself in a sunny, verdant paradise that's locked in eternal spring. Seems downright nice, until you notice the floating green crystals with eyes in all the public areas. You see, while Kael in this mission was aghast at the notion of draining magic from demons, Quel'thalas at large seized on the notion and many blood elves saw it as poetic justice for the Third War. The demons who drove the Scourge and almost destroyed the world, now summoned en masse and drained like batteries for the benefit of Quel'thalas. And if everyone's eyes are now glowing green from a mild case of fel magic corruption, Silvermoon is filled with The problem is, ever since the dark trolls discovered the Well of Eternity in Azeroth's ancient history, the power of the arcane - the cosmic power of order - altered and rewrote the trolls into the elves. After the War of the Ancients, the night elves got by without further changes by essentially microdosing magic - this is what the night elf moonwells boil down to, massively diluting arcane energy and filtering it through nature magic and purification rituals to the point where it's just enough to sustain their genetic need for magic, nothing more. Why the high and blood elves look so different from the night elves is that they represent a further stage of mutation, brought on by Dath'remar Sunstrider creating the Sunwell and the effects the Sunwell had on Quel'thalas and the Highborne over the next ten thousand years. With the Sunwell's destruction, the blood elves turned to demons to sate their needs and fuel the rebuilding of Quel'thalas. But this was never a stable state of affairs, and the use of demon magic was further supplemented by the blood elf magisters working to redirect the ley lines running under the Eastern Kingdoms to funnel more magic into Quel'thalas. Not only did this have the effect of draining magic from elsewhere on the continent, it's a recurring plot point in Warcraft that messing with ley lines is extremely dangerous. As in, 'one wrong move and reality implodes in this area, spilling hordes of ravenous energy beings into the world.' And just that did in fact happen.  Concept art of the Dead Scar Quel'thalas was quite literally scarred by the Third War. The path of destruction that the Scourge carved on their way to the Sunwell persisted as a straight line of dead earth running through Quel'thalas that magic could contain, but not cure, and for all the magical power of Quel'thalas and the self-assured arrogance of the nobility, Quel'thalas was still embattled. As for the Alliance, that political relationship finally collapsed during the years after the Third War, and there's a strong implication that, besides Garithos and his ilk, the night elves are partially to blame. With the reborn Alliance pursuing closer ties with the night elves, the night elves kept a close eye on their estranged kin and became deeply alarmed at what they were seeing in Quel'thalas. Demon summoning running rampant, fel corruption everywhere, and blood elves redirecting ley lines that sometimes literally exploded in their faces. To the night elf leadership, Quel'thalas had become a ticking time bomb, a facade of power and confidence over an unstable and decaying foundation. The dwarves of Ironforge supported this fear, the effects on the Eastern Kingdoms' ley lines were being felt as far away as Ironforge and Gnomeregan. Relations between Quel'thalas and the new iteration of the Grand Alliance cooled until finally breaking when the blood elves found new allies. Or rather, renewed an old alliance in a new form. The people of Lordaeron were still around at this time, just not quite as they were (and we are not discussing this right now), and related very much to the crisis in Quel'thalas and the transformations taking place there. This remnant of Lordaeron had, by this time, become members of the Horde in response to their own conflicts with the Alliance, and sought to renew diplomatic ties with Quel'thalas. In time these efforts succeeded, and through a renewed alliance between Lordaeron and Quel'thalas, the blood elves became members of the Horde. It's been an uneasy relationship throughout Warcraft's history. The close-to-nature noble savage thing of the Horde did not coexist easily with the haughty, decadent blood elves. But hey, elves are hot so blood elves immediately became more played than the rest of the Horde races put together. Also the first draft of models for playable blood elves made the men very slender and fine-featured. Player outrage over how 'gay' and 'effeminate' this looked lead to their modern redesign as the same trapezoidal beefcakes that almost all Warcraft men fall into.  The whole demonic magical addiction thing was resolved in the expansion it was introduced in, as it happens. The Sunwell was reignited through the sacrifice of a Naaru and the Sunwell's own sentient avatar which took the form of a teenage girl, and all the problems in Quel'thalas went away. While overwhelmingly popular with the player base, the blood elves frankly have spent most of WoW's run struggling for plot relevance. Their own story had been effectively resolved in the expansion they were introduced in, and after that were largely reduced to bit players filling in as haughty wizards and sometimes rangers when the game calls for one. Suramar and the Nightborne brought them back into some prominence, but largely had the problem that the Nightborne were, for the most part, a retread of the blood elves' own story and issues, just even more exaggerated. Nowadays, pretty much whenever you see one of the two races, the other will be there with them, to the point that the ruler of Quel'thalas outright married the ruler of Suramar in the current expansion. There's also the issue that the blood elves have consistently been such an awkward aesthetic and story fit for the Horde that Blizzard has found themselves regularly writing stories where the blood elves almost leave the Horde and rejoin the Alliance, only for some Alliance character to pull a Garithos and drive the blood elves back into the arms of the Horde. To some extent this is undoubtedly because of just how overwhelmingly the orcs dominate the Horde's stories and aesthetics, you're not about to see any magical spires rising over Orgrimmar. When your developers are this committed to ethnostates, welding the savage barbarian race to the decadent wizard race is a challenge at the best of times, and Blizzard's own often ham-fisted writing hasn't helped the blood elves fit any better into the Horde over the years. But I suppose there is something to be said for the sex appeal sell, and the blood elves certainly do provide a conventionally attractive race for the Horde. As for the high elves who remained with the Alliance, and Quel'thalas' own dissidents who split off later to join the Alliance, I will be discussing those groups in their own lore post later.
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Dec 10, 2023 14:51
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One small little interesting detail: It's not actually necessary to use a boat to rescue units from the outlying bases at the start. If you simply take all the units in those bases, and run them off to the east, past the edge of the eastern-most outposts, they will not be discovered by the Scourge forces destroying your outlying bases, and will actually get teleported over to your central base for free. And yes, finally getting to use the Royal Guard for yourself is a wonderful little bit of Catharsis, it is every bit the wrecking ball Truck of a monster it is when you have to fight against it.
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Dec 10, 2023 15:06
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Fun fact: Lady Vashj doesn't even get new lines - she uses the same voice set as the multiplayer Sea Witch. This happens with several heroes in TFT.
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Dec 10, 2023 16:02
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Wasn't the outcry over blood elf male models partly because night elf males also looked like beefcakes? And blood elves, despite favouring magic, are still very physically capable; Kael himself is an expert swordsman and they have a lot of famed archers. They didn't necessarily need to look like they grunt and slam protein powder into a cup of their morning coffee, but it does make sense that they would in fact have bodies to reflect physical feats.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:36
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ApplesandOranges posted:Wasn't the outcry over blood elf male models partly because night elf males also looked like beefcakes? And blood elves, despite favouring magic, are still very physically capable; Kael himself is an expert swordsman and they have a lot of famed archers. Honestly, it was both, at the same time. On the one hand, yeah, it's fantasy. You can look like a scarecrow and still bench press a castle if you're magic enough. On the other hand, lol @ making a third new body type that would make everyone happy.
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Dec 10, 2023 18:08
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There were/are people that call the male Night Elves "gay and effeminate" too, despite looking jacked enough to rip a tree in half with their
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Dec 10, 2023 18:42
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the blood elves were a transparent attempt to try to correct population imbalances on WoW servers, and also were one of the approximately one interesting plot points in Burning Crusade. necessity being the mother of invention, and all that. this is one more plot point than their counterparts on the Alliance side have ever received.
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Dec 10, 2023 19:09
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Gruckles posted:There were/are people that call the male Night Elves "gay and effeminate" too, despite looking jacked enough to rip a tree in half with their In absolute terms, male belves in WoW are ripped In relative terms, have you seen male orc and human models in WoW? E: of course, people should be able to independently realize that when an orc's little pinky looks like a tree trunk and their legs are almost as big as their pauldrons then it should not be used as a comparison. Belves do objectively look twiggy compared to Warcraft orc or humans, but so would an olympic athlete Omobono fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 19:35
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The blood elf male model change was pure cowardice. WoW was released in 2004, and the 00's, as part of the general cultural void of the decade, were primo "gay as a slur" territory (as you'll see pretty fast if you ever go to LPs from that decade), and it cultivated a fanbase that clung to its bigotry like a drowning man to driftwood. This was the decade that gave us "metrosexual" to denote "a dude who washes his rear end" because, as we all know, actually caring about your appearance is gay. In fact caring about anything at all is gay, unless you're caring about things like big trucks, and missiles, and hating foreigners, especially if they're from any part of Asia. The United States as a whole was desperate to regain it's manhood after 9/11 and took it out on anything and everything they could find. Cannot stress enough that the 00's were a miserable decade owned by the most pathetic people imaginable. And so, the blood elves were denoted as "feminine" and, the worst sin of all, "gay," and were changed. Like I said, pure cowardice. Timeline wise, I think Quel'thalas doesn't start going hard into demon draining until after these campaigns are done? I could be wrong, but I think the general timeline is "Kael learns a way to quench that mana thirst -> Kael brings it back to Quel'thalas -> Kael vanishes back into Outlands." Blood elves are very similar to night elves in that they have some pretty drat good storylines, but they're all just blood elves doing blood elf things and nobody else is typically invited. Much as the night elves end up a weird fit in Warcraft because of how insular all their storylines are, so too do the blood elves suffer from their storylines rarely involving anyone else. That said, the more I think of it, the more I kinda realize how common this is in Warcraft in general. Nobody else is really involved in the dwarven drama of the three different clans; nobody gave a poo poo or will ever give a poo poo about Gnomeragan other then the gnomes; most of the major "Alliance" storylines are just human storylines being inflicted on everyone else. If anything, the core Horde species actually sharing storylines together is something that's weird and stand out amongst everything else, and even then, there's a major problem with it turning into "orc drama envelopes everyone else" same as human drama does. Still, the night and blood elves tend to get the worst of it, as they get the larger, more ornate storylines...that don't feature anyone else. The biggest thing I remember about blood elves and their introduction to the MMO is that Alliance players were really mad about it. And I do get it - elves are very classically an "Alliance" race, both historically in the game, and in how the game is set up and how elves are usually portrayed. That said, and of course feel free to accuse me of Horde bias, I thought it was a really interesting decision for that exact reason. Blizzard's usual MO is to take already exisiting ideas or cliches or what have you, give it a twist, and polish it to a sheen, and the twist of elves joining the Horde because their addiction to magic and the desperation it pushes them into was too dangerous or unclean for the Alliance is a solid one. As I like to hammer on, the Horde, when well written, is a group of the desperate and the hated banding together, and the blood elves match that underdog side of the Horde perfectly - and the decision to make the ever classic elves INTO the desperate and hated is pretty drat cool. If you couldn't tell, the blood elves were a very clear drug addiction allegory (some might argue it's not an allegory as an allegory implies more subtlety then the belves get), and "people struggling with their addiction while trying to live a mostly normal life while hated and despised by those around them" definitely has plenty of real life claws to it. "The Alliance has major problems with intolerance" could've been a fun storyline to pursue alongside that, were Blizzard ever interested in pursuing any kind of storyline involving internal flaws in the Alliance; alas, that storyline is almost always limited to just the Horde. But, given how that storyline leads to things like Garrosh and another figure we'll get to know soon enough becoming just absolute generic bad guys, maybe the Alliance is better off for it. Far more shallow, but at least your major faction figures - one of whom was very beloved beforehand - don't just randomly go so goddamn crazy and become sudden psychopath baddies, while the game laughs at you for ever caring. Anyways, besides, Alliance got Draenei, and who doesn't like the Draenei? Blood Elves may have been put into Horde to try and fix that faction imbalance, but Alliance in return got the /waggle.
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Dec 10, 2023 19:44
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I was a player who got into TBC from my high school chemistry teacher, her and her husband both being Warcraft fans, showing me the recent expansion trailer and decided to hop in. The blood elves just appealed to me far more than any of the options available and the fact they were so wildly different from their counterparts in the Horde plus being the only paladin option they had at the time made them the selling point for the game at large, funny enough. I was the one player in our high school group with the chemistry teacher that played a blood elf character, and I was happy with that.
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Dec 10, 2023 20:01
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Blood Elves are an honestly fantastically interesting idea ruined by the culture they were introduced into. It's kind of a pity, because there is some definite meat to the bones of the blood elves. Granted, one could also say that the Night Elves haven't fared any better. Chalk one up to Warcraft's recurring tendency of interesting ideas with troubled execution.
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Dec 10, 2023 22:03
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I feel like Blood Elves would be a lot more interesting if there weren't permanent mana fonts all over the place, either in [astrology]Well flavour, demon flavour or whatever other flavour. If they were a minority who had to maintain some sort of semi-nomadic lifestyle to avoid completely tapping out the aether flows in a given area, or perhaps to travel around performing periodic rituals to cause large mana in-flows to keep them sated, that would give them some sort of persistent hook, a constant friction with more settled factions who either do not want to share their homes with the Mana Nomads or who might look askance at Blood Elf mana-gathering rituals in their back yard(either because of pure racism and ignorance, or because they do actually have some sort of risk to them, either attracting various mana-hungry beasts or having a twisting effect on the region). They would be a "problem" that would only have a solution in tolerance, not some sort of permanent magic option.
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Dec 10, 2023 22:11
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Neat little point about blood elf eyes: as of the character creation update that got added in Shadowlands, it's now possible for blood elf PCs to have the original blue high elf eyes. They also gained the option for yellow/golden eyes, that presumably reflect the effects of the reignited Sunwell's Light-based power. On a similar note, both masculine and feminine night elves (WoW recently did away with explicit male/female terms in favor of a token 'body type' option) can have either silver or gold eyes now. Bloody Pom fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 22:26
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Bloody Pom posted:They also gained the option for yellow/golden eyes, that presumably reflect the effects of the reignited Sunwell's Light-based power. Or mild Light corruption.  I'll talk more about that when I cover the Quel'thalas dissidents who stuck with the Alliance and how all that's shaped up.
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Dec 10, 2023 22:37
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Cythereal posted:Or mild Light corruption. Light corruption? Can you just get corrupted by anything in the Warcraftverse? "Sorry, sir, you ate too many pizzas, now you have pizza corruption." "Spent all your time in the woods? Sorry, pinecone corruption." "Lived in a nice comfortable house with your spouse? You got house corrupted. So sad."
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Dec 10, 2023 22:40
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I think the general idea is that too much of any of Warcraft cosmology's fundamental forces is a bad thing. Which is a pretty common thread amongst fantasy settings, really.
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Dec 10, 2023 22:43
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I don't mind it. It was always a bit...let's go with "offputting" that one singular group in WoW could claim to have the Objectively Good kind of magic, and everything else was a shittier, worse, and more evil version of it. Also that kind of magic was heavily connected to specifically western Vaguely Catholic Crusader aesthetics - remember at the start of the thread, the Light literally had crosses on the churches and whatnot. EDIT: I should say I don't fully mind it. The Light frankly just needs more fleshing out period. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 22:51
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PurpleXVI posted:Light corruption? Can you just get corrupted by anything in the Warcraftverse? Yeah. Warcraft's pretty much gone for the standard 'Too much of anything is bad, stay the course within the broad confines of non-disruptive social conformity or adventurers will be assigned to correct your behavior if you feel or believe in anything too strongly' nowadays.
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Dec 10, 2023 23:01
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Also trolls and their descendant species are just consistently easily corrupted and branched off. Night elves? Arcane corrupted trolls. Blood elves? Arcane/Light corrupted trolls. Add some fel into that cocktail? Welp, got some green eyes now. Just going crazy with dunking the troll in all that arcane energy? Nightborne. One of the only incidents in warcraft lore of interspecies breeding is humans and high elves, which, I would argue, makes half-elves just human-corrupted elves, enabled by this weird rear end fantasy slippery genome effect.
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Dec 10, 2023 23:10
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Don't forget draenei and orcs, which is even more bizarre considering that they're from completely different planets. At least with half-elves you can write it off as a result of troll, and by extension elf biology being highly mutable.
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Dec 10, 2023 23:43
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The basic idea, that these weird cosmic forces do something bad to mortal beings and push them further into that weirdness, is fine. If only they had decided on that early on and kept to it! The problem is how uneven it is; you have fel and shadow/void magic which at first is cast as just immediately corrupting and bad, then later you get figures like Illidan and, later, WoW warlocks, which go for a more "fight fire with fire" sorta attitude and maybe avoid corruption (with Illidan they seem to change their minds on how corrupting it is every time he shows up). You have DEATH, except uh, too much death apparently makes you un-death, which feels like that's not how that should work, and the jury's out on if death magic corrupts you or if it's mostly weird psychos who get into death magic in the first place. But then you have Arcane, which...is corrupting, maybe? It's definitely mutating, and the Belves get addicted to it. But is also the source of the Titans? You have Life magic, which is also really weird as its own thing, given that uh, I'm pretty sure "life" is the default of, you know, living beings, except we have flesh and life-y bits because of void corruption, so how does that work? Does Life magic corrupt you into being...more...alive? And finally you have the Light, which is set opposite of Shadow, but doesn't actually have anything to do with the Shadow, and it's primo dudes, the Naaru, seem way more interested in the Burning Legion and fel magic, and in this game, light is opposed to undeath...but undeath doesn't fall under Shadow, it falls under Death. Shadow is the force of...wait, no, it's the source of life in all us weirdo mortals, because it was the "Old Gods," who aren't actually old, or gods, who made us all fleshy, except that made us ALIVE. Anyways Light doesn't really have any personality beyond Good Guys and sometimes into Weird Violent Extremists aka when "good guys" start seeing everyone as bad guys, so the Light can corrupt. Except most of the examples of that happening end up not involving the Light at all! None of this poo poo makes sense!
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Dec 11, 2023 00:12
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I don't think we've had Elune corruption yet (though it's probably only a matter of time...)
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Dec 11, 2023 00:32
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ApplesandOranges posted:I don't think we've had Elune corruption yet (though it's probably only a matter of time...) We kiiiinda have, but it's more "power overload" than outright corruption.
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Dec 11, 2023 00:57
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As always, the problem is that Blizzard makes this poo poo up on the fly for whatever story they want to tell right this second, no matter what hacks like Metzen and Danuser protest. There is no setting Bible and never was.
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Dec 11, 2023 00:58
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Cythereal posted:As always, the problem is that Blizzard makes this poo poo up on the fly for whatever story they want to tell right this second, no matter what hacks like Metzen and Danuser protest. There is no setting Bible and never was. They tried to make one, problem is it immediately got tossed out the window as unreliable narration.
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Dec 11, 2023 00:59
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At the time of Vanilla there was absolutely a setting bible. There are first party accounts of it as a physical thing that Metzen kept in his office. It almost certainly collapsed under the weight of creative requirements for World of Warcraft.
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Dec 11, 2023 01:01
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The line I've always heard is that the story truly starts to fall apart post-Lich King, now that all the major WC3 storylines were done with, was teetering hard by Pandaria due to pushes to reignite the faction war, and is in utter shambles by the time you arrive at Battle for Azeroth for...well, the same reasons as Pandaria's problems. You might have noted how many dumb bullshit bits to the lore come from specifically BfA, and the following expansion, Shadowlands! The funniest thing about all this is that...remember eons ago when I made big effort posts about religion in WoW? Particularly, the divide between western "religion" (as can be seen in the worship of the Light and Elune) and "mysticism" (as can be seen in the religion of the orcs, tauren, and trolls, believing in ancestors, the "earthmother," the elements, and the spirits?). A lot of this goes back to real life pushes first by Christianity as it colonized the world to divide "religious beliefs" and "cultural beliefs" (after all, a cultural belief could ALSO include Jesus!) and by Enlightenment Era and beyond thinkers who wanted to do the same (so that they could retain "cultural beliefs" while also pushing away Christianity in favor of things like Deism or, later, Atheism). Nobody's been corrupted by any of the Horde based religions...because they have no proof of existance. Where do the ancestors fall into those 6 cosmic powers? What's the Earthmother? As I understand, things became even more strained in Shadowlands where there is an active specific troll afterlife...and only for the trolls! Everyone else goes into some great machine of sorting, but trolls specifically get to go to their own special afterlife, because the loa are...different, somehow, from everything else. The Light and Elune clearly exist and are connected to the Shadowlands great cosmic bullshit map or whatever, but the Earthmother? Nope.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:28
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I think half the problem is that, like a lot of games, Warcraft ultimately wasn't willing to just let religious beliefs be religious beliefs and felt the need to give them a concrete existence in the cosmology and explanation. The Earthmother's gotten away with being vague so far because Warcraft in general can't be arsed to tell stories about the tauren, but the night elves have had no such luck and Blizzard's been toying with the idea of the Light being the main bad guys of an expansion for years. WoW isn't quite as mistheistic as some MMOs I can name, but serious stories about belief and the relationship between mortals and spirituality and any divine that may exist just don't seem to be something Blizzard's interested in doing. We'll get to Elune in due time.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:34
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There's a whole lot of specific afterlives, we only get to see the Troll One because their personal Psychopomp is getting in ahead of the standard system. But Elune also normally gets in ahead of the system for Night Elves. That's what Wisps are after all. The Earthmother is probably Azeroth itself, or a higher order Life Being. Ancestors are provably existent in both Burning Crusade and Warlord of Draenor, and as far as alignment don't have one, as they're a bridge between the material plane and the afterlife. The big thing is that the Trolls have a Higher Level Death God on their side to deal with the afterlife on their behalf. Elune is, as far as can be determined, probably Life aligned primarily. So her intervention in the system of the Shadowlands doesn't involve an afterlife in it, but stopping the her faithful from leaving the material plane for the Shadowlands at all.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:40
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ProfessorCirno posted:None of this poo poo makes sense! Life as we know it being a confluence of forces works fine, where even pure Big-L Life Magic does weird poo poo to little-L life if you pump too much in. It's a cliche comparison at this point but cancer is what you get when senescence doesn't work right, after all. Too much medicine turns into poison. And so on. So you can have a literal balance of forces being ideal for the creation of life that has full sapience and free will, and an imbalance in one way or another will cause problems. Maybe those problems are more or less drastic depending on the force involved, but they will crop up eventually. It's just, yeah, the complete wild inconsistency of it all that's the real problem.
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Dec 11, 2023 04:03
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Oh, one last thing, before I forget. So, here in WC3 (and indeed all the way until...I want to say post-Lich King?), there isn't actually a hardline separation between "arcane" magic and "fel" magic. This is before the very silly and very dumb D&D-esque Map of the Planes. Instead, magic is simply all from the Twisting Nether, which was the 40k Warp between worlds/dimensions, and the difference is how hard you snatch from it. Night Elves originally in WoW didn't have mages at all because, from their view, all magic is demon tainted bullshit evil. And they aren't actually wrong! Kinda. Clearly, it's possible for wizards to train themselves sufficiently to use magic without going full demon on it, but also the Night Elves had a history of wizards going "Trust me" and then whoops, you shouldn't have trusted them. This is also why Illidan's story is what it is - what he wants is magic, and the purest magic is inevitably going to involve demons, because they're the alien denizens of the Twisting Nether where all magic comes from, but he isn't actually aligned with the demons; he's trying to grab as much magic from them as he can and then get out of dodge before the bill shows up. And the Blood Elves turning to just slurping magic directly from demons makes sense because, well, all magic is the same. This is just that raw, uncut poo poo, rather then the filtered slims they're used to smoking. This had some pretty interesting implications for the Titans as well, as they were strongly related to arcane magic...which, again, comes from the Twisting Nether, the same place all those demons come from. Hey, that's an interesting thought! Also it challenged the idea of "fel magic" as being inherently corrupting - clearly it was possible to use the "less-pure" magic from the Nether without going full psycho, so you are open to the possibility of characters like, well, Illidan, who drinks a bit deeper from that well, and clearly has a demonic transformation, but, again, is not actually aligned with the demons. Maybe you can even have demons who aren't aligned with the Legion! It's that "fire to fight fire" kinda thing. And people absolutely eat up all those plot devices. Magic that's super dangerous to use...but MAYBE, you can be one of the few to master it and not be taken over by it! Alien demons who aren't actually in line with the invaders, and maybe they can even join you in fighting against it! Wizards with good intentions who grow power hungry and their hubris leads them to making increasingly bad deals with beings for more power until they're owned by it! Oh well. That got retconned. Nevermind. Magic is back to being uninteresting.
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Dec 11, 2023 04:06
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Life corruption is basically what the Botani do.
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Dec 11, 2023 07:24
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And nowadays you can have legit eredar paladins running around in service to the Alliance. It's one of those 'Well, we COULD do something interesting with the Alliance, but let's make a glossy cinematic about orcs having questions about honor instead!' things. Like how at present the Lord Regent or whatever of the Alliance is Lightforged, and his wife got high off the power of a Dark Naaru and now lives in a pocket void dimension. You'd really think there could be some interesting stories about the ruling couple of the Alliance being that kind of dichotomy, or the eredar reuniting with the draenei, or the night elves' everything that isn't 'Here's a new tree!'. Or for gently caress's sake, let the gnomes get Gnomeregan back. But no.
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Dec 11, 2023 14:36
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Cythereal posted:Or for gently caress's sake, let the gnomes get Gnomeregan back. Pfffft. Like that would ever happen. Blizzard would have to remember it exists first. It's kind of funny how completely forgotten it became given that it was a hugely prominent dungeon in vanilla.
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Dec 11, 2023 14:58
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FoolyCharged posted:Pfffft. Like that would ever happen. Blizzard would have to remember it exists first. It's kind of funny how completely forgotten it became given that it was a hugely prominent dungeon in vanilla. It's going to be a major raid in the next phase of Season of Discovery.
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Dec 11, 2023 15:15
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Personally, I think I'm just tired of *~corruption~* in general. It's so very often used as a crowbar in place of character motivations and development. Arthas in Reign of Chaos worked because, no matter what Danuser said, you can follow his line of thinking, his feelings, and his motivations pretty well. But that requires a tautly written plot that I'd argue Blizzard never pulled off again even in Warcraft 3 (so far, at any rate), and it's much easier to just say 'Oh he chugged the green apple magic-aid, he's bad now.' There's a drat good reason why the game I'm most likely going to LP after Warcraft, at least as I presently feel, does not do magic or corruption or Cthulu or any bullshit like that. Plenty of bullshit in the setting of its own, sure, but none of this 'and now magically this character's motives and personality are completely different because that's the plot we're telling right this second.'
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Dec 11, 2023 21:46
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Cythereal posted:And nowadays you can have legit eredar paladins running around in service to the Alliance. Wait when did that happen? Last time I paid attention it was only draenei and lightforge draenei?
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Dec 11, 2023 23:30
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