I feel the inherent trouble is much of CDev just seems fundamentally disinterested in history and culture. Which is pretty problematic considering the genre of high fantasy is inextricably connected to it.
But this hasn’t always been the case. I’m sinking my teeth into MoP for the first time as it was impossible to get very far in it pre level revamp. Now I’m not an expert on any Asian culture. But it’s clear to me a real attempt was made with Pandaria.
The Pandarens feel like a genuine society. I really appreciate how much you learn them about their values, traditions, beliefs, and taboos. They’re also flawed and more than capable of having deep rooted familal disputes and other petty squabbles. Their monasteries show some stagnation and are rife with favoritism and the ego of instructors. One of their deities expresses annoyance, albeit in a patient and understanding sense, at their need to cling unto her when it is the simple nature of things that she must die. Likewise even an authority like Lorewalker Cho has blindspots to his history, being gobsmacked when the legends of gigantic Sha turned out to be anything but.
Suffice to say they feel like an actual society. Yeah you’ve extremely competent people but also bitter alcoholic groundskeepers and even history professors don’t know everything.
So some people at Blizz clearly have an interest in this sort of thing. While others do not. Seriously an interview with Golden on the Sylvanas novel was interesting. It’s such a small exchange but her going “That’s great I’m steeling that” in regards to the interviewer saying “the elekk in the room”, as opposed to elephant in the room, was so telling.
Because if you know anything about linguistics you know how completely confusing idioms are to non native speakers. A favorite of mine was explaining to a coworker that the phrase “Like a bat out of hell” was meant to describe speed, and not abject terror. When come to think of it - that phrasing really does seem like it’s trying to describe something scary, not something that’s fast.
And going back to the elephant in the room - that came from a Russian poem about a man so obsessed with the minutiae of a museum exhibit that he fails to notice an elephant in the room. Mark Twain presumably read that at some point and wrote his own story about detectives doing the same thing in a missing elephant case. And through the weird alchemy of human conversation it became a phrase to describe a big topic or question hanging over proceedings people are deliberately not addressing.
What about Draenei culture would lead to such an idiom? To them they’re not all that large and are fairly common beasts of burden. Nobody says ‘the horse in the room’. Perhaps you could do something interesting there and have the phrase mean ‘an untidy room’, IE; ‘This place is in such disarray they must let their pack animals live here’.
But I guarantee you I just put way more thought into that then Blizz will if it pops up. Which is kind of the problem. They’re hiring competent people but ones who are fundamentally incurious about language and culture.
Which is how you wind up with them trying to delegate matters like that to an algorithm.
