Certainly easy to win arguments when you don’t know what words mean.
Why do the humans need an explanation for differing skin pigments when the gnomes and dwarves don’t?
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Dwarves have an explanation.
Humans don’t and Gnomes don’t (Both of which got the latest changes) and I have been advocating for a similar treatment as the dwarves. They are a variety of Scottish, but with unique identifiers. I don’t think we need a whole new zone to this… a name and some flags could be a start.
I have told you this like 7 times by now, try to understand what words mean.
They categorically do not.
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They categorically do.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Wildhammer_clan
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Iron_clan
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bronzebeard_clan
No, they don’t. The Windhammer and Bronzebeard do not have diffetent ethnicities. They can both be white, brown or black. Because curse of flesh.
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All dwarves, including Dark Irons are all from curse of flesh.
And all 3 looked distinctly different, recently they added the Wildhammers to the same pool as Ironforged dwarves to have their ethnic woad warpaints.
A curse of flesh race with different cultures, different looking visuals and the world is still spinning. Let go of your bias Ben there is nothing wrong with giving a little bit of story to people that aren’t white in the story.
Don’t pat yourself that just because they got through the front door that thats enough integration for one day. Actually let them sit down and participate.
The Dark Iron do. Because theyre magma. And yeah if WoW suddenly added a magma customization to humans that would warrant an explanation.
The Wildhammer and Bronzebeards would be identical if not for differing tattoo styles. Pretending otherwise is delusional.
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It diminishes any experience players have had with that area, drastically changes existing lore without precedent, and suggests by its very implementation that ethnicity and culture can be handwaved with a color swap. It is effectively saying “I’m too lazy to meaningfully represent people that look like you in the game, so we’re just going to paint existing characters a different color and call it a day.”
If you take Eurofantasy location and say “lol they’re mostly Asians now” you are steamrolling established lore for that location. I don’t know why introducing token characters by fiat in Westfall is somehow unique compared to introducing token characters by fiat in Stormwind. Except that Stormwind is already a culturally mixed power center metropolis port where it actually makes sense for disparate cultures to congregate.
Because the writers actively resent Tolkien and his work and (more generally) many creatives seem to be obsessed with seeking out franchises they view as problematic and attempt to adapt them in a way that their existing fandoms are guaranteed to hate.
Warcraft wasn’t conceived of as an English mythology though, so I wouldn’t necessarily hold it to the same standard as Middle-Earth. It is more like a kitchen sink D&D setting, complete with space goats and technodemons. Even so, I think caramel elves just appearing one day with no explanation is kinda dumb, but I think whatever way I feel about that is probably less important than people who want to be able to play an elf that resembles them in some way. I’d much rather see the world flesh out different settlements to explain away drastic differences that should be based on local climate. That argument gets a bit hairier with elves who live for hundreds if not thousands of years that shrivel into mana junkies if they’re not near the Sunwell, though.
So yeah, I’m not thrilled about how it was rolled out, but explaining it in a logical way would probably involve more time and resources better spent elsewhere, and the positives involved for the playerbase outweigh the negatives.
Nah, the tool is there to make sure characters superficially represent a diverse range of people. It would get applied to people like Anduin, Thrall, Genn, Magni, Mayla, Nathanos, etc. NPCs that actually receive some sort of characterization in the game. I don’t think randomly generated guard NPCs walking around Stormwind are the targeted assets there.
Adding new bits of lore doesn’t bother me if it isn’t replacing existing lore. We haven’t really gotten to deal with a lot of noble houses in Stormwind that I’m aware of, so inventing new ones in and of itself isn’t an outrageous notion. Also, humans have had darker skin tones and Asianish appearances since this game began, including NPCs, so it’s not exactly out of left field for them to continue existing in the game with higher graphical fidelity. Fleshing out a noble house isn’t the same as replacing a zone with a specific ethnicity, though. I don’t know why you would prefer that to just detailing out a new location that solves the same problem without retconning existing lore.
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This should be looked at from a roleplayers perspective. Asian and black Humans are currently able to have the same backgrounds as white Humans in the lore, and people create characters fitting to that. If asian and black Humans suddenly get lore that change their backgrounds, proper roleplayers will have to change their character backgrounds to accommodate that, which can have huge consequences. Time and effort used to create those backstories would be wasted and their characters wouldn’t be able to be a part of what they use to. It’s creative segregation.
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Then there you have your explanation for different Humans, as there’s a wider range of geographical varieties between Tirisfal and Arathi than elevation differences on the same mountain.
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If you think this is a good explanation than so do I, no problem from me but if we could be a little more specific of who is from where then great. That’s all I wanted.
I honestly don’t see how, all we are adding is a little more detail about “ancient” ancestry being from a region we players know of. The areas would still remain multiethnic like a D&D setting because wow has had several… and still continues to have world ending events that displaces many people.
Yeah we can have Westfall to appear a mix bag of different ethnicities but that Asian human, well his grandparents were probably born and raised from Alterac Valley.
You know… may be its just a question of taste but if I saw something like this in wow I would not really feel offended. I would welcome it because the Lore is not wholley changed, the previous content I did is in noway recontextualized. I just got more details about something I didn’t know.
I honestly wouldn’t call that steamrolling and it changes nothing in the story if it turned out that Westfall folk kind of look asian rather than white… its probably weirder that all humans continue to look so distinctly different when they should have homogenized by now since WoW seems to work at 1000x the speed that RL seems to move at.
I fully agree and this is a terrific reason to explain why Stormwind is multicultural but all I am asking for is where are these other cultures from… and instead of adding an entire expansion’s worth of lost continents or retcons like “there were always humans on Panderia” we just use existing content to give those descriptions.
Honestly this sort of tokenism is what feels like what Blizzard did but instead of just 1 guy cosplaying an elf they just did it to an entire faction’s race.
I am playing a lot more Hearthstone now and its far more enjoyable as a story delivery mechanism than wow is… incredible to think about but thats the state we are in.
Love seeing humans coming in a color other than white but I just wish there was more.
That precisely the problem though when a new Andiun level character gets introduced and they start to dominate the narrative but without any of the worldbuilding to support them. They are just going to be at a disadvantage compared to the other characters.
In any other medium I would always argue for something new but in wow we have so much unused material already… I just want them to use them and include these new additions too.
A two bird one stone situation.
Its the best compromise in my eyes…
I would love to get content dedicated Stromgarde, for them to get full fleshed out and if Stromgarde can be the original home of asian/black/brown looking robothumans then… yey? Its not perfect but its better than nothing.
Your solution to avoid tokenism is to tokenize whole zones. If what you’re proposing happened, people would remember zones for being “the black zone” or “the asian zone”.
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Not really a zone thing but region, culture/kingdom name to call their own and still feel and be included in the existing lore.
What makes something a token a gesture is measured by the effort and scale of its inclusion. Unless you prefer entirely new zones and kingdoms to be introduced and the existing ones continue to be ignored and forgotten.
My solution is a net win for both.
This is already the case in Stormwind, the kingdom of Azeroth’s culture belongs to asians and blacks as much as whites. Also for Gilneas and Kul Tiras too.
Retroactively changing existing zones backgrounds with a handwave takes little effort.
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Honestly, just reinforcing in-game that the surrounding (inconsistent climates) areas are home to a much wider spectrum of people would be enough, I suppose. The scale of the game doesn’t do a good job of translating the vast distances the continents are supposed to represent, and designing several asset types for each subfaction is not practical from a development perspective. I can’t say for certain what the size of each continent is, but the EK Alliance could technically cover a space comparable to Africa in size. There’s bound to be a diverse group of people living in that space.
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I had a totally different reply ready, but I think Jaina forming into a Winston Churchill lookalike is more comedic.
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Someone needs to pull a Diogenes at Blizzcon and run up with a hamster.
“Behold! A Caucasian!”
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Me walking in with a hamster and a Roomba
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We’ve known for some time now that the people in charge of Activision were soulless bean counters in suits who saw customers merely as numbers to manipulate, we just never thought that they’d take things this far. It’s some weird Horseshoe Effect where the most annoying parts of both the Left (patronizing forced diversity) and the Right (unmitigated corporate greed) merge and have an evil baby.
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I just realized if the Robot and Hamster have a baby, Blizzard would prolly give them equal points to the Black Brazilian who is in the middle of the spectrum
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