I have a serious question this time for the story forum. Can machines be corrupted by demons or old gods, or any magical force?
Before you say it, I know the old gods have corrupted some Titan watchers, but those beings appear to have souls given to them by the Titans, thus they are not truly machines but living things.
Do you think it is possible, or is there any example, of a soulless machine being corrupted by a magical force or energy?
Gnomes humans and I think dwarfs were once machines before being corrupted by the old god, the curse of flesh.
It depends on what you would consider soulless and how you define corruption.
If you’re discounting Titan constructs, then that pretty much only leaves robots built by gnomes and goblins and maybe golems created by mages. These mindless machines can’t really be mind controlled or “corrupted” to my knowledge, but they’re just mindless machines, so they can be reprogrammed or tricked into following an unwanted command just as easily.
Im just picturing an old god, sitting with a mechanical gnome trying to look through an instruction manual figuring out how to reprogram it for evil.
But yeah I don’t think they can corrupt mindless things.
There’s actually an instance of this in the Shadowlands leveling experience in Bastion. (minor spoilers)
Bastion has these robot curators called Mnemis units. You eventually encounter one that was reprogrammed by bad guys and it gets in your way while you’re trying to access a Kyrian facility. You have to smack it around while another NPC resets its programming.
It’s debatable whether that can really be considered “corruption”, but it basically has the same result more or less.
That is what N’zoth was trying to do in 8.3. So yes I believe they can be, but I think the titan machines are different than those used by say dwarfs, gnomes, or goblins.
They could become possessed, but not not corrupted in the sense we understand corruption in wow.
Considering the nature of Spirits and how everything has a spirit, I wonder if Machines have spirits too…?
Techno-Shamans! Commune with the Machine Spirit! Summon Mechamentals! Unleash technology!
The Defias reprogrammed Harvest Watchers to attack Alliance forces and non-Defias, so depends on what you mean by “corrupted”.
You can’t really corrupt something that has no mind.
They can’t be corrupted in the sense that tech in 40K can be corrupted. In WoW it’s either they’re reprogrammed or their functions are damaged by corruption and they go haywire.
Yes.
Didn’t N’zoth also corrupt, or attempt to corrupt, some titan machinery? I swear I remember tentacles coming out of a console somewhere.
In other news, Blizzard once again throws around words they haven’t thought about.
Of course, haven’t you seen Mechagon?
The king was overthrown by machines irrevocably corrupted by the flesh they were saddled with.
If you’re thinking in some kind of biological corruption then I don’t think it would be possible with machines but a corruption of the mind could be considering that the brain is also a machine (a biological one of course), just like they trick us with visions they could trick machines challenging their logical thinking.
We see fel or Void taking control of constructs all the time.