Ah the curse of Obsidian’s contracts. They do so well with their quests but so many times they get screwed over by overly harsh deadlines.
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Yeah… an alternate universe where it showed all the theories we had as players where we asked ourselves “what if the orcs knew?” or “what if they were warned?” or “what if the orcs never drank the demon blood?”
Well we got our answers officially. Nothing would have changed. Time is a river maybe so its destined to follow the same path regardless.
They are responsible for their own actions.
He is completely responsible until the exact point where he was mind bent. Even the Orcs were not affected this way. Do you see me blaming Sylvanas for killing blood elves under the orders of the greater will? No? Well thats because it would be silly to do so.
Like it or not the Orcs still had free will.
Arthas did not. Sylvanas until her rebellion did not.
No disagreement from me if that was your point.
Which has already been proven to be a monumentally stupid move as per WoD.
And at the same time, they as well are also victims of the legion.
Is there anything that explicitly makes this clear? I’ve been wondering if there was something to Sylv’s statement about how it would be better if Anduin took up the blade on his own choice. Was he dominated, or was it just his arrogance being used to get the desired result?
I still think somebody sold their soul to Satan to make New Vegas in 18 months.
If I were Batman, New Vegas would be my murdered parents. It’s what I point to as proof video games aren’t just art, but are a unique form of art I’m so grateful to be born in the era where we’ve them.
That game has so much to say. It questions your personal sense of justice, pragmatism, faith, and patience.
I’ll never forget doing genuinely reprehensible things on my first Dead Money playthrough. And wanting to desperately apologize, explain I was just scared and just trying to get out of this situation. But there could be no forgiving what I did. Blood would spill, and I wasn’t going to let it be mine- even though I knew I deserved it.
Man that came out when I was 17. Most ‘serious’ games were just using the veneer of geopolitical conflict to pretend they had something more than “This unstoppable killing machine feels at least somewhat sad he had to butcher his fellow man by the hundreds”.
Meanwhile I came out of the Sierra Madre going “I’ve seen the devil. In a mirror”.
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This is the opposite of what you are saying about Arthas, on the other thread.
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I’ve got my desperate hope now that MS owns them both to see Obsidian work on another Fallout. I’ve always felt if Beth and Obsidian teamed up there strengths it could be an amazing game. Let Beth do their world creation thing, then Obsidian does all the quests and characters to fill it up.
Oh yeah, and use the New Vegas ammo types thing instead of just making everything a bullet sponge as they get tougher.
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Both can be true.
The book about him goes into explicit detail about that.
It basically changed him completely, rewired his brain to suit their own purposes, whatever Arthas was. Flaws and all died when he touched that sword.
We really only saw Arthas at the end of Wrath when both the helmet and the sword were broken. He asks us if it was finally over.
It really isn’t and I don’t know how much more clear I can be.
Tbh the talent that forged New Vegas have already scattered to the 4 winds as I understand it.
It was true lightning in a bottle.
As for Bethesda - they introduced me to the Fallout franchise and 3 gave me a genuine appreciation and interest in the music from the 1920s-1940s.
I’ll never forget the look of complete confusion my grandma gave me when I started absent mindedly singing along to Tex Beneke and Margaret Whiting’s A Wonderful Guy she had playing.
Toward the end there she could still remember everything from until about 2014. But would tell you “Oh! So nice of you to come by!” when you stepped out of her own bathroom. So it was genuinely a cherished gift, being able to talk about something we were both passionate about that she could clearly remember. I will always thank Bethesda for that.
But that being said Fallout 4 massacred the IP and danced on its desecrated corpse. A Fallout game with no dialogue trees is like a TES game with no magic. Why even make it?
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It really is. And aren’t you the one who was saying that if someone doesn’t respond to your point, they are admitting you are right?
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I have been pretty explicit about free will and culpability being paramount in deciding how someone is responsible for their own actions.
Arthas had free will from birth up to when he touched that sword. You want to blame anything on Arthas on it has to be between that window because after that window he has a total loss of free will.
If you want to play gotcha with me at least post the quote that is making you confused rather than lie about what I have said.
Yup. That’s all I’m saying, there’s layers to the whole thing. I just would say the Legion is the most to blame as they’re the ones who set it up, but the orcs have and accepted responsibility for what they did when worked up. (going off stuff like Saurfang and the orc depression in the camps over what they did)
And the Draenei have the responsibility for their lesser inaction. Like I said earlier I think, it seems like it would be something that has kept Velen sleepless on a few nights going over what might have happened if he handled things differently. It’s not something that should be used to damn the alliance or draenei, just a facet of story that would flesh things out more and provide a bit more nuance.
As for Arthas it feels like they keep bouncing back and forth on what was going on in his head. I’ll admit, I prefer the idea that he had more agency in his story, yeah, it’s nothing new as it’s just plain old hubristic downfall, but I like that better than “And then he touched the thing and turned completely evil” I’d rather see it presented more as a willing dive after power and the twisting of his priorities as he finds the tools at his disposal now and the excuses that come to explain why he needs to use them to justify the horrors that they are.
Like how the Xera flashbacks to Illidan show him making excuses for the horrible actions he does and justifies as protecting his people.
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I honestly would have much more sympathy for the orcs than I currently hold but the writers have made these guys have no excuse what so ever. They keep doing the same thing! Over and over! They have to keep learning the same lesson every couple years. At some point we just have to recognize the issue.
Orcs have a huge problem and it wasn’t demon blood or manipulation.
I think Sylvanas follows this narrative much more, and it is very difficult to pull off. I think trying to fully commit Arthas into that type of character from naive foolish prince would have been too complicated for the strategy games. And since then they have tried to stay true to the origin story.
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Hot take: People need to stop bringing up SW:TOR as a justification for why WoW should have Evil Horde. It’s just not the same setup.
One huge difference is that SW:TOR tracks your character’s light side/dark side score separately from what your faction does. WoW doesn’t have that mechanic, and if they were doing their job right, they wouldn’t need it for what they are trying to do.
I just feel that’s more a writer problem in my view. There was the Horde that we were sold at launch, but it just feels like the writers have no idea how to write that Horde, some have been a bit overly fond of wc2, which while I liked, wasn’t really the best the story has been.
I feel like so many problems with the story might be lessened just be actually having nuance in the story. Let Anduin in his role of King have to deal with the internal politics, have the nobles see how far they can push this inexperienced new monarch. Let there be competing factions, the ones pushing for peace, and the ones who want war for revenge or for profit reasons.
And the horde just needs to get some story that’s about their internal experience. Have more expansions with two separate tracks for the factions in the main story like BFA had (just without the trainwreck of an idea behind it) See the work of picking up the pieces after all this mess (since my dreams of “Everything after Legion was all just a dream” retcon are unlikely to happen)
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thats not entirely true, the blood curse was some kind of “enslavement”, i mean, look at grommash story in wc3
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Although, this one did have the twist of TOR does better in letting you play a good Sith than WoW does at times in playing a good Horde character
“a bit more nuance”, means again here to make the horde appear less evil…thats the entire thing of “more nuance” and what this would “solve”.
Yeah, and that’s a pretty huge problem with the way the story has been handled. Took what was marketed as two factions with their own concerns and priorities, neither being the good or evil faction, and turned it into that. Which has lead to the faction hit with the villain bat frustrated at their story being hijacked, and the ‘good’ faction frustrated that they never take action or show imitative to protect their own interests because they’ve been written as Stupid Good.
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Honestly, the Horde has already tried to invade Alliance territory in Vanilla, we even have battlefields around it. The intro has always been hypocritical in this regard.
The problem I have is that the Alliance A) is not allowed to react in proportion and really show the consequences of the Horde, even a more nuanced story would not change that.
B) The Horde is protected by Plotarmor which protects them from exactly these consequences…which explains their own misdeed.
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And the Alliance invaded Horde territory in Vanilla as well. I mean, I think all the Horde starter zones feature Alliance invasion forces in them. But that’s just territorial conflicts, pretty standard geopolitics. It’s not some sort of war of extermination or grand cosmic plot to clog the dimensional drain with so many souls that it clogs up and backflows into reality or that type of nonsense.
Hey, frankly, as long as it’s handled in a fair way that doesn’t go out of its way to sugarcoat it, they should strike back. If both factions are in such a tense standoff both sides should have a reason to fear the other. I just don’t want to see Alliance go on an equal rampage to a Sylvanas or Garrosh and be treated like they’re angels doing no wrong.
And the Alliance isn’t? I mean sure, you lost territory because when they decided to equalize the play experience so the Horde players weren’t stuck with a vastly inferior world setup than the alliance they decided to make the horde evil for that, instead of using the Cataclysm in spots. But so many times the Alliance starts stuff and the story goes way out of the way to make them somehow the victims of what they started.
I just want the story of Horde and Alliance sharing a world to get back to basics, more jockeying for resources or strategic points from both sides, less "and then this character has gotten whacked with the stupid stick and wants to blow up the planet so it’s never night and they can tan whenever they want to, or similar stupid evil acts.
Would it have been so bad if they ran with the fog of war story out of Broken Shore and had the more warlike alliance members push to take out Undercity as a threat to the Alliance and revenge for their supposed betrayal of Varian?
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