Obviously spoilers, it’s a side quest but will still blur it anyways
One of the side quests from the first zone, isle of whatever, there’s a quest chain of helping these earthen dwarves. One of them you can obviously tell they have dementia and is ready to pass over. The real question is how does an earthen, that has no living organs, be able to have something a living meat bag can have? It makes no sense. They are made out of stone.
My first guess would be erosion.
Even stone wears down and weathers as time goes by.
If they are effectively machines of a sort, parts wear out if not replaced/maintained.
That’s how I’m interpreting it.
Entropy. Everything degrades. You don’t have to have squishy parts for that to apply.
They literally tell you in the quest text for The Lost Earthen.
The earthen are essentially machines.
Urtago tells you that their memory is finite, and at some point begins overwriting. The more an earthen exert themselves, the faster the energy depletes, and they lose memories.
We are all just the computer that is running a complicated operating system that can sometimes become corrupted or damaged, no matter what the hardware consists of.
Zuma doesn’t read quest text unless someone screencaps it and posts it to Twitter for him.
That’s only part of it! In an earlier part, they say there was a machine they used to use to “recharge” themselves, that has long since broken. So now when they run out of energy it’s permanent. But they have ways to conserve it for long periods.
The memory concern is a secondary issue.
They explain it in the quest.
They only have so much memory (think you’re hard drive) so new memories start overwriting the old ones.
It says in the quests.
Thier memory essentially fills and starts over writing itself.
Nameless Passions
Fade with Time
Like Crumbling Mountains
Erosion of Life
They said that the new memories start to overwrite the old.
I wonder if one of the designers for this quest line went through something similar with a loved one.
Everything breaks down eventually. Even stone automatons like the Earthen. These things have been active for countless millennia. Much longer than of the player character races.
An example from the real world would be Disc Rot. This is a chemical process that causes media like CDs, DVDs, and Bluray to break down over time and lose their data. Many discs are experiencing this now. So when that old DVD of “Land Before Time” skips and stutters then this is probably what is occurring.
In magic universes, the mind is a separate thing. The mind can decay on its own.
Literally the quests that you’re doing explain it lol
with the power of family, anything can happen in the world of warcraft these days
I mean, they can talk and act like living organisms. If that can happen, we have to assume that at some level they’re organical beings with a brain.
I just wish they gave a old yeller option over the forced mellow drama