Story Forum Community Lounge (Part 1)

Because half the zone is just a lame Indiana Jones trilogy reference.

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But Indiana jones is awesome

I didnā€™t have electricity as a kid, so I missed a lot of the television and game things.

ā€¦But I read voraciously in self defense. Ivar the Boneless from Lawrence Yepā€™s dragon fantasy books was my first introduction to that sort of humor and being. ā€¦Man, I havenā€™t thought about those in forever. I should hunt them down and see if they stood up. Or alternatively, never ever do that.

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Said Indiana Jones reference needed Moon Elementals, Star Elementals and Sun Elementals!

The lack of the 3 is an outrage!

Welcome back Shernish!

There is no interaction between Garithos and Sylvanas. Heā€™s only refered to as ā€œBalnazzarā€™s minionā€ in the book and thatā€™s it. I think, it was only a page or two where heā€™s even mentioned and from what I remember heā€™s just a footnote.

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Iā€™m continually baffled by the lack of Worgen content.

Itā€™s particularly frustrating as theyā€™re such a ready made counterpoint to the Forsaken. Iā€™m of the firm belief that save for the Hinterlands everything between Thoradinā€™s Wall and Thalassian pass should be Halloweentown, Spooklysvania.

The Worgen provide an Alliance race to scrap with the Forsaken who maintain this aesthetic. Theyā€™re also creatures of the night with claws, glowing eyes, Gothic architecture and a penchant for looking real cool in haunted forests.

Theyā€™re absolutely perfect. And whatā€™s even better is the humans and belves can turn up for when itā€™s time for the spooky races to play the Slasher movie villain role.

In conclusion the Northern EK should just be this;

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Iā€™m wishing you well and hoping that internet access isnā€™t too difficult for you.

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Shernish, we have missed you!!

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Yeah it was shocking how little worgen stuff there is outside of their starting zone. I think they have one base in Stonetalon Mountain where the gnome wants the worgen to bite him so he can become a worgen, but outside of that Blizzard just abandoned worgen content. Itā€™s probably due to how much alliance stuff got cut in the initial cata revamp, but you would have thought by now they would have at least adjusted that.

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Thatā€™s the thing.

Iā€™m appreciative of the complexities of having to create a product this massive. The amount of people and moving parts youā€™ve to try to keep track of between programming, design, art direction, voice acting, marketing, quality assurance etc. are legion.

Some content being cut or half baked is going to be an inevitability no matter how well organized you are.

The Worgen in particular suffered from having a EBG that while cool conceptually didnā€™t really pan out with play testing and had to be scrapped. So itā€™s understandable that the rest of their content may be a touch janky.

But that was a decade ago. And Stormheim and those WPvP spots in Legion are really the only distinctly Worgen centric content outside Gilneas.

That is absurd. It genuinely feels like they didnā€™t want to make them a playable race. I feel like Iā€™m annoying the game when I start digging around for Worgen content.

ā€œOh well thereā€™s some over there. In the far corner of the Blasted Landsā€ it seems to say, ā€œbut wouldnā€™t you prefer all this human content? We put so many references to 70s-80s movies we like in it!ā€.

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Something I think about often is how much things seem to change in the time Iā€™ve been alive. My favorite YouTubers use to be a group called Super Best Friends Play, which were four Canadian guys playing a variety of games. They split about 4 years ago and two of them still do a podcast together. Recently, one of them told the other live on their podcast that he moved from Montreal (a city they both lived in) to Vancouver and got married, and didnā€™t tell him until that moment because he thought itā€™d be funny to inform his business partner and friend of over a decade after it all happened. Itā€™s a unique feeling to have your opinion of someone gradually get worse over years time, especially when that person has a viewer army which is worse than Asmongoldā€™s that will defend them no matter what they do.

Thatā€™s how I felt about Draenei from BC to the end of Legion (and then after legion again they were irrelevant). Iā€™m not counting the AU draenei because thatā€™s not the PC draenei and they are isolated to their own bubble, but even like the Yrel and Maraad stories were cut. But even though draenei were mostly irrelevant after their introduction, they had some relevance in BC, whereas the Worgen werenā€™t even relevant outside of their starting zone in the expansion they were introduced in. You would think they would have done something with an expansion feature race, it really was absurd.

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Yeah it remains extremely confusing to me that the Alliance has a completely unique to this setting faction in the Draenei and unique spins on familiar fantasy tropes like the Kaldorei and Worgen.

And itā€™s 95% about dudes in armor making a Rambo reference or w/e.

Iā€™ve mentioned before how the Horde does a very good job at balancing itā€™s factions. The Orcs probably get more screentime than anyone else but I donā€™t ever feel like theyā€™re muscling in on otherā€™s turfs. Because there are still distinctly undead, elf and troll stories all over the place.

The odd man out is really the Tauren but theyā€™re usually there at least. Theyā€™re unfortunately burdened with being the Hordeā€™s designated driver so they donā€™t typically get to do anything all that interesting.

But overall it really does feel more like an ensemble production similar to original Star Trek. Where yeah I guess Kirk and Spock get most of the stuff to do but the other characters donā€™t feel ancillary and thereā€™s episodes devoted to them.

Wheras the Alliance is more like the Star Trek reboot movies were the rest of the cast are supporting characters without much agency of their own.

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Garithos renouncing the BEā€™s from the Alliance was one of reasons why the BEā€™s joined the Horde. Sylvanas only recounts how she would use the BEā€™s as a weapon.

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Yeah itā€™s like you have these great concepts for races, nocturnal purple 7ā€™ tall magical forest warriors riding sabertooth tigers and are allies with all the different strange forest creatures, or like draenei kind of being a essentially a holy light crusading version of eredar (who are more typically demons, like satyr), or literal werewolves and they choose to go with stormwind ā€œhuman potentialā€ for most of the game. I think they do it just because itā€™s easier for them to write regular humans than these other races.

It could go back to they have good world building and interesting concepts that they never really flesh out and kind of just ignore for an easier but far worse story, something they can never really execute on properly especially on the alliance and it just feels so boring.

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Do they even write the Allianceā€™s Humans?

Blizzard for the most part just writes the Alliance Army, Fleet and Spy Organization not the inhabitants themselves!

Itā€™s like Blizzard only sees the Alliance as the Army which is faceless!

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The thing is I could see say the Kaldorei and Draenei as being daunting to write for. If they ever took their timeline seriously.

The Draenei can live for 10,000 years. So one Draenei couldā€™ve watched humans go from standing upright to landing on the moon in just their natural lifespan.

What sort of perspective would a being that ancient have? Would they even be capable of seeing humans as equals? Because that would be like us encountering a civilization of fruit flies. Entire bloodlines would rise and die out in what for us would be but a year.

But Blizz doesnā€™t write them like that. Velen just seems like a nice old Eastern Orthodox Priest to me, not a timeless being.

Everybodyā€™s basically human in this setting already so Iā€™ve no clue why theyā€™re allegedly difficult to write for.

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yeah and thats lame.

especcialy in the alliance. Its not even tried to show the long lived races different.

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Yeah, I guess you could say the write specific human characters like Anduin or Jaina, not really the humans. They just kind of take perspectives of humans. Itā€™s like why isnā€™t the house of nobles a thing? It exists, but itā€™s never used or never relevant, and this is from the people who claim to like game of thrones (omitting the last seasons), but thatā€™s all about political intrigue, backstabbing, the relationship between the different houses etc.

Maybe plotlines like that donā€™t translate well into wow and they just want to blow more stuff up, but then why are we wasting an entire expansion and throwing away basically every character that was present in the shadowlands so we can talk about how Sylvanas feels?

But going back to humans, everything still feels too human focused, whereas at least in the horde there is a feeling of those different cultures existing, on the alliance we get Varian telling Tyrande how to fight because the female leader is too incompetent, or in wolfheart the night elves becoming more diurnal to fit with how their human allies operate. Itā€™s just the watering down of all these cultures so they can fit with humans better, instead of just expanding on these cultures.

This could kind of be it too, but they hardly even think about the perspective a kind of long lived race like that would have. And they have like Varian teaching Tyrande patience, when she was leading her people alone for like 10,000 years while patiently waiting for Malfurion while he was in the emerald dream. Itā€™s like what would some 30 year old know about patience compared to her? And yeah Velen too. But itā€™s like these characters (and racial cultures) just get scarified on the alter of human potential so Varian, Anduin or Jaina can have their moments.

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Funny how all these things happened during Kosakā€™s run. Kosak clearly loves Humans!

Afrasiabiā€™s run seemed more interested in studying the Cultures in every Zone we walk into.

Danuser seems to not bother investigating anything aside from Zereth Mortis, the Kyrian(or more specifically how to reverse the flaws that Afrasiabi shoved onto them as he clearly cares little for the Zone in general) and Revendreth!

Christie Golden who runs the Cinematics only showed interest in Sylvanas and Anduin. With them gone she will have no choice but to care for the rest of the Lore it seems. Necessity is the Mother of Invention alongside Curiosity.

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