Story Forum Community Lounge (Part 1)

Lore Story Forum
8569

Their answer is “there’s something for everybody!!” Want a serious war? We got that!! Want goofy comedy? We got that too!! But because they try to do both at the same time, you get this narrative dissonance. You get:

Log in.
“Something has spooked one of the brotasaurs, sending it into a PANIC!!”

Check your map. Horde invading Kul Tiras, so you head there.
“This pandaren monk is protecting civilians and healing critically wounded soldiers. She’s off to the side and staying out of the conflict because she wants no part of it. Murder her. Then go find some civilians elsewhere and murder them too.”

Rise, repeat, go to the next stage.
“HEY DO I HAVE A DEAL FOR YOU!!! Monster Hamster Ball of DEATH!!! Roll over people, then use it to blow up the gates with you in it!!! Roflmao!!!”

Cool, done, time to do some WQs for my Emissary.
“A turtle made it to the water…”

Like, if the objective is to make me emotionally numb to it all and totally unimmersed, you succeeded.

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8570

What I find the most frustrating about BFA is the faction conflict should be fun. But it should always feel a bit like this;

Ah the heroes are having a punch up. This could all easily be avoided if everyone acted like an adult for all of two minutes but cmon you want to see them smack eachother around.

Because it’s neat to see asymmetric power sets bounce off eachother. I think a Forsaken VS Nelf fight could be extremely entertaining because they have the most disparate powers imaginable.

But it’s supposed to end with the misunderstanding resolved and attention moved to the main big bad. They don’t have to dust eachother off and go get lunch but at least a begrudging respect and letting bygones be bygones for at least the time being.

Instead they make it this poe faced war drama but we still have to team up to fight the cartoonish big bad anyway. So it now feels like if midway through Saving Private Ryan aliens invade and they gotta team up with the N@ZIs because the movie decided its Mars Attacks! in the middle of the 2nd act.

This has just been a baffling product.

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8571

The fundamental issue with making a “more fun version” of the faction war is that because of how every other threat is also treated, it needs to be serious.

Dark Portal opens again and spills demons from Outland? Rally your forces, Horde and Alliance! The Argent Dawn is fighting for the sake of our world, and you just got drafted to invade an alien world!!

Scourge invade from Northrend? Put aside your petty grievances, because all life is under threat!! It’s literal zombie apocalypse time, and you need to save the world!!

Deathwing awakens? Holy crap, this one might actually do it because he already started the job!!

Dark Portal opens again and technologically advanced orcs invade? We’re all gonna die, go through and invade yet another alien world, but it’s kinda that first one too, and stop this threat to our very existence!!!

Demons are raining down from the sky itself!! WFT?!? This might really be the end boys!! Throw everything you possibly have at it, because we have next to no freaking chance again!!!

Ok, freaking N’zoth now?!? He’s literally eating the soul of the world!! We can’t, we just cannot possibly win this freaking thing!!! Do the best you can, because nothing can be worse than this!!!

It’s worse now!!! Totally worse!!! Death itself is coming to kill us all!! AND the Scourge are back, freaking hell!!!

Ahem.

Literally every threat is an extinction-level threat. Every single time we’re called to act, it’s for the fate of life itself, so the very idea that the only two megapowers who are barely holding things together just decided to throw down against each other? It has to be at that same scale, or it’s just as dissonant.

Because if it’s not, then it means everyone’s a freaking idiot. With annual threats looking to wipe everyone from the face of the world, y’all thought it would be a good idea to weaken each other in the few moments of peace and safety we have?!?

The problem is that because everything around the factions is some life-or-death-but-probably-death struggle against all odds, the very idea these two entities would fight each other in the middle of it all is beyond ridiculous. The over-the-top level of threats regularly facing Azeroth shouldn’t leave any room at all for a blow-up between the Alliance and Horde.

And yet, there’s always room for mass-slaughter of the only line of defense we have against the infinite cosmic threats facing all life.

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8572

This is WoW storytelling boiled down. And yeah Wrath lost me at the end because the Alliance and Horde deciding to kill eachother while in the Lich King’s laundry room was almost as stupid as the big twist. That apparently a mindless zombie swarm is even more dangerous without strategic high command and a full support structure.

But seriously though this is why WoW’s narrative needs to calm the hell down and focus on a more basic fantasy storyline. I really loved Exile’s Reach because it was just a fun little story. It had a zombie army and an ogre clan and a huge undead dragon but that feels positively mundane compared to the rest of SL.

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8573

What would happen if a Hate Plague caused Paranoia in people(to the point where they see everything as inhuman monsters seeking their death) within a specific town at the same time some Malignant Cosmic manifestation of the Void started possessing people?

I’m sure the Hate-Plagued People wouldn’t be able to even so much as attack the Void corrupted before the Void decided to infect their Hate-Plagued Minds making them go instantly from “Die you inhuman monster!” to “We are all. We are nothing. We are the thread that binds eons together. We cannot be undone! That which was once Void shall be returned to it!”

A Virus causing a Hate Plague of Paranoia would be no match for the Void in any of it’s corrupting incarnations(Final Fantasy, WoW, Guild Wars, etc.).

8574

Speaking of April 1st…

Everyone’s favorite yearly patch notes!

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8575

As soon as Dark Rangers are available to play, that’s my new main.

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8576

This is the way.

8577

Just want to point out they couldnt resist a bard joke…

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8578

Thats the jist of it.

In Vanilla it was like, “Hey, here’s the people, and if you missed wc3, heres a recap and recontextualization of their motivations, have fun exploring while you level up. If you get to max level, there is some exciting stuff to do in the world. There are some high stakes, if no one does anything about it, so someone really should. Maybe Varian. Idk. Enjoy!”

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8579

It’s a reference to Inglorious Basterds. Everything involving those characters from Silverwing Refuge onwards is taken directly from that movie. All of those characters are named literally after the characters in the movie. Aldo (Rock)rain is just Brad Pitt and the speech he gives is the same speech from the movie, just replace NSDAP (can’t use the actual word on the forums) with Alliance. It’s immediately obvious for anyone who’s seen it; you should watch it, it’s a great movie.

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8580

I’ve seen that movie a few times. It’s a pretty good movie. Even though the bar scene is kinda silly if you know any German.

Because Michael Fassbender’s accent is just loudly British. As in, it’d probably raise suspicions instantaneously. I get that does happen later in the scene but it’s so obvious it’s kinda funny it took any amount of time for Germans to notice.

But I can’t remember the scene this questline was referencing.

8581

They outright stated the solution though, without even realizing it.

“The faction conflict is at the core of world of warcraft”

No one asked them to make a new world ending threat for SL, or even BfA. In fact, in the trailer that got everyone so psyched (the last project Metzen worked on with Blizzard) there was absolutely no mention of a world ending threat.

When a sports team has a few bad seasons, or a rough start with a couple bad games, the coach in the press conference always says something along the lines of “We’re going back to basics. We are gonna watch a lot of videos and work on the fundamentals.” When they do that… it typically works. They come back at least better than they were. Winning at soccer boils down to putting more balls in the opponents goal than you allow them to put in yours.

No coach is getting in front of the press and saying, “Well, actually it has always been like this, also what the real problem is, is we just made too many goals, so next expansion we are going to just focus on one really obvious goal in the beginning of the match…” He’d be fired.

We are smart and discerning fans. If blizzard said “We know its been a tough couple expansions. We are going back to basics. Next expansion we are going to deliver an experience that is fundamentally WoW. The high stakes threats are going to be optional high end content and the majority of the expansion will be experienced in the open world. There is going to be a lot of tension between the factions even with warmode off. We have some server events like AQ planned, and we are making some infrastructure adjustments to restore that sense of community. We are bringing back PvP ranks (with titles) earned only through random BGs and world PvP, and some cosmetics that can only be displayed while at the appropriate rank.” … if they said something like that, I wouldnt need a giant giga dragon to make me excited about the next expansion. I wouldnt even need new zones. Just throw a bunch of new quests in the old zones.

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8582

You say that, but I have read the comment section on Wowhead.

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8583

Don’t even need to go that far. Just read some of the comments here. Some can’t tell their own headcannon from actual lore :wolf:

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8584

Honest to God I think turning WM off should make the opposite faction Unfriendly rather than Hostile.

You’re not an enemy combatant, you’re a civilian. Perhaps a dangerous one but you can’t just be offing people because they’re capable foreigners.

Maybe even scatter a select few neutral NPCs around. Just a little world building that shows a lot of people are hostile to Red/Blue nationals but some don’t care or at least have a mercenary attitude when it comes to business.

You already have to go back to your Capitol to turn it on so you couldn’t use this as a loophole to set up attacks. Plus it’d be cool to use those areas for cross faction RP.

8585

I mean I can. Because 7 out of 10 times it’s better thought out, at least in regards to the Forsaken.

I was relieved they confirmed my idea that the Forsaken can be everything from Return Of The Living Dead’s Tarman to Garry Oldman’s Dracula. Which was good news as I’ve 6 Forsaken characters who are all across that spectrum.

From the supernaturally unblemished Baroness Faustadt to the mostly skeletal Holmstein Drakebreak vargul and everything in between.

But there’s some ideas I’d like to give them. Like the Forsaken seem to only sell mushrooms for the most part. Where other innkeepers usually have meat or dairy they usually only have fungi.

My hypothesis for this is since mushrooms can grow from decay, that this basically the Forsaken’s vegan option. As it was grown from corpses it registers as humanoid flesh to their bodies.

8586

I was planning on a fancy date tonight, but now I get called into work to both supervisor stuff and because one of my troops decided to make some terrible decisions that landed them in a country jail.

I hate you, geopolitics.

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8587

Chaotic Good Forsaken vibes but I asked my instructor to let us study with specific cadavers using their names on their tags for an upcoming anatomy exam and he was like “this is the first time in 20 years of teaching a student not only remembers the names of the cadavers but requests specific bodies because of their specific anatomical preparation for an exam and also requests those bodies using their names with prefixes”

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8589

Thought some of you might enjoy these bits of art.

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