What is the most interesting way to do the First Ones?

I’m sort of expecting/dreading the First Ones to basically be aloof Protoss - more or less the Xel’Naga, with personalities more along the lines of MOTHER than Aman’Thul. The Titans had a bit of character, uniqueness, and humanity to them that made them interesting, but there seem to be implications that the First Ones may be a bit more alien.

Is there a way to do the First Ones that won’t fall into the trap of Halo Forerunners, Xel’Naga, Protheans or others in the “extinct forebear race” trope?

Possibility. The question is if the current WoW writing team can play around with that concept instead of just following it to the letter.

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Would the worst case scenario in your mind be them literally being the Protoss from the StarCraft Universe itself making Blizzard go the way of DC Comics and Marvel Comics?

Forerunners are old news in the Halo universe. The real alien species is the Precursors, who made the humans and Forerunners. Their motives are so alien that they let themselves and their god-tier civilization be annihilated by their creations because it was the move that maximized the total poetic irony of the universe.

The trick to pulling this off isn’t refusing to explain the First Ones motives and be all mysterious about it in a cop-out. The trick is to just make their motives so bizarre and weird that we have no ability to understand why. “Ah yes, we created the universe because it its the most blhurgentrostibl thing to do. What, you guys don’t have that emotion?”

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I think my worst case scenario is that it would be boring. So…come to think of it, no, Actual Protoss wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen.

The Precursors merely allowed their forces in the Milky Way Galaxy be wiped out by their creations. Their holdings outside the Galaxy and in the Domain are in good condition.

Of course the Precursor inside the Domain(Abaddon) of course was incompetent enough to get hacked by Cortana’s Rampant Spikes(whose splitting off killed Cortana in Halo 4) and turned into the Warden Eternal basically making him an enslaved Gravemind(ruled by the Rampant Spikes of Cortana) leading the Prometheans.

Question: Do Rampant Spikes of AI with access to Precursor Tech have understandable motives or are they so Insane/Rampant that they are more incomprehensible than Precursors?

What

10char

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It’s a tough one, how do you something that hasn’t been done a thousand times before? Maybe you could have a traceable lineage of extermination throughout history that nobody has noticed the pattern of because nobody would have thought to look and it turns out the race survives by goading the next race in their cycle into killing them before possessing them all and carrying on their work.

I suspect even that idea has been done.

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https://www.halopedia.org/Abaddon

https://www.halopedia.org/Dominion_Splinter

The first link gives a description of the being guarding the Domain that Cortana accessed as well as it’s name.

The second link reveals that the Cortana from Halo 5 was infact the Rampant Spikes expelled by the real Cortana and had hacked the Domain and usurped the entity guarding it and since Abaddon was the one guarding it in the first place…

The Monitor from Halo 5 also stated that the Warden Eternal is not a robot so him being Abaddon and a Precursor(rather than a mere creation of theirs) makes the most sense.

https://www.halopedia.org/Flood#Origins

The Gravemind is the Precursor consciousness of the Primordial controlling the other Flood/Precursors in the areas near the Milky Way which had lost all sapience due to their dust/spore form decaying.

A Precursor Hivemind is a Gravemind therefore a Precursor Hivemind in the Domain like Abaddon/Warden Eternal is a Gravemind tied to the Domain and it’s Prometheans.

One of my favorite sayings is:

“There is no new thing under the sun.”

It especially rings true in Fiction. It is easy to look at something and see influences or inspiration, if not out right copying.

I am not a big gamer. So I tend to take WoW for what it is, and don’t compare it to other games because I don’t have that reference.

Is this… real? It seems like a joke. What do you call the people before the First Ones when you want to go back even further? The Even More First Ones? The Firster Ones?

Maybe if the First Ones are actually the Last Ones of a different timeline/universe who escaped into ours? Sort of how the Maghar came to our Universe?

Like if we find out their Universe was being destroyed, so they came to ours, and maybe they had some stowaways, which helps explain some unexplained creatures.

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Honestly, I can’t bring myself to get interested in the First Ones at all. It just feels like the writers have decided that they’ve explained too much about the Titans, so they’re not mysterious anymore, so they need to bring in a new “original power” to be mysterious again.

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100% agree. It’s a common writers trap. You feel the urge to reveal secrets and make the unknown known. Pull back the curtain. And then once you do you realize that you need some mystery, someone behind that curtain. Most stories it only happens once in, but when you’re a franchise like WoW or Halo that have lasted this long, and you keep falling for that trap, you end up giving your players/reader fatigue on the entire thing and it sucks all the excitement and mystery out of it, which is the entire purpose of this trope to begin with. So it’s self defeating in that way.

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Forerunners are supposed to be the role of the Titans or Night Elves: Ancient Race that predated Modern Humanity.

The Precursors AKA Flood are the real First Ones: The race that preceded all others including the fabled so-called Gods.

Yes the Flood preceded and created the Forerunners and Humanity!

The Halo writers didn’t create a random Race preceding the Forerunners. They made the Forerunners’ archenemy that they wiped themselves out to contain into the Race that preceded the Forerunners!

The Forerunners when they first appeared were an ancient Race that created Superweapons that completely wiped out the food of the Flood including the Forerunners themselves with Guilty Spark treating Humanity as the Forerunners’ reincarnations.

Of course Halo 3 revealed the Precursors who created the Forerunners and thus would be assumed to be the race that created Humanity.

Come the Halo Primordium Novels and it’s discovered that the Forerunners are merely a sister Race to Humanity and that the Precursors were the Flood that drove the Forerunners to extinction.

Basically Halo’s backstory changed from “Alien Parasites caused Ancient Humans to wipe themselves out to stop them” to “The Precursors caused Humanity’s Sister Race the Forerunners to wipe themselves out to stop them”.

Xel’naga in MY Warcraft? It’s more likely than you think.

This is why I don’t play Halo anymore.

I usually like the ancient humans/trolls/orcs stories, but I absolutely hate Battlestar Gallactica’s Anarcho-primitivism approach to it.

They could go the Babylon 5 route and make the first ones into sperate species or groups that choose to guide the younger species. And have those groups have vastly different ideology on how to do so. Or like the Ancients from Stargate SG1; an vastly old race that is now dead/ascended and left behind extremely advanced technology. There are a lot of possibilities.

It would be ironic if the First Ones included the Void Lords and the Naaru’s Keepers.

It would be especially interesting if the Daelaam Protoss were WoW’s version of the Firstborn(the Daelaam did call themselves the Firstborn in SC2 after all) while the Purifiers(who still have their counterpart to the Khala which the Protoss describe as Light) serve as the Vorlons(Light) and the Zerg Swarm/Taldarim serve as the Shadows(Void).

Of course it would all make one wonder which Cosmic Force each First One Race(outside of the Daelaam which embodies them all) embodies: Light would be Purifiers(Vorlons), Void would be Zerg Swarm/Taldarim(Shadows), Life would be Primal Zerg, Arcane would be ???, Fel would be ??? and Death would be the Ihan-rii(their Energies resemble Death’s).

The Cosmic Forces in the end would all be Void(Shadow, Fel and Death, Essence(Arcane and Life) and Psi(Light) Energies! Of course the Daelaam isolating the various types of Psi, Essence and Void into separate Realms would be unsurprising as well.

I came here to post basically this and was surprised, happily, to see it already here. Hell, I would go further: don’t even have them be communicable at all - just have them be a totally incomprehensible mess of eye-watering chaotic, nonsense visuals, basically white noise, and be totally beyond comprehension. That still communicates the story information ‘we were obviously made not in their image’, which provides context, without needing to know why they did it.

Of course, the true answer was that we should never have been in a position to meet them and we should never have gotten involved in the cosmic order at all, before that.

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