So DF just keeps losing me, and I think I’ve figured out the problem. A dangerous calcium deficiency;
Seriously though the lack of much explicitly horror themed stuff is just, weird. There’s typically at least a few zones or subplots dedicated to the children of the night as it were.
BFA had Drustvar and Nazmir. Legion had vampire vyrkul and like 30% of the Class Hall stuff sent you to Duskwood to help the world’s most trusting Priest.
There was the Gnoll stuff and I guess some of Deathwing’s labratory stuff gets a bit Umbrella-y. But I just don’t find Unit 731 ish all that bothersome when it’s being inflicted on reptillian monstrosities. Seriously one time I sat in the Swamp of Sorrows murdering the ever loving crap out’ve green whelps in the vain hope the pet version dropped. Because the idea of my deader ninja having a lil posion puppy sounded cute. Am I to understand that was now basically the worst crime imaginable?
Idk I’m still holding out the vague hope Sindragosa proper will make a triumphant return. They were resurrecting Scourge champions in the SL starter, we know necromancy is cosmically neutral at worst now, and a dracolich dragonflight just sounds awesome to me.
But what about you? Feeling down from the lack of monster mashing and graveyard smashing or do you feel this is a welcome reprieve?
Because you’re a s̶q̶u̶e̶a̶m̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶c̶o̶w̶a̶r̶d̶ person of differing and totally valid tastes.
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Eh. The way Warcraft treats undead has been more goofy than spooky since really Wrath, which I think was a mistake. I appreciate a stroll through a Halloween aisle as much as the next guy, but the dated Futurama jokes transplanted into the march on the Lich King’s fortress did less than nothing for me. Same for all the skeletons and zombies suddenly being shaped and colored like kiddie Halloween decorations.
Give me Thaddius over Rotface every time. An expansion like Dragonflight could have virtually every character be undead, like Shadowlands did, and still fail.
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Well A, I’m a sucker for Futurama references;
And B,
I actually did quite like Revendreth and Maldraxxus. And really I’ve never found WoW’s horror outright scary. Outside that one Wrath dungeon filled with spiders and some of the bits in the Horrific Visions nothing has made my skin crawl.
I’ve frequently mentioned my love of the Forsaken is rooted in my love of Sam Rami esque gore-as-slapstick, or splatstick as it is delightfully called.
That’s kinda been a side appeal of Warcraft for awhile now. I fell in love with WC3 the milisecond it let me explode a small child by catapulting a hunk of meat at him.
Need more of that energy.
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I’m not hating on Futurama, I rewound that “no ordinary honey” bit like eight times the first time I saw it. Couldn’t breathe. But Wrath didn’t do it justice, not to mention it was a pretty old bit even by 2009, and the situation just didn’t really call for levity.
I hear you about Raimi, but as a fan of Evil Dead 1 I think things like Vanilla Scholo really got closest. The modern game avoids gore, serious or comical, more than ever.
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Which remains bewildering to me because this game still has a class with the ability to detonate corpses with their mind.
Can’t quite take DK over Priest though because forcing people to throw themselves off cliffs will never stop being hilarious.
I’m just kinda going, who is this for?
I think you might have a point in that earlier thread. They did that hopelessly stupid thing and listened to Twitter users didn’t they? Yeah that’s only gone catastrophically awry every single time because like .03% of the population uses it. So it’s just not a good barometer for gauging public opinion. Great if you want to gauge the opinions of self important sad sacks with delusions of grandeur though. Or just use Tiktok which is the same but for those who are additionally illiterate.
And the thing is I actually quite enjoyed phase one where we we’re just kinda vibing. I liked the Star Trek appeal of boldly going to strange new worlds and interacting with the cultures therein.
I’m just uh, really not a fan of the dragons. Which is a shame as this is pretty wed to that concept.
They’re dumb animals we are obliged to murder by the hundreds without mercy, strange horses, but also like things we are allegedly supposed to grant personhood and all the empathy that implies? But also murder their children by the bushel and parade their heads through the street?
Look just give me a sexy undead Sindragosa and everything will be jake.
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That’s a good point about the lack of gore, I remember it’s something WoW use to have a lot of. Makes me think of the rotting meat on hooks with flies buzzing around.
The quests to find the two dead guards in Elwynn, who you discover have been killed by murlocs and their corpses are just blood and bone. It highlights the change in the game’s artistic aesthetic that’s happened in MoP, Blizzard has only leaned into the Pixar style since then. A mix of gore and mystery are what used to scare me in vanilla WoW, things like the pentagram lakehouse children and the Karazhan crypt with the upside down sinners.
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I still think Horrific Visions got delightfully dark. The orphans being puppeteered by faceless ones playing with the murderered matron is legitimately some great imagery.
But then we got Torghast and torturing the vague implication of a person just isn’t particularly interesting to me. If a humanoid gets their belly slashed I can imagine how badly that would hurt. If a fart soul gets poked with a hot poker I’m more just confused how the physics of any of this parses out.
Horror and mystery aren’t the central point to WoW but they’re a hell of an underlying one. Bizarre to me to essentially abandon it in favor of dragon drama.
I think Blizzard just overcorrected with this expansion. They saw people were kinda tired of the grimdark themes and went full on sunshine & rainbows. Maybe perhaps the next expansion will have a better vibe that properly finds a balance. Or they’ll continue to lean away from blood and violence. It’s obvious the parts of this ship have mostly been replaced.
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See though I never saw WoW as grimdark. A lot of it’s implications are truly horrific but the cartoony graphics and comedic tone let you know at the door not to take this all that seriously.
They do understand it was the horrific, criminal and I’d argue unforgivable treatment of employees that got everyone mad, right?
I really don’t get too worked up about bad ends to little computer people.
Horrific visions and Torghast are undoubtedly grimdark, as is Drustvar and Nazmir. There’s nothing comedic or feelgood about any of that. The Karazhan crypt is the epitome of it.
Not just that. You mentioned Twitter users before so I assume you know about how they make mountains out of molehills. Wasn’t that long ago they were mad about killing Gnolls in quests and how in one quest Wrathion gets punched in the face.
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I’m just kinda officially fed up with the online left at this point. I was out in Chicago campaigning for Brandon Johnson while still going through two simultaneous family tragedies. We managed to get an 11th hour, victory-from-the-jaws of defeat win with an outright Teacher’s Union, working man’s dark horse candidate.
Absolutely unprecedented win and it restored my faith in my city and country in a pretty dark hour when I truly forgot what good news sounded like.
And their reaction is of course preformative indifference. Because nothing is ever good enough for the people who do nothing.
So it’s unsurprising to me their main concern was the reproductive rights of Godzilla. Yeah I can’t think of any pressing IRL concerns of that nature. This is totally a heckin valid use of people’s time and energy.
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They were describing California Gnolls as depicting “dead children”
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Who cares? They’re not real.
Teldrassil I got. Because people have genuine memories attached to that place. Actual human beings exist because their folks met in WoW. I’m beyond positive more thaj one “How I met your mother” story started in Darnassus.
Obviously it’s going to hurt when you destroy it so thoughtlessly.
But c’mon now we’re breaking down in tears over Godzilla? C’mon. Like there’s gotta be a line here somewhere where reality steps in and reminds you that;
A. This is a video game and more importantly
B. It’s a commercial product produced by an objectively evil company.
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I do think there is dignity in respecting the game world, which is both older and more permanent in the fiction as well as more impactful in players’ real lives, over the character soap operas and factional casualties.
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Alexstrasza used to have a lot of personality, she used to violently hate orcs. Being Azeroth’s Life-Binder didn’t necessarily extend to alien invaders who violated her.
Dragons have broadly been kind of a sleeping aid in Warcraft, but they’ve really fumbled any chance to turn that around so far.
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There was a whole song and dance about an Alexstrazsa quest regarding a Warcraft 2 subplot. That literally only existed as a fun bait and switch as red dragons are typically evil in fantasy.
They’re on the cover of most D&D books and The Red Dragon is another term for Satan. They’re typically nogoodniks.
So revealing actually they’re uber chill dudes and their broodmother is literally the aspect of life itself was a fun little twist.
And I agree it was a tone deaf idea but. Look I didn’t see the quest but from the absurd comparisons to IRL horrors people were making I kinda want to play it. Because it’s either being absurdly exaggerated or is inexplicably the darkest possible tone shift I’ve ever seen. How’d we go from soup time with Grandma Walrus to Law & Order: SVU?!
It sounds like the Ice-T meme gone sentient and homicidal.
“They call it demon soul. They drug you with it then use your babies as aircraft”.
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The Warcraft 2 Horde basically forced the red dragons to breed so they could use the hatchlings as war machines. People describe this as SA and equate it to the real world crimes alleged to have been committed by employees of the company. You tell me what’s tone deaf.
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Yeah I remain baffled. I’m as close to that topic as you can be without being a survivor myself. My mother, several SOs, my dead best friend- close to home is my point. Misery loves company so traumatized people just sorta flock together. There’s a reason I know so many veterans, suffice to say.
And never once was I playing WC2, which I did semi recently in 2020, and went;
“Ah yeah that’s totally what happened to my loved ones”.
And hey I’m not one to throw shade about maladaptive coping methods. I am legitimately sympathetic to anyone who finds that triggering. But if something so removed from any lived experience is that bothersome then I guess ya gotta hear it from me;
You’re not healing.
Please seek help. This isn’t an insult. I personally know people who’s demons of that nature took their life. And I hate myself everyday for not seeing it coming and stopping it.
Choose life, please. It’s mostly miserable but theres a lot of cool stuff and more importantly cool people who’ll miss you terribly. And I say that as someone who’s such a bad assassin I failed to off myself three times now.
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I thought you meant actual Godzilla. I’m aware of the Alexstrasza quest situation. I have mixed feelings on it. People seem to be upset that it’s about reinforcing tragic events that have happened, which is something the bronze dragonflight regularly does. I don’t have a problem with that, though I haven’t looked much into the quest itself and AFAIK Chromie was being peppy throughout the whole ordeal which is the inappropriate part to me.
So the quest has been changed to Rhonin finding a dragon egg, which is supposedly the catalyst to him saving Alexstrasza. Which presents a different problem, in that he finds the egg at a different time then he’s supposed to, and Chromie is like, “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go but oh well!” So when that’s her attitude and she’s trying to stop Nozdormu from becoming Murozond, she seems terrible at her duty. Realistically, the bronze dragonflight should be taking notice of her careless attitude and do something about it, Nozdormu especially. It makes an overall picture that the bronze dragons either don’t actually care about what’s supposed to happen or are bad at their jobs, which brings into question what the point is.
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