Video Games General

Gonna be honest, that looks hilarious.

 

I wasn't around for that one, not really. Back in BC I was only playing sporadically and never even got a character to max level until Wrath of the Lich King. Even then I've never been a devoted fan of the games: I'll pick up a new expansion, play for a while, and then get bored and quit sometime around the second or third content patch. When Legion came out I played from the pre-release campaign until right before the Throne of Sargeras raid unlocked, which was when I started getting really sick of the story telling me that Illidan was a good guy after all and it was our fault, the players, for not sympathizing with his ends justify the means mentality regarding fighting the legion.

In general I have liked and disliked a lot of things about WoW, but I would say the high point for me was definitely Wrath, with Mists coming in close behind it. Wrath was the last time I was really invested in the plot because Arthas was the last holdout of Warcraft 3 who hadn't been properly beaten yet and Blizz had just started doing world instances with big events like the Wrathgate and the Siege of the Undercity, so it was also the first time that I felt like my actions had a real effect on the game world. On the other hand, Mists was an expansion that I skipped entirely until Warlords of Draenor came out and then I had to level through Pandaria and was like, "Shit, this is a really cool setting!"

While I wish WoW in would go back to being like Wrath again, I want Blizzard to make an entire Mists MMO separate from the Warcraft property. Make it a Kung Fu Panda MMO if need be, I don't care, I just want to spend more time in a bright colorful wuxia setting with a kickass traditional-sounding OST.

 

There's a thread over on RPG.net you might be interested in.
https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?831587-(WOW)-The-Horde-and-the-Villain-Ball/

 

That thread makes me wonder how things would have gone if Thrall had put Vol’jinn or Cairne in charge instead of Garrosh. Probably much for the better. No bombing of Theramore, no invasion of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor and by extension Legion get butterflied away altogether...

 

Anyone that was interesting in Star Ruler 2, pop on over to this thread:
https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/free-stuff.843/page-11

 

Yes, yes, yes, Epic Battle Fantasy 5 just got released as a beta version to backers (of which I am one). Now the question: do I start playing it now, or wait for an unknown amount of time for the finished version?

 

Reminds me that I need to beat epic battle fantasy 1-4

 

Isn't 1 a reflex game ? I remember getting to the Zombi-Goku but that bastard just kept skewering me.

 

God I love super mario rpg legend of the seven stars.

 

That's a great rpg simply because of the AXEL RANGERS!

 

Only thing I hate about it is the timing for the yoshi race. Seems I'm way out of practice.

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My younger self kicks my ass in rhythm games.

 

That's the game that got me into RPGs in the first place. I should really get around to playing that fan remake of the game I downloaded months ago, but it just doesn't feel as responsive with a keyboard as opposed to a controller. Not sure if that is my nostalgia kicking in, or if it is just because the game was designed with a controller in mind.

 

Actually, it's recommended to play the game with a controller. Don't know about the fan remake though, it's probably just the fan remake that's really unresponsive.

Works fine with me using my xbox controller for PC.

 

Nah, you only need to do EBF 3 and 4 (3 is available for free on Steam, and 4 isn't all that much more). That's when the series becomes the JRPG games it currently is.

 

Yes, I meant I stopped because I only have my keyboard to use, not a controller. That is what makes it feel so unresponsive, the fact that the keys just don't work as well for me as a controller did when I was a kid. To be fair though the remake in question wasn't meant to be a straight port or anything- it is more of a redesign than a remake. The first example of what I mean to come to mind is Another Metroid 2 Remake, which gained quite a bit of notoriety when Nintendo had it taken down something like a week after it finally finished being made. I'd link it, but I can't remember the name and have to search through a bunch of files on my computer to find it. Not planning on doing that now.

 

WoW had a plot? I mean, I only played through Vanilla and a chunk of Burning Crusade, but I don't recall much of a plot. Background, sure, but no plot.

 

Wow...has a major plot in the background. Starting from Warcraft 1.

 

Warcraft 1 was an RTS, so it had a plot - things happened as you played and a story played out. That's true of all the Warcraft RTS games. WoW on the other hand... had quests, but I wasn't aware of much of an in-game plot. Nothing on the level of something like Guild Wars where there was a definite sequence of events happening within the game that showed your character saving the country or whatever. Unless the in game plot was connected to dungeons/raids? I never really did those.

 

Most of the dungeons and raids tell the main plot yes. It's kinda no wonder that you missed a lot of shit if you've never done them.

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There are quests that also helped the main plots along too. I think that was around wrath of the lich king where it was really apparent.

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Though honestly, I stopped playing because my account was hacked during the wrath of the lich king and it was at a time I was moving anyway to a place where I didn't have good internet and my main computer burnt out so I wouldn't have been able to play the game.

That, that was pretty much adding salt to the wounds there when I quit wow.

 

Well that's silly. I played largely solo through vanilla and a largish chunk of BC. I had WotLK but never really played anything in Northrend other than the Death Knight opening. So I didn't get any plot quests, and being largely a solo player I never did any dungeons or raids. It's pretty easy to come away from the experience like that with the impression that there isn't an overarching plot, just a setting.

 

MMOs were different back then. Vanilla WoW was made back in the day when Everquest and Ultima Online were the big names in MMOs, and in those games you really couldn't do solo play without making things a lot more difficult for yourself, the genre just wasn't built for it. So WoW had plotlines like Westfall's Defias Brotherhood which would play out through the usual zone quests and only be concluded with a quest that required you to raid the dungeon because the assumption was that this would bring the playerbase together and encourage people to join guilds and form parties and stuff, not just skip the content because they couldn't do it alone.

These quests were what formed the backbone of the plot of Vanilla WoW. There wasn't really a singular plot thread that all of the factions and players were pursuing the way there is in later expansions (Stop the Burning Legion, Kill Arthas, etc), just these individual stories related to each faction. The Defias Brotherhood story, for instance, eventually led Alliance players into the search for Varian Wrynn, which wasn't concluded until Onyxia's Lair, the first end-game raid.

Wrath was when Blizzard really started getting their shit together and reworking the game to make it more accessible for solo players and also introducing stuff like Heirloom gear to make leveling easier because the vanilla content was already showing its age and Cataclysm was needed to rewire everything. Wrath was also where they introduced random pick-up groups, allowing solo players to queue up for a dungeon without getting together with friends or a guild. Wrath was the first time I saw the inside of most of the game's dungeons thanks to those pick-up groups. They introduced pick-up raids in a later expansion too.

 

Pugs... ugh.

There are a lot of horror stories running with random people you don't know I can say to that than working with people in your guild.

Like always needing to be either healing or a Tank or wait hours before getting a group. At least that's how it was in the server I was playing wrath on.

Shit ton of DPS, close to nil tanks and healers.

Heirloom stuff was fun though. Made easy semi twinks for low level PvP without actually being a twink.

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Hell, random low level dungeon line ups with heirloom gear users were when I figured out more low level dungeons existed than I thought besides dead mines, stocks, and whatever dungeon is in the middle of orgamare.

Always ended up as the fucking tank though even at a low level.

 

This is an interesting post from the thread that Tagon quoted a little farther up the page that does a good job of explaining what was going on in Vanilla WoW and how the story has diverged since then.

Spoiler: From RPG.net

I stopped playing at the end of Mists of Pandaria because of my dissatisfaction with the storyline -- but since then I've spent a bit of time thinking about what went wrong. (I keep track of the story in the vain hope that it'll improve at some point.) At this point, I think they've built up a lot of inertia behind bad story practices, and don't know how to stop.

Originally, in vanilla, there were things to like and dislike about both factions. The Horde were all coming from a bad place -- whether it was as minor as the Tauren being rootless and never having a chance to build a homeland due to being hunted by the centaurs and quillboar, or as major as the orcs having been part of a demon-driven army, or the Forsaken having been killed and used as a mindless zombie horde. But they were all coming out of dark places, and trying to be better than that. Some were more committed to this than others -- the Tauren have always been pretty all-around good, while the Forsaken (or at least their leaders) were always pretty much cartoonishly bad -- but at least parts of each race were trying. There seemed to be an indication that the main struggle for the Horde would be whether they could rise above their past and become something greater, or get pulled down back into the dark.

Meanwhile, the Alliance races were starting off from places of light and prosperity -- but there were strong indications of internal weaknesses and failings in each race, things that could drag them down. The humans had selfish, corrupt, racist nobles, and an underclass of people who felt wronged by them. The dwarves had almost a race war going -- Magni ordered the killing of the Dark Iron king because he couldn't believe his daughter would willingly marry 'one of them.' The Night Elves had a strong xenophobic, isolationist streak to them, with even a bit of supremacy. And, of course, the gnomes had lost their home due to the political ambitions of one of their own. The implicit plotline for the Alliance was working to preserve what they had, and facing their own dark sides before they could be dragged down by them.

The trouble is, in those early days Blizzard didn't have any experience with how to tell a story in an MMO. (Not many people did, to be fair -- it was still a pretty young field.) And they had no idea how long the game would last. So they 'resolved' the whole human plotline in the first raid, chalking it all up to Onyxia's influence, and presuming that killing her would solve everything. Other plots were given similarly trivial treatment. And then everything... stagnated. The surface impressions of the Alliance being a shiny happy place and the Horde being a rough-n-tough brutal place survived, but the undercurrents that gave each of them depth were lost. In particular, the Horde was made to embrace the dark places they were coming out of. The orcs remained a brutal demon-influenced militarist culture ruled by an unquestionable military dictator. The Forsaken kept on hating having been made into emotionally-deadened zombies and yet decided their 'race' couldn't be allowed to die out. And so on.

(I also have to quibble with something here: Sylvanas was never a 'morally grey' character, at least not since her undeath. No, not even back in Warcraft III. In her first missions, back in The Frozen Throne, she's malevolent, brutal, and very eager to betray her allies before they get a chance to betray her. There's a common narrative that the Forsaken were rejected by humans who were scared of the undead. But that never happened, at least not before any more recent retcons I may not be aware of. The first humans the Forsaken came across were Garithos's army. Now, Garithos was probably the worst racist the Alliance had to offer at the time. And yet even he was no worse than somewhat skeptical and surly about her and her army. She promised him that she just wanted revenge on the demons who had made her this way, and offered to help him retake the capital city, then leave peacefully. And he accepted this, even putting himself and his men under her command. But as she confided to Varimathras immediately after making that offer, she planned to betray him from the first. And she did, slaughtering him and his army after they'd gotten her what she wanted. The Forsaken were never victims of the humans. Of the Lich King, yes. But from the beginning, when it comes to humans, they've always been the victimizers, and Sylvanas first among them.)

Through at least vanilla and Burning Crusade, and arguably much of Wrath of the Lich King, there was very little in the way of actual development for the Horde and Alliance as a whole -- just set pieces that reverted things back to the status quo at the end. That was the nature of the storytelling at the time -- they didn't have any methods in place for really doing a storyline that lasted longer than a single patch. And so the status quo got firmly established, and cemented as 'what should be' to both the developers and the players alike. The Horde must always be a military dictatorship that uses force to get what it wants. The Forsaken must be a zombie army that does horrific experiments on the living. Stormwind must be a beautiful fairy-tale kingdom where the major conflicts have all been resolved. And so on. When they eventually got more daring and started doing storylines that changed things up, this was the baseline, and the only thing the developers could do to it that players would accept was turning things up to 11. Make the orcs more aggressive and brutal, make the Forsaken not just an aggressive zombie army but a rapidly-expanding one that slaughters entire towns, make the humans a nation of paladins whose only major conflict is 'other races don't respect our king enough, and we have to prove them wrong.' Of course, this got eventual pushback, too -- but attempts to take things in other directions would get even more pushback.

The point where it became clear to me that there was no will for actual meaningful change and growth was the end of Mists of Pandaria. The Horde had just been given a strong reminder that the position of Warchief, a military dictator who the whole Horde swore personal allegiance to and who could only be dethroned by someone capable of defeating them in a duel, was bound to be abused when the wrong strongman got into power. This could have been the impetus to change things. Abolish the position of Warchief, and instead set up a council of elders or something like that, where members were picked for wisdom instead of might. Make Warlords of Draenor's Horde half be about delving into the past of the orcs, finding out what their traditions were like before being distorted by the demons, letting them learn from the past but not be bound by it as they grew for the future.

Instead, they decided 'the only thing wrong with the Horde today is that the wrong person was on the throne.' Get rid of Garrosh and everything is fine forever. Back to the status quo that nobody can imagine departing from. And, well, we can see how that worked out. I knew upon seeing that cutscene that it would only be a matter of time before Sylvanas or another expansionist orc or some other aggressive dictator was Warchief -- and when that day came, the Alliance would never make good on Varian's promise to 'end' them, since that would be destroying a player faction. As someone who played primarily for the story, I knew there was nothing for me to look forward to from there.

I'm sympathetic with the people who wanted to play the original promised storyline of the Horde -- the 'dark,' 'monstrous' races struggling to rise above their pasts and build something new and lasting. But Blizzard's never really delivered on that, and with nearly fifteen years of inertia keeping the plot barreling down the same direction, and them struggling to hold on to what loyalist players remain long after the game's peak, things aren't going to change.​

 

Fucking hell, that level of Gap Moe shouldn't be allowed. Stories that nightmare inducing have no business looking so CUTE!