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  1. #141
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    Everyone with this Sword and Sorcery and DnD style blah blah blah. Do you even know what the fuck you can pull out with pen and paper D&D at epic levels? If not, go read some manual and then come back. Burning Legion is nothing compared what you can pull off from those.

  2. #142
    Scarab Lord Leih's Avatar
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    The weird thing in this thread is all the people saying things like "Nowadays" and "Lately" and "Now it's always..." when talking about how we're being bombarded with demons and spaceships and other worlds and stuff like that.

    And it's like... yeah, this expansion is about demons and the Legion and fighting that greater threat. There's going to be a lot of that. It's likely the next expansion will be about something different.

    The game explores a huge variety of themes and areas from expansion to expansion. We went from Outer Space to the Frozen North to a World-Ending Dragon to Farming Middle-Eastern Pandas to Time-Travelling Orcs.

    If you don't like the current theme of spaceships and demons that's okay but it's not like "This is what WoW has become and we're stuck with it" kind of thing. Next expansion will be about something else...
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  3. #143
    Quote Originally Posted by Benomatic View Post
    I think the biggest issue for me was in WoD with all the hardcore industrialisation, the advanced military, machines, trains, bombs and guns! Now with Legion and the fel cannons and fel ships. It's leaving behind the adventurer and turning us into the terminator.
    you just dont like high fantasy
    i was the same in TBC, now i dont mind as much

  4. #144
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    TBC came out 10.5 years ago, the same theme is just expanded on that, just bigger green structures and ships.

    Outland was just a legion outpost, not a direct full invasion point, it still had the cannons and portals.

    Also many demons were under Illidan's control/loyalty.

    Tempest keep had a whole network of mana forges, and floating satelite structures (exodar/mechanar/arcatraz/botanica), naaru "tech".

    So in the end, nothing suddenly turned sci fi, as it happened 10+ years ago already...
    Last edited by Teri; 2017-09-19 at 09:50 AM.

  5. #145
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    Quote Originally Posted by Eurhetemec View Post
    I would also question how good it was at conveying the sense of "humanity", because a lot of the time, the humans just seemed to be parodies/jokes/references rather than people (not even comedy characters, just cheap cardboard stereotypes/archetypes). And it didn't help that every time someone was evil, magic seemed to be at fault, not a personal flaw or the like. There were a few places it did work very well - oddly enough everywhere kind of "gothic" in WoW seemed to work extremely well atmospherically and stylistically. However, even that broke down with the original Naxx and so on. WoW was always headed rapidly back to High/Epic Fantasy with the odd poop joke along the way.
    I'm not claiming it was King Lear or that it needs to be, but it was relatable in a way that tentacle monsters and demon lords starting every sentence with "Puny mortals!" never can be.
    Last edited by Thoughtcrime; 2017-09-19 at 11:26 AM.

  6. #146
    I think so, remember that I even thought it was weird that there was guns in the game when I started.

  7. #147
    Quote Originally Posted by Emmagad View Post
    I think so, remember that I even thought it was weird that there was guns in the game when I started.
    Guns were first developed in the middle ages. It's weird for sword & sorcery to not have them, not the other way around.

  8. #148
    Quote Originally Posted by Benomatic View Post
    I think the biggest issue for me was in WoD with all the hardcore industrialisation, the advanced military, machines, trains, bombs and guns! Now with Legion and the fel cannons and fel ships. It's leaving behind the adventurer and turning us into the terminator.
    The biggest change going from WC1 to WC2 was how heavily WC2 emphasized industrialization. To get your naval warfare going you had to build oil refineries, and the game featured bombs, guns and even gyrocopters. This ship (heh) has sailed 10 years before WoW came out. That was well over 20 years ago. Although I really disliked WoD, the expansion was an attempt at going back to the roots because Azeroth was set up as an industrialized world.


    As for the original question - No, not really. Generic sword and sorcery is unfathomably boring and there's already hundreds, if not thousands of medieval fantasy MMOs that all look the same. Even old-school D&D scaled to pretty crazy stuff at high enough levels and Warcraft has featured the Titans and Old Gods looming in the background for a long while. It actually reminds me a lot of actual D&D progression where you start with a simple sword and shield and eventually getting closer to the celestials, planetars and solars and even Gods in power.
    Last edited by Turina; 2017-09-19 at 11:53 AM.

  9. #149
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    Quote Originally Posted by Benomatic View Post
    The steampunk didn't bother me. WoD did with the massive influx of heavy industry was too much.
    Well they were creating a war machine big enough to take on a whole planet so you know, there's going to be lots to build.

  10. #150
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    Quote Originally Posted by huth View Post
    Guns were first developed in the middle ages. It's weird for sword & sorcery to not have them, not the other way around.
    Actually, no, the key sword and sorcery writers (Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber) had settings which were more bronze age and iron age technologically than 1200s+. Indeed that's an important part of the Conan setting ("the riddle of steel" etc.) and with Leiber's heroes, when they travel to the real world for a strange incident, it seems to be distinctly pre-medieval. So it would be weird to see them in an archetypical S&S game.

    What Warcraft draws from is primarily Warhammer and 1980s D&D, and what Warhammer drew from was primarily 1970s and 1980s D&D and 1400s-1600s European military history, and what 1970s and 1980s D&D drew from was a strange amalgam of Sword & Sorcery stuff (which is what Gary Gygax himself liked best), Michael Moorcock (which occupies an interesting space, with an S&S tone but very epic happenings) and Tolkien (which Gygax didn't want to include in D&D, as he thought it too different, but gave in after incessant begging from his players - this is why elves, orcs, dwarves etc. are common to fantasy games, but much more rare in fantasy novels, which don't derive from D&D for the most part - with the odd exception like Malazan, which was literally based on an AD&D game that transitioned to GURPS).

    Anyway, with such a multitude of sources, I think it's pretty clear the three primary ways by which guns come in are Warhammer (which has them because of European military history), Moorcock (who had a ton of steampunk and dieselpunk before they even had names - back in the 1960s and 1970s), and to a small extent D&D - via things like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (which had jetpacks, laser pistols, and all sorts, yet worked kind of surprisingly well in D&D).

    Quote Originally Posted by Thoughtcrime View Post
    I'm not claiming it was King Lear or that it needs to be, but it was relatable in a way that tentacle monsters and demon lords starting every sentence with "Puny mortals!" never can be.
    I honestly feel like they've improved here, gradually, but the problem is that we never see anyone but big, important people, and no-one matters but big, important people. It's hard to back out of that, and last time they tried to do "but what about the actual people of the world?" with Cataclysm, it didn't really work. I think they might want to look to GW2 - for all its flaws, it does a better job making you think of places and people and maybe caring a bit about them - having normal people be nice to the PCs, need help from the PCs in an honest way, and so on, would be cool. I don't think that means going back to delivering love letters or whatever, but having us actually help people, and be helped by people in the world, would be good - again they do this a bit, but they forget so quickly and often make it a sort of "You must earn their help" thing that you don't get fond of them or anything.

  11. #151
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    Quote Originally Posted by Paula Deen View Post
    This. I don't have a problem with it really, but it just feels even more implausible than 'There must always be a lich king' or Deathwing not being dead after WCII.
    Deathwing having survived Warcraft 2 is older than Warcraft 3 though...

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  12. #152
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    Quote Originally Posted by Benomatic View Post
    I think the biggest issue for me was in WoD with all the hardcore industrialisation, the advanced military, machines, trains, bombs and guns! Now with Legion and the fel cannons and fel ships. It's leaving behind the adventurer and turning us into the terminator.
    Man i feel ya. The past couple expansions have given us weapons that make it look like we're supposed to be the end boss of a raid...I was going through my transmog staves for my druid, and realized how im just used to all the badass flashiness they have. I scrolled to the end and realized that i couldn't tell a difference between all the random low lvl staves. I remember a time when every weapon change, even if it had a similar model but different colour, felt like a HUGE deal. I dont know if they can pull that off now, or maybe they can, but it would be super hard...

    I sorta get it, cause that's gotta be the logical progression to a game thats been out 10+ years. You start as the adventurer, how the hell are you gonna stay an adventurer for so long? Ppl start recognizing you for saving the world just cuz u did ICC, well, i also got a few race changes, but i dont see that part in my class order hall campaign.. LOL. It kinda reminds me of an old Blizzcon panel were Jeff Kaplan talked about how they stayed away from personal story in quests cause it just feels weird. Thats sort of what artefact weapons felt like. Youre the champion to PERSONALLY wield the ashbringer! and you, and you too! and you and you!!!!... Im all for getting the ashbringer destroyed into a million pieces next expac. Bon voyage !!!

    If Kul'tiras is part of the next WoW expansion, that might give them the opportunity to just pull a hipster-sea-life trend to the new armour and squish everything a bit. Atleast, fingers are crossed.

  13. #153
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    I know what the OP wants and I can sympathise, to an extent. Truth is, you can't unring the bell. Last few expansions the player has been bigged up as a major hero, who heads of state look to in order to Get Things Done. Threats have to escalate alongside our level and our in game status.

    Wow is more Michael Moorcock/Eternal Champion in its fantasy than JRR Tolkien and always has been. I mean the Burning Legion are essentially aliens from another dimension. And they've been a thing since the first RTS. They even tossed Lovecraft into the blender with C'thun and have kept adding to it since.

    The days of more downhome, relatively identifiable fantasy adversaries are pretty much over the moment you hit 58 and enter Outland while levelling. Even Wrath is smothered in Old God and Titan technology shenanigans. WoW (and Warcraft as a whole) has never been stock "swords and sorcery".

  14. #154
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    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    1) Bigger is more epic. Witness Deathwing and how dumb and counter-intuitive that all turned out. "But he's FUCKING GIGANTIC! THAT'S EPIC!!" I can hear it now.

    Yep. So sad, so true.

    Quote Originally Posted by MoanaLisa View Post
    2) "We'll kill people that players know". See above for the problems with that if they don't have a plan to replace them.
    It is a problem that started as early as BC, when major characters like Illidan, Kael and Lady Vashj (oh poor, poor fish lady) were thrown into the fire for no apparent reason. The BC story arc would have been enough for 2-3 xpacs... with proper and careful storytelling, something that old Blizz seems to sorely lack these days

  15. #155
    Old God Mirishka's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Soon-TM View Post
    It is a problem that started as early as BC, when major characters like Illidan, Kael and Lady Vashj (oh poor, poor fish lady) were thrown into the fire for no apparent reason. The BC story arc would have been enough for 2-3 xpacs... with proper and careful storytelling, something that old Blizz seems to sorely lack these days
    You not liking a thing =/= something wrong with that thing or with the people who created it.
    Appreciate your time with friends and family while they're here. Don't wait until they're gone to tell them what they mean to you.

  16. #156
    Old God Soon-TM's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mirishka View Post
    You not liking a thing =/= something wrong with that thing or with the people who created it.
    Yes, and your point is...? Of course it's my opinion, that's the entire idea behind a discussion forum, isn't it? Of course, having several major characters killed for no apparent reason may be a good thing for you, but I beg to disagree.

  17. #157
    Merely a Setback breadisfunny's Avatar
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    it hasn't been like that since warcraft 2.
    r.i.p. alleria. 1997-2017. blizzard ruined alleria forever. blizz assassinated alleria's character and appearance.
    i will never forgive you for this blizzard.

  18. #158
    While I'd prefer the simpler setting with complex stories among different areas/factions, the game is past that point. We have downed too many characters that are next to gods strength and impact. The only logical direction with Blizz's story telling is up. I'm still curious what will happen after Sargeras faces his inevitable defeat.
    The wise wolf who's pride is her wisdom isn't so sharp as drunk.

  19. #159
    So long as warriors, paladins, DKs, mages, and warlocks exist in WoW, there will be swords and sorcery.

  20. #160
    Quote Originally Posted by Kazela View Post
    So long as warriors, paladins, DKs, mages, and warlocks exist in WoW, there will be swords and sorcery.
    That's not really what the sword and sorcery genre is about, though. Think stories like Conan or The Witcher. Suffice to say that WarCraft, not just WoW, has never been Sword and Sorcery, so there's nothing to return to anyway.

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