World of Warcraft: Dragon Desperation

[Dr1f7]

*nasal nerd virgin loser voice*
HEY GUYS IT'S THE 'RED ROGUE GAMER' HERE

 

[Talby]

Streamers should be hunted for sport.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Streamers should be hunted for sport.

Hemet Nesingwary should've a quest just for this.!

 

[Garyxeao88]

Still playing.... Now I'm really into WotLK Classic.

 

[Sykar]

You just have to get used to the idea that the average forum user here not only cares more about the game, but now also better understands the history, setting, tone, and game design of it than the average employee working on it does. That is not hyperbole. It is plainly evident when you listen to the devs talk.

Blizz is one of the reasons why I’m critical of the entire concept of lore. At least until Star Wars, Star Trek, and MCU started falling apart, WoW was the highest profile example of a lore falling apart under the creators of said lore… so new writers never stood a chance.

Honestly I feel that the whole WoW lore situation is similar to Avatar where the guys who get the most credit for writting the series were basically only handling background details and the actual writer responsible for the important parts is forgotten. I suspect something similar happened with Metzen because after WoW his writing literary went down the shitter. In Vanilla the Onyxia and Nefarian story is written as a multi-level plot that is in plain sight from level one but resolves only at level 60 and even then its resolution is not that "Onyxia did it all" but that Onyxia was simply exploiting flaws already present and simply exacerbated them. In TBC he re-wrote the one character explicitly made to be morally ambiguous into a mental muhaha villian and his only explanation for it was "well he went crazy you know". Same in every expansion he has written where it was basically highschooler tier fan-finction(remember green jesus?).

I suspect that a lot of "his" early work was not really his but I do not care enough to figure out who actually did it but I am almost certain it was not Metzen.

This is a recurrent theme with Blizzard. When in doubt, let someone go insane and blame it on "The Old Gods". Creative bankruptcy, thy name is Bizshit!

 

[Myobi]

Still can't get over the god damn pink humanoid dragon things.
It's time to hit the red button. Give birth to Azeroth, nuke the planet and start over...

 

[J1M]

Still can't get over the god damn pink humanoid dragon things.
It's time to hit the red button. Give birth to Azeroth, nuke the planet and start over...

Wait until you see the character art for the shadow priest talent tree.

 

[J1M]

Sykar
mediocrepoet

Each of the talent trees has an iconic character associated in the background of the tree. Well, except Shadow Priest on the PTR, since even Blizzard seemed to think this was too much. Odd, since they went out of their way to make the new dragon race look like something from the furry section of deviant art.

 

[Myobi]

LOL! Light fanatics serving as cover for shadow shit reminds me of trans man serving as cover for woman of the year.

 

[Sykar]

Sykar
mediocrepoet

Each of the talent trees has an iconic character associated in the background of the tree. Well, except Shadow Priest on the PTR, since even Blizzard seemed to think this was too much. Odd, since they went out of their way to make the new dragon race look like something from the furry section of deviant art.

Wait, are they going back to traditional talent trees like they had until Cata came? Or was it Chinamo... errrr Pandaland when they changed the original talent trees?

 

[Kem0sabe]

Sykar
mediocrepoet

Each of the talent trees has an iconic character associated in the background of the tree. Well, except Shadow Priest on the PTR, since even Blizzard seemed to think this was too much. Odd, since they went out of their way to make the new dragon race look like something from the furry section of deviant art.

Wait, are they going back to traditional talent trees like they had until Cata came? Or was it Chinamo... errrr Pandaland when they changed the original talent trees?

Each class now has a general "class" tree and a spec tree, its now impossible to get all the best spec talents with the talent points available, forcing many classes to specialize further. I like the idea, the execution and balance tho, that i need to play to see.

 

[Goddess of Discord]

You just have to get used to the idea that the average forum user here not only cares more about the game, but now also better understands the history, setting, tone, and game design of it than the average employee working on it does. That is not hyperbole. It is plainly evident when you listen to the devs talk.

Blizz is one of the reasons why I’m critical of the entire concept of lore. At least until Star Wars, Star Trek, and MCU started falling apart, WoW was the highest profile example of a lore falling apart under the creators of said lore… so new writers never stood a chance.

Honestly I feel that the whole WoW lore situation is similar to Avatar where the guys who get the most credit for writting the series were basically only handling background details and the actual writer responsible for the important parts is forgotten. I suspect something similar happened with Metzen because after WoW his writing literary went down the shitter. In Vanilla the Onyxia and Nefarian story is written as a multi-level plot that is in plain sight from level one but resolves only at level 60 and even then its resolution is not that "Onyxia did it all" but that Onyxia was simply exploiting flaws already present and simply exacerbated them. In TBC he re-wrote the one character explicitly made to be morally ambiguous into a mental muhaha villian and his only explanation for it was "well he went crazy you know". Same in every expansion he has written where it was basically highschooler tier fan-finction(remember green jesus?).

I suspect that a lot of "his" early work was not really his but I do not care enough to figure out who actually did it but I am almost certain it was not Metzen.

I think a lot of early Warcraft lore, etc., was based on Chris' tabletop experiences with friends who then later became employees of Blizzard. Warcraft itself is (probably) highly-derivative of stuff like Warhammer because that's (probably) actually what they were actually using as a tabletop setting. I have no proof of this whatsoever but I vaguely remember him mentioning it in interviews during WoW's really early popularity. I know for a fact he played a lot of tabletop though.

If any of that is true then the easiest explanation for the game's writing becoming worse is the simple fact that WoW became a massive success. Metzen & Co. had to focus more on keeping the hamster wheel of content turning rather than doing anything overly-creative. Deadlines had to be met; no time to play things out organically and make the setting, characters, etc. believable. Then later when Blizzard became a golem for Activision nobody working on the game played tabletop games (nor cared for video games at all beyond how much money they could make.) You're seeing the end result of that nowadays where WoW has become a platform for shameless rip-offs and alphabet representative B.S. that's slowly tarnishing the brand.

tl;dr I think Metzen actually did come up with the early Warcraft stuff with his chums but as things blew up in scope/budget all the suits, investors, fans, etc. demanded more.

 

[J1M]

Sykar
mediocrepoet

Each of the talent trees has an iconic character associated in the background of the tree. Well, except Shadow Priest on the PTR, since even Blizzard seemed to think this was too much. Odd, since they went out of their way to make the new dragon race look like something from the furry section of deviant art.

Wait, are they going back to traditional talent trees like they had until Cata came? Or was it Chinamo... errrr Pandaland when they changed the original talent trees?

They are putting talent trees back in the game, yes. I wouldn't say they are traditional trees though. Only a handful of nodes are clean passives like +1% Crit.

Most nodes only require one or two points and most nodes either unlock a pruned ability or modify a specific ability.

As Kem0sabe mentioned there is also a class tree that is shared across all specs a class has. In some cases this allows for cross-spec abilities that weren't possible before. (Havoc with sigils for example.) In many cases, the tradeoff seems too high.

People seem pretty happy with the shaman tree, but it highlights the problem other classes have because the reason people like shaman is because they can grab everything they want before running out of points.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

tl;dr I think Metzen actually did come up with the early Warcraft stuff with his chums but as things blew up in scope/budget all the suits, investors, fans, etc. demanded more.

IIRC, Metzen was brought in during the development of WC2. He played no part in WC1.

Also, Metzen is an absolutely shitty writer and worldbuilder long before the franchising took over. His worlds are just lazy ripoffs of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k with some details changed, and his scripts are mind-numbingly stupid and contradict his own worldbuilding. He keeps retconning his own work even during development and this results in garbage continuity as rules change from scene to scene and sometimes within scenes. He’s about as competent as the writers of Rings of Power and She-Hulk tv shows at the best of times. He got lucky and praised because he was writing for video games in the 90s, before people cared about writing in video games.

 

[J1M]

General thoughts on talent trees:

They would be better off with more +2% mastery nodes and fewer cases of chopping an ability into four ranks that need to be purchased to restore current baseline function. (Eye beam, divine steed)

Would be nice if they didn't all try to follow the same format of 3 capstone nodes at the bottom for each. For example, demon hunter has so few abilities that instead of hiding them around the tree the demon hunter trees could have all been passives.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have a hard time buying the "they ripped off Warhammer!" rumor. Warhammer was unheard of here in America during the 90s when Warcraft was made. It wasn't until the 2000s that it began picking up over here. And when you look at the actual lore, Warhammer and Warcraft have pretty much nothing in common with each other. The similarities are in aesthetics, which were not exclusive to Warhammer but were common for 90s fantasy art. Reminds me of Babylon 5 fans always accusing DS9 of being a ripoff of B5 when that was simply the way the genre was heading (space opera was becoming stale, setting it on a space station was a novel idea, this naturally leads to serialized storytelling and war stories, being set exclusively on a space station becomes a limiting factor so a spaceship is added halfway through the show, etc).

 

[mediocrepoet]

I have a hard time buying the "they ripped off Warhammer!" rumor. Warhammer was unheard of here in America during the 90s when Warcraft was made. It wasn't until the 2000s that it began picking up over here. And when you look at the actual lore, Warhammer and Warcraft have pretty much nothing in common with each other. The similarities are in aesthetics, which were not exclusive to Warhammer but were common for 90s fantasy art. Reminds me of Babylon 5 fans always accusing DS9 of being a ripoff of B5 when that was simply the way the genre was heading (space opera was becoming stale, setting it on a space station was a novel idea, this naturally leads to serialized storytelling and war stories, being set exclusively on a space station becomes a limiting factor so a spaceship is added halfway through the show, etc).

Warhammer was absolutely a thing in the 90s in North America, did you spend much time in hobby shops? It was a rich person's game though. I just happened to have friends who were well off who were into that. No one else could afford to even look at it.

And there's actually an interview or two about how Blizzard wanted the Warhammer license and got turned down on it.

e.g. https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161

 

[zapotec]

Yea the Warhammer Grand Tournaments pratically started in US

 

[Tyrr]

I have a hard time buying the "they ripped off Warhammer!" rumor. Warhammer was unheard of here in America during the 90s when Warcraft was made. It wasn't until the 2000s that it began picking up over here. And when you look at the actual lore, Warhammer and Warcraft have pretty much nothing in common with each other. The similarities are in aesthetics, which were not exclusive to Warhammer but were common for 90s fantasy art. Reminds me of Babylon 5 fans always accusing DS9 of being a ripoff of B5 when that was simply the way the genre was heading (space opera was becoming stale, setting it on a space station was a novel idea, this naturally leads to serialized storytelling and war stories, being set exclusively on a space station becomes a limiting factor so a spaceship is added halfway through the show, etc).

Warhammer was absolutely a thing in the 90s in North America, did you spend much time in hobby shops? It was a rich person's game though. I just happened to have friends who were well off who were into that. No one else could afford to even look at it.

And there's actually an interview or two about how Blizzard wanted the Warhammer license and got turned down on it.

e.g. https://kotaku.com/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-5929161

This. And Starcraft is obviously ripped off 40k.

 

[ADL]

Last screenshot

 

[rusty_shackleford]

WoW devs reduced to making poor copies of 15 year old addons and releasing it as official content

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Old but still relevant today. The streamer now plays other games but still hilarious and sums up the situation.
https://youtu.be/-UXk9hLORYE

 

[Sykar]

Well what would you expect of these hacks?

 

[Delterius]

Old but still relevant today. The streamer now plays other games but still hilarious and sums up the situation.
https://youtu.be/-UXk9hLORYE

'log in to confirm your age'

lmao the retail players reported this en masse didn't they

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Old but still relevant today. The streamer now plays other games but still hilarious and sums up the situation.
https://youtu.be/-UXk9hLORYE

'log in to confirm your age'

lmao the retail players reported this en masse didn't they

Probably!! ahahah