[9.2 spoiler] if the Winter Queen

… is a construct, does it mean that her “sister” Elune is a construct too?

We’re all constructs.

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Azeroth is just a game, just like WoW. Enjoy your immersion into the world.

That’s the real reason Elune didn’t save the Night Elves in the Burning of Teldrassil then…I guess a “construct” does not have any real feeling toward inferior beings at all even when it’s worshipped :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

If there was any tiny bit of hope I could cling to, this finally killed it. The story is dead to me. Fitting, I suppose, since it died within the expansion centered around death…

Shame it ended this way. I grew up with the Warcraft universe. But I cannot bring myself to see what it has become…

Rest in peace, World of Warcraft.

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Interesting, because even from the start, we were all constructs.

Humans? Descendants of Vrykul, themselves descendants of Iron Vrykul, titan-forged constructs.
Dwarves? Descendants of Earthen, another titan-forged race.
Gnomes? Descendants of the original Mechagnomes, a titan-forged race.

And the list goes on and on. It’s not surprising the Shadowlands are so very similar to Azeroth.

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Comparing few races to the entire universe and its greatest entities cannot defend this direction the story has taken. You might be indifferent to it, but I cannot be. It has ruined everything for me.

We have been shown far too much. Like Wimbert said, it is as if the world itself is trying to portray itself as the game it is. I resent that.

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You do you. But the story of warcraft has always been full of constructed races, big and small. I mean, the most powerful inhabitants of the planet (the players, who defeated everything thrown our way so far), the majority of them are descendants of constructs. This direction isn’t new, it’s been a part of the lore since about day one.

There is a difference between few mortal races being descended from constructs created by something akin to gods and gods themselves being constructs.

It is clear that we shall not see eye to eye on this though, so let us leave it at that.

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That is not entierly the same.
Humans, dwarves, gnomes and all titan construct were corrupted, grew and evolved, made cultures and such.

These constructs are exactly the same, even in clothing, just unfinished. basicly stating that all these powerful gods have no will or personality of their own, they do not evolve, adapt and change.
they are stated to been made at the begining of time, and in all that time they did not develop enough to think for them selves to even change a wardrobe or adopt new costums.

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“Everything is a construct.” isn’t necessarily a bad story (though WoW’s writing certainly doesn’t have the tools to do ir right). It’s a Matrix moment. Everything we thought was true has to be reexamined. The stuff we thought was important actually isn’t, but there is a whole new world of stuff to get a perspective on out there.

It’s just that after taking the red pill you don’t care about the world you woke up from anymore. And that world is what most players here actually enjoyed. Thank you very much, Blizzard, for inventing the red pill, but I’d very much like to take the blue pill and enjoy the preexisting game world again.

“Your race stems from constrcts” just affects their origin. “The world is a construct” robs it of meaning, and instead tries to shuffle whatever meaning it had over to the world outside of it.

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…and so did the denizens of Shadowlands, apart from the being corrupted part. They grew, made cultures and such. We see them evolve during our adventures in the Shadowlands. Who knows what happened before?

Yet, we see the Archon have a change of heart during our adventures. Just because something is a construct, it doesn’t mean they can’t have a personality, a soul, or that they can’t evolve, adapt, or change. This is a fantasy world. A construct isn’t necessarily a mindless, pre-programmed machine.

We’ve known that many races started off as similar constructs. I don’t see why it’s surprising that more powerful beings than “some mortal races” are, too.

It’s a fantasy world. Why couldn’t a construct have a soul? Why wouldn’t a construct be able to adapt, evolve, and grow, like any other being? How do we know that the constructs weren’t infused with a soul, to begin with? What if that is exactly the difference between a prototype and the final version, the soul?

Well, if you don’t care to actually try to understand the points made, I won’t repeat mine. Have a nice day.

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Your points make zero sense, when we know nothing about the history between the prototypes and the pantheon of death. If the constructs were infused with a soul for example, then they’re no different than any of the mortal races that descend from titan-forged races: the origin of the Pantheon of Death then would be constructs, but the Pantheon itself would be something more, not pure constructs themselves.

My points are about the player experience. I don’t care if that stuff is “possible” within the game world. We’re not talking about things just happening. They are written. It’s a story. Anything is possible. But not every story is a good story. And a story that’s hard to relate to, is doing something very wrong.

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That’s the thing: we don’t know a large part of the story, so we can’t properly judge it yet. All we know is that there exists a prototype of the pantheon of death. What happened between that, and the real ones? We have absolutely no idea.

We know that there’s Zereth Morthis, where afterlives are made. It’s a testing ground of sorts. Do we know how the afterlives differ from the prototypes? Not for certain, for sure. But we do know that many denizens of the Shadowlands do have souls, and are not constructs themselves. It stands to reason that this applies to the Pantheon aswell, and likely most afterlives aswell.

I find that a decent story, and one that’s been part of warcraft lore from the beginning, so nothing really new here, apart from the “big” revelation that it’s not only some mortal races that originate from constructs, one way or the other.

That’s true of course, but if you look at the Dwarves for example they had to come up with the Explorers’ League to slowly unearth the mysteries of their Titan legacy. It has become quite an important part of their lore that some of them are so dedicated to learning about those things. I think it hardly compares with having each new patch unveiling the biggest secrets behind Warcraft’s cosmology, stuff like what is death like, who are the Eternal Ones, who is Elune…

It’s also not about being a construct in itself, it’s about what having this knowledge implies. Most Titan-forged races don’t really care about being Titan-forged (when they know they are, which isn’t always the case). Humans don’t care if they’re descended from Vrykuls. Vrykuls and Giants don’t care if they’re the fleshy versions of Titan constructs, they might even go to war against Watchers and Keepers. Gnomes just do their thing. Nerubians have forgotten about their ties with the Old Gods, and the reveal that Kal’dorei used to be Trolls has had literally zero impact on both races.

Now the things we learn with each passing minute on the Shadowlands ? They all have tremendous impacts both from an ingame perspective and for the player experience. And it doesn’t change anything that the big mysterious guys are now the First Ones - if writers keep on this narrative then even they will get unmasked soon enough. I also couldn’t care less about what the world creating process is in detail : when your house collapses, you don’t care which brick fell first, honestly. You just know that your house collapsed. Here the world-building and sense of immersion is the house basically.

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And do we know whether the Pantheon of Death know their origins? Or if they care? We do not. They might know, and not care. They might not know, and still don’t care. Or they might not know yet, learn about it during 9.2, and evolve, adapt based on that knowledge.

I’m not seeing how it’s bad in any shape or form. It’s Just Another Way of explaining one’s origins. Whether one’s ancestors are constructs infused with a soul, or affected by the curse of flesh, or whatever other origins they have, it’s just another origin story, like the rest.

So what if the afterlives were first prototyped? Why does it matter? Every worthwhile creator will do a prototype first, which may or may not resemble the final piece.

Let me give you a real life comparison!

My day job is writing keyboard firmware, but I dabble in designing keyboards too, for myself, to sate my curiosity. I first take a piece of cardboard, draw the layout I had in mind, and see if I like it. If I do, I build a model out of modelling clay, to test height, shape and whatnot, a form that’s closer to the end goal than a piece of cardboard. After that, I go and design a 3D-printable thing, and send it off to print, usually out of some kind of plastic. When that’s done, I add the electronics (hand-wired, usually, no PCB) and type on it for a while. If I end up liking that, I ask a good friend of mine to build me a wood frame to replace the plastic (I do love the feel of wood), I design a PCB and soldier it all together properly - no more wires!

Now, during this process, I had cardboard, modelling clay and plastic prototypes - just empty shells. Two of those didn’t have any electronics at all, and even the third, which was fully functional, had electronics that have nearly nothing in common with what the final version will have.

Afterlives are infinitely more complex than a keyboard, so I’d think it safe to assume that creating them takes many iterations, and lots of different prototypes. Lot of them will resemble the final version in various ways, but they’d be just that: prototypes. The final versions might not be constructs at all: like the final version of my keyboard has no cardboard nor modelling clay in it, either. What if these afterlife prototypes just serve as prototypes? And once its decided that it’s good to go, they’re just brought to life. Construct no more, but a living entity.

Truth is, we currently have no knowledge about these things. The Eternal Ones might know their own origins, they just don’t think its our business. All that was revealed is that even the Eternal Ones were created somehow, and there are entities even more powerful than them. Big news? Hardly.

everything is artifical nothing is real even the void are just a computer virus trying to destroy the azeroth save file :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s okay to like the story.

That said, I personally have had a problem with Shadowlands as a setting from the get-go as it forcibly recontextualize so much of what came before it and in its wake it just raises more questions, and the few answers we do get are not satisfying.

Azeroth may be a fantastical place but it borrows its physical laws from our reality, which is good as it helps immerse us into the world. If water isn’t wet, if the atmosphere holds no breathable air, if rocks are soft to the touch etc. then the world loses its believeability and it becomes harder for us to immerse ourselves into it. The creation myth of Azeroth is not as egregious as this “reality factory” is. Religion is not a foreign concept to us on earth and many different cultures throughout time have created their own whimisical creation myths – and whether we choose to believe in them or not is a personal question. At the end of the day there are many questions we simply can’t answer, and the answers provided by religion may provide comfort to some.

The Titans are (or at least were) a creation myth and I don’t particularly like it when Blizzard provides answers to aspects of the world that really should be shrouded in mystery. I don’t want to “solve” Azeroth. It is the conflicts within the confines of the world’s rules that interest me. A story about two rivalling goblin cartels set entirely in Azeroth has more good storytelling potential than the unraveling of how the entire universe was created. Because the latter will inevitably just lead to a chain of question that goes something like this:

If A was created by B, and B was created by C, then what created C? Was it D? And if it was D, then what created D? Was it E? And so on. Eventually you’ll reach a point where the denizens of Azeroth become so self-aware that they are in a game created by game developers that the writers will insert their actual selves into the world as the übergods of Azeroth.

I honestly don’t think that it can lead to good storytelling in the long run and it really does diminish everything that came before it.

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