I agree the Horde had better characters. Still, aside from Bwonsamdi and Rastakhan, nothing that gave me “oh, this is amazing” vibes.
I found the Horde just had the better deal, throughout.
They had the better questing zones and the story, where they were always outplaying the Alliance in the eventual future.
I did the Alliance War Campaign on the Night Elf Warrior, just because she was half way through it anyway and I thought “well I might as well finish it” and it was so long and boring.
I think the Horde had the edge in this regard because of the Saurfang/Sylvanas loyalist questline, whilst Alliance never had this option. Alliance never had an Anduin/Tyrande loyalist questline.
I mean, I just levelled my Blood Elf Death Knight and I chose to be a Sylvanas loyalist on her because from a visual standpoint, it just made sense.
I do agree though - the War Campaign for both was very dull storytelling. Kudos to them to try and use old zones such as Elwynn and Redridge, but the questlines were very sub-par.
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I mean, considering the rest is made of even more cardboard than Flynn is, yeah. But he doesn’t actually have any interesting qualities of his own, they tried to make him a Han Solo but A: did it poorly and B: forgot that Han Solo was never a compelling character to begin with.
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Well, I think that one of the one of the things that we’ve done in Shadowlands in a lot of different ways is try to really show that Azeroth as a whole represents the inclusiveness of the real world - the diversity of the real world. We’ve spent a lot of time creating the character customization options that you’ve seen go into the game and, you know, humans in particular.
It’s really awesome now that players will be able to create characters that more represent themselves, or the diversity of the world, and we’ll see that woven into the populations of places. And part of that also includes the representation for other perspectives on gender or sexuality. And while Warcraft is not a game that’s about those things - it’s a heroic adventure - we want players to be able to see themselves reflected in these characters, and a lot of different perspectives, and maybe it’s an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes, rather than just your own.
I think it’s a valuable thing that we show these different perspectives on Azeroth and want to really make clear that, you know, there’s people who sometimes say, “Well, Warcraft is this medieval fantasy game and those kinds of things weren’t talked about in medieval times, so they shouldn’t be in Azeroth,” but I disagree with that.
I think that Azeroth is a world of magic and a world of possibilities, and one of the things that’s really important to know is that, in Azeroth, you can love who you want, you can identify yourself the way that you want, and all of those things are possibilities. We just want the game to be able to reflect that through it storylines, and through its character customization options, and we’re really excited about that.
Homophobia is non-canon in the Warcraft universe, as now confirmed by Lead Narrative Designer Steve Danuser. We all already knew, but it’s great to see it in writing.
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Wtf I love Danuser now
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Absolutley love how he shut down the “But Azeroth is a medival setting, so muh homophobia, sexism and racism makes sense!”
Gonna bookmark this and reference it if someone brings it up again from now on.
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Lord Bayerleyn despairs to the Heavens as his realistic medieval fantasy is dashed on the rocks and he’s unable to discriminate against LGBTQ+ characters
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Bold of you to assume he’s gonna accept something as feeble as the word of a Lead Narrative Designer.
Heck, it’s bold of you to assume he has the necessary reading comprehension.
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I suppose if he doesn’t acknowledge gnomes or misconduct allegations, he won’t acknowledge this
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Racism does make sense. It’s literally the foundation of warcraft. Orcs bad because they big dumb and green and from a foreign place.
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I think it’s more speciesism v racism. The former, yeah. People can hate orcs, dwarves, whatever. But it’s putting a lid on the occasional human on human racism I’ve seen every so often, which is for the best.
Also homophobic characters are now literally head canon. This isn’t just top kek, this is A S C E N D E D kek.
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As Darianuth said, it’s more specism. But you have a sad amount of people who diss members of their own race(Often humans) based on skin-colour, which is not on.
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Sadly, second to the original topic of this thread, gnomophobia is the most rampant sickness amongst the Argent Dawn community.
Jokes aside though it’s lovely to see Blizzard confirming the stance that so many of us were already taking. Cheers to you, Danuser.
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Gnomes are just comedic relief and sidekicks.
And are ugly little things.
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It makes me genuinely very happy to see leading figures in the dev / story teams begin to make it very clear that Azeroth isn’t a place where people have to worry about their personal identities. I don’t pay enough attention to who’s who in Blizz to care much about Danuser, but what he said was really great.
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That’s honestly pretty based.
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Steve Danuser is /our guy/
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Nathanos is a bi switch.
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First of all; I do agree with Danuser’s confirmation. Warcraft’s always been a fantasy lore and we can all be happy about it taking on more representation and slowly trying to shed itself of harmful themes.
I however have a question on this topic: ‘Do you think there should be some kind of group or organisation that actively seeks to promote inclusiveness, such as writing articles about it? Should, say, Argent Archives have more talk about sexuality?’
I think this topic is important. In fact, it’s very important. Everyone should be able to feel included. At the same time, I personally don’t always want to discinclude difficult topics from my roleplay. I haven’t done so, but if I was to ever portray homophobia in character, I’d want to make it clear that it’s an antagonist who isn’t hating others out of a twisted sense of what is his norm - they’d hate others because they’re themselves outside the norm and what the canon clearly puts as the norm. Yet, hurting someone out of character would be the last thing I’d ever want to do, with such character, even when delving into tough subjects.
And contemplating on that, in light of reading this topic, I find myself wondering if there could be a way of for example writing a guide on this, or ‘why repeating a trope is usually just repeating a trope, not inventive’ and ‘how you cannot actually tell people to just opt out of certain kind of roleplay, you yourself are responsible for being respectful - and the opposite of being respectful is disrespectful, which saying ‘just ignore it then’ is’.
As Perroy put it, perhaps inexperienced roleplayers are more prone to doing something harmful - but it does not change that it’s harmful. There should be a guide, or a summary, somewhere, on this. Is there? If not, why not? Homophobia in roleplay needs to cease, but how to make it cease?
I am sorry, I guess that ended up being several questions.
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