I queued up for the temporary 2-man dungeon in FF14.
And then the gods made this teamup happen. Glorious.
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You could fix basically everything about them conceptually by having them be⌠literally just another faction of titans, maybe a bit older. Like greek myth titans are to olympian deities - fundamentally the same order of being just older.
Having weird cosmic world shapers is fine and can even be a cool element in a fantasy setting, itâs the constant escalation of stakes that is the issue imo.
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Establishing the Eternal Ones as deceased Titans and not including the First Ones at all would have tied things in reasonably well, at least compared to what we were given.
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Or even just⌠titans who lived in the shadowlands. Theyâre magic space cloud people, they can do what they want.
Nah, I like the idea that theyâre tied to the life/death cycle in the same way as everyone else. When their time is up, they pass on, but because their souls were so powerful in life, they were able to forge their own realms in the Shadowlands. Titans just be compulsive architects.
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You know what would have improved Zereth Mortis for me?
Turn it into an âunfinishedâ death realm. Something that isnât fully formed yet where you can see (and hear) the building blocks of the whole thing. Keep the building blocks vague.
There
Nice
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It would also have clearly linked the Jailer/Primusâs Domination magic with the Titansâ Order magic, which would feed into the âthe Titans subjugated Azerothâ theme of the Primalists
[also âOrder + Death = Dominationâ is a neat theme]
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Domination magic being a spinoff of order magic, oppressive ordering taking to the extreme, would have been an interesting twist.
But instead itâs mostly use for, well, âdominationâ and spiky armored mobs.
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Domination magic sounds like something from a pulpy, smutty fanfic. I refuse to recognise Shadowlands as anything other than a fever dream.
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Yes, thatâs a major issue.
But the problem is the one above: they are detached from Azeroth. They are the titansâ makers, how would we explore them through Azeroth, in such a way that we perceive them as tied to Azeroth, when they are clearly beyond a world-orderer scale? Itâs their whole thing, after all.
Another problem is that theyâre written in a way which looks like a titan reskin (Zereth Mortis is very much akin to Sholazar Basin, and F.O. they are very much giving a role and form to everyone, thus, an âorderâ, starting from metal-like creatures and engines, then moving down to fleshy beings). Or, even worse, they are hi-tech Xelânaga people using robot/iphone machinery to create the universe (and do a really bad job while theyâre at it). So, to me, that feels a cheap way of the new writers to say; âthis is my narrative now: I want to be done with the old!â.
But a third issue is; they come out of nowhere. The cosmology was already there and itâs not like it hasnât been rewritten multiple times but there were several things that remained fixed in the universe: Sargeras was the ultimate bad guy, the titans were responsible for the shaping of Azeroth, Old Gods are dangerous eldritch creatures that predated the titansâ ordering of Azeroth. The cosmic scale was set, and just arriving all of a sudden and retconning all that, well, itâs just disrespectful towards the 20+ years during which the game made all of this stuff.
Now all of a sudden, the First Ones promise to change it all! Their introduction doesnât do justice to the previous narrative. Furthermore, it retcons a lot of things in a lazy way: we know they have a design for each of these forces, seemingly, and there is an outer threat which all the cosmic forces are scared of (but for some reason, instead of working together, they want to destroy all others before this new conflict because reasons).
And so far, what weâve got about it all are a bunch of vague whispers that could be about anything. âA world divided is not ready for what is to comeâ is basically the laziest form of telling rather than showing. Itâs so vague that most people have likely realized that NâZoth - who said something like that, apparently - wasnât speaking about Death but this new power looming on the horizon about⌠when the Devs said that during the latest interview.
Now, seeing how it has seemingly a bad start and a bad concept, a new question arises: can we count on them doing better in the future with what theyâre building? As the bar is low, they can do better, but the question should be read as: is Blizzard a trustworthy story-teller?
You can look at the past and note how most of the time, a lot of these narrative devices that were used to make the fanbase speculate about the lore have been cheap one-liners that can be read as basically anything, and often were plot threads that led absolutely nowhere (Volâjinâs resurrection, the whispers of Ilâginoth, etc).
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My brain has simply decided that Zovaal was the first Titan to die (soon followed by the others), and Domination magic is the art of imposing the Arcaneâs Order onto the magic of Death.
Iâd still rather none of it ever happened, but thatâll do.
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The Titans learned the important lesson that order is important for shaping the world (and constant elemental infighting doesnât let anything grow), but Order has to eventually end and you have to let your creation grow outside of your expectations lest you stunt it
Immortal within the realm of Death, Zovaal did not learn that lesson
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Did the titans learn that, or did they just get punked before they could become a problem?
they say that ever since learning their spoopy powers came from some handsome squidward looking robot this can be heard from Acherus nearly daily
(7) Yakuza OST - Baka Mitai (ă°ăăżăă) Kiryu full version - YouTube
You mean to imply the adventures of gothmommy and her new bulky prison tat bf wasnât that on some level?
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Pair it with a few weird and very suspect tweets from a certain CDEV and i believe it.
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Weird and oxymoronic. Shouldâa made winter queen the true goddess of death who dies regularly and is reborn as part of the eternal cycle and Ardenwealdâs theme of reincarnation.
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Warhammer joy but also peeve; someone mailed me a spare helm for my Demon steed Lord, and it looks perfect.
The peeve; I want another one to kitbash onto my lord on foot, so him, the steed and Karadrak (big, angry armour lizard) lord are all the same. But theyâre a real nuisance to come by, bar asking around :<
wait WAIT
we could flavour all the healthy realms of Death as a cycle of death and rebirth
Bastion: through acts of devotion of service, a worthy person eventually learns the truth - that they need to kill the Archon and take their place
Maldraxxus: your afterlife here is short and brutal, but the strongest rise up to form an army with a single purpose - keep the Void and other outside influences out
Ardenweald: if you know even a little lore about fae courts this is obvious
Revendreth: you could do some kind of gothic tragedy here where people absorb the power but also the sins of others, eventually becoming so terrible that they themselves are cast into the Maw
the Maw in a healthy place then becomes a place where your personality and sins are stripped from your soul, leaving a fresh one which can then be returned to the world of the living
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You know, normally Iâd be like âUrgh, theyâre resurrecting a villain -again-?â but in the case of Nâzoth⌠honesty Iâd welcome a âHaha, Nyâalotha was merely a setback.â sort of narrative where he only made us -think- we killed him. Given that with the current expansion, ties to the Old Gods seem far from over. ( And the world the Primalists want is a world ruled by the Old Gods even if they conveniently leave that out or seem to have forgotten that this elemental-ruled world had itâs own masters.)
That and Nâzothâs appearance was just so⌠unsatisfactory⌠and short, to me. I daresay that goes for Yogg-Saron and Câthun aswell, beings that could have easily earned their own expansion but instead were always there to act as secondary antagonist to the true expansion villain. ( Okay in Vanilla there was no clear expansion villain unless youâd count Kelâthuzad as one). But in BfA, I always felt that they tried to cram too many stories into one expansion.
Kulâtiras and Zandalar and a faction war could have been their own expansion, followed by Nazjatar ( as a fully fledged continent) and Azshara shenanigans, which would -then- lead into the freeing of Nâzoth, whoâd then get a whole expansion to himself to assault Azeroth and work out his own plans. And weâd skip Shadowlands.
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