keighley getting put on blast for the game awards again. i’m glad i don’t watch it live because it’s a 3 and a half hour show mostly with advertisements
the devs acceptance speeches were 30 seconds long before they got drowned out by music and a teleprompt telling them to wrap it up tears of the kingdom director has 30 seconds to give his speech while it also has to be translated, unreal
meanwhile kojima gets like 10 minutes to talk about his new game which is great, but i thought this was an awards show not E3
i’m not sure why anyone was expecting them to talk about the ridiculous amount of lay offs in the industry, geoff’s relevance and ability to deliver his shows is entirely reliant on his relationship with these huge developers, and lambasting them or even alluding to how bad things are puts that at risk
edit: oh and also sven from baldurs gate 3 intended to announce the drop of the xbox version of the game if they won an award but his 30 second timeslot didn’t allow it lmao
Yes, but that can also be the creative narrative process for creating the story. I can imagine the intention being that each team got the prompt and had their own freedom to come up with what went down to tell the story of war propaganda and you cannot actually be sure at what’s the truth or what wasn’t.
It’s what I meant with fumbling the bag - and like you mentioned in the linked post - players are used to having what they see be the truth, or at the very least have some sort of neutral viewpoint (not necessarily told by the neutral writing team which I assume was moreso for the Heart of Azeroth/raid stuff) that does tell you the objective truth. Used to be the Chronicles for that purpose, but then they got funky with that as well.
like making him wrap it up is so gross, dude was speedrunning what shoulda been a highlight of his career just so they could have show another ad. Super gross.
The issue with this is that they did it like 1000x better in Pandaria, so this just isn’t a scenario anyone can believe because if this was the case how did it end up being such a clustersuck and mishmash of different themes with absolutely no coherent throughline of thought.
I’m not entirely sure (and I’m starting to sort of forget specific facts about past expansions), but wasn’t Pandaria moreso told objectively about what’s going on - as Lintian said, what you saw was the truth - but it was the Sha influencing you/other characters to do things you usually wouldn’t do/go too far?
I don’t think there were ‘no coherent throughline of thought’, you mentioned Brennadam as an example. That to me sounds like the creative teams were told to write a story about the Kul Tiran stories and atrocities the other side would have done, and the really good things your side did. And thus we got the clustersuck, as that very often is what comes out of war propaganda - one side demonizing the other and making themselves look better.
The problem with that line of storytelling in my opinion is really just that it’ll ever only work for literally the adventurer who has beaten the Light King and brought down N’zoth and so on, as the immersive experience told was how the player character has the truth twisted to them. It creates a massive headache for roleplayers trying to unravel the story to know what to state as fact, as a lot of the propaganda might not have even been public knowledge to the entire world.
And Blizzard hasn’t really made any effort to showcase that happening. The way you can use BfA lore would just be hearsay of characters who went there and thus continue propagandizing, not using an encyclopedia to state facts. You literally can’t say that ‘oh yeah Alliance did X and Horde did Y’, as that’d require your RP character to have been in the role of the unnamed adventurer Player Character, who takes the quest from the questgiver and the questing experience thus becomes a telling of the story from the questgiver’s perspective.
Peeve, albeit a complex one; can’t see decent info or feedback on Rogue Trader as there’s a deluge of people attacking Owlcat for being a St Petersberg/Rus company.
Which… ok, yeah. Like, I get it, believe me.
On the other, I’m pretty sure some businesses didn’t have the scope to get the heck out of dodge when the time came, and I’m relatively certain it’s more murky grey than The Internet would like to rage about?
I was initially going to say that I thought Owlcat had left russia, and even if not, their games seem to(especially Wotr) to be very LGBTQ+ inclusive, which doesn’t strike me as very pro-regime.
However, allegedly the stuido’s lead cinematic artist was actively posting slurs and negative remarks about Ukranians back in 2017 & the executive producer did business stuff related to the occupation of Crimea in 2014.
Allegedly Owlcat is shutting down any discussion on it currently and their only statement in regards to both previous stuff and the war is from 2022 saying they “want to avoid politics” and will not be commenting on it.
I don’t know if any of this is actually true though, because as I said, until I googled now, I thought they were not even in Russia anymore and based on other stuff I’ve seen+their games they’ve seemed friendly.
So my tinfoil hat theory (which I think is entirely reasonable given Blizzard’s track record) is that the lack of cohesion in the story was not deliberate, but rather was a result of lack of communication between teams and of last-minute plot rewrites, which they then tried to retroactively pass off as an intentional case of unreliable narration.
This is one the biggest thing I’ve had issues with in regards to Blizzard lately, but also in general.
I really dislike the notion of that admitting mistakes is wrong or somehow bad. No, I’d honestly respect them a whole lot more if they openly said that “Yeah, no we messed up here” or “yeah we forgot this bit of lore, we made a mistake” etc instead of trying to spin things.
There used to be a lot more communication from writers about what worked and what didn’t, like acknowledging they mishandled Garrosh’s story because of lack of communication. There was Ask CDev in Cataclysm, which smoothed over rough patches of lore despite the answers being obviously written after the fact. Heck, Chronicle was a monumental effort to unify the mess of retcons accumulated over the years into a consistent narrative of cause and effect. When I read Chronicle 1, it gave me hope that maybe things would be different from that point on.
Good news: Ion and the gameplay teams have been doing a lot of interviews recently talking about past mistakes, messing up and admitting that maybe they shouldn’t just have been trying to keep things the same for decades but instead make something new and fresh and their own rather than preserving the gameplay rules of the 2004 dev team.
Bad News: Rumours abound on the grapevine from people with sources at Blizzard saying that a lot of people (even in Blizz) are very unhappy with the story team because they aren’t getting this new message of admitting mistakes and trying to move past them and interacting more with the community.
The actual timeline of what happens when in Stormsong (particularly for the Horde and the outpost there) is a complete mess, so miscommunication on the story team’s part does not surprise me in the least
They have been doing that with Season of Discovery at least.
I’m not getting that from the article, at least from the start where they mention Stormsong. It states their original vision for Stormsong was not what they hoped for and then took this angle. It explains why they’d fumble the bag, but not entirely disproves what I said either. It could be that their original vision was something entirely different while still attempting to use the reliable narrator thing through.
I don’t have the time to scavenge through the entire article right now so correct me if I’m wrong. But, y’know, I also said that the process of creation for the story required no communication between teams.
I guess it’s also important to mention that when I did it on Horde side (I think I did), I didn’t really dig that deep into everything, my tinfoil hat theory is mostly made from my experience from Alliance POV.
Low-key sus of this if only because of the worry that ‘admitting mistakes’ can be anything from lore inaccuracies to the tone of story being told. I can see this being story dev unwilling to admit mistakes wrt to Shadowlands lore being extremely bad and unpopular with the fanbase- and why Danuser got the axe - which is BAD…
and story devs unwilling to change their new direction of WoW storytelling that is more inclusive wrt representation and whatnot (or Dragonflight’s stories being more grounded and Warcraft-y feeling while some people would want larger stakes and return to cosmic stories etc), which is GOOD.
I genuinely hope WoW storytelling moving forwards stays at the very least the same like it was in Dragonflight (and some aspects of Shadowlands), where you do have more explicit representation. Now with their China (and Russian) market supposedly gone that argument against representation shouldn’t really hold any water any more either.
Give me more questgivers like the two drakonid researches at start of Waking Shores. I get concerns over the excessive Disney-feel to the current stories being told, and that can absolutely be toned down without having representation as collateral. (It’s really funny to see people present representation as examples of how Disney-fied WoW has become.)
Honestly, while I get the “Disneyfied friendship-is-magic” criticisms of the Dragonflight story, and I admit they could have done it better, I’m willing to cut the writers some slack.
The way I see it, the themes of Dragonflight are renewal, healing, and second chances. “Look, we started on the wrong note and we thought we had good reasons because we didn’t have the knowledge we have now. Could we start again?” The optimistic tone and the grounded setting were intentional choices, and the writers have been refreshingly open about this. It’s an intentional departure from the “too bleak, stopped caring” and “too cosmic, too abstract to comprehend the stakes” feel of Shadowlands.
The execution could have been done better, much better. I agree with this. But at least I can see a coherent theme and tone behind this. I can see what the writers were trying to do, which is more than I can say about BfA or Shadowlands.
It’s the same reason I’m willing to cut Andromeda slack despite the faulty execution, whereas the main plot of Mass Effect 3 (apart from the krogan and quarian/geth arcs) makes me want to puke. I’d rather have writers try to execute a theme and fail, than simply string together empty Epic Moments that, taken as a whole, don’t say anything.
And to put the tinfoil hat on again, if the writers have been resistant to ‘admitting mistakes’ - especially if it’s criticism of the tonal shifts and focus on renewal etc, the follow-up trilogy of expansions are building on Dragonflight if the initial press is to be believed.
Dragonflight is going to be the story for new players moving forwards, they’re going to level 10-60 in Dragonflight (and who knows what exactly it will be like for TWW, Midnight, Last Titan). I understood it as Dragonflight will be the starting zone and will stay as the starting zone.
It’s a very bold gamble, as it’s inherently meant to replace the old Classic, including themes and stories being told. So if that’s the case, yeah - you sort of have to be resistant to making changes to how Dragonflight’s story was told, as you’re now in jeopardy of the next several expansions.
So to somewhat summarize, the old Warcraft is in the past, you can play that if you wish through Classic servers (and with Cataclysm classic you’ll even get the ‘new’ Classic zones, now to be considered Classic), and the new Warcraft - thus New Classic, is going to be Dragonflight onwards.
In a way, I sort of welcome the change, as several stories of WoW ended up being recitations of old ones (f.e. BfA was just revamped MoP that was revamped Classic etc), and funnily enough the cinematics in BfA spoke about wanting to break the cycle and whatnot. It’s time for new stories, and we just gotta hope they’ll be good.
tears of the kingdom director has 30 seconds to give his speech while it also has to be translated, unreal
