[SPOILERS] Eternal Palace - New Cinematic

Argent Dawn
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Sneak peak into the next raid: Siege of Thunder Bluff…

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Perfection.

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If I force a meme hard enough maybe someone out there will finally tolerate me.

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Let’s not get carried away now. You are playing the least popular race in the game, lest you forget. :octopus:

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somebody hold my ear rings while i tear this dorks weave out

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elf please

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[pumped up kicks begins to play]

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No, and that’s exactly why I wont be detailed.

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Up until the really egregious stuff, that’s how it looked across the lore and story - that she, in her amoral and cold-hearted way, did care about her people.

There was a wonderful drawing by Trashboat of Sylvanas looking at her people and saying, “Cursed to undeath. What a miserable existence.” Second panel is the Forsaken chanting her name, 'wooo dark lady’s. Third panel is Sylvanas again saying, “If anything ever happened to them I’d kill everyone in this room and then myself”, referencing Rosa from Brooklyn 99. That’s how she cared.

All that’s changed is that we’ve seen that, “to me, this Horde is worth saving” was probably a lie.

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Going back to the wc3 era and early WoW that was also exactly how it was, just not how it looked. Her central motivation then was to fight for/with those who were shunned by the world, and now without purpose due to breaking free from the lich king’s control, hence why the name “forsaken” was adopted for them in the first place. They were outcasts, but outcasts together.

I’ve said it before, but I feel like her story went wonky after Wotlk, the first bad move was to ressurect her and give her Val’kyrs. Her built up story concluded with Wotlk and it would have been a fitting end for her as well had she still killed herself but not haven gotten ressed.

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I enjoyed the Cataclysm dynamic (with the exception of the two times blizzard dipped its toes into proper swearing), but Wrath would have been a good time to close that story.

I am intrigued to see where it goes from here, all the same. I used to join along with the BAD AWFUL TERRIBLE NO GOOD STORY BLIZZARD SUCKS NOTHING WILL BE GOOD crowd but honestly that kind of relentless pessimism just ruins any enjoyment I could gain from the story that I’m experiencing now.

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For me personally, Im just kinda curious to see how it ends. BfA hasnt had a pull for me in the terms of “omg what happens next”.

And regarding the whole “bad writing” bit, I am very mixed. As certain zones and quests show, and has done for years, there are talented writers at Blizzard. They tend to overall(with a couple of misstakes) make very compelling and honestly exciting smaller stories, such as zone-quest chains and dungeons.

What I personally feel that they -completly- fall apart on is their greater narrative, the overarching expansion story/stories, and the big epic cosmic storylines. These go from just decent to something i geniuenly feel to be -awful-, like very much so. And just going from interviews with the top-guys at Blizzard/WoW who also seem to be the ones in the charge of the big stories, the problem honestly seem to be ego. They see themselves as -masters- of writing, worth awards and on par with the greatest writers in history, and therefor can’t do -anything- wrong, and are completly unable to take criticism. We see and saw this in the Q&A’s and lore interviews for BfA with Ion and the other bigshots, where they -only- brought up gameplay, or postive questions, and spent a majority of those sessions to praise eachother for their amazing work. And in interviews when they did get questioned, they dodged everything, or gave anwsers such as “players will see, we got good stuff going on” or “well they are wrong, they need to stop being so impatient” etc etc.

so TL:DR, Blizzard got some -really- good writers and good writing, but that is put into smaller zones and questlines, while the same old, honestly -bad- writers/leads keep the major spotlight for themselves for ego boost.

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A lot of it will be that the gameplay/cinematic beats are locked in ahead of time, and the job of the writers will be to create a narrative that surrounds it.

I cannot stress just how common this is in video game writing, particularly in huge budget ones where multiple different departments will all be working on things separately from each other.

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You’re right, and I think it is mostly common knowledge at this point that Blizzard works like that as well, yeah. They officially stated it back at a Blizzcon around Wotlk, when Jesse Cox asked about a giant tentacle thing inside Gundrak.

After a quick joke, they(I think it was Chris Metzen?) said that they had no idea what it was really, and that the way they work is that the world design comes first, primarily out of what the sketch/concept artists think looks cool, and once everything is in place, they write a story around it. And sometimes they forget to include stuff since it was only there because it looked cool.

And as for BfA, we got word quite early that the story was primarily written in three teams that specifically werent/isnt supposed communicate. One for Alliance, one for Horde and one for Magni/neutrals.

And then atop of that, the lead guys write the big story and just kinda excepts everyone else to tie it into whatever they write/decide.

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I just want a new engine, Blizzard. This one is 15 y.o and it is as optimised as american SAM Patriot system

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It runs well on craptops like my own though :frowning: I worry that if they change engine they will do the typical AAA thing and take the biggest, fanciest, most demanding(to play) engine possible.

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This is a big part of it - gotta maximise appeal by having it keep low minimum specs.

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I remember the Gundrak snake. I think he was supposed to be a boss in the larger structure intended to be a Troll Raid, but was eventually cut.

The important thing to note is that any disconnect that happens as a result of that structure is not due to bad writing but bad management. Writers deal with enough nonsense without having a giant forum of gamers piling onto them too.

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That’s the issue. Buying new and better (at least for me) is not making the game run any smoother. Hell, I still get some random FPS drops to 5 from time to time for whatever reason, when ESO on ultra runs just beautifully.

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