It’s just unsuitable that the powers of the Void, supposed to twist and corrupt just as much as Fel does, somehow turns the servants of the -void- into creatures ressembling Titanic constructs around the face.
But yeah, market dpt has a hand in this.
The Bug’s Life Nerubian designs in the new trailer were already awful before the Xal’atath transformation. I would never have guessed these things were supposed to be Nerubians and not a new race if it weren’t for the lore cues and external confirmation that they are.
If you compare these:
To these:
They’re obviously still just stylised human faces without noses. 0/10, decidedly not kino.
It seems it’s only Ansurek and Neferess who are designed this way, and that the unnamed Nerubian masses in the cinematic still have their potato heads and arachnoid mandibles up until they’re transformed. I guess that past that point they functionally are a new race, just a much less interesting one. The whole time I was watching it I was going “man, please don’t make the Nightborne/the Venthyr a third time, who asked for that?”
can’t wait until we have to become friends with them!
Oh an interesting looking new race? Monstrous by design aaaand they are turned into elves.
Why do they look humanoid? Nerubians are specifically an Old God race, they’re supposed to not look anything like a titan creation aka “normal”.
Ah, but you see, the Void is unpredictable and does not conform to a singular truth or vision. You thought you knew what it could do to living flesh?
WHAMMO!!! Expectations subverted! The Void does it again!
Shocking for everyone for miles around, something in Argent Dawn’s got me a little irked.
Argent Dawn has talked a lot about ‘bubble’ roleplay to a point where the term has lost all meaning, to the point where anybody with any kind of requirement or vetting process to join a guild or community, no matter how small, gets that stuck to their name; all while ignoring something that, honestly, kills my immersion and enjoyment of roleplay far more than ‘bubble roleplay.’
A lack of object permanence is the only way I can put it in short form. Acting as if the game world is as it is, where the distance between kingdoms is a few minutes at most; as if characters, or entire realms, factions, and many things more, do not exist in a place as long as there are no roleplayers there, and thus, acting like their characters are either self-aware that they are roleplay characters, or played by folks with either a lack of object permanence, or a self-imposed one out of fear of being called a bubble roleplayer.
In the best of scenarios? It makes Azeroth feel infinitely small, and every effort to tell a story within it absolutely useless. After all, what are ships, magic, and any kind of other means of transporation worth for, if according to the average character in the realm, the difference between riding a dragon from Booty Bay to Silvermoon and the same but with a horse is a difference of perhaps ten minutes in the worst case scenario?
In the worst of scenarios? It enables some of the worst roleplay I’ve seen in a while.
Self-awareness that they are in a videogame where a race or faction has less numbers, or a relatively inactive roleplay scene in the large scale of things, and going as far as ignoring their entire existence in-universe, because if it isn’t described in a raid warning (and forgotten in the next event), or roleplayed by other players, why should one care about the world they write on?
After all, if no one roleplays in Redridge, what would impede me from making an orcish clan taking over the entirety of the region bar Lakeshire? Besides the fact that it would be vomitive for anyone with any degree of love for the setting, I mean.
This is just a single example of the many, many things it enables. I am sure that anyone who has played in the realm for a while can think of more than just a few examples of the genuinely mind-numbing stuff this line of writing thought (or a lack thereof) has spawned.
The fact that this realm has demonised creativity instead of folks with a total lack of respect for either roleplay or the setting they write on baffles me to such a degree that I lack the words in this language to fully describe what it makes me feel, and makes me question why some of you go through the effort of paying 15 whole bucks a month to write on a setting you hate, only to write characters that aren’t even characters.
Marketing, I imagine. There’s a case to be made that they’re more expressive like this (a lot of the ‘shots’ in the cinematic are of faces), but doing this sort of storyline with them in the first place was at odds with how alien they fundamentally are (or were) in concept.
On second watch, the scene with the beggars and the guardsmen is especially odd because Nerubians are cannibalistic - they eat their own young to survive when resources are scarce, like they did when the Scourge came. Nothing was gained from turning them into (more) reskinned Nightfallen here, the shoe just doesn’t fit.
You mean like the Zandalari used to be cannibalistic? It’s pretty safe to say that this is just removed from lore.
This is a topic that we often discussed in our premiere bonkposting roleplay group and in my mind, I think that this phenomena continues to become more widespread which in turms makes me less and less interested in roleplay and interacting with people who don’t really seem to understand what it means.
I always default this to a general lack of care about immersing oneself or specifically caring about the immersion of others. The biggest factor of this is that roleplayers tend to treat the roleplay world as the true reality of Azeroth because I guess imagination is a great hurdle to overcome.
“oh I see no roleplay characters in x city, that means its dead”
“npc guards don’t exist, only the ones played by players do”
etc etc
It always irked me too how, while on one hand we pretty much blacklist the extreme roleplayers and their d-egen antics, on the other the roleplay community at large is more than willing to acknowledge them as part of the setting. Oh yes, goldshire was always a brothel filled with naked draenei babes, don’t you know?
Certain groups/guilds/communities foster these idiotic and anti-immersion mindsets and poison the minds of other, potentially ignorant roleplayers. A lot of us tend to learn by following example, after all.
I mean it’s very disappointing that the process of the [dreadly sounding] quality control has been demonised so much on this server and I really don’t understand how it can ever be a good thing. In fact, I find myself less enthusiastic about the projects who don’t do this because it tells me that the person behind the guild/community/whatever doesn’t really care about providing a platform for a coherent and immersive experience (eg: the situation with guard guilds in stormwind mentioned before and how pretty much anyone or anything can be in it)
Probably. My (never charitable) expectations are that when the expansion comes out, we’ll be helping some faction of conveniently detoothed humanlike Nerubians stage a revolution, and the alien ones we worked with in WotLK will have functionally ceased to exist.
I think the Klaxxi mantid retained their Other-ness well through befriending the player character back in MoP. They make all of this look so unnecessary by comparison.
Well The Nerub faction we work with is the part who is against ascension from what I know.
Spoilered for TWW spoiler.
I bring spoilers.
It seems to be the other way around.
I know we’ll be siding with the ‘non-ascended’ Nerubians against the ones Xal’atath is manipulating. My point was that the former already bear no resemblance to Nerubians as previously depicted in the Warcraft setting, and I know we aren’t getting those back.
Ooooh gotcha.
Maybe something like this could have worked as being readable for expressions in a cinematic (you need some base parts to read as somewhat human for us to read emotions on a face) while retaining more of the spidery bits?
Roughly based on some of the facial features we have on the older models.
Demoniaco has heard my own bonkposting about this a hundred times before, but yeah. ‘Bubble RP’ is a natural, appropriate response to people roleplaying things that are distractingly incongruent with the setting. I’m not sorry for ignoring people who don’t respect my immersion and never will be.
I mean, I wish the people we’re commenting on would do it too. Play your zany, whacky and kooky modern elf characters, spam someone with your intrusive walkietalkies or have western duels with your 50. cal desert eagles for for the love of God, do it in a private setting, don’t wave it in front of a stranger’s face in a public setting.
(example) I don’t really care if you use Gnocaine in your DM’d guild/private event, but if my character gets approached by some hobo elf and asks him if he wants to buy some, I’m going to get pretty upset and maybe cringe a little too.
I mean, this is simple courtesy and some degree of respect for your fellow roleplayer, it’s not asking for that much.
People forget that this is a High Fantasy setting.
Not only that, it isn’t Eorzea where you can cyberpunk your way through a brothel while still getting called ‘my liege’ by a scantily clad paladin.
The world is made small by small people with big egos who parade around the CAPITAL CITY of the Alliance shooting fully-automatic gold-plated uzis at civilians. “Bubble RP”. The concept is flawed.
You ‘Bubble’ yourself, of course. Write compelling, long stories. Write. Engage. Interact. But then you return to that wretched city. Then your immersion is suddenly broken - the bubble easily /pops/ and you’re faced with a 12 foot tall dragon man who despite being a scalecommander moonlights as a Bartender, a Stripper, or whatever’s new and fun.
You bubble yourself and even when you do – even when you narrow down the world to a usable setting, even then, the filth, the scum, the salt of the earth makes you gingerly step around the one natural path in Elwynn. “Let’s avoid Goldshire”. Why? Why do we have to avoid Goldshire? The quaint human town? With friendly merchants and an affordable Smithy. You can’t even hail from there, your character – a lowly human peasant, born in ‘Goldshire’. “My, do you hail from the brothel?” Which brothel? You inane, bland, senseless bastard piece of nut-brained excrement.
You walk through the docks, yet the view is sullied, for when you stand over the ledge, contemplating the naval might of the Alliance, feeling pride for it, a latex-clad pest approaches you.
You ignore them, then you come out of said spot in the city. You walk through the graveyard, to mourn an old acquaintance, only to find DEMONS and NECROMANCERS just hanging out. Kissing, doing hand stuff.
You ignore them, too. And walk into Old Town, oh, Old Town, the famous Pig N’ Whistle, where Reese Langston used to pour the meanest pint in Stormwind, only to find pandaren-cosplaying borderline racist caricatures speaking in a language that nobody understands.
‘Bubbling’ doesn’t work. It’s too late.
I don’t care about it, anymore. Partake in the chaos, witness the inbreeding, a demon-super-engineer just parades around the city, an Illidari does nothing but offer to pour them a drink, a paladin of the Scarlet Crusade calmly chats with a high elf Vampyr and suggests they both head back to his ‘inn room’ in ‘the dwarven district’ for a night cap. And it’s fine. The moment it takes processing the chiptune-midi-hell protruding from a Musician addon as cheap ‘northern vodka’ pumps through your veins you hear a ‘GUNSHOT’ from just in front of the cathedral, the CATHEDRAL, where a death knight stands gawking at women. And it doesn’t affect me any longer. I can’t ignore it. Interacting with those deemend ‘decent’ until they suddenly “Flinch at the loud noise” or quietly mutter “By the Light… Is that a Man’ari?” So you immerse yourself in it. The bubble pops. It was meant to.
But it’s all good. I’m better than them. I turn my nose up at the deficient hordes of sin’dorei refugees and half-orcs, I’m better. I’m literate. I am beyond their reach. I’m above it.
As someone who RPs a dockworker in Stormwind sometimes, I very rarely RP him at the docks for this exact reason. It sucks.