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[PA Comic] Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - Inverse Traditionality
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Posts
Back after a three year hiatus!
And it isn't as though they're even new to WoW. Mention of Chen Stormstout dates back to classic WoW. There used to be a quest chain in the Barrens about Chen's lost stout.
Sometimes you collect bear asses.
Other times?
Genocide.
If you put a top hat on a Panda, does it become dapper?
This is the ultimate deciding factor in whether or not the new race can truly be accepted as part of the lore. If it can't look dapper, then the whole race should be jettisoned into space and never spoken of again.
I remember we used to complain about the stupid drop rates for like bear ears. It was so bad that Blizzard expressly forbade comic submissions about the drop rates (and "YOU ARE NOT PREPARED") because "we're sick of them." lol
They've been mentioned, but not seen. If you didn't play WC3 you could write off the Chen reference as some obscure Dwarf or something. A lot of people's knowledge of the Warcraft universe is pretty much built out of WoW, less people played WC3 and even less played 1 or 2. Even WC3 played them off as a joke except for the optional character for that RPG-style Durotar campaign. Before this expansion they were sort of like Star Trek's psychic cat people - they were canon and you can point to them on screen and bring up their disturbingly detailed wiki page, but relegated to such an obscure set of appearances that even most fans would be excused for saying WTF when they show up in the novels from time to time.
They weren't a part of "lore," they were a silly thing to do. There was no established history, there was no importance of presence. It was a silly, silly thing. It was fun.
And that's not to say silly things can't become more than silly one-offs.
My problem with MoP at face value is that Blizzard clearly feels some obligation to get a representation of every real-world culture into the Warcraft culture. And it's a silly goal. Azeroth, as a world, was very complete and fine without this. It starts to complicate the world when things like this get injected, but more importantly it begs the question, "Where are the boundaries?" Where does additions to the world stop, rather than elaborations on currently existing things or moving forward of events?
As if kung-fu panda bears are a meaningful representation of any culture anyway.
Well I didn't say "faithful." :P
But I mean the eastern tones are pretty in-your-face, even if it is stereotypical.
The Skinner Box is pretty obvious in this expansion. Painfully obvious.
But that, as immortalized in a certain epic thread/interactive story, is a completely different kind of fucked up.
Oh wait, I am. *Crawls back into the Pedantcave*
The big question is, do faux-Chinese culture, architecture, and motifs actually attract Chinese gamers?
"They were in Warcraft 3!"
Yeah, one was. Briefly. As a joke.
"Well what about Taurens?"
Man if the Tauren were called Cowdarians and they came from Cowtopolis and were all Cowboys (except for a secretive hidden sect of Cowdarians called the Shado-Cows) I'd probably hate them too.
I'm not going to resubscribe.
I MUST BE STRONG.
<resolve face>
How do you feel about daily quests?
Lore for all the races save the humans, orcs and occasionally undead has been at a standstill since vanilla, with the goblins and worgen forgotten in the same expansion they were introduced in. WLK brought my investment in the existing lore to an end and the new stuff doesn't interest me at all, which is why I stopped a few months into Cata and haven't picked up MoP.
Well, I don't like to brag, but I do have a rather impressive stout set of apparels adorning my temple of a body.
This, for me. Well, I do like playing with others, but WoW requires a block of uninterrupted time with others that I just can't manage, with me now being a parent. Playing through the game single player and exploring the world is fun, but the concept of Daily quests/ faction grind quests etc just never did it for me. I'm willing to level additional characters and do some of the quests I did before again- it's not really that much of a grind, even, because you're killing the same things with new abilities in potentially new ways. Doing the same quest(s) hundreds of times with the same character so you can get your mount/weapon/prestige/access to instances/whatever is too skinner-y for me. And from all accounts that stuff is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in the new expansions.
If the game was Free To Play I would probably log on, chat with some people and level some characters sometimes, but with the subscription model... yeah no.
I would pretend to cry but I am actually freaking giddy at the thought.
PSN: ShinyRedKnight Xbox Live: ShinyRedKnight
This is Mommy Gabriel -->
So basically, what you're saying is that you never played the Orc Campaign in WC3: The Frozen Throne, where that "one" that appeared "briefly, as a joke" helped found the Horde capital city.
You might consider playing SWTOR, up to 50 at least. I had/have the same problem with WoW and most other MMOs, that they require grouping often and since I work odd hours getting together with regular groups is difficult to impossible. One of the first things that drew me to SWTOR is that I could complete all the content up to 50 with my companion character; there is some group content but it's easily skippable without missing on much.
Of course level 50 content is dailies + group content, but at that point you can just do what most people do and roll an alt to see a different storyline.
And it's FTP.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"