The Queue: Five months
@MatthewWRossi
Well, maybe a little less, since we’re a week into April and Battle for Azeroth will be launching in mid-August, but we’re still looking at the end of Legion. If there’s any stuff you were trying to get done like the Mage Tower, now’s the time.
Let’s talk about Blizzard games.
Q4TQ: SO this more of a bold prediction than question but what the heck. Unless we visit the Shadowlands proper (ie they do something like what they did with Argus) this expansion….Sylvanas makes it through the expansion alive/undead. Her character arc since the end of Wrath has been so tied with fearing death i think it only proper that ether her character’s story/or chapter ends with her confronting whatever is out there in the Shadowlands. And this isn’t necessarily a going out in blaze of glory ether but having her deal with the Shadowlands feels like where ether her story would end or where one chapter ends and a new one begins. Your thoughts?
Sylvanas is one of the most popular characters Blizzard has. I don’t expect they’d kill her off or change her drastically. No disrespect to Varian, Vol’jin or Garrosh here, but Sylvanas is at this point probably more popular than Thrall and I’d never expect to see Thrall die, so I would definitely not expect anything to happen to Sylvanas like dying or being changed from an undead state.
Q4tQ: Are the Old Gods going to form Voltron? I mean C’thun is some big eye, Yogg is a pile of mouths, Y’Shaarj is the heart of the beast and who knows what N’zoth is going to bring to the table….but isn’t their a weird possibility of them coming together and forming Old God Voltron? Follow up: Just what would N’zoth be in that scenario?
The Old Gods hate each other.
They hate each other so much that they spent the entirety of the existence of the Black Empire waging war on each other. You see it in the Dragon Soul, when N’Zoth’s Nraqi servitors are described as having lead armies into battle with C’Thun and Yogg-Saron. These are not guys that are going to cooperate, much less form a giant tentacle monster with a squid for a body and a whole lot of mouths underneath a giant eye. They plot against each other so much I wouldn’t be surprised if Yogg engineers it’s own ‘death’ just to mess with N’Zoth’s plans.
I think I’ve finally pinpointed what bothers me so much about putting the faction conflict front and center in the story. The fact that they’re player factions inherently means we never really get high stakes, or that at best, we get the illusion of stakes.
There’s definitely some potential cool factor to the thought of sneaking in and sabotaging Alliance fortifications, or raiding outposts, or things like that. I’d still rather it be an NPC faction than the Alliance, but I’ve also never been a PvP guy, so your mileage my vary. I know, though, before even starting any of it, that there’s only so much that can happen. I’m not going to help the Horde win the war. The Alliance isn’t going to wipe us out if I throw up my hands and go fishing instead. No one is going to really win or lose, because these are player factions, and Blizzard has to at least appear neutral.
At worst, if one side loses something, the other side has to lose something similar. The balance of power has to remain fixed. This inevitably leads to low expectations for me.
Also, on a related note, I was left scratching my head in the interview when the Broken Shore was brought up as a good example of how they want the faction conflict to play out. I absolutely hate when the conflict centers on a giant misconception that could be solved by literally 30 seconds of people talking to each other.
At the end of Warcraft 3, Humans under Jaina fought alongside Orcs under Thrall and the Night Elves and Tauren (both new races) to defeat the Burning Legion and save Azeroth, and it was thematically the final death of the factional war in Warcraft as a setting.
Or it should have been.
Keeping the ‘Orcs vs. Humans’ alive in the game ignores that ending, which bled into the Rexxar story — Jaina going so far as to step aside and allow the death of her father in a moment that’s a symbolic coda to the old “Horde bad, Alliance good, war war war” mindset of the first two Warcraft RTS games. In a narrative sense, the entirety of WC3 has been about the breaking of the old ways of things and the need to move forward.
Here we are in 2018, and we’re still going back to the Horde vs. Alliance well. I sincerely hope this is the last time. In order for it to be the last time, the faction that was the aggressor needs to suffer in a way that makes them reluctant to do it again. If the Siege of Orgrimmar didn’t make the Horde reluctant to attack the Alliance again, I can’t imagine what would. So I’m not hopeful that the conflict will be resolved in Battle for Azeroth but I hope it is.
Honestly, I wish that the Alliance had attacked first this time. Just for once it would be nice if the Alliance shot first and the Horde were the ones left reacting to unprovoked aggression. We haven’t seen that since Daelin Proudmoore, and we could use it if we’re going to try and make the faction conflict interesting. It can’t always be “Horde attacks, Alliance is on the back foot but ultimately the status quo is retained, albeit with the Alliance losing something to the Horde” the way it has been since Cataclysm.
What do you guys look at for inspiration to build fantasy world maps? I’m trying to build up one and need to know the general continental layout so I know where to put the rain forest, deserts, trade alliances, etc. Any suggestions?
Well, Blizzard does have a really nice art department and their maps are pretty awesome, so that’s one suggestion that allows me to keep this somewhat tangentially related to Blizzard.
One of my favorite fantasy maps is the one Robert E. Howard drew for his own Hyborian Age stories — the Conan ones, basically. Another inspiration is Michael Moorock’s Young Kingdoms and his Melniboné in particular. I have a few Atlas of Fantasy style books I flip through — one of my favorite maps is the original map of Oz, drawn after the book series got rolling and it’s completely insane.
Okay, that’s the Queue. It’s been a heck of a week.
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