Cataclysm

[Chris]

As for the memes, I can't really be bothered by them. WoW is such a rich tapestry of themes, influences and ideas that it's easy to just cherrypick the stuff you like and skip the rest. It's no different than, say, the internet itself: there'll always be places and things you dislike, but that's no reason not to visit the sites that you do enjoy.

That's not the same at all. The only way to avoid some reference is to know it's there and not talk to that character or whatever--and the only way to know it's there is to actually experience it the first time. Once you talk to some NPC and they say something to the effect of "LOLL look how my name is actually kind of like the name of a singer you've probably heard of!!1" you've already experienced the lame "joke." There's no way for you to avoid having had that experience.

Everything in WoW is part of WoW. As big and diverse as it is, it's a single world with shared themes and art direction and tone. Blizzard has just gotten increasingly lax about maintaining consistency--or it's a deliberate stylistic choice. Either way, it's the same result. As far as I'm concerned, it's a negative aspect of the game, not something that's purely inevitable.

I did an interview with Obsidian's Feargus Urquhart about Fallout New Vegas, and one of the answers he gave about Fallout 2 really sums up what I mean: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5943/taking_back_fallout.php?page=2

He talks about how Fallout 2 went really overboard with the pop culture references and tongue-in-cheek humor. That's not because of any inevitability. He acknowledges he didn't properly oversee all the different writers and designers to ensure that wasn't going on. Each of the individual designers thought they were being clever and unique by slipping some of that stuff in there--and maybe they would have been if they weren't ALL doing it. The fact that so many of them were resulted in a game whose tone was out of whack. (Some people prefer the tone of Fallout 2, which is a separate issue; either way, it changed from Fallout 1.)

I suspect something similar happened over time with the WarCraft universe. The difference is, WoW has been under constant development for so long that I imagine at this point it's just become a deliberate and acknowledged part of the world's character.

My other longstanding suspicion is that, due to the massive size of the game's development team, Blizzard has hired a lot of quest and NPC writers who have little to no game development or writing experience (particularly based on how the job descriptions read), who think that being clever and funny is the same thing as referencing the existence of a person or trend of whose existence the player is likely aware.

[Roderick]

I read the interview about Fallout 2 before (or at any case heard the story of it). I do agree that what happened isn't a good thing, don't get me wrong. But I think WoW is such a large, non-linear thing that you'd be amiss to treat it as any other singleplayer experience. That's why I likened it to the internet.

Though the meme stuff may be a little too ubiquitous for this to be completely true, in WoW you are completely free to choose which zone to enter and which questline to follow. So if you enter a zone like the Goblin one in Cataclysm, that you'll know to be full of injokes, there's absolutely no reason not to notice that and decide to go somewhere else that's less obvious with it. The game facilitates making your own adventure.

Right now I've sampled pretty much everything the Horde side has to offer and at no point did I get the feeling the experience was being overshadowed by meme stuff. But as we've read in this topic, opinions on that differ and that's fine.

[Sombre]

I hope orcs still say "Zug Zug"

[Chris]

I hope orcs still say "Zug Zug"

I love zug zug. It's actually part of the WarCraft universe. You don't have to draw meaningless lines to real-world celebrities to get it. It's just a funny goofy property of Orcs in the WarCraft world.

[Sombre]

I love zug zug. It's actually part of the WarCraft universe. You don't have to draw meaningless lines to real-world celebrities to get it. It's just a funny goofy property of Orcs in the WarCraft world.

I think that's one of the things that endears me to Warcraft as a franchise, as opposed to World Of Warcraft as a closed off little thing. It's just the amount of super Warcrafty doofy humor they put in sometimes. A lot of it, for me personally, stems from the ridiculous barks that the WC3 units shout. Admittedly, WoW has some of those, but it's not really the same when every 5th line is some sort of internet meme. Or a dwarf being drunk.

[Twig]

I can't lie, I like drunk dwarves. O:

It's a stereotype and a cliché, but it's one that I happen to love.

[Forbin]

My other longstanding suspicion is that, due to the massive size of the game's development team, Blizzard has hired a lot of quest and NPC writers who have little to no game development or writing experience (particularly based on how the job descriptions read), who think that being clever and funny is the same thing as referencing the existence of a person or trend of whose existence the player is likely aware.

It's certainly not impossible to have strict control over tone, but it's not very productive. Either way I still don't agree that the humour is somehow an aberration of the WarCraft universe. Ever since the first games they've had a juxtaposition of a "serious" story line, and NPC piss lines.

In general I think they're good at avoiding the quirky writing in the starting zone content, waiting till players are out of their honey moon phase to introduce them to a character like "Haris Pilton".

[DanJW]

It's certainly not impossible to have strict control over tone, but it's not very productive. Either way I still don't agree that the humour is somehow an aberration of the WarCraft universe. Ever since the first games they've had a juxtaposition of a "serious" story line, and NPC piss lines.

Chris was saying he finds a distinction between silly or funny-in-itself and references to outside media. He likes the former, not the latter. The former was always present but the latter crept in as time went on.

a character like "Haris Pilton".

Yeah, like that.

On the whole I don't let the outside-references spoil my fun. I can either grin or roll my eyes and then afterwards I can integrate them into the game world, in a kind of suspension-of-disbelief-aided-by-forklift.

[Forbin]

Vanilla wow had the entire Link quest line "it's dangerous to go alone", Larion and Muigin (Mario and luigi), Chasing A-ME, Donkey Kong barrels dropping from Gorillas. The "Greench" stole christmas, Gahz'rilla was in ZF... ok well i'm mostly just cribbing from this article on WoW Wiki.

The point is that there's always been a lot of pop culture references, some of them are more jarring than others. But others are subtle easter eggs like Edward and Tyler having a fight club in UC, or Innkeeper "Bates".

This is certainly a lot more fuel for the argument that there's too much of it in the game, but I think if anything Blizzard has toned it down recently. The goblin starting zone in cataclysm is an exception.

[Twig]

Vanilla wow had the entire Link quest line "it's dangerous to go alone", Larion and Muigin (Mario and luigi), Chasing A-ME, Donkey Kong barrels dropping from Gorillas. The "Greench" stole christmas, Gahz'rilla was in ZF... ok well i'm mostly just cribbing from this article on WoW Wiki.

The point is that there's always been a lot of pop culture references, some of them are more jarring than others. But others are subtle easter eggs like Edward and Tyler having a fight club in UC, or Innkeeper "Bates".

This is certainly a lot more fuel for the argument that there's too much of it in the game, but I think if anything Blizzard has toned it down recently. The goblin starting zone in cataclysm is an exception.

Yes, but you had to go out of your way for many of those. I can't speak for the rest, but all I've been saying is that it's gotten worse over time.

[Orv]

Un'Goro was the worst perpetrator of this nonsense in the old world. And while I admit things like "Tonight We Dine In Havenshire" and "Grand Theft Palamino" made me grin, that's all they did. In time, they became obtrusive.

As much as MMOs ruin their own story telling and mythos with the fact that Player #930918129031 just killed The Great Bad Fellow five minutes before me, seeing pop-culture references annoys me after a time.

(Keep in mind, I don't find Family Guy, Jackass or South Park funny. I may not have a sense of humor.)

[Thompson]

mother fucking achievments for exploring the entire game (i can't handle being told when a guildie explores ashenvale)

I've done that, it's a daunting but ultimately rewarding experience, also, while it may be a little like burning down a forest to put out a camp fire doing this may help you be less annoyed.

Right click on your chat tab, choose "Settings", and on the left, choose "Others" and turn off "Guild Achievements" in the filters.

[DanJW]

Vanilla wow had the entire Link quest line "it's dangerous to go alone", Larion and Muigin (Mario and luigi), Chasing A-ME, Donkey Kong barrels dropping from Gorillas. The "Greench" stole christmas, Gahz'rilla was in ZF... ok well i'm mostly just cribbing from this article on WoW Wiki.

The point is that there's always been a lot of pop culture references, some of them are more jarring than others. But others are subtle easter eggs like Edward and Tyler having a fight club in UC, or Innkeeper "Bates".

This is certainly a lot more fuel for the argument that there's too much of it in the game, but I think if anything Blizzard has toned it down recently. The goblin starting zone in cataclysm is an exception.

Those are all in WoW. I can't think of many examples from previous Warcraft games.

[Roderick]

We've had this discussion before Warcraft has always had the 'piss lines' referencing pop songs, series and whatnot. With wow it might seem more extravagant, but the humor just scaled along with the whole game. World of Warcraft is a biiiiiiig game. Percentage-wise the amount of time spent on humor will be roughly the same.

[Lu]

I think there is a rather big difference between hiding those things away for the player to find and just putting them right in your face. Like when in Starcraft 2 I did some underground tunnel mission where I came across some marines who did their scripted thing and then them going "game over, man, GAME OVER" when I met them. Feels out of place and cheap; elicited a roll of my eyes instead of a smile. Blizzard always put some amount of silliness in their games, but most of the time it was under the surface.

[Forbin]

I still think that letting something like flavour text put you off WoW is silly. No matter if the pop-culture references are increasing or decreasing, they still represent a very small portion of the content. There is something unique about what comes out of a development team so large, with an almost unlimited budget.

[Twig]

I still think that letting something like flavour text put you off WoW is silly.

Well, two things.

1) It's much more invasive than just simple flavor text. I don't know why you keep acting like it's something that can be easily ignored, when that is not the case.

2) Pretty sure no one's doing that. I still play WoW (and have Cataclysm preordered). Although technically I'm on a break right now, so I don't play WoW. And then there's Chris, who said in his post that the pop culture chicanery is the straw that breaks his camel, or something to that effect. It is not the ONLY thing he dislikes about WoW. It is just ONE thing he dislikes about WoW.

[Forbin]

Well, two things.

1) It's much more invasive than just simple flavor text. I don't know why you keep acting like it's something that can be easily ignored, when that is not the case.

2) Pretty sure no one's doing that. I still play WoW (and have Cataclysm preordered). Although technically I'm on a break right now, so I don't play WoW. And then there's Chris, who said in his post that the pop culture chicanery is the straw that breaks his camel, or something to that effect. It is not the ONLY thing he dislikes about WoW. It is just ONE thing he dislikes about WoW.

1) it is just flavour text. We're talking about names of NPCs that are well off the beaten path. Haris Pilton for example is in World's End tavern in the Lower City in Shattrath. Tucked in behind the bar, you're more likely to notice the band with pyro-techniques than the name of the bag vendor. Blizzard has had a notoriously hard time getting players to actually pay attention to quest text rather than just following UI helpers killing X monsters and collecting Y widgets. I suppose there are some people that read absolutely everything, but it's a hard position to defend that the text in this game is invasive to most.

2) Chris said it's the final straw, and the tone of the conversation that followed seemed to reinforce that it's a big deal. Maybe people are just venting a frustration.

[Patters]

You're wrong, so wrong. Look at the fucking phrase "the straw that breaks the camels back", seriously, you are implying that that Chris thinks it's a big problem. Think about the god damn words you just read and realise that you're wrong.

Logistics: straw is light, straws are light camels can carry a lot of mass, the small mass of the straw has broken the camels back as it is above the threshold of mass the camel can hold.

Addendum: I don't know whether Chris how big the problem is, frankly it doesn't matter to me, with my interest in WoW being zero.

[Twig]

You are a silly person, Forbin, and I find it difficult to have a reasonable conversation with you!

Suffice it to say, I find it much more invasive than simple "flavor text" might be, because it is constantly jumping out in my face as I play the game. I'm not talking about Little Miss Pilton, and, no, I can't think of any specific examples because it has been way too long since I actually played the game, but it happened to me as I played the game normally.

[Forbin]

You're wrong, so wrong. Look at the fucking phrase "the straw that breaks the camels back", seriously, you are implying that that Chris thinks it's a big problem. Think about the god damn words you just read and realise that you're wrong.

Logistics: straw is light, straws are light camels can carry a lot of mass, the small mass of the straw has broken the camels back as it is above the threshold of mass the camel can hold.

Addendum: I don't know whether Chris how big the problem is, frankly it doesn't matter to me, with my interest in WoW being zero.

All I said was that he said it was the final straw, and yeah I understand the "logistics" of the saying.

You are a silly person, Forbin, and I find it difficult to have a reasonable conversation with you!

Suffice it to say, I find it much more invasive than simple "flavor text" might be, because it is constantly jumping out in my face as I play the game. I'm not talking about Little Miss Pilton, and, no, I can't think of any specific examples because it has been way too long since I actually played the game, but it happened to me as I played the game normally.

Honestly, I don't need your examples, if you want some I did provide a link to a few of them. I'm not arguing that they don't exist.

What I'm saying is that the game is so vast, those elements are not everywhere. As much as they seem huge intrusions, they really are just bits of text written by low wrung designers. While the rest of the team is making fantastical environments that not only look amazing, but tie into a more thought out fiction, and are amazing works of social engineering. So personally I find it easy to ignore an NPCs name.

[Twig]

If it was just names, I would find it easy, too.

[Patters]

All I said was that he said it was the final straw, and yeah I understand the "logistics" of the saying.

2) Chris said it's the final straw, and the tone of the conversation that followed seemed to reinforce that it's a big deal. Maybe people are just venting a frustration.

You're doing it again.

[DanJW]

Time for change of sub-subject maybe?

Can anyone playing currently tell me what the changes to PvP are like? My PvP-ing, like my raiding, happened in fits and starts, but WotLK got me playing PvP a lot more than I had before (part of that being down to the dual specs).

[Thompson]

These videos are painful.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/06/30/cataclysm-beta-worgen-silly-and-flirt-sounds/#continued

Truly painful.