I don't get the hype behind Kingdoms of Amalur

[rusty_shackleford]

I prefer RPGs to be a bunch of individual stories somewhat interconnected such that it's entirely possible for there to be an ending to one story without ending them all

[DecadeRiptide]

The combat was good on the 360. The "remaster" was disappointing

[J1M]

It’s a dame shame what happened to 38 studios it’s not to often you get a wealthy boomer conservative individual making a studio who loves the medium that wants to make a fun game.

Yeah, a shame. You see conservative figures often complaining about "why is there no good art that pushes our values?", but then they don't want to create it. Doomcock and all of those other people who amassed large followings in the mid to late 2010s for criticizing Hollywood could have used their audience as an opportunity to launch a book series or an indie animated show or indie games and then grow from there, but they didn't do that. I guess Matt Walsh made a ****** children's book, and Shadiversity wrote a one off novel and then never made more.

As for making a new studio being formed and then diving into making a high production value game - which is very complicated - I suspect it might be difficult to do. Lots of people left Blizzard in the wake of WoW's launch to go form their own studios. Dozens of studios. But only two of them have released anything decent, Arena Net with Guild Wars and Runic Games with Torchlight. Everyone else either released crap or didn't release anything at all. That one Chinese guy who was making his own FF15 imitator all by himself wound up catching the eye of Sony and got to build up a studio to finish his game, which is finally releasing this year, so maybe it is possible and Westerners just suck too much. And I guess KCD1 was okay technically.

Are we claiming Steve Danuser and Salvatore were executing Curt's vision for the story?

What the guy tried to do is commendable, and it is sad to see someone who was well intentioned and rich unable to start a successful studio.

But you need to walk me through step by step how that story is a conservative treatment. My impression was that it was dour and nihilistic and fawning over the player while at the same time too meta by acknowledging the main character as a player. But I didn't get very far in it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It’s a dame shame what happened to 38 studios it’s not to often you get a wealthy boomer conservative individual making a studio who loves the medium that wants to make a fun game.

Yeah, a shame. You see conservative figures often complaining about "why is there no good art that pushes our values?", but then they don't want to create it. Doomcock and all of those other people who amassed large followings in the mid to late 2010s for criticizing Hollywood could have used their audience as an opportunity to launch a book series or an indie animated show or indie games and then grow from there, but they didn't do that. I guess Matt Walsh made a ****** children's book, and Shadiversity wrote a one off novel and then never made more.

As for making a new studio being formed and then diving into making a high production value game - which is very complicated - I suspect it might be difficult to do. Lots of people left Blizzard in the wake of WoW's launch to go form their own studios. Dozens of studios. But only two of them have released anything decent, Arena Net with Guild Wars and Runic Games with Torchlight. Everyone else either released crap or didn't release anything at all. That one Chinese guy who was making his own FF15 imitator all by himself wound up catching the eye of Sony and got to build up a studio to finish his game, which is finally releasing this year, so maybe it is possible and Westerners just suck too much. And I guess KCD1 was okay technically.

Are we claiming Steve Danuser and Salvatore were executing Curt's vision for the story?

What the guy tried to do is commendable, and it is sad to see someone who was well intentioned and rich unable to start a successful studio.

But you need to walk me through step by step how that story is a conservative treatment. My impression was that it was dour and nihilistic and fawning over the player while at the same time too meta by acknowledging the main character as a player. But I didn't get very far in it.

I never got far into it either. I started at least two playthroughs and always wound up losing interest by the time I reached the "city" at the northeastern tip of the first continent. I barely recall anything about the plot other than the player starting off as being dead, reviving, and then being told that he was outside of destiny.

I did not become aware that Danuser worked on Amalur until later in 2025 when Bellular broke down how Danuser reused his story idea for WoW. For Salvatore I read the first Icewind Dale novel and found it utterly forgettable so I didn't think anything of his ideological leanings either. I still stand by my original point that it is incredibly rare for well off conservatives to try to establish their own companies and try to produce mass media, particularly for games. In this instance it is unfortunate the hired people who appear to have not reflected his values so I wonder how much he cared. Or maybe it was harder to tell back then.

[J1M]

Yeah, a shame. You see conservative figures often complaining about "why is there no good art that pushes our values?", but then they don't want to create it. Doomcock and all of those other people who amassed large followings in the mid to late 2010s for criticizing Hollywood could have used their audience as an opportunity to launch a book series or an indie animated show or indie games and then grow from there, but they didn't do that. I guess Matt Walsh made a ****** children's book, and Shadiversity wrote a one off novel and then never made more.

As for making a new studio being formed and then diving into making a high production value game - which is very complicated - I suspect it might be difficult to do. Lots of people left Blizzard in the wake of WoW's launch to go form their own studios. Dozens of studios. But only two of them have released anything decent, Arena Net with Guild Wars and Runic Games with Torchlight. Everyone else either released crap or didn't release anything at all. That one Chinese guy who was making his own FF15 imitator all by himself wound up catching the eye of Sony and got to build up a studio to finish his game, which is finally releasing this year, so maybe it is possible and Westerners just suck too much. And I guess KCD1 was okay technically.

Are we claiming Steve Danuser and Salvatore were executing Curt's vision for the story?

What the guy tried to do is commendable, and it is sad to see someone who was well intentioned and rich unable to start a successful studio.

But you need to walk me through step by step how that story is a conservative treatment. My impression was that it was dour and nihilistic and fawning over the player while at the same time too meta by acknowledging the main character as a player. But I didn't get very far in it.

I never got far into it either. I started at least two playthroughs and always wound up losing interest by the time I reached the "city" at the northeastern tip of the first continent. I barely recall anything about the plot other than the player starting off as being dead, reviving, and then being told that he was outside of destiny.

I did not become aware that Danuser worked on Amalur until later in 2025 when Bellular broke down how Danuser reused his story idea for WoW. For Salvatore I read the first Icewind Dale novel and found it utterly forgettable so I didn't think anything of his ideological leanings either. I still stand by my original point that it is incredibly rare for well off conservatives to try to establish their own companies and try to produce mass media, particularly for games. In this instance it is unfortunate the hired people who appear to have not reflected his values so I wonder how much he cared. Or maybe it was harder to tell back then.

It is deeply ironic that Curt founded the franchise as an insurance policy against WoW becoming something he no longer liked, and one of the people primarily responsible for WoW becoming utter **** (Danuser) used Amalur as a springboard to work at Blizzard.

[Tangerine]

Yeah, a shame. You see conservative figures often complaining about "why is there no good art that pushes our values?", but then they don't want to create it. Doomcock and all of those other people who amassed large followings in the mid to late 2010s for criticizing Hollywood could have used their audience as an opportunity to launch a book series or an indie animated show or indie games and then grow from there, but they didn't do that. I guess Matt Walsh made a ****** children's book, and Shadiversity wrote a one off novel and then never made more.

As for making a new studio being formed and then diving into making a high production value game - which is very complicated - I suspect it might be difficult to do. Lots of people left Blizzard in the wake of WoW's launch to go form their own studios. Dozens of studios. But only two of them have released anything decent, Arena Net with Guild Wars and Runic Games with Torchlight. Everyone else either released crap or didn't release anything at all. That one Chinese guy who was making his own FF15 imitator all by himself wound up catching the eye of Sony and got to build up a studio to finish his game, which is finally releasing this year, so maybe it is possible and Westerners just suck too much. And I guess KCD1 was okay technically.

Are we claiming Steve Danuser and Salvatore were executing Curt's vision for the story?

What the guy tried to do is commendable, and it is sad to see someone who was well intentioned and rich unable to start a successful studio.

But you need to walk me through step by step how that story is a conservative treatment. My impression was that it was dour and nihilistic and fawning over the player while at the same time too meta by acknowledging the main character as a player. But I didn't get very far in it.

In this instance it is unfortunate the hired people who appear to have not reflected his values so I wonder how much he cared. Or maybe it was harder to tell back then.

Most other conservatives were still operating on the idea that you should hire people qualified for the job, not those that toe the line. Leftoids were happy to parrot that message while doing the opposite. He probably didn't care because anyone conservative that cared about pop culture messaging had been blackwashed by the media for at least the previous 20 years; see those "crazy Christian moms" making stinks out of nothing-burgers. More specifically, he didn't care because he was conditioned to never consider caring.

As an aside, Critical Drinker made a ****** movie. Critics don't have the best track record at making their own media.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Are we claiming Steve Danuser and Salvatore were executing Curt's vision for the story?

What the guy tried to do is commendable, and it is sad to see someone who was well intentioned and rich unable to start a successful studio.

But you need to walk me through step by step how that story is a conservative treatment. My impression was that it was dour and nihilistic and fawning over the player while at the same time too meta by acknowledging the main character as a player. But I didn't get very far in it.

I never got far into it either. I started at least two playthroughs and always wound up losing interest by the time I reached the "city" at the northeastern tip of the first continent. I barely recall anything about the plot other than the player starting off as being dead, reviving, and then being told that he was outside of destiny.

I did not become aware that Danuser worked on Amalur until later in 2025 when Bellular broke down how Danuser reused his story idea for WoW. For Salvatore I read the first Icewind Dale novel and found it utterly forgettable so I didn't think anything of his ideological leanings either. I still stand by my original point that it is incredibly rare for well off conservatives to try to establish their own companies and try to produce mass media, particularly for games. In this instance it is unfortunate the hired people who appear to have not reflected his values so I wonder how much he cared. Or maybe it was harder to tell back then.

It is deeply ironic that Curt founded the franchise as an insurance policy against WoW becoming something he no longer liked, and one of the people primarily responsible for WoW becoming utter **** (Danuser) used Amalur as a springboard to work at Blizzard.

I did actually like a lot of stuff that happened during the Danuser era. The War of Thorns, the space fantasy Shadowlands expansion (sans the afterlife retcons and the Sylvanas centric storyline), a lot of Dragonflight (The Primal Incarnates were a neat villain ensemble, particularly Iridkron), and the Arathi Empire and Hallowfall. I think it is deeply unfair to place everything wrong with that era on his shoulders. I did a lot of digging and have talked about it on the MMO Champion forums, but we know that the WoW story director never had anywhere near as much authority as people like to imagine.

• When WC3 and WoW were being made simultaneously, Metzen wrote the Forsaken but was upset that the dev team wasn't "getting" them and just thought that they were evil zombies (well in a way yes but Metzen meant about their breakaway attempt at becoming human-like). Forsaken were only added into WoW at the last minute because some devs thought they were cool.
• Metzen did not want Blood Elves as a part of the Horde. That was a call made by the rest of the higherups because WoW was becoming huge in Asia but the Asian male gamers who chose to play Horde characters were struggling to get their girlfriends to join them.
• Metzen did not want the evil Death Knights to become playable (he wanted Runemaster instead), but was overruled by the devs.
• According to a Blizzcon 2013 interview, the other devs talked about how they came up with WoD. The initial idea was that Garrosh escaped to go round up the fodder races of Azeroth like Troggs, Quillboar, etc, and founded a "Mongrel Horde", when someone pitched that they should do awesome powermetal orcs instead. That is how WoD came to be.
• Metzen envisioned Starcraft 2 as being a story heavy game like a JRPG or a VN, a "Gone With the Wind in Space", but he couldn't get the other devs on board because they didn't like story heavy games.
• Etc.

So WoW's story direction is really a hodgepodge where you have a lot of different people inserting their ideas or pushing and pulling. The lead writers never had dictatorial control like Hironobu Sakaguuchi, Hideo Kojima, Naoki Yoshida, Yoko Taro, Toshihiro Kondo, Kinoko Nasu, etc. Infamously, Christie Golden - the writer of the WoW tie in novels and arguably the most experienced writer who ever worked on the Warcraft franchise - became a lead writer on WoW at the end of Legion, but then wasn't really allowed to do anything before getting replaced by Metzen. And then when Metzen came back, he talked about how surprised he was how "democratized" the WoW dev team had become. In other words, they were not very receptive to his vision of Warcraft. And then during the TWW interviews, we found out that there was a "committee" that checks the story. So Metzen is just one voice outweighed by many.

[J1M]

Dragonflight recast the dragons as teenage elves to re-tell Avengers and complain about Trump.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Dragonflight recast the dragons as teenage elves to re-tell Avengers and complain about Trump.

I do not recall any Trump allegories in Dragonflight, except for maybe the Drakonoid civil uprising sidequest (tldr the Dragons used to rule the Dragon Isles, 10,000 year ago they left and were cut off during the War of the Ancients, and their Drakonoid servants on the Dragon Isles effectively ruled themselves. Then the dragons come back and expected their servants to resume their position as servants), which ended with Alexstraza telling them to just suck it. That's not a very libertarian ending. Unless maybe you mean the ending to the Night Elf and Gilnean storylines where Malfurion and Genn Greymane abdicate leadership and appoint a young woman as the next leader of their race.

The English title and marketing of Dragonflight was rather baffling because it made you think about the unintelligent dragon mounts, the ones you would be hunting in quests or riding as the mounts advertised in the key feature of Dragonriding. But then you acquire your mount and it never gets any story focus, and yes the actual main content was about humanoid looking characters called "dragons" who can transform into dragons but actually spend most of their screentime in human form. The Chinese title translates into "Age of Dragons" which does a little better job of clarifying that we are talking a civilization/empire and thus refocusing you back to Warcraft's humanoid sentient dragons rather than dumb dragon mounts.

Kalecgos being depicted as a wandering youth who has to be guided by the Tuskar grandma chief was annoying.

[J1M]

Dragonflight recast the dragons as teenage elves to re-tell Avengers and complain about Trump.

I do not recall any Trump allegories in Dragonflight, except for maybe the Drakonoid civil uprising sidequest (tldr the Dragons used to rule the Dragon Isles, 10,000 year ago they left and were cut off during the War of the Ancients, and their Drakonoid servants on the Dragon Isles effectively ruled themselves. Then the dragons come back and expected their servants to resume their position as servants), which ended with Alexstraza telling them to just suck it. That's not a very libertarian ending. Unless maybe you mean the ending to the Night Elf and Gilnean storylines where Malfurion and Genn Greymane abdicate leadership and appoint a young woman as the next leader of their race.

The English title and marketing of Dragonflight was rather baffling because it made you think about the unintelligent dragon mounts, the ones you would be hunting in quests or riding as the mounts advertised in the key feature of Dragonriding. But then you acquire your mount and it never gets any story focus, and yes the actual main content was about humanoid looking characters called "dragons" who can transform into dragons but actually spend most of their screentime in human form. The Chinese title translates into "Age of Dragons" which does a little better job of clarifying that we are talking a civilization/empire and thus refocusing you back to Warcraft's humanoid sentient dragons rather than dumb dragon mounts.

Kalecgos being depicted as a wandering youth who has to be guided by the Tuskar grandma chief was annoying.

The most acute example that I remember is the Drakthyr questline ending in a monologue that basically felt like a lecture about MAGA with a few proper nouns changed. There's also the not-subtle theme of old men moving aside for less experienced women to lead and why that is needed, regardless of how capable or popular the men are. They went even harder with that theme in War Within, though they had only minor and new characters left to apply it to.

I don't absolve Golden of her responsibility either. People are way too quick to overlook her influence as the only 'real' writer on staff. The fact is that WoW went from a franchise that A-list actors and sports stars were proud to talk about to a dying brand when the testosterone was replaced with the political agendas of the writing staff. The apologists would have you believe that nobody made these decisions and nobody approved them, yet they were somehow all unanimously supportive of the 'democratic writing process'. Choosing to let the staff run amok and approving their submitted work is why Danuser and Golden are responsible.

[Valter]

**** now I wanna play it again