I would like to play in an alive / persistent world that has true darkness.Could WoW be that? WoW 2 with a new engine?I want the 80s/90s dark fantasy back.
>>3486479You can see through the growth of WoW that they really decided their main audience were 9 year-olds.
>>3486487I remember being 9 yo and I wasn't that retarded back then.Plus, kids this days don't have money for subscription + expansions + cosmetics + market + classic...This are adults with 4 yo brains.
>>3486505The developers, or more likely the higher executive team who didn't know what a vidya game was, thought their playerbase were children. Doesn't mean they were right.
>>3486514And who allowed those retards in the first place?I get that executives may not be gamers, but dude at least know in what market are you going to work.
>>3486479There was one "horror" MMORPG that was basically that. The world was fucked and players had some kind of monster within they could unleash and eat their enemies to gain more powers.Don't remember the name.
>>3486479I don't think so. WoW got fucked by Blizzards new artstyle that affected all their games. Hilariously, Pandaria was the last "dark" style leaning expansion graphics wise before Warlords and especially legion went full chunky mobile style. That kind of proves that you don't even need to have a deliberately dark fantasy setting for more spicy designs.
>>3486792I think part of the artstyle problem is also that early (pre-Great Graphics Engine Update) wow was able to get away with the more cartoony, unrealistic proportions because shit had less polygons. WotLK was still running an engine that was made to work on the average PC in 2003.The more limitations you place on graphics, the more stylised they become to work within those limitations. It's why the GBA advance wars sprites have more soul than the reboot camp models.But you take that level of "cartoony abstraction" and update everything to have modern game model detail and texture quality and suddenly you get modern wow. The dragons are a really telling thing, though, that they have also 100% hired scalie artists, which is a dumbfuck move.
>>3486479I mean you can try and be as dark as you want but it's always gonna spoil the moon when most of your player base is pushing how far they can get their name past the built in censor, stripping down to their underwear and spamming the dance emote
>>3486792they shat the bed with wc3: wc1, wc2, diablo 1 & diablo 2 are dark fantasy, and sc is dark space fantasythey were products of the time in which they were produced though, most of the pop culture for nerds at the time of their creation went for that kind of dark aesthetic (look at the crpgs, doom, alien, etc) because that's what was popular
>>3486479>"death knight" then>"dark fantasy" wowmillennials lolYou're part of the problem.
>>3486792true
>>3488161Are you stupid? Both characters are from the same game, practically an expansion of difference.Why /tg/ has the worst posters on this site?
>>3488231>Lord Soth is from wowYou must be one of those cut off date millennials that's nearly a zoomer.
>>3486479Armor on the right looks cool not going to lie
>>3488306>left: overly designed early 2000's edgelordism>no context>no sense of a world to belong to, just a collection of randomized fantasy features, might as well be AI>no story>right>2015-2020 overly designed inclusionlordism, why can't a death knight be a shining argent paladin or whatever the fuck that cartoon is supposed to beBoth are in fact, garbage.
>>3486843True, that's why multiplayer by proxy like DD2 is the generally the way to go, it's just still undercooked. Maybe keep a small co op invite only system so you don't have to suffer retards but with better and more organic matchmaking.>people will still try to populate the game with shitty meme models and dumb names but you could restrict character creation more, and/or have a vote system to remove themFor example: It's always been cool to see since DD1 someone's character they actually put work into pop up as you're wandering around out in the regular world, and they kept that in DD2. Hired more than a few pawns that way.
>>3486842WoW's artstyle changed because the team changed. Chris Metzen and Samwise Didier did the art for the RTS trilogy and early WoW, but eventually Metzen stopped doing art, and Samwise Didier transferred from the WoW dev team to HotS and then retired. Mark Gibbons who did the fantastic raid tier sets from Wrath through MoP left to follow Ghostcrawler to Riot. Wei Wang who did the awesome faction leader art left to go freelance. Alex Horley was always a freelancer and wound up drawing more art for Hearthstone than for WoW after WoD. And so on. Now look at who they were replaced by. Look at Ariel Fain, the tranny Dracthyr artist's twitter. He doesn't have a taste for 80s powermetal album covers or pulp fantasy novel covers or roided men. He draws tumblr scalies.If you want a high production value high fantasy RPG with powermetal album cover aesthetics, then you are out of luck. It's 2024. All Western devs with the money have been converged by leftists through the HR departments, and Asian devs don't have a taste for powermetal album cover aesthetic at all. The closest you get is FromSoft's Souls aesthetic and that's it.
>>3488319That explains all the gaydar alert I got from Anduin but it weirdly seemed like they were taking their damn time about "outing" him way past the time anyone actually cared about WoW anymore.So he's gay now right?
>>3488326Not yet, but according to that forum user's end of 2022 post, there is a loud clique within Blizzard that is pushing for it and is trying to oust people in their way.
>>3486479Dark sun mmo or nothing
>>3488328>not yetWow must be still some OG grogs hanging on still in Blizz. Not that I care about their garbage lore much less wow at all now but it's weird and amusing.
>>3488161>KitiaraFuck that bitch. Laurana the true lancewife.Pic related.
>>3488161B A S E D
>>3488319Oh. Well then.God I hate the slow creep of "we must portray all worlds like THIS or we're not accepting and that makes us evil"
>>3486479Not exactly fantasy, but The Secret World, SMT: Imagine, and EVE Online all sort of fill that dark 90s vibe. They're all mostly dead though.
>>3489296>The Secret WorldI miss it, /v/ros.
>>3488319The art style wasn't great at the start either. It was noted for its outdated and low quality assets. Now they call it timeless.I remember in another multiplayer game in the mid 00s and they imported wow models for weapons, but they always looked like toys.
>>3488319Wow and Warcraft 3 were a really special blend of Metzen and Samwise. If you look at Metzen's art it's all super masculine, comic book hero proportioned, grim dark warriors and blood. Metal album covers as you describe.Samwise on the other hand is like someone read a bunch of Conan the Barbarian stories growing up, but was also a cartoonist. He somehow blends muscle bound beefy warriors with a very elegant and almost cartoony exaggeration of form.When you combine Metzen and Samwise you get that perfect mix of over the top stylized, but still cool that Warcraft 3 and Early WoW captured. No other game has ever hit that blend as well as those two games. One unexpected benefit of the stylized forms is that they read SUPER cleanly from far away and that made WoW the most successful at visual communication of all the MMOs.
>>3486479>wow>wow 2i hope the mmo industry keeps getting worse and worse and never dies to be reborn until you grow old and die you fucking faggot
>>3486479They're boring.
>>3486479True darkness involves loneliness. A community based game seems pretty antithetical to that. The best I can think of is having towns that are relatively bright and but every dungeon be spoopy.
>>3493060I always wanted to play an MMO where the atmosphere was truly oppressive. I mean setting foot outside without a strong group got you killed level of oppressive.Players absolutely forced to work together to do anything, and furthermore if they didn't work together to keep their outposts and bases maintained, AI would build goblin tunnels, wraith tombs etc. around them and crush them right back to the starting point over time.There would be no artificial raid points, no content timelines. New content would just be built on top of the oppression pyramid and players would not even be informed as to what it was with as much kept from the clients as possible to prevent datamining technique. If they got reset back to the start because they let Goldshire overrun, so be it, no new content for months until they built back to the proper launching points and state of fantasy civilization to be able to take it on.In fact they would get stalked within most "safe" towns without some precautions, base defense and supply logistics would give lower level players something to do to get stronger before they went out on expansion raids.No PVP as the enemies would be so oppressively programmed to be stalking you like players you wouldn't need it.It can be done since there were quake bots that were capable of chasing people through maps and sniping them off ladders at the tiniest of angles back in the late 90s.
>>3493076Sounds like a Minecraft server. Players build the towns, GMs spawning monster invasions to tear them down.
>>3493076Would be cool but PVP should exist and players allying with some AI faction too to defeat other players or AI (and later betray it because why not), with AI being more "intelligent" games could truly become a Game of Thrones.
>>3488277You're stupid, I was talking about the OP's image.
>>3488312Yes, you are a faggot
>>3488380CRINGE
>>3488161I'm not a millennial. But WoW is the most popular fantasy MMORPG, if we want Dark-Fantasy back, we need some popular to do it.And when WoW was Warcraft was cool because the dark-fantasy influence from 90s Warhammer Fantasy.
>>3489758>Samwise on the other hand is like someone read a bunch of Conan the Barbarian stories growing up, but was also a cartoonist. He somehow blends muscle bound beefy warriors with a very elegant and almost cartoony exaggeration of form.Speaking of which Age of Conan was linda there. But "dark fantasy" almost always turns into "brown and spikey" as made by people who don't know how to design armor any other way.
>>3486479Define "dark fantasy"
WoW is the worst possible choice to try and turn into dark fantasy. It has never even tried to be like that. From the very beginning it was a lighthearted romp filled to the brim with pop culture references.
>>3494297looks a bit random but I like it
>>3494297I like Funcom for their willingness to stick to pulp fiction but I kind of also hate them for half assing these things when they could be so much better.Like how many good modelers have been locked into low budget and mediocre standards hell this way over time?
>>3494319> From the very beginning it was a lighthearted romp filled to the brim with pop culture references.The original W3 Arthas was not about gay centaur marriage and tranny reptiles so some reddit elements have disproportionately taken over the setting over time.
>>3493596GMs are an ok concept but they're ultimately too biased and limited to scale to any kind of MP game popularity. You've got to have AI because you're just never going to have 1 skilled GM with the time and energy to entertain every 4 people in a party. Then they have to have no biases to give their regs easy treasure filled stuff and invalidate the whole concept of "game". Such people barely exist.
>>3494297>>3495273What truly bothers me about dark-fantasy is that you don't need the edgy/bizarre (in a retarded way) armors to look dark, in real life you can see medieval/modern armors (picrel) that would fit in a dark-fantasy universe and the best of all is they actually protect you.And with the rise of the AI art and coding, despite all the good things it could create, I have the bad feeling that it will be used to create the worst armors ever imagine.
>>3488312Based-take.
>>3486479It's part of the greater problem of the infantilization of the West and the appeal to childish, liberalized fantasy that exalts the fantastical over the grounded, the spectacular over the compelling, and the flashy over the depthful. Things need to be accessible, things need to always have a positive spin, things always need to be cheery and colorful, and anything "grim" or "dour" or "gritty" or "raw" is seen as white supremacist, fascist, and "adolescent" that is meant solely to appeal to old boys/young men.Basically the genre has been hijacked by the most pansy faggots imaginable.
>>3495478i like that the guy that made your picture didn't call out the bikinisi dislike that he didn't call out tigger
>>3495276>You've got to have AISo like what Everquest Next was supposed to be with Storybricks?
>>3486479WoW is quickly becoming a MOBALots of grimdark fantasy mmorpgs have been tried, most of them korean, most of them flopped
>>3486479MMOs have NEVER been rpgs, they're all essentially cosmetic collection slave games made for slaves to login once a week for their one drop of content (raiding)
>>3486487>through the growth >implying the main audience of warcraft wasn't 9 year olds from the very beginningmassive cartoonish shoulder pads = toddler audience. no exceptions. it's the same with warhammer
>>3495478Finally I see some calling out those things, I thought I was the only one that hate them.How are the retards that came with the idea of doing armor parts and weapons as useless and ridiculous as possible?>>3495658I play the MMOs only for the story, not the cosmetics, raids, whatever.
>>3486479The issue is that the story has to remain somewhat noncomittal since all players follow it. Making death knights actually evil would not make any sense given the current setting, they would be switfly kicked from the Alliance and the Horde and promptly killed.
>>3495876Remember the Death Knight class order hall campaign in Legion, when Bolvar ordered Mograine and friends to invade the Paladin class order hall underneath Light's Hope chapel and slaughter every paladin in their way (comrades they fight alongside with against the Lich King in Wrath) to retrieve Tirion's remains and raise him as a Four Horseman, only for Bolvar to say "just kidding!"? Remember Bolvar ordering the Deathlord to invade Ruby Life Sanctum and slaughter red dragons and the last red dragon eggs and babies there?
>>3495671>massive cartoonish shoulder padsWho created that shit? He should be punished for crimes against aesthetics.And why many people thought and still think it looks cool? It doesn't, it looks ugly and goofy.
>>3496380I always assumed they were copying what was popular in anime. Though it looked cool there.
>>3495876In Shadowlands we could had Lord Garithos back, but he was too based for current Blizztard and its cucksoomers.>>3495886The Scarlet Crusade was right, again. The Argent Crusade are a bunc of cucks and deserved it. Bolvar was kind based.https://youtu.be/XF3omoRE2EY?si=wfrJ5VMsuQ-jkbBr
>>3496386>coping anime>anime, where logic and common sense go to die>anime, jap blackholeIt's all so tiredsome. This is why 2 nukes weren't enough.
>>3495648Can MOBAs be grimmdark?Also WoW its becoming more like Sims 4 than a MOBA. At least MOBAs don't have tab-combat.
WoW is a faggot game where you're either killing animals or dicksucking the guild leader for raid drops.
>>3486479>I would like to play in an alive / persistent world that has true darkness.But then how would developers sell rainbow unicorn mounts and skimpy outfits to make money?
>>3497178>But then how would developers sell rainbow unicorn mounts and skimpy outfits to make money?
>>3486479>Could WoW be that? WoW 2 with a new engine?I don't want a WoW2. I just want it to finally die out.
>>3486479Dark Fantasy does not work the entire time you are logged in. You need a more complete emotional cycle
>>3488317fuck that, I want WoW but with only one server.
>>3493076That is really close to FF11, you would pull a second orc and have to run back to the castle gates to get it off your back, ruining the experience of every player between you and the door. I miss the danger of MMOs, be it player ganking or mob ganking
>>3494131NIGGER
>>3486479i don't recall darky knights having crystal nipples in my /vr/ games.
>>3495876This is also why MMORPGs aren't actually RPGs, there is no consequence and no reactivity for any action.Even the slightest differences in choice like one faction having paladins and the others not having them was too much for whiny players and lazy cut and paste tuning devs.Even the racial choices were all but removed other than cosmetically, same with the crafting bonuses.Just a twitch gacha grinder after a while, with bad action mechanics since it's still tab target.
>>3500345>12 days later still mad he got clocked on not knowing who Soth was.Damn son, you must be one of those millennials who are too stupid to feel shame.
>>3499845>t. retard
>>3500690>Even the slightest differences in choice like one faction having paladins and the others not having them was too much for whiny players and lazy cut and paste tuning devs.>Even the racial choices were all but removed other than cosmetically, same with the crafting bonuses.At this point, Alliance and Horde should united in a single faction, so the players can finally play another one (Scarlet Crusade, Twilight's Hammer, etc) that is actually cool.
