Category Archives: My writing

Top 5 Wings of Liberty Moments + A Writing Rant

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I originally planned this post to be a massive rant on some recent writing-related frustrations, but I don’t think anyone wants to read a thousand words of my bitterness, so I’ve cut it down to a smaller rant at the bottom of the post. In the meantime, let’s talk about something happier.

Top five Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty moments:

Heart of the Swarm is just around the corner, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to look back at some of the better moments from Wings of Liberty. I’ll focus on the campaign, since multiplayer experiences vary from person to person.

5: Ghosts of the Past trailer:

Under normal circumstances, saying that I like the trailer for a game more than the game itself would not reflect kindly on the game. But when it comes to Ghosts of the Past, it’s because the trailer is just that good.

I love a good trailer, and Ghosts of the Past is one of the best I’ve ever seen, easily the equal of anything Hollywood has put out. Ghosts of the Past is everything a good trailer should be: it’s epic, it’s intriguing, it’s emotional, it looks pretty, and it has a great score.

Dear God, I wish they’d do a Starcraft movie.

4: A Card to Play:

I love Blizzard’s style of story-telling, but I will admit that — barring a few notable exceptions — their stories generally don’t have a lot of depth or originality.

The cinematic “A Card to Play” from near the end of Wings of Liberty is a quintessential piece of Blizzard story-telling. Is it cliche? Yes. Is it borderline mindless? Yes. Is it cheesy? Yes.

Does any of that stop it from being ridiculously awesome?

Not for a second.

3: Outbreak:

Outbreak is a simple idea for a mission, but it’s incredibly fun. Each night, you are assaulted by thousands upon thousands of Zerg zombies and can only huddle behind your defenses and pray you see the dawn. During the day, you have a brief window to strike back at the Zerg while the zombies are in hiding.

This was the first mission in the campaign that I found significantly challenging. I was hovering between normal and hard at the time and had been mostly facerolling my way through the campaign, but Outbreak had me on the edge of my seat. I barely survived each night, and the days were a panicked frenzy of trying to hunt down the Zerg while I could.

Needless to say, there was much punching of the air when the victory message popped up. It’s one of my fondest memories from my first play through of WoL.

2: Bar Fight:

Although I have traditionally been a bigger fan of Warcraft than Starcraft, I will say that Jim Raynor is my favourite Blizzard character. In fact, he’s my favourite video game character period.

At first, I’ll admit I wasn’t feeling the same love for Raynor in WoL. He just didn’t seem to have quite the same charm or heroic spirit. But this was entirely intentional on Blizzard’s part, a crucial part of his character arc that only made it all the more spectacular when the old Jim we know and love came roaring back.

Behold the glory that is… Raynor.

“Now that’s the commander I been waitin’ on.”

1: In Utter Darkness:

I’ve already written at some length about the mission In Utter Darkness. I consider it a masterpiece of the art of game design. It’s an incredibly fun mission, and it’s also a powerful and emotional story, and those two factors feed off each other to create an experience that is far more than the sum of its parts.

I’ve replayed In Utter Darkness more than any other mission from WoL, and it just doesn’t get old. No matter how many times I play it, it always seems to end too soon. There’s always that moment of heartbreak as you realize you can’t hold off the Hybrids anymore, and there’s nothing left to do but stand back and watch as all you’ve fought tooth and nail to defend is torn apart before your eyes.

I don’t doubt there will be some awesome moments in Heart of the Swarm, but I really don’t see Blizzard doing anything to equal In Utter Darkness.

Of course, it would be nice to be proven wrong.

Rant:

The life of a freelance writer is fraught with hardship. The Internet is essentially the Wild West, and there are legions of people out there trying to rip us off. Nearly every day, I am faced with obvious scams or jobs that pay so low as to be analogous to slave labor. Many employers won’t pay at all, listing only “exposure” as their compensation.

I do my best to prevent being ripped off. I avoid anything that looks suspicious, and I take all reasonable precautions to avoid being cheated. But still, bad guys slip through. In the two years I’ve been freelancing, I’ve been cheated out of hundreds of dollars.

A recent incident was perhaps the worst to date.

A new client hired me to do some editing. I did so. They then decided they wanted me to give up on fixing the old content and just write some new stuff. I agreed, but asked that I be paid for the work I had already done.

They refused, and they fired me for asking.

I sent them a series of polite but firm emails insisting that they pay for the work completed. They responded with several increasingly irate and belligerent messages stating that new content was what they’d wanted all along — despite my quoting their own statements to the contrary — and went on to question my ethics, my professionalism, and my intelligence.

It gets worse. This was a World of Warcraft writing gig, and they required me to reactivate my sub, which I’d cancelled in anticipation of Heart of the Swarm. (As an aside, I have no idea why, in retrospect. They didn’t end up asking me to do anything in-game.) They originally said they would reimburse me the cost, but they refused to do so once they fired me.

This makes this the first job in history I’ve actually lost money on.

I don’t have a point to make here. I’m just really angry. I’m angry that it’s so easy for people to scam writers and so hard for us to get any justice. I’m angry that I can’t warn the next poor writer these scum are going to cheat.

I see no difference between these people and a mugger on the street, other than that only one is likely to go to jail. They have stolen from me by refusing to pay what I am rightfully owed. They’re common criminals, nothing more.

I’m also angry at myself for falling for this. They seemed legitimate and professional at first glance, but I guess I should have been more careful.

New article:

On a more positive note, my latest article on WhatMMO is More Great MMO Players of History. The last one was so much fun I couldn’t resist doing another.

I really do think George Custer and Leeroy Jenkins are kindred spirits.

The Genius and the Folly of Garrosh Hellscream

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When Blizzard announced that Garrosh Hellscream would be the new warchief of the Horde, fan reaction was strong and almost uniformly negative. Massive lists of better potential warchiefs were compiled, mentioning everyone from Saurfang to Sylvanas, from half a stack of peacebloom to basic campfire.

An election banner for Varok Saurfang and Vol'jinCertainly, I have always counted myself among the Garrosh haters. He has taken the Horde back in time, effectively erasing a decade of development for the faction’s lore, and he has generally been written as an emo, thick-headed, and utterly unlikable character.

But Mists of Pandaria has caused me to see Garrosh in a new light. Could there be some method to Blizzard’s madness?

Yes, and no.

The genius:

I don’t know when Blizzard decided Garrosh would be a new main villain. I’m sure it wasn’t in their minds when they first stuck him next to that campfire in Nagrand, but I’d like to imagine it wasn’t something they just pulled out of their proverbial behinds when Pandaria came along.

It feels to me like they planned ahead a bit here, and that’s where I start to believe there might be some sparkle of brilliance in making Garrosh warchief of the Horde.

Garrosh taking over pissed a lot of people off. Those of us who were fans of Thrall and his Horde have grown incredibly resentful of Garrosh and Blizzard’s decision to appoint him. We feel like our Horde has been stolen from us. We feel disenfranchised.

I’ve even compared it a form of false advertising. I joined a faction of noble savages, not the Nazis. The Horde I agreed to play is not the Horde currently in-game. I very much feel as if the rug has been pulled out from under me as a Horde player.

Not coincidentally, this is exactly how most of the fictional members of the Horde now feel, too.

Garrosh has become a ruthless tyrant. Anyone not an Orc and a loyalist is treated as little more than disposable cannon fodder. Hellscream’s secret police roam Orgrimmar in the night, brutally silencing any who dare speak against the warchief.

The Tauren hate him because he killed Cairne. The Blood Elves hate him because he’s wasting their lives, something their small population cannot withstand. The Trolls hate him because he killed Vol’jin — as far as they know — and threw them all in internment camps. The Forsaken hate him because… they pretty much hate everyone, actually.

Even many Orcs hate him for his allying with the Blackrock Clan and essentially restoring the dark Horde of yore.

But still, Garrosh does have his supporters, and this, too, mirrors the real world. Many young and hot-blooded Orcs, born into slavery under the Alliance and tired of being hated by the rest of the world, welcome Garrosh’s take-no-prisoners attitude towards any who would oppose the ruthless advancement of the Horde.

Similarly, many players feel that Garrosh has gotten the Horde back to its savage roots. They feel that honour and the Horde are two concepts that can’t coexist, and that ruthless conquest is the natural way of life for Orcs.

I would argue that such players grossly misunderstand the lore, but that’s a discussion for another time.

The point is that there is a conflict among Horde fans that closely mirrors the conflict in the game. In both realities, those who cling to the brutality of the past are arrayed against those who welcome an honourable future.

Burn, Hellscream, burn!It’s a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy that could almost give The Secret World a run for its money.

Ultimately, I tend to view villains as having only two key responsibilities, and one is to be hated.

Garrosh Hellscream has absolutely aced this test. By making him the leader of a faction without initially hinting he would be a raid boss, Blizzard has given us a personal vendetta against Garrosh. For the first time since Wrath of the Lich King, I’m truly chomping at the bit to face a boss purely because he pisses me off.

I’d happily kill Garrosh even if he dropped no loot. Hell, I’d sell off my purples for a chance to take a crack at him.

From that perspective, putting Garrosh in charge was something of an act of genius.

The folly:

But unfortunately, it’s not that simple. I said that villains have two responsibilities. One is to be hated. The other is to be feared.

Garrosh has failed this test miserably.

Garrosh is something of an anomaly among Warcraft villains in that he has no special powers or abilities. He’s just an Orc, albeit an unusually strong one. That in and of itself might not have prevented him from being compelling as a villain, but Blizzard has almost gone out of their way to ruin his intimidation factor as much as possible.

When we first met Garrosh in-game, he was a pathetic, depressed creature who spent all his time weeping by the fireside because his grandma was dying. And it hasn’t really been uphill from there.

We’ve been told Garrosh is a military genius, but we’ve never been shown this. When you think about it, he’s actually been something of a spectacular failure as a commander-in-chief.

His invasion of the Borean Tundra promptly got its ass kicked by Scourge. It was only the meddling of Saurfang, and the assistance of the player, that enabled it to succeed. Garrosh got the credit because Saurfang kept his actions a secret.

His plan to conquer Gilneas proved to be an utter failure and has dragged the Horde into a bloody quagmire war that is still unresolved.

Garrosh has tried and failed to invade Ashenvale not once, but twice. In-game, the Night Elves drove him back, and the only thing that stopped the Horde from losing their foothold in the forest entirely was a pact with a Demon. In the novel “Wolfheart,” he was driven back, and he personally got his ass beaten in by Varian in single combat.

He lost Stonard to the Alliance, robbing the Horde of one of its oldest and most storied settlements in Azeroth.

His invasion of the Twilight Highlands was an unmitigated disaster, saved only narrowly by the efforts of the player and Zaela.

And then there’s the whole “let’s experiment with the Sha because that’s totally not a bad idea or anything” scheme of his.

I could keep listing off his failures, but you get the idea. Simply put, Garrosh is an idiot, and it’s hard to take seriously a villain who has been so clownishly incompetent for most of his history.

Now, he did lay the smack down on Theramore pretty good, and he has generally come across as much scarier and more capable in Mists of Pandaria, but it’s hard to ignore the past.

And this brings us to the other fatal flaw of Garrosh Hellscream, and that is that his writing has been horrifically inconsistent. One day, he’s preaching the virtues of child-killing to Saurfang. The next, he’s executing his own generals for killing children. Then an expansion later, he’s burning the ships in Theramore to ensure as many civilian casualties as possible.

I actually have an explanation for this, and Christie Golden has said the same thing when talking about her take on Garrosh’s character: he has a very weak personality.

This may seem odd for a character who greets you by screaming, “ONLY THE STRONGEST MAY DWELL WITHIN ORGRIMMAR,” but what this means is that he’s very susceptible to the influence of others.

When he was hanging out with Saurfang, he picked up some of the elder Orc’s high-minded ideals. Now that he’s fallen in with Malkorok and the Blackrock Clan, he’s adopted their vicious attitude toward warfare.

But again, this does not make for a compelling villain. He’s little more than a spineless puppet, following whoever whispers in his ear at the moment.

There’s an almost tragic irony here. One of Grom Hellscream’s favourite insults to throw at his enemies was, “Weak-minded coward!” And weak-minded is exactly what his son grew up to be.

* * *

In the end, Garrosh looks set to prove far more interesting and valuable to the ongoing storyline of Warcraft universe than I ever thought possible, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a character more funny than frightening, or the countless missteps Blizzard have taken in regards to him.

Garrosh could have been brilliant, but he was mostly terrible, and I see it averaging it out to a story that is merely okay.

New article:

My latest article at WhatMMO is Great MMO Players of Fiction. Because I know you all want to hear about Batman ganking Captain Ahab.