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With Metzen... man, I just don't know. I never followed whatever the fuck happened with World of Warcraft past the vanilla experience. The cracks were showing in WarCraft III, at least for me, and StarCraft II was heart breaking in how profoundly stupid and masturbatory the story was. Do a thing, undo a thing, redo the thing. I hated it.
I just don't think Metzen's ability to story craft grew with his ambition to be "epic". He was perfectly able to do some rudimentary world building and a pulp fantasy storyline, largely following Carmack's old formulation that story in games was like story in a porno. When he tried to make the story good for it's own sake he fell flat on his fucking face. Maybe he got lucky with StarCraft, probably the singularly good story he did.
I think this is just part of the broader signs that our culture is dying. Nobody tries to tell a tried and true story with any sincerity anymore. Everything is endless subversion. Heal turns, face turns, pointless soap opera drama. I've come to loath all that deeply. It feels like we can't even create stories anymore, much less anything more substantial.
I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton passage somewhere about age and fatigue in a society. A society created last week might have very high average age, and be senescent and likely to die soon; a society created a thousand years ago might be full of vigorous members of a young age, and set for the future. I wonder if something similar might apply - the more a people's storytelling is obsessed with the young, the new, the innovation, the deconstructive, the more that's a sign of the people's age and stagnation. Meanwhile retelling the old classics is not a sign of decrepitude, but rather one of vigour.
If nothing else, what types of stories do you tell to children? It's the old classics and the tried-and-true. Daring deconstructions are stories for old, cynical people. The young and vital like to hear the same old thing.
That said, I think there are some older stories out there if you look for them, though sometimes you might have to look to non-Western developers. I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
Funny you mention that. I'd heard enough positive chatter about it that I bought it on sale and jumped in almost completely blind. I've been very pleasantly surprised, and I'm about 4 hours in.
I am tremendously salty about the lack of PC port.
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