Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "warcraft"

I was about seven or eight years old when I got the demo disc for Command & Conquer. Up until that point I'd only ever played games like Commander Keen and Super Mario Bros. and such, which were fun but not particularly noteworthy. I had no idea what to expect from the opening demo and that guy (my first FMV experience) talking to me... until the music kicked in, accentuated by the explosions, the cannons, the gunfire, and the screams of the dying, and promptly blew my mind.

I played that game as much as I was allowed for the next couple days, until the disc was taken away. I never figured out how to set up the construction yard and make buildings and new units, and instead charged with my mammoth tanks and others in a suicide mission against the NOD walls and the laser obelisk, over and over again, like banging my head to a wall. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that I never got over that: I later learned that the next demo mission involved a commando, and that guy probably would've blown my mind all over again in some unhealthy way, with his badass one-liners and awesome insta-kill sniper rifle.

Christmas 1999 I got Tiberian Sun, and I still remember it as one of my most beloved presents. Even today I think that game has the overall best soundtrack in the series - sure, it doesn't have any Hell March in it, but neither does it have a single C&C Thang - and a pretty great visual style that's influenced my scifi writing a fair bit.

In any game of the series, I always loved engineers. I preferred capturing all enemy buildings rather than destroying them, because it felt wasteful. But there's a thing there: what's up with the way reverse-engineering works in these games?

Okay, I've acquired the NOD stealth tank designs, can I use these in the next mission? No? Why the hell not? Why do I need to do this again every time? Shouldn't once be enough, and now everyone in GDI everywhere should be able to design these things? This makes no sense!

I didn't get to play Warcraft II or Starcraft until years after Tiberian Sun, but as soon as I did they resonated with me. They didn't have this reverse-engineering nonsense. Warcraft's armies were equal: obviously the orcs had long since stolen the sword designs from humans, for instance. And yeah, they still had dragons, but the Alliance has a bunch of gryphon riders that can shoot lightning, so it evens out.

(I used to experiment with their stats in level editors, giving humans better penetration and armor due to sharper weapons and better steel, while orcs got higher damage and hit points because they were stronger and tougher themselves. It never really went anywhere.)

And in Starcraft, of course, the three different factions are entirely different - but also of entirely different races. I can't imagine humans figuring out how to use Zerg tech. So that's also pretty great.

That's why I like them better than Command & Conquer. They're so realistic.

Even in fantasy settings far removed from our world, if you look up to the sky, it's going to look much the same as ours: there's the stars, and there's our old friend the moon. There's no need to change this because it's not the focus - the focus is down below, on the people and their struggles. But as in everything, there are exceptions.



Two moons is pretty popular in fantasy, for a good reason. It makes things of the world and its standing far more clear: as soon as you look up, you realize we're not in Kansas anymore. Instantly you get the feeling that this is quite a bit farther removed from our own world. That things are going to be different here. A good author will capitalize on this: you can't just have the second moon hover there and do nothing, you have to make it mean something, do stuff. If nothing else, the setting's people will have worked their mythology around it.

Pictured above is the Warhammer world's dreaded Morrslieb: whenever it's full, things are going to get weird indeed. Another example is Masser and Secunda from the video game series The Elder Scrolls: they're actually the sundered decaying corpse of a dead god, the first and most obvious sign of the trippy, drug-fueled, absolutely friggin' bonkers nature of the entire setting. Final Fantasy IV and Beast Wars each have two moons, and reveal great things about the second one. The setting of Warcraft has a second moon, except then it didn't, and now it does again. The setting of the musical project Bal-Sagoth mentions a couple times a third moon that fell from the heavens, meaning there's probably still two up there. It comes up a lot... even if not all of them take full advantage of it.

You can get the same thing across with just one moon, by making that one moon a little bit weird and fantastic - in a meaningful way, of course - but two moons makes for a very nice fantastic imagery that's hard to beat. You can also add more, but it tends to have diminishing returns: Dragonlance gets away with three, but it really binds them to its magic system in a way that really makes it impossible to have any less, but Eberron's twelve moons, while tying up a bit to its theme of thirteen-minus-one, is just excessive. At the opposite end there's the moon of Forgotten Realms, Selûne, which just has a few glittering comets following it around: enough for just a bit of imagery while not taking too much of our time, subtle and very nice.

The weirder you get with your night sky, the more it kidnaps the reader's attention, drawing focus out of the earthly matters where it should be. But if you do not properly tie up all the other moons and stuff into the world, it just comes across as gratuitous and overcompensating - it's a wasted effort you'd have been better off to put elsewhere. It's very hard to marry both with a good middleground.

But that's all fantasy. In science fiction, it's a whole other story: the eye can be drawn to the stars all the time, because the protagonists often actually go up there. They get to visit all sorts of weird constellations and gas giants and moons and what have you. The focus is up in the skies, so the skies should reflect this - if not in the main character's own boring-ass homeworld, then elsewhere.



My own setting not only has half a dozen moons to it - it is a moon, in itself, all of them orbiting around the same gas giant, making for a real lightshow up there. The stories seem just straight-up fantasy at first, but gradually, more scientific matters come up, rockets and lasers and trips to the stars... and the night sky is an early clue of this. To set the true score of things from the very beginning, if you look at it the right way and think the same way I do.

The protagonist Peal is very small by any measure of things, and yet he has his entire world to look after. But whenever he looks up to the sky, he realizes - his beat is pretty small too. There's so much more out there, so many greater and more important matters, interplanetary and interstellar and galactic affairs some people are saddled with. All in all things could be worse for him. He's got this.