Why does the Warcraft setting suck so bad at cosmic horror?

>>48810833

High magic settings and elder gods don't mix well in my opinion. The Elder Gods and the unknowable are scary when you aren't flinging magic left and right, dabbling in the unknowable and mystical and magical pretty much constantly and unleashing torrents of it at a whim.

>>48810900

Like, what can the Eldritch bring to bear that you can't fling from your fingertips on a whim?

>>48810948
Reality breaking bullshit.

>>48810833
>starry cults and
They got confused and thought that "starry cults" meant "sparkly cults".

Man, I've never seen the Big Ol' C so buff or shiny!

>>48810958

Like shit you already do with a casting time of 2s or every 30min cooldown?

Reality is broken by magic portals to other worlds, leviathans at the head of armies of demons, whole fucking cities so powered by magic that half their shit floats around, sunken temples every other large lake, magical forests so oozing with nature magic that they light up like a rave...

>>48810833

Lovecraft was never that good and is so overdone at this point.

If you want to complain about it though, start with D&D and the Far Realm, or every other author over the last 40 years who has inserted Lovecraft's IP into their work.

>>48810833
Because it's not cosmic horror, not really, they're just cosmic horror themed. They're another thing, like all the other horrible things that you fight, except they do things that are associated in media with cosmic horror stuff such as driving things insane and having the cults infiltrating society.

Warcraft is a kitchen sink world, it's like an international buffet, there's a lot of stuff and there's little bits and pieces of all different styles and flavors but none of them are going to be as good or well developed as if you'd gone to a place that specializes in that.

But that's just my thoughts on it.

>>48810833
Because of the relenttless pressure of players to have new, differant content as soon as possible. Look at WoD, look how much everyone hates orcs. Same thing would happen if we had 3 old god tiers in a row. Most of the playerbase don't know what they want, go apeshit over irrelevent crap.

All that comes together into an environment where you can't build up the sufficient horror aspects over time like you need to and theyre relegated to either easter eggs or dropped in front of the player where they cant be scary.

1. Aesthetics. Warcraft has a cartoony aesthetic that does not mesh well with any kind of horror setting.

2. Philosophy. The philosophy behind cosmic horror is the insignificance of man, the monstrous nature of the universe, etc. The philosophy behind Warcraft is having fun killing monsters with your friends. They're incompatible.

3. Finally, the people behind Warcraft make the mistake a lot of other people trying to do cosmic horror make: they think the scary part is tentacles and nonsense words like "Yuzrl-Shubboth". What makes cosmic horror scary is realizing there are vast alien forces beyond your comprehension that make humanity look totally insignificant and an oppressive, insanity-tinged atmosphere.

>>48810833
Because cosmic horrors aren't supposed to be easely defeated.

>>48810833
>Why does the Warcraft setting suck so bad at cosmic horror?
Because Warcraft relies on an overwhelmingly visual medium: video games. And probably the worst visual medium of all for these kinds of things. With a movie or (especially) a cartoon, you can always pick a certain lighting, pace, angle or frame that makes something look a lot scarier than it is. In video games all angles, including the unflattering ones, are visible.

On top of that, these nightmarish, faceless horrors are supposed to be creatures so unnatural, so depraved, that merely gazing upon one drives many good men insane. We should not know what they look like, we should only have descriptions. The more details we know about them, the less scary they are.

This is why even horror movies generally save the reveal of their monster until the end.

>>48810900
>>48810948
One way to do it is set immutable laws and limitations of magic then have the Elder Things completely break those restrictions on a whim, completely shattering physical and magical reality on a level that even the Archmages can't keep up with.

>>48811137
>Look at WoD, look how much everyone hates orcs.
People were tired of Metzen's orc boner way before WoD.

Although I originally liked the idea of an Elder God avatar slowly corrupting everything around it like it was the case with C'thun, I quickly realized it was not the "powerful spawn of a bigger, meaner Elder God who just happened to crash nearby" like in Lovecraft fiction, but a literal eye-god in the middle of the desert who enslaved insects and was driving their evolution for its own evil agenda.
WoW's general setting did drift away from those in the OP pic being the spawn-minions of first an Elder God spawn in WCIII to magic generals in early-wow, to actual children of the """"chaotic""""-evil MYSTERIOUS void BBEG.

>>48811082
This.

>>48810833
>Why does the Warcraft setting suck so bad at cosmic horror?
Because magic in WoW is just power levels.

>>48810833
old gods were supposed to be an outside-context-problem. and one of the core components is that you cant kill it, maybe at a huge stretch you can inconvenience it.

in WoW everything has a healthbar, therefore it can be killed.