To survive the onslaughts, I had to acquire new orcs during siege battles, defend my best orcs from dying during sieges, and level up orcs in-between sieges.
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Then I'll go into the menu and I'll spend those coins on a loot box filled with more orcs to fight for me, more orcs who can help me turn other orcs into slaves or swords (or, if I'm being really efficient, both).
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In the world of Azeroth, humans are fighting off an invasion of orcs, who arrived via a magical portal that linked Azeroth to the orcs' dying home world of Draenor.
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Just think of it like the blade Sting from The Lord of the Rings in the presence of orcs... if the orcs were fortifying locations in your mouth instead of Middle-earth.
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Now, you're enslaving orcs and making them fight for you.
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It's a lot easier if you just buy some orcs.
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Heretofore, trailers for Warcraft adaptation have gone like this: Orcs!
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These orcs aren't your typical video game NPC cannon fodder.
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The catch is that the orcs actually aren't inherently evil.
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Beren set off to retrieve the gem, encountering Orcs and Sauron.
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Mine's just like his, but with less sweating and more orcs.
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Underneath this world-ending plot is racial tensions between orcs and humans.
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It paid off with these spectacular portraits of zombies, mutants, and orcs.
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Orcs and humans are the bread and butter of all of Warcraft.
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The orcs remember things, hold grudges, and react to your leadership accordingly.
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The wraith and ranger abuse and slaughter orcs and dominate their feeble minds.
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I feel bad about Talion's—and by extension my—treatment of the orcs.
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Like Tolkien's orcs, his pubescent hoods are bad because, well, they're just bad.
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He had written his orcs to be revolting, devolved, violent agents of evil.
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The orcs are special, but as the game churns on and I began to melt down orcs for loot, I begun to see them as a series of traits mixed together instead of the unique and beautiful creatures they were.
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Unlike other universes in which orcs are run-of-the-mill, ill-intentioned brutes, the orcs in Warcraft are another race of intelligent creatures trying to survive through the death of their world, even if that means taking over someone else's.
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The movie is a cop thriller called "Bright" that contains "fantastical elements" (including orcs).
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We aren't beggars, or migrant workers, or some borderland wedged between orcs and elves.
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They don't even explain where the orcs are coming from or who they are.
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Popstars, orcs and a wiener-dog are coming to the big screen this month.
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This may be the only time orcs and 808s ever meet, so enjoy it.
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ORCs are humanoid creatures, best described as ugly, filthy, fanged beings who resemble gnomes.
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You can go fight evil orcs, or befriend them and start a new religion.
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He can't be allowed to show that orcs and trolls can rebel against their masters.
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The filmmakers knew (obviously) from the beginning that the orcs would have to be digital.
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All of the emotional subtlety the humans lack, the orcs have, and it's really weird.
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In the world of the film, humans live alongside fantastical beings (like orcs and fairies).
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In Shadow of War, the player can only dominate orcs at or below their level.
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Shadow of War has gone to pains to make the player care about the orcs.
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The genesis of his tale featuring elves, trolls and orcs was in the Somme's trenches.
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Every day, thousands of players meet here and have sex as either elves, orcs, or pandas.
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Different orcs belong to different orc cultures, all vying for power against one another in Mordor.
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Players can pay a few extra bucks for boxes of rare orcs and other legendary loot.
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He called to his fellow orcs, said he smelled manflesh and pulled me out of hiding.
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If the game sends some orcs after you, you can fight them or form a band.
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To put it as simply as possible, Warcraft is about the war between humans and orcs.
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Those high-ranking orcs you come up against can either be killed or enlisted in your army.
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You can travel to space, wage war with elves and orcs or simply live the agrarian life.
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"We'd love to cast orcs and seven-foot-tall creatures but they just don't exist," says Westenhofer.
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Thankfully, the game allows you to humiliate orcs to lower their level and make them more compliant.
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"It was never really a question" to Huxley to use CGI for the orcs in the commercial, either.
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I'm suddenly finding fantasy lands more interesting than ever, craving stories about orcs and elves, goblins and ghouls.
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Because everyone plays differently, and because the orcs were procedurally generated, no two players' experience was the same.
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In it, the player controls Talion, a human ranger who loses everything and responds by killing many Orcs.
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A core part of the game was about building relationships with orcs and using them to fight Sauron.
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True to the game, the orcs and humans in Warcraft each have separate stories, and draw separate sympathies.
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It's a small price to pay to for the privilege of slaughtering orcs in the name of education.
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I've seen starships battling each other, fire-breathing dragons, orcs and Balrogs, Wookiees and Ewoks, Webslingers and Kryptonians.
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Except, instead of orcs and whatnot, he's facing images symbolizing feminism, Marxism, anti-fascists, and other typically lefty ideologies.
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The orcs revel in violence so much, they love it so much, they're almost like vikings in that sense.
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He also wrote the most harrowing essay you'll ever read about orcs and conquered his video game completionist obsession.
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So they changed to calling black people 'Orcs' so they can avoid being reported for saying the N word.
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Pretty soon, he was spending 20 to 40 hours a week raiding dungeons and slaying orcs, trolls and dragons.
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He and his wraith companion talk about the orcs as if they were discussing brood mares and racing horses.
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The presence of orcs is Bright's big hook: it takes place in what seems like modern-day Los Angeles, except it's a version of LA where fairies are a common, insect-like nuisance, orcs are societal outcasts, and elves dominate Beverly Hills as the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.
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Fortunately, it was more than enough to put ideas of orcs and elves out of mind for a good while.
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Developing the motion-capture technology to create the film's gargantuan, tusk-mouthed orcs took many months for Industrial Light & Magic.
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Even if you don't read the books, ENTs and Orcs are good to know for the purposes of crossword solving.
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Training involves learning how to fight as military officers, in a war against the savage orcs of the Southern Jungles.
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" (Mild spoilers follow.) "So, in the movie, the orcs are coming through the portal, and we're going to close the portal.
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Despite that, they've experienced so much discrimination that Smith's partner is one of the first orcs ever allowed on the LAPD.
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In Shadow of Mordor, you were essentially torturing and brutalizing orcs in an attempt to gain intel and intimidate your enemies.
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There's an inherent tension between humans and orcs due to a long-ago war, and the two rarely mix and mingle.
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In Duncan Jones' Warcraft, humans and orcs form an uneasy alliance as they face a grave threat to their entire world.
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It's a great game with solid systems, but enslaving the army of orcs to hunt your enemies is the real draw.
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Creator Nick Walton joined a band: That time I joined a band of Orcs as their drummer and toured the kingdom.
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The game really relies on these characters to fill out the feelings and emotions of orcs outside of the encounters you have with them in combat; Shadow of War is uncannily committed to showing that the orcs and trolls are thinking, feeling, real people (which is what really drives the grossness of the Nemesis System home).
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The movie has Will Smith playing a cop in a gritty version of Earth where orcs and elves and fairies exist. Okay!
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As orcs become more powerful leaders, their influence will also influence regional fortresses found throughout Mordor, as well as their surrounding areas.
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The pair both hate Sauron and criss-cross Mordor killing his soldiers and building an army of orcs to take him down.
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The Warcraft movie jumps into the story at the pivotal moment the race of orcs escape their dying world to enter Azeroth.
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Dig too deep, and the world might be invaded by creatures from the abyss; abandon a settlement, and orcs might take over.
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I watched a brief demo of the game that featured everything from dismembered arms and heads to orcs being stabbed in the eye.
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Essentially, the idea is that there are certain orcs — captains, warchiefs, and other powerful leaders — who have distinct personalities and, more importantly, memories.
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Eventually you'll get your hands back on that second ring of power, which allows you not only to control orcs, but entire armies.
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He's the "good" kind of Black, a position that allows him to enact dominance over one species (fae) while advocating for another (orcs).
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On the 10th comes Middle-earth: Shadow of War, which we now know has wisecracking Cockney orcs in it—what's not to love?
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Cleo: We start out with the orcs, their shit is fucked up already, and this guy is already cracked out on fel energy.
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The orcs, performed via motion-capture, are similarly distinctive in the early going, but hard to tell apart when battle erases their individuality.
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Gylt is one of only a handful of exclusives games Google has announced so far, alongside Orcs Must Die 3 and Get Packed.
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First, there are orcs, goblins, poisonous snakes and slime beasts to overcome, as you explore the Dwarven ruins of the mountain's bottom levels.
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If you've ever watched a gritty cop drama and wished there were more orcs and fairies in it, Bright might be for you.
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Aragorn was facing down orcs, who sported symbols for feminism, communism, media outlets — and oddly, an Android ghost emoji striped with rainbow colors.
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After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in Middle-earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there.
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But while its array of leathery orcs do look tremendous, the film is far more than just a pretty (well, fantastically ugly) face.
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The hackers-versus-suits mythos transcends any specific story: it's as universally recognized as (when it's not outright crossed with) Tolkien's orcs and elves.
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To that end, Talion will be recruiting orcs and building his own army in order to take down the heavily fortified fortresses across Mordor.
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The nemesis system in this game turns the slaughter of potentially faceless orcs into a much more personal challenge, and it quite frankly rocks.
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And fighters, half orc fighters...I'm an adopted person, I always felt sort of like an outsider, so I like to play half orcs.
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"[Orcs] don't really get any respect, and the cops are constantly kicking their ass," Ayer said — a notion that Smith had some fun with.
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The movie's visuals, for example, are consistently stunning, with intricately detailed orcs that come across as eerily lifelike, despite being created via digital wizardry.
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In World of Warcraft I even do away with the blades, preferring to play a tubby monk who wallops orcs and trolls with his fists.
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Just a few hours in, you'll be able to unleash hordes of killer spiders and pin orcs to the ground with a well-placed arrow.
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On the other end of the spectrum, orcs are typically found performing low-skill and low-wage labor in the less savory parts of town.
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Yeah, it sucked that since they started with the very beginning of the lore sequentially in time that we were stuck with orcs and humans.
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The computer composed this appropriately violent addition: The orcs' response was a deafening onslaught of claws, claws, and claws; even Elrond was forced to retreat.
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You might follow a writer you like who posts about elves 99 percent of the time, then all of a sudden they post about orcs.
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"They know that when they're watching 'The Lord of The Rings' there really aren't a lot of orcs in New Zealand appearing in the movie."
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The trailer shows some of the new enemies Talion will have to face, including a Balrog, the Nazgûl, and of course, lots and lots of orcs.
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But in War, they become your army — and with the orcs at your side, you can storm entire fortresses and claim them for the Bright Lord.
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It was really our way to show all the filmmakers, 'Yes, we can pull these orcs off,' and when they first saw it they were floored.
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All you need to know is that the Orcish homeland has been corrupted and is collapsing, so the Orcs have invaded the human land of Azeroth.
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D&D players, working collaboratively, can let their minds roam free through stories about brave warriors locked in combat with trolls, orcs, dragons and other evildoers.
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Picking an orc to rule over your newly-claimed fortress also means picking a certain culture of orcs and, along with it, their specialties and abilities.
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In most games, this would be fun, but in Shadow of War, the orcs' AI and personalities are so vivid that it's also an emotional burden.
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After a visit you, too, may find yourself believing in the reality of Middle-earth and the hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards that live there.
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I started with Orcs and Humans (the original Warcraft game, released in 1994), back when there was a turf war between that game and Command & Conquer.
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Instead, the orcs are actors in prosthetics and makeup, outfitted with real-world props — a marked improvement from the digital creatures in Jackson's own later Hobbit films.
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For most of the 25 years since releasing its breakout hit, "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans," Blizzard has been perhaps the most beloved video game maker in the world.
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You can interrogate orcs to learn about their boss's weaknesses, or you can utilize explosive barrels or caged animals to thin out the ranks before you strike.
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The family then moves to industrial Birmingham, and its dark satanic mills resemble the orcs' forges in Peter Jackson's film adaptations of "The Lord of the Rings".
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Gizmodo has also been unable to determine whether orcs are explicitly included in the predator ban, but we will update if and when that information becomes available.
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They've forged a new Ring of Power that they intend to use as they build an army of orcs to resist the rule of Mordor's Dark Lord.
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The Fall of Gondolin includes the first instances of orcs and balrogs and even has an appearance from the sea god Ulmo along with dragons and elves.
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This was especially true in the game's final act, which required players to defend their castles from wave after wave of orcs, and that I never completed.
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The advertising tagline is "Nothing Will Be Forgotten," live action commercials depict orcs lovingly caring for players years after they've stopped playing, and holding grudges for decades.
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" (Mild spoilers follow.) Article continues after the video below "So, in the movie, the orcs are coming through the portal, and we're going to close the portal.
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These orcs are by far the most interesting, charismatic, and human characters in the entire game, and the only memorial I have to them is an inventory screen.
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The orcs and monsters in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy would have been a lot less impressive if WETA had tried to construct them all digitally.
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While more evolved than, say, Tolkien's orcs vs hobbits, Harry Potter still pales in comparison to the complex moral tapestry of other fantasy contemporaries, like Game of Thrones.
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As I came to understand which of my actions would be ignored, the pleasure drained out of the ways I'd made fun for myself outside of killing Orcs.
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In a country that revels in its association with the "Lord of the Rings" movies, J. R. R. Tolkien's orcs and elves wouldn't appear out of place here.
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The two live in an alternate present-day reality where mythical-type creatures, like Orcs and Elves, have evolved alongside the human population, sharing a dank, sprawling metropolis.
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On the off chance that you saw the recent Warcraft movie, he's also the neon baby Moses figure some other orcs put in a basket in a river.
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The armies that are usually deployed in defense of Democratic policies are mercenaries who are mostly happy to work for the orcs, too, if the price is right.
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Because Warcraft is an introduction to this universe, it focuses on the core conflict that originally brought the orcs and humans together, also known as the First War.
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It's all good fun ripping on the characters until Nanjiani reveals, cringing, that he voiced "Dugz the Agonizer," one of the enemy orcs that they were about to face.
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Bright is a "gritty" cop film with orcs and elves thrown into the mix, though it might be a fantasy film onto which Training Day has somehow imposed itself.
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One in which every home has a dedicated VR room where viewers can wander around—fighting orcs, winning the World Series, shoving their fists up people's asses, or whatever.
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The company launched "World of Warcraft Classic" Monday, a nostalgic version of the multiplayer online roleplaying game, in which players can adventure as orcs and elves, among other characters.
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Whereas you could come to "Game of Thrones" and not know anything about Dungeons and Dragons or orcs and trolls and you would get some sense of what they're doing.
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Meanwhile, Warcraft, a film about a race of orcs teaming with humans and using magic to fight an evil magical force, avoided censorship and raked in $220 million in China.
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The elves are wealthy and magical, and seem to have all had copious plastic surgery; the humans are just humans; the orcs are generally hated, and relegated to the ghetto.
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His favorite game had a medieval-fantasy premise and a lot of noisy monsters, off-brand orcs who lumbered through a pixelated hellscape, grunting or sneezing this sound like zug!
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But it's not like we've exactly got a handle on race in the present plane—small wonder transporting to one with orcs or cyborgs mostly sees us losing it entirely.
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This news may mean something to people who play the game, but the rest of us are left to wonder what's gone wrong in the world of elves and orcs.
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But alas, few would have understood why there is a movie about Warcraft in which Humans and Orcs would indeed fight for the extinction of the other and eventually win.
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In the timeline of the Warcraft franchise, the film is largely based on the original game — one that came in 1994, before World of Warcraft, called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.
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But because there are so many orcs in Shadow of War, and so much to do in between fighting them, I haven't had as many of those relationships in the sequel.
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That world was dangerous because it was beset by Orcs, or by Cauldron-Born, or by Tripods, or by whatever adversary that was most easily battered into submission with a sword.
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The orcs in "Warcraft" prove somewhat more psychologically complex than any number of cartoon Hollywood villains — they're sincere, for one — and they're generally better company than the king and his crew.
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The Alliance is a collection of classic fantasy races such as Night Elves, Humans, and Dwarves while the Horde is a collection of oddities such as the Undead, Orcs, and Trolls.
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You can certainly mute the word "orc" but if someone tweets "Look at this article" and the article title is "Orcs are better than elves" you're still going to see it.
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"Thrones" felt like the natural extension of that approach, a realpolitik fractured fairy tale in which good and bad were harder to distinguish than they were among Tolkien's orcs and elves.
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In fact, for much of World of Warcraft, humans and orcs aren't even at war (although there are still skirmishes and conflicts, hence some of the game's player-versus-player combat).
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The interest in board games is at a significantly higher level now than it was five years ago, says Peter Wooding, owner of independent board game retailer Orcs Nest in central London.
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As you know, it's a way of procedurally (or programmatically) generating non-player characters in the form of orcs for Talion to fight and, ultimately, dominate in the service of his mission.
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The first is centered on a small number of refugees from Gondor, and the second is about Talion and a few named orcs who show up in cutscenes every now and again.
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Netflix used tonight's Academy Awards to show off the first trailer for Bright, a cop drama set in a version of our world that also contains orcs, elves, and other mystical creatures.
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And the partnership will continue in the future as well: Blizzard says that it's planning GOG releases of both Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II. Meanwhile, you can grab Diablo right here.
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"The Lord of the Rings" book by British author J.R.R. Tolkien is an epic tale of a clash between good and evil in a world inhabited by elves, dwarves, orcs and humans.
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The film opens with Will Smith's vaguely racist (against orcs, in case you forgot) cop character murdering a fairy with a broom because the fairy has been getting into his bird feeder.
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The orcs are beholden to the monstrous orc warlock Gul'dan (Daniel Wu), whose magic consumes entire worlds, pushing the orcish Horde to seek new places to settle and new life to consume.
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The movie's plot sees Smith playing LAPD cop Scott Ward, who's paired with an orc partner, Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton) – one of the first orcs to be appointed to the police department.
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The action film is set in a modern fantasy world where elves, humans, and orcs live alongside one another, but it only alluded to the larger world that drives much of the story.
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While purchasing Orcs in the Market is more immediate and provides additional player options, we have come to realize that providing this choice risked undermining the heart of our game, the Nemesis System.
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LONDON (Reuters) - J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastical world of hobbits, elves and orcs have won over fans around the world in the decades since "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" stories were published.
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In this way, D&D is similar to online games like World of Warcraft, where people take on imaginary identities, form a guild and shout at one another using headsets while fighting orcs.
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No, I'm describing the interminable 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, where a field of mortal men and women — no orcs or half-elves in sight — are still battling it out after a grueling campaign.
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For one thing, despite efforts to translate the orcs into live action, and despite the real performances underneath, there's still something comic book-y about them — and I mean that in a good way.
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He is an avid online gamer – and he's goodSince the game's inception in 22004, Grevers has played World of Warcraft, a multi-player game that pits players against orcs, dragons, ogres – and other players.
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"The notion of power, and the ring of power, and of turning Mordor against itself, and even the nature of the orcs themselves, is definitely about power and violence and conflict," de Plater says.
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I just didn't want them in my head, and I know that the first time I ever got horribly terrified by something was actually Lord of the Rings, when all the orcs came out.
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With this quest, "Children of Men" becomes a dark and bloody magical adventure, played out in cozy woodland hide-outs and hellish concentration camps populated by the human equivalents of hobbits, wizards and orcs.
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He tells us that he really likes the story, but there's one huge problem that he would change: he would tell the story from both the point of view of the orcs and the humans.
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The trailer gives viewers a longer look into the upcoming film, which takes place in a futuristic world where magical creatures like orcs and elves exist alongside humans, and face discrimination because of their differences.
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Adapted from the popular video game series, the film (which Universal will release on June 10) depicts the conflict on a mythical world called Azeroth, as humanity defends itself from a horde of invading orcs.
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There is in this movie, for starters, the visual appeal of those Blutoesque beings, lovingly fabricated and ornamented motion-capture creations who share their name with the creatures that J. R. R. Tolkien called orcs.
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There is no nod to newcomers, the movie just starts: orcs, humans, griffins (I think), and a stray elf or two, begin talking in a stilted cadence about even more creatures you haven't yet met.
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In reviewing my Xbox One X, I've spent a lot of time wondering whether my Xbox One X was properly running Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a new action game about enslaving and killing orcs.
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Lost among the streets of the castle on a hill, I felt like I was in "The Lord of the Rings" or had gone back to the Middle Ages — minus the orcs and the plague.
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Way back around release you wrote about this whole thing for Paste, and I remember clearly that you wrote about how there was no way to "dress up" the things that Talion did to the orcs.
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Shadow of War ups the stakes on 2014's surprisingly good Shadow of Mordor, allowing you — as the ghostly Bright Lord — to build even bigger armies of orcs, led by warlords you've coerced into following you.
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At the heart of the story is Sir Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), and the Orc prisoner Garona (Paula Patton), who band together to fight against the Orcs, led by the ferocious, power-hungry Gul'dan (Daniel Wu).
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Directed by Suicide Squad's David Ayer and starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, this fantasy adventure is set in a modern-looking world where humans live alongside creatures such as Orcs and Elves live alongside humans.
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Early on, the movie attempts to address racism and the social caste system, with elves taking on the roles of the elite, and the orcs filling in for the racially profiled minorities and the lower classes.
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Our more experienced friends had to give us some coaching, and it took us a little while to get the hang of the rules, but soon we were slaying orcs and giant spiders like nobody's business.
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I wanted him in my army but this was before I'd learned how to subjugate orcs to my will, so I slaughtered him in the street assuming he'd make good on his promise to never die.
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While official books from Wizards of the Coast have given guidelines for creating players from "monstrous" species like orcs, lizardfolk, and firbolgs, Kamstra's "Monstrous Races" offers guidelines for playing as species that are far from humanoids.
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Since installing a new boss in 2015, the company has simplified its Warhammer series and relaunched a number of older, more casual games, most notably "Blood Bowl", which pits orcs against elves in violent American-football matches.
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As suggested, trying to figure out who's doing what to whom and why — or how orcs dress with such huge hands or how they chew steak with those tusks — is often pointless when it comes to spectacles.
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With the buddy-cop fantasy "Bright," Will Smith and the director David Ayer attempt to chart new territory: an urban action film populated not only by humans but also fantastical creatures like centaurs, fairies, orcs and elves.
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In a fantasy world where orcs are marginalized citizens, cops are talking down medieval sword-wielding crazies, and elves are shooting up convenient stores, a magic wand is a weapon of mass destruction…that can also grant wishes.
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In fantasy video games, we know these stereotypes as they grew primarily from Tolkien: the dark and brutish orcs, the sturdy dwarves, the lithe and airy elves of the forest, and the structured and king'd hierarchies of men.
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In one scene, a bit of graffiti on the bathroom wall reads: I love orcs — NOBODY And that's about as subtle as Bright can bring itself to be about its aims, while also somehow saying nothing at all.
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It's a gutsy way to open — if the visual effects don't deliver, you've basically tanked your film in the first five minutes — and it's to Warcraft's credit that the orcs are often the easiest characters to identify with.
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In its early scenes, the movie seems to want — in the manner of the similarly soul-draining Bright — to use different species (elves, orcs, fairies, puppets) and their relationships with humankind to say something about race and policing.
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But broadly speaking, the lack of a clear line between good and evil is perhaps what sets Warcraft apart from, say, The Lord of the Rings, in which Sauron and the orcs are clearly up to no good.
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The short film sees Talion — the main protagonist in the Middle-earth games — fighting his way at the head of an army of orcs, storming a fortress while fending off attacks from enemy warriors, drakes, and huge hulking trolls.
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In-game currency and "war chests" players could earn through normal play or buy with real money allowed them to skip a lot of grinding (especially in the last section of the game) by just acquiring more powerful orcs.
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What's interesting to me is seeing how the heavily animated orc world interacts with the human world; right now, the humans seem to have a more natural look, while the orcs speak more to the property's video game roots.
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There are all your classic fantasy things like orcs, elves, mages, dragons, and druids, all of it entwined in a deep well of lore set on a world packed full of characters, stories, and a colorful array of enemies.
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Here were these orcs, each component piece lovingly rendered by an artist and then compiled by a sort of Tolkein-esque bingo machine; here was my blade, going into their skulls; here, my mystical brand compelling them to kneel and obey.
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It's yet one more piece of evidence that orcs and trolls have their own motives, thoughts, and feelings outside of those of the Dark and Bright Lords, but I digress; it's a surprising moment because the dominated have, generally, stayed dominated.
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"While purchasing Orcs in the Market is more immediate and provides additional player options, we have come to realize that providing this choice risked undermining the heart of our game, the Nemesis System," the studio said in a blog post.
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Bright takes place in modern Los Angeles, but one that looks more like J.R.R. Tolkien's worlds than the one we know: Orcs, elves, fairies and other mythical creatures live among humans, and you better believe there are tensions between them.
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During World War I, a young British officer who was hospitalized after the Battle of the Somme began writing a tale about the struggle between good and evil, set in a hidden city called Gondolin and featuring gnomes, spirits and orcs.
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Also planned for Stadia is indie puzzle game Kine, Orcs Must Die 3 (which will be exclusive to Stadia), Windjammers 2, the upcoming reboot of Destroy All Humans, Superhot, Superhot: Mind Control Delete, and Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle.
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And the worst crimes are always reserved for your enemies—terrorists, the Russians, people who as a group are painted almost entirely as chaotic evil, orcs in military dress—in order to make you feel better about your own transgressions.
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Before it came out, Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, released three big strategy games in the same universe: Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994), Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002).
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The argument for this is that people like Zuckerberg and Larry Page should never have to take marching orders from the orcs on Wall Street, people like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman, who may seek board representation by accumulating large blocks of stock.
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Here's how Kollar explains the dilemma for players, given that Shadow Wars requires you to acquire more and more powerful orcs, in order to defend the strongholds you're overseeing: The presence of microtransactions and loot boxes beyond cosmetics is not, inherently, bad.
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The ruler here is King Llane (Dominic Cooper), a rather progressive monarch who fights the invading orcs with a multihued army, a rakish aide-de-camp (Travis Fimmel), a token chick (Paula Patton) and a magical twosome (Ben Foster and Ben Schnetzer).
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It is part of a budding effort by Twitch, acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion, to cultivate viewers interested in all forms of creativity, whether sewing, sculpture or cooking, not just those who want to watch virtual orcs getting slain.
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You know in Lord of the Rings, whenever anyone touches the ring, they see sudden visions of hell and violence: rushes of orcs, the swinging of axes and clubs, the sound of the wind around a projectile as it whooshes toward your face?
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David Fear, Rolling Stone: Kicking off with a montage featuring "Curse the Police" graffiti and murals of orcs with fists raised in the air, Bright wastes no time in setting up its magic + metaphor modus operandi and quickly pounding it in to the ground.
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It does not require 40 minutes of screentime to convey that, spoiler alert, the Rohirrim defeat Saruman's orcs and Uruk-hai, and it will certainly not take longer than that for Game of Thrones to show whatever ends up happening at the Battle of Winterfell.
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The 26-year-old was one of around 150 people who took part in a two-day live action battle between orcs, elves, knights and other fantasy characters from the online role-playing game that has become a cultural phenomenon since launching in 2004.
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The movie, set in Los Angeles in a world where orcs, elves and other fantastic creatures co-exist with humans, cost more than $90 million to make, and it is the kind of rich, cinematic action movie traditionally generally considered best on the giant screen.
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A $90 million-plus fantasy and action adventure film from Suicide Squad director David Ayer, it seems to have a little something for everyone: gritty action beats, a fantastical, magical world full of orcs and elves, and the still-undeniable star power of Will Smith.
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Toward the end of Warcraft, when the orcs and humans have finally escalated into full-on war, he serves up some visuals that are right out of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings playbook, where the camera glides over the battlefield, surveying all the devastation.
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The story draws on settings and ideas from Blizzard's ever-expanding 2004 MMORPG World Of Warcraft, but it's more deeply and specifically rooted in 1994's simpler series-launcher Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a real-time strategy game where each side had its own story campaign.
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Netflix turned David Ayer loose on his elves-and-orcs fantasy cop drama Bright, a movie that "is taking itself seriously," leans hard into issues of race, and will put plenty of gnarly, hard R-rated violent action on our home screens this December.
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"You are in good hands, dwarf," said Gimli, who had been among the first to charge at the orcs; it took only two words before their opponents were reduced to a blood-soaked quagmire, and the dwarf took his first kill of the night.
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But after all this, when I stop with the euphemisms, I've realized that there's a pretty big difference between buying orcs in boxes and buying a FIFA Ultimate Team card: With the latter, you're buying the ability to play as an athlete you wish you could be.
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Or maybe you imagine something a little more grounded than aliens and orcs, instead picturing a British nanny who glides over London, or a team of dinosaurs stalking two kids through an amusement park kitchen, or a man who ages backward as he journeys through time.
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Edgerton plays him like the happiest, most naive police officer in the history of film, and while he's estranged from other orcs, he also can't fit in with the rest of the cops who resent his presence in the LAPD as part of a diversity program.
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Mr. Pardo was the lead designer on World of Warcraft, an online multiplayer fantasy game that came out 12 years ago and developed a following so passionate that players were willing to shell out $15 a month in subscription fees to kill orcs and goblins together.
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The plot involves bad orcs (of a type different from but related to J.R.R. Tolkien's beasts) invading a human land whose king, played by Dominic Cooper, fights back alongside a motley crew (including Travis Fimmel and Paula Patton) and an immeasurable amount of makeup and digital effects.
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Unlike a Lord of the Rings–inspired trip to New Zealand, where travelers are eager to see a land of fictitious hobbits and orcs, or even Eat, Pray, Love, where readers were romanced by Liz Gilbert's journey of renewal, Ferrante's novels, though fictional, are not glamorous.
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There's hordes of orcs, the Nazgûl, the Army of the Dead, drakes, the One Ring, Sauron, a Palantír, some kind of giant tree woman, a mysterious dark-haired woman, soldiers of Gondor (one can do magic?), giant spiders, and what appears to be a fiery Balrog covered in armor.
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The tale of StarCraft Universe goes way back to 2011, when a group of modders headed by Ryan Winzen announced that they'd made a mod for StarCraft II that turned the real-time strategy game into a MMO kind of like that other game of Blizzard's with orcs and purple elves.
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The orcs fare better, and feature in several scenes that are legitimately intriguing on an emotional level, as Durotan (Toby Kebbell) and Draka (Anna Galvin) struggle to build a new life and raise a family in a culture where warfare and battle are seen as the chief reasons to be alive.
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But it does find distinction in the smallest touches, like the smart way it handles the orc / human language difference by sticking with individual characters' points of view, or the way it sometimes takes time for odd and immersive spectacle, like the orcs' experience in falling through the doorway between worlds.
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In fact, I'd say that the same bright, colorful aesthetic extends to the entire movie: When you see live action humans fighting giant, furious-looking orcs, it feels like a comic book come to life, and if you've still got an inner teenager somewhere, they'll probably be jumping up-and-down with excitement.
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In your Polygon piece you stress a divide between narrative—Celebrimbor is clearly a fascist and Talion is a complicit abetter who will have to face his sins one day—and mechanics—the player happily enslaves countless orcs because it's a core mechanic and because the depth of the game happens there.
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Bright exists in a universe very like ours, a place where racism and gun violence and police brutality all exist, but where there was some kind of vague battle a few thousand years ago between humans, orcs, and elves — and then when it ended, everyone somehow wound up living alongside one another.
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Weta's work with Caesar and the simian cast of the new Planet of the Apes films, as well as the orcs of 2016's Warcraft (overseen by Westenhofer), achieved expressive performances, thanks in part to "path tracing," a more sophisticated simulation of how light bounces, penetrates, and reflects off surfaces and materials.
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Untamed Land's spaghetti Westernized "Old West Black Metal" feels like a railway crash between what Cobalt aims to be aesthetically and, oddly enough, Summoning, with whom this Akron, Ohio outfit share a love for bombastic strings and grandiose atmospheres (though they're more focused on lighting prairie fires and ancient mountain mysteries than battling orcs).
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The most interesting mythologies (about the origins of the elves and the orcs and the whole system they've set up) are dashed off in quick montages, while the audience is forced to endure several ponderous, expositional stretches with the cops about how Humans and Elves Don't Trust Each Other and Thus We're Not Really Friends.
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In many ways, they sound like the written version of deepfakes, which are persuasive — but fake — video and audio files created with AI. For instance, OpenAI researchers fed the following Lord-of-the-Rings-style prompt to the system: Legolas and Gimli advanced on the orcs, raising their weapons with a harrowing war cry.
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There were dungeons aplenty — deep, multilevel labyrinths outfitted with false doors and booby traps and elaborate menageries of monsters: ghouls, gorgons, hydras, mummies, minotaurs, basilisks, gnomes, orcs, chimeras, hobgoblins, centaurs (which could "attack twice, once as a man and once as a medium horse") and griffons ("the most prized of steeds ... fond of horse flesh above all other foods").
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And the way MMOs are played, the fact players identify so easily with—and have been experiencing so intensely over the years—both sides of the in-movie conflict, makes it hard to tell a story that doesn't involve humans and orcs getting along and come up with some sob story to justify the action expected of fantasy movies.
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Young mage Khadgar (BEN SCHNETZER) rides a gryphon across the skies of Azeroth Making the orcs: A CGI and live action challenge Everyone who makes films hopes to, at some point, have the chance to create a world with strong, diverse characters and a vast number of locations, says Jones — but seizing such an opportunity is not such an easy task.
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It has Will Smith playing a cop in a world where orcs and fairies and other fantasy creatures are living and creating havoc in LA. I'm very skeptical about how this has all turned out (it's from the director behind Suicide Squad, for what that's worth), but I guess I'm still glad Netflix paid for this odd thing instead of, say, a Transformers spinoff.
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There is some kind of racial metaphor aching to get out here, but it's either incredibly dumb or kind of evil — particularly because Jakoby is the first orc to be admitted to the LAPD (which nevertheless polices the whole city and all three species) and gives speeches about how orcs, who in days past chose the "wrong side," need to make better choices now.
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Welcome to New York The space had a big area dedicated to original movies Bright and Death Note, with airbrush tattoo artists, selfie stations that turned us humans into the Orcs of Bright ... A portrait of the author as a young Orc ... and costumes from the film starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton as a human/Orc buddy cop pair enforcing the law in a modern Los Angeles that's filled with mythical creatures (Bright comes to Netflix in December).
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