To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush, Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light, Company of Heroes II.
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
Many people have said pandas are not serious, yourself included. In fact the whole argument form the anti-panda people is that the xpac is too childish, thus not serious enough.
I see a few posters here on crusade against the panda. Repeatedly posting the same stuff over and over again. The news for these folks is this: You are not going to change anyones' mind.
As to pandas being cute. I think they are filthy wild animals just like the rest of us. WoWs orcs are quite cuddly though ( not at all scary sorry to say).
People, pandas existed before the disney movie. Now please find a more valid argument.
And as far as I know the ESRB does not stipulate that stores can't sell "T"-rated to under 13; it's only the MA/AO that are suppose to 'demand' proof of age (like R-rated movies are suppose to) to anyone not looking above 17-years of age.
Furthermore, I suggest everyone who is not in favor of this make a Free-Till-20 account and take every incarnation of "Po", "Kung Fu Panda", "Shifu" (this includes adding "Master [any form {"Masta", etc} added to before the name), as well as, any martial artists (Bruce Lee, etc), and any Street Fighter who specialized in martial arts.
Nothing will piss people off more than to come up with a "funny" name only to find they cannot use it an any form (phonetically spelled, ALT-code, etc). Best of all, it won't cost you anything but ~20min of your time.
In addition, if you do play; make sure to repeatedly kill anyone rolling a Pandaren..whether they be Horde of Alliance; turn this "expansion" (it's really just a major Content Patch, you dolts) into the worst "expansion" ever.
Why would anyone want to do any of that?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
Many people have said pandas are not serious, yourself included. In fact the whole argument form the anti-panda people is that the xpac is too childish, thus not serious enough.
I see a few posters here on crusade against the panda. Repeatedly posting the same stuff over and over again. The news for these folks is this: You are not going to change anyones' mind.
As to pandas being cute. I think they are filthy wild animals just like the rest of us. WoWs orcs are quite cuddly though ( not at all scary sorry to say).
People, pandas existed before the disney movie. Now please find a more valid argument.
Nope, sorry but you're completely wrong. I never once said that pandas were not serious. Blizzard could add pandas in WoW and I wouldn't care less about it, and I doubt most other people that take issue with Pandaren would feel much different.
What I've actually been saying, is that anthromorphized panda people that perform kung-fu, aka Pandaren, are not serious.
Please stop misquoting or otherwise lying about what other posters have said.
The entire expansion is a joke to me, except for Monks finally being added to the game...
I was hoping the next expansion would continue the ever evolving storyline from Deathwing,, but unfortunately this expansion is all about mocking China, adding Kung Fu Panda's, and trying to satisfy those who only care about PVP,,, instead of what I feel made WoW popular in the first place, which is the lore and story... But that's just my opinion...
Rallithon Oakthornn (Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
I suggest reading all of what I say before you decide you know what I'm going to say.
I was leveling amother character today, and ran through some of the newly re-vamped quests in Cataclysm in the lower 30s I hadn't done before. In one of those quests, you are supposed to get on a ship and shoot at some bad guys to help save this captain. Now, cannon-shooting in WoW is pretty much kiddie level stuff to begin with, so I thought about just skipping it, but I thought I'd just do it just to do it anyway.
It was (is) the simplest, worst encounter in the game - and that's saying a lot. You couldn't move the cannon, all you could do was click on it and make it "bang". There wasn't even a cannon ball or any projectile, just a kind of puff of flame and sparks out the end. The mass of enemy targets coming to kill the captain of the ship turned out to be all of a group of 2 that appeared at a point in a path (directly where the cannon was already fixed in aim at). Click on the cannon once, and bingo! you save the captain. Quest over.
Now, it would be an over-simplification to say that Cataclysm is made of easy stuff; it's not, but the fact is, much of the day-to-day tasks and level-up questing and requirements have been made easier in a game in which they were already too easy for many of us. Frankly, all I can see with a quest like this is some developer with a 3-year old in his/her lap (far as I know, all the WoW devs happen to be male) "playing the game with the kid".
I play WoW DESPITE the easy-sleezy content, because it's got enough other stuff I enjoy, that it does very well. When I saw the release announcement, I thought it was a joke at first, too, it had to be, but soon learned it wasn't and learned there was actually Warcraft RTS game history with Pandarens. Okay, Panda players that look like the movie guy are coming to WoW, what don't I like about that?
What I don't like about that ties in with my experiences in WoW to date, and my concerns that the game is just going farther down a path I don't want to go down in my MMOG game play. That means, more kiddie play, and by that I mean more play designed to talk DOWN to the 6-year old level and under. It looks to me like WoW is becoming in large part a "hook" MMOG for older WoW players to get their kids conditioned to playing it, or games like it, from an early age.
Not only are the WoW devs developing the non-raid content for very young kids, they don't seem to think those kids have much on the ball.
So, the announcement of "Mists of Pandaria" meant to me that the play in WoW, outside of raiding and instances, was going to be even simpler and less involving than it has been to date. There was going to be more insipid cannon shooting, more stupid arcade game rip-offs, and a line of coloring books and a Saturday morning cartoon could be expected at some point, as well.
It's not about Pandas; the people for this Xpak keep trying to make it about the fact that there are Pandas, but it's not that they are Pandas, it's that they look like the movie version, the Pandas are going to bring with it a very similar culture and fight style to the game as is in the movie, which was made for a young audience, and it feeds in to our worst fears about where the direction of the game is headed.
We are, after all older, veteran players of the game. We need harder content to find it as rewarding, as fulfilling, as we did in "vanilla" WoW, not easier content, because we are that good at playing the game. Loading up the game with more immature content and more immature players is going the entirely opposite direction of what players like me want to see. We see cute movie-Pandas with their movie-Panda theme as a huge commitment to kiddie WoW, and we don't like it.
HOWEVER, we are, at least in part, wrong. I don't think we are wrong in saying that WoW has become easier where it has become easier, but where we are wrong is in that we should expect that part of WoW to ever be fulfilling or a challenge to begin with. WoW was never that game.
WoW's challenges come in Raiding. WoW's challenges come other ways, too, but those ways have to be discovered, really - the best challenges are the ones you discover for yourself. "It says I need 2 people, can I solo it? Can I solo this 3-person quest? Can I solo this instance? Can my Warlock character and my friend's Warlock character get together and do some Cataclysm instances?" What about PvP? What about multiboxing?
WoW is about RAIDING. That's the real meat of the game. The people that are saying there has always been goofy, childish content in WoW are right. And, there has always been some good story in WoW amongst the nightmare slop of lore, too. Mists of Pandaria will bring both, more fractured lore, and more good story. It will also bring more interesting dungeons and challenging raids.
Me, I've pretty much come around. I'm not saying I'm thrilled, I still feel haunted by my fears of the direction WoW is going (don't take that line too seriously ), but I think there's enough fun potential I'm going to give the Pandaren race a shot, and certainly will give the Monk class a go. But the thing is, I've remembered my focus in the game, what I forgot in a moment of gaming "panic".
WoW never was the game I wanted to play, but it was the game i couldn't stop playing because it was so much fun. I have to re-evaluate it regularly - do the pluses still outweight the minuses? I still check out other MMOGs. I still haven't found one that makes me want to leave WoW. Some of them are better in some ways, but an MMOG is a sum of a lot of parts, and while a game might be like a Ferrari to drive, it also might be like a Ferrari to do everything else you need a car for, too, and so not exactly what you want overall. (There are no Ferrari MMOGs, at least not in my opinion.)
To sum it up, yes, WoW has it's stupid and brainless content, but it has a lot of other stuff too. The question is, as it always has been, what are you there to play? Is what YOU are there FOR still there, and is it still good for you? Mists of Pandaria will bring content for everyone to like and dislike; that's WoW, and that's MMOGs in general, because they are, after all, Massive. (I'd like to see developers work on better targeting MMOGs for particular play styles and still making them open and massive worlds.)
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
I am almost at a loss for words here. Kung Fu Panda? Not only is Blizzard simply ripping off something Disney (I'd sue) but this is just another one of Blizzards tactics to get children who are much too young for some of WoW's content (you have to be at least 17 to buy the game) to pester unsuspecting parents into buying them the game. No wonder the game has gotten so easy it is a bore to play. In my mind this is sleazy marketing done to recover from some of the heavy market share they have lost from being lost. They have totally screwed up the game and have no clue how to fix it so they have resorted to gimmics. I think the fat lady is approaching the stage on WoW.
World of Warcraft is rated "T" that's 13+
And as far as I know the ESRB does not stipulate that stores can't sell "T"-rated to under 13; it's only the MA/AO that are suppose to 'demand' proof of age (like R-rated movies are suppose to) to anyone not looking above 17-years of age.
Furthermore, I suggest everyone who is not in favor of this make a Free-Till-20 account and take every incarnation of "Po", "Kung Fu Panda", "Shifu" (this includes adding "Master [any form {"Masta", etc} added to before the name), as well as, any martial artists (Bruce Lee, etc), and any Street Fighter who specialized in martial arts.
Nothing will piss people off more than to come up with a "funny" name only to find they cannot use it an any form (phonetically spelled, ALT-code, etc). Best of all, it won't cost you anything but ~20min of your time.
In addition, if you do play; make sure to repeatedly kill anyone rolling a Pandaren..whether they be Horde of Alliance; turn this "expansion" (it's really just a major Content Patch, you dolts) into the worst "expansion" ever.
How is it not an expansion? Unless you think all WoW expansions aren't really expansions, that doesn't make sense.
"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people." - Eleanor Roosevelt "Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security." -Norman Vincent Peale
How many big and clunky moving characters can ya have?!?!? ONE MORE PLEASE MR PANDA MAN!! Also- I would like to see all characters eyes BIG and ROUND next patch. Then and only then will this capture the audience from around the world. But till then.......Omgitsapandawoopingmyass.
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
Many people have said pandas are not serious, yourself included. In fact the whole argument form the anti-panda people is that the xpac is too childish, thus not serious enough.
I see a few posters here on crusade against the panda. Repeatedly posting the same stuff over and over again. The news for these folks is this: You are not going to change anyones' mind.
As to pandas being cute. I think they are filthy wild animals just like the rest of us. WoWs orcs are quite cuddly though ( not at all scary sorry to say).
People, pandas existed before the disney movie. Now please find a more valid argument.
Nope, sorry but you're completely wrong. I never once said that pandas were not serious. Blizzard could add pandas in WoW and I wouldn't care less about it, and I doubt most other people that take issue with Pandaren would feel much different.
What I've actually been saying, is that anthromorphized panda people that perform kung-fu, aka Pandaren, are not serious.
Please stop misquoting or otherwise lying about what other posters have said.
Really ceridith? I mean really? Now you are just mincing words. I haven't lied about anything. Your whole argument has been about the pandas in the xpac, and that is exactly what I refer to. Not real world pandas, though we have discussed those as well. Again, no misquote or lie.
So If you are to lead it back to the actual game then yes you are right, pandas are just as serious as the rest of the game with the 12+ rating. Completely not serious fantasy, unless of course WoW is your only point of reference in terms of "fantasy".
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
Many people have said pandas are not serious, yourself included. In fact the whole argument form the anti-panda people is that the xpac is too childish, thus not serious enough.
I see a few posters here on crusade against the panda. Repeatedly posting the same stuff over and over again. The news for these folks is this: You are not going to change anyones' mind.
As to pandas being cute. I think they are filthy wild animals just like the rest of us. WoWs orcs are quite cuddly though ( not at all scary sorry to say).
People, pandas existed before the disney movie. Now please find a more valid argument.
Nope, sorry but you're completely wrong. I never once said that pandas were not serious. Blizzard could add pandas in WoW and I wouldn't care less about it, and I doubt most other people that take issue with Pandaren would feel much different.
What I've actually been saying, is that anthromorphized panda people that perform kung-fu, aka Pandaren, are not serious.
Please stop misquoting or otherwise lying about what other posters have said.
Really ceridith? I mean really? Now you are just mincing words. I haven't lied about anything. Your whole argument has been about the pandas in the xpac, and that is exactly what I refer to. Not real world pandas, though we have discussed those as well. Again, no misquote or lie.
So If you are to lead it back to the actual game then yes you are right, pandas are just as serious as the rest of the game with the 12+ rating. Completely not serious fantasy, unless of course WoW is your only point of reference in terms of "fantasy".
I am not mincing words in the least. Rather, you're just not understanding what I, and others are taking issue with in regards to Pandaren.
It is not just that pandaren are an anthomorphized race of Panda people.
It is that Pandaren are an anthromorphized race of Panada people, who have a culture that is made up of a mish-mash of stereotypes of various Asian cultures, and whom also happen to practice kung-fu.
These things in combination strike an extremely close resemblance to a very recent movie intended for young children, and as such the concept of Pandaren are associated to being childish and immature.
If that were not enough, Pandaren were also used as the punchline of a number of Blizzard's joke. So not only are Pandaren, as anthromorphic Panda who practice kung-fu, related to a kids movie, they also have a history of being treated as a joke and not as a serious part of Warcraft lore.
All of these things in combination with one another is why I cannot take Pandaren seriously.
If Blizzard had instead chosen Ogres as the next player race, I can say without a doubt that there would be considerably more acceptance from the MMO community at large, because they have always been a serious part of Warcraft lore. That is, so long as Blizzard didn't suddenly decide to make them look like Shrek.
Comments
To all the people moaning that pandas are to cute to be serious, go and fly to China, find a Panada and annoy it. Then come and post about how cute and childish they are.
Currently playing:
EVE online (Ruining low sec one hotdrop at a time)
Gravity Rush,
Dishonoured: The Knife of Dunwall.
(Waiting for) Metro: Last Light,
Company of Heroes II.
Who said pandas can't be serious?
All I see is people complaining about Pandaren being too cute and childish. Considering pop-cultures recent history regarding kung-fu wielding anthromorphized panadas, I can definitely see why so many people feel that way.
Many people have said pandas are not serious, yourself included. In fact the whole argument form the anti-panda people is that the xpac is too childish, thus not serious enough.
I see a few posters here on crusade against the panda. Repeatedly posting the same stuff over and over again. The news for these folks is this: You are not going to change anyones' mind.
As to pandas being cute. I think they are filthy wild animals just like the rest of us. WoWs orcs are quite cuddly though ( not at all scary sorry to say).
People, pandas existed before the disney movie. Now please find a more valid argument.
Wow, it sucks to be a WoW player with a fragile ego. (Of course, I guess the former part is redundant and it just sucks to have a fragile ego.)
Why would anyone want to do any of that?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Nope, sorry but you're completely wrong. I never once said that pandas were not serious. Blizzard could add pandas in WoW and I wouldn't care less about it, and I doubt most other people that take issue with Pandaren would feel much different.
What I've actually been saying, is that anthromorphized panda people that perform kung-fu, aka Pandaren, are not serious.
Please stop misquoting or otherwise lying about what other posters have said.
The entire expansion is a joke to me, except for Monks finally being added to the game...
I was hoping the next expansion would continue the ever evolving storyline from Deathwing,, but unfortunately this expansion is all about mocking China, adding Kung Fu Panda's, and trying to satisfy those who only care about PVP,,, instead of what I feel made WoW popular in the first place, which is the lore and story... But that's just my opinion...
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
I suggest reading all of what I say before you decide you know what I'm going to say.
I was leveling amother character today, and ran through some of the newly re-vamped quests in Cataclysm in the lower 30s I hadn't done before. In one of those quests, you are supposed to get on a ship and shoot at some bad guys to help save this captain. Now, cannon-shooting in WoW is pretty much kiddie level stuff to begin with, so I thought about just skipping it, but I thought I'd just do it just to do it anyway.
It was (is) the simplest, worst encounter in the game - and that's saying a lot. You couldn't move the cannon, all you could do was click on it and make it "bang". There wasn't even a cannon ball or any projectile, just a kind of puff of flame and sparks out the end. The mass of enemy targets coming to kill the captain of the ship turned out to be all of a group of 2 that appeared at a point in a path (directly where the cannon was already fixed in aim at). Click on the cannon once, and bingo! you save the captain. Quest over.
Now, it would be an over-simplification to say that Cataclysm is made of easy stuff; it's not, but the fact is, much of the day-to-day tasks and level-up questing and requirements have been made easier in a game in which they were already too easy for many of us. Frankly, all I can see with a quest like this is some developer with a 3-year old in his/her lap (far as I know, all the WoW devs happen to be male) "playing the game with the kid".
I play WoW DESPITE the easy-sleezy content, because it's got enough other stuff I enjoy, that it does very well. When I saw the release announcement, I thought it was a joke at first, too, it had to be, but soon learned it wasn't and learned there was actually Warcraft RTS game history with Pandarens. Okay, Panda players that look like the movie guy are coming to WoW, what don't I like about that?
What I don't like about that ties in with my experiences in WoW to date, and my concerns that the game is just going farther down a path I don't want to go down in my MMOG game play. That means, more kiddie play, and by that I mean more play designed to talk DOWN to the 6-year old level and under. It looks to me like WoW is becoming in large part a "hook" MMOG for older WoW players to get their kids conditioned to playing it, or games like it, from an early age.
Not only are the WoW devs developing the non-raid content for very young kids, they don't seem to think those kids have much on the ball.
So, the announcement of "Mists of Pandaria" meant to me that the play in WoW, outside of raiding and instances, was going to be even simpler and less involving than it has been to date. There was going to be more insipid cannon shooting, more stupid arcade game rip-offs, and a line of coloring books and a Saturday morning cartoon could be expected at some point, as well.
It's not about Pandas; the people for this Xpak keep trying to make it about the fact that there are Pandas, but it's not that they are Pandas, it's that they look like the movie version, the Pandas are going to bring with it a very similar culture and fight style to the game as is in the movie, which was made for a young audience, and it feeds in to our worst fears about where the direction of the game is headed.
We are, after all older, veteran players of the game. We need harder content to find it as rewarding, as fulfilling, as we did in "vanilla" WoW, not easier content, because we are that good at playing the game. Loading up the game with more immature content and more immature players is going the entirely opposite direction of what players like me want to see. We see cute movie-Pandas with their movie-Panda theme as a huge commitment to kiddie WoW, and we don't like it.
HOWEVER, we are, at least in part, wrong. I don't think we are wrong in saying that WoW has become easier where it has become easier, but where we are wrong is in that we should expect that part of WoW to ever be fulfilling or a challenge to begin with. WoW was never that game.
WoW's challenges come in Raiding. WoW's challenges come other ways, too, but those ways have to be discovered, really - the best challenges are the ones you discover for yourself. "It says I need 2 people, can I solo it? Can I solo this 3-person quest? Can I solo this instance? Can my Warlock character and my friend's Warlock character get together and do some Cataclysm instances?" What about PvP? What about multiboxing?
WoW is about RAIDING. That's the real meat of the game. The people that are saying there has always been goofy, childish content in WoW are right. And, there has always been some good story in WoW amongst the nightmare slop of lore, too. Mists of Pandaria will bring both, more fractured lore, and more good story. It will also bring more interesting dungeons and challenging raids.
Me, I've pretty much come around. I'm not saying I'm thrilled, I still feel haunted by my fears of the direction WoW is going (don't take that line too seriously
), but I think there's enough fun potential I'm going to give the Pandaren race a shot, and certainly will give the Monk class a go. But the thing is, I've remembered my focus in the game, what I forgot in a moment of gaming "panic".
WoW never was the game I wanted to play, but it was the game i couldn't stop playing because it was so much fun. I have to re-evaluate it regularly - do the pluses still outweight the minuses? I still check out other MMOGs. I still haven't found one that makes me want to leave WoW. Some of them are better in some ways, but an MMOG is a sum of a lot of parts, and while a game might be like a Ferrari to drive, it also might be like a Ferrari to do everything else you need a car for, too, and so not exactly what you want overall. (There are no Ferrari MMOGs, at least not in my opinion.)
To sum it up, yes, WoW has it's stupid and brainless content, but it has a lot of other stuff too. The question is, as it always has been, what are you there to play? Is what YOU are there FOR still there, and is it still good for you? Mists of Pandaria will bring content for everyone to like and dislike; that's WoW, and that's MMOGs in general, because they are, after all, Massive. (I'd like to see developers work on better targeting MMOGs for particular play styles and still making them open and massive worlds.)
Have played: Everquest, Asheron's Call, Horizons, Everquest2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall
Ewoks.
I suppose then at least the Gnomes will be able to pick on someone their own size. O.o
How is it not an expansion? Unless you think all WoW expansions aren't really expansions, that doesn't make sense.
"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security." -Norman Vincent Peale
How many big and clunky moving characters can ya have?!?!? ONE MORE PLEASE MR PANDA MAN!! Also- I would like to see all characters eyes BIG and ROUND next patch. Then and only then will this capture the audience from around the world. But till then.......Omgitsapandawoopingmyass.
Oh and I wonder if I can make one of those with my Free to Play account?!?! ROFL ROFL
Really ceridith? I mean really? Now you are just mincing words. I haven't lied about anything. Your whole argument has been about the pandas in the xpac, and that is exactly what I refer to. Not real world pandas, though we have discussed those as well. Again, no misquote or lie.
So If you are to lead it back to the actual game then yes you are right, pandas are just as serious as the rest of the game with the 12+ rating. Completely not serious fantasy, unless of course WoW is your only point of reference in terms of "fantasy".
I am not mincing words in the least. Rather, you're just not understanding what I, and others are taking issue with in regards to Pandaren.
It is not just that pandaren are an anthomorphized race of Panda people.
It is that Pandaren are an anthromorphized race of Panada people, who have a culture that is made up of a mish-mash of stereotypes of various Asian cultures, and whom also happen to practice kung-fu.
These things in combination strike an extremely close resemblance to a very recent movie intended for young children, and as such the concept of Pandaren are associated to being childish and immature.
If that were not enough, Pandaren were also used as the punchline of a number of Blizzard's joke. So not only are Pandaren, as anthromorphic Panda who practice kung-fu, related to a kids movie, they also have a history of being treated as a joke and not as a serious part of Warcraft lore.
All of these things in combination with one another is why I cannot take Pandaren seriously.
If Blizzard had instead chosen Ogres as the next player race, I can say without a doubt that there would be considerably more acceptance from the MMO community at large, because they have always been a serious part of Warcraft lore. That is, so long as Blizzard didn't suddenly decide to make them look like Shrek.