Marketing decisions aside, I never would have thought Fatshark would retcon a character just to do a career which was chosen, as their livestream shows, because fans have been asking about a bretonnian for a while.
You know what this means, you’ve all thought about it! It’s high time we ask for a nude Kerillian class!
Think about it! It’s lore friendly: she couldn’t be more au naturel! Get rid of those clothes and show the pactsworn they can’t even hit an unarmored target! Show those Lumberfoots how nimble you are. Taunt them like never before! Press F to coo and stunlock an enemy while reviving fallen teammates.
Nude Kerillian adds many new voicelines to the game, and synergizes splendidly with Kruber’s new french lines expecially. Make Saltzpyre so incensed when he’ll get his career you know it’ll be a whopper!
Nude Kerillian builds on existing gameplay to give elf players a new reason for running away from teammates!
I know what you are thinking: without clothes how can FS sell premium cosmetics? Glaikit mayflies, if Bardin can, so can we: never-seen-before tattoo skins, made with natural inks of course, and for just 9.99$ you’ll get the premium version, with the mudbath skin and the moon-tan skin. Plus of course, the gameplay challenges.
For 3.99$ you’ll still get the class, the new weapons - club or barehands - and the whole talent tree!
@AdelionRetroactive continuity* , or retcon for short,[1][2] is a literary device in which established diegetic ‘facts’ in the plot of a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.[3]
There are various motivations for applying retroactive continuity, including:
To accommodate desired aspects of sequels or derivative works which would otherwise be ruled out.
No point going further, as this falls under the first motivation: ‘facts’ (kruber’s lineage) in the plot of a fictional work are adjusted (this is the case here) to accommodate desired aspects of derivative works (kruber grail knight dlc) which would otherwise be ruled out.
No, no I understand the term. But so far the backstory for Grail Knight has only told about some long-time ago ancestor of Kruber.
I can understand people saying it doesn’t fit, it feels forced or it is out of character. But the question is if there is some already established history of Kruber which is contradicted or has been ignored by the Grail Knight addition.
For me it is an not-told-before addition, not an adjustment.
I guess the difference would be if they had planned it before or not. As I said already in a post, when they build on existing lore, it’s beautiful, when they do not, not so much. I see the backstory as stretchy and that’s reason enough for me not to like it, but regarless of that: Kruber GK is a big change which goes in a very different direction from the old Kruber, without building it on previous lore.
For example, even shade kerillian (probably the hardest to swallow) was forshadowed in vermintide 1 “Lileath is my shield, Kurnous guides my aim, but my soul? that belongs to an other”.
Kruber GK wether you like it or not, is completely out of the blue, and FS ceo himself said the GK was done because that’s what some fans wanted. there’s no previos plan to build on it, so adjustments had to be made.
Nothing is either adjusted, ignored, nor contradicted by the revelation that one of Kruber’s ancestors turns out to be a brettonian Knight. Nothing about his story so far has been affected by this. You can argue it’s a bit of an @ss-pull, but nothing about his previous history was altered at all. Nothing about Kruber GK is a retcon.
We’ll get to bardin, it’s just a matter of when, not if. We can get what we want.
Btw iirc one of the skin descriptions mentions he’s wearing the pants just after too many complains by the others
I mean, retconning is to rewrite or change a characters story to accommodate new stuff even if said stuff makes no sense whatsoever.
As far as Kruber is now concerned no real retconning has taken place, they just expanded on his ancestry out of the blue to make this “what if” story possible and in a way that i personally do not find to be bad. Rather i think it´s a pretty good way to add in a class that otherwise might not fit or would have overlapped too much with others.
It’s not technically a retcon because we didn’t know who his ancestors were, but arguing there’s not actually any change involved in making him the last descendant of a legendary hero instead of just a talented soldier from common roots with nothing special about him is pretty ridiculous.
That sort of discovery would be a pivotal character moment in basically any other story like this. I doubt it will be however, as we don’t really get proper arcs in game.
If Kruber really would have been a nobody special soldier, he’d have been dead a long time ago. He could always effortlessly keep up with a bloody Witch Hunter (super elite, trained for his whole life, handpicked, low survival rate warrior) who has killed Vampires, a Warmage that can chuck fireballs almost non-stop without having destroyed herself during a life of battle, a hundreds (thousands?) of years old skilled best-of-the-best elven commando, and a battle-scarred Dwarf who used to be an Ironbreaker (toughest and most skilled of all dwarf warriors) who then survived trekking the grimdark Warhammer alone for a long time. All of those are proper hero-tier units. For Krubs to have been matching them in combat, he needs to have had something exceptional about himself as well. Markus’ humble origins are still his humble origins, but the revelation that he has the blood of a great hero might not be as much of a jarring “retcon” invalidating his backstory, but rather finally a logical explanation of who he is and what he can do.
Kruber was a talented soldier from common roots, like I said in my post. That was kind of the whole point of him, that there’s nothing outstanding about who he is apart from his skill, he was like the baseline for the more extreme characters to play off.
Now he’s not, he’s the final descendant of a great dragonslayer who the fay enchantress herself got involved to save. Saying that has no actual impact on the character is just obviously not true.
It could work if there was an actual arc where he came to terms with that and we saw why he chose to go down the different paths he did with that knowledge, but that’s clearly not going to be the case, it’ll just be expected to fit in alongside the other stuff like him getting made fun of for being related to farmers.
Also
Why? Valten was just the son of a blacksmith and became the chosen of sigmar, Luthor huss was an orphan, Wulfhart just grew up as a commoner, Ludwig Schwarzhelm was a nobody from a tiny village and yet all of these are clearly way beyond Kruber or any of the people in the team.
The idea there needs to be something special about a characters bloodline for them to be something special is silly.
Valten was a blacksmith’s son, but then he got blessed by Sigmar and did great deeds. Huss was an orphan, and then he underwent Battle Priest training and blessings and then became a badass. Those are perfect examples of people who were or had something special. They aren’t just random rank-and-file guys that just walk and fight along heroes and match their power. They were the special guys. The others you mentioned, I admit I don’t know them so I can’t comment on those.
But my point is, that Kruber simply is a good or even exceptional soldier, so much that he can keep up with warriors that a normal soldier could never match. And that the explanation for that is that the guy has some genes of a great warrior makes perfect sense. In order do the deeds of the Ü5 you don’t need to be a blessed hero with special blood (none of the others have that either), but having it turn out that a human battering ram descended from a great warrior makes perfect sense.
Yes, and Kruber was just a commoner, but then became an exceptional soldier. He doesn’t need some fancy ancestry to justify why he was able to become that, that’s my point. Exactly like all of the characters I mentioned, bar Valten who did get a boost after he was born (but is also on a whole other level to the rest, so).
They were just rank and file guys who not only fought alongside hero tier people, but were way stronger than most, including everyone in the U5 by far. Obviously they’re special guys at this point, but at birth they had no claim to anything, no links to anyone impressive and no reason to expect they’d ever do anything. Yet for whatever reason, they did work to make something of themselves, and as complete commoners managed to work themselves into some of the highest positions in the empire. They didn’t need special blood to justify why they were able to do that.
Arguing whether or not it makes sense that Kruber could descend from great warriors is irrelevant to what I’m saying, which is that it should have a massive impact on his character which I can almost guarantee will never actually be explored. His humble origins aren’t just humble origins anymore, they’re evidence of glory lost. He isn’t just a nobody shoved into a position no-one would think he should be able to survive in, he’s the last living descendant of a noble house, and directly linked to dragonslayers. If you can’t see how that should impact his character, and does impact how he comes across as a person, I’m not really sure what to say.
Just throwing out a revelation like that and going “lol it doesn’t actually change anything” is terrible storywriting, and makes it even clearer that it is just a retcon intended to justify selling a product.
Only one of Kruber’s dozens of ancestors was a hero, the rest are commoners. I guess in the end where we disagree the most, is that you feel this revelation changes his entire character waaaaay more than I feel it does. He’s still old Markus Kruber, commoner turned battle-scarred soldier. He didn’t fight through the Skaven invasion of Übersreik with magic powers granted by his ancestry, but because of his natural skill and toughness. His humble origins are no less humble. Having a few badass genes doesn’t really hurt there, and thus having a Knight in his ancestry fits there, but that’s not the only source of natural fighting ability so who cares. His blood merely enabled his promotion to Grail Knight, but his deeds done as a mundane soldier in the Ü5 earned it. He was just a normal regular soldier, and if it was somehow known all along he had a brettonian Knight somewhere in his ancestry nobody would probably have cared and his life wouldn’t have been much different. But because there was a knight somewhere in his family tree, he was eligible for the drink from the holy sippy cup of Antioch when he earned that by doing great deeds. That’s all the revelation about his family line did, and nothing more.
