This is my main complaint with the tone of Kalimdor faction quests, especially night elf questing, and especially quests that involve the player’s allies dying. I’m fine with questing being a give-and-take, of having the other faction win against us as much as we can win against them. But I feel that the night elf questing experience collectively put far too much focus on the tragedy of events the player is too late or unable to stop, and focused far too much on losses that were only partially redressed in questing.
Like, for multiple Horde quests (and what I think is the better way to have tragic events in a game where the player is meant to have agency), the average theme was:
Go out to an outpost/frontier to fight your enemies → Ally dies in the fight/find ally’s body → slay the enemies responsible.
And all too many night elf quests had the flow of:
Go to what is supposed to be a safe area where civilians live → find ally’s body → 50% chance of fighting enemies responsible/50% chance of the responsible party being out of reach or not something that can be fought (like a tidal wave that already passed) → talk about how tragic the death and destruction is.
Taurajo is one of the few examples of this on the Horde-side, and I think the ongoing reaction that story causes is a testament to how much this kind of plot affects people.
The main issue is that there are too many of the latter in night elf questing, from the moment the player flies into Lor’danel all the way to the end of Ashenvale questing.
A large part of this is, I think, due to different visions and expectations for the two factions. The Alliance races are mostly settled in lands they have lived in for a long history - thus, when they are turned into questing zones that require enemies for PCs to fight, they’re written as a bunch of vulnerable civilians in danger of violence that they can’t defend themselves against; versus the Horde, who are more portrayed as settlers or nomads with a bigger focus on individual strength and whose civilians themselves are capable and prepared for violence. But a lot of night elf players, especially the WCIII fans, view the night elves as the latter rather than the former, and thus are upset by the pity party that too much of night elf questing is - since we players can see all the game’s quests, we can see all other depictions and grouse about why we didn’t get the existing one that we think would fit better.
And unfortunately for the Horde, Ashenvale is the last non-neutral night elf zone, and thus where a lot of players expected to pay off all that accumulated story debt - to get some grand, fulfilling ending that would make all that suffering worthwhile.
But Ashenvale is at best just status quo - the Horde is shown as occupying new areas all the way through the zone up to the Darkshore border, killing innocent (and possibly familiar) NPCs and sieging night elf civilian centers along the way, and the Alliance player… takes some, not all, of those areas back.
And stops there. Yay? At least more innocents didn’t die (at least until the next incursion, because the heart of the problem is never dealt with).
That’s it, shuffle on to the next zone. (And if it’s Stonetalon, get ready for another pity party where you get to fail and watch the innocents you’re supposed to protect die in front of your eyes. Woo, faction pride, aren’t we such perfect warriors?)
So all that accumulated frustration bubbles over, and leads to these eternal arguments here on the forums.
