Unless of course, they are cannibalistic Night Elves and do both!
cannibal? We aren’t some gross trolls. laughs in night elf
I sometimes wonder. We were passing by a Bones and Beef in Newport Mall yesterday on our way to see Barbie and he make the off hand comment about Humans not cooking the same way as cow beef.
I think he’s been playing his troll character too long.
I think you missed the memo from Cataclysm - there is a shrine in Desolace where you had to put sacrifice from meat of fallen enemies. And then Elune was hijacked to use her power against nelves on top of that.
Damn, that was ahead of the curve. I actually forgot about it and didn’t make connection between this incident and SL.
Oh yes, I know what you are referencing. That was… odd. Though it does seem to invoke/evoke the power of elune’s new moon aspect you generally do need to a blood sacrifice of an enemy. It isn’t a power to call on lightly, as it tends to kill you.
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I saw the Wowhead entry (moving my post here so poor Ëlësà isn’t crit by my doctoral dissertation below)…
First, let me caveat by saying that nothing I posit is assumed to be a majority opinion. It is my opinion, and folks should feel free to disagree (or agree) with my assessments.
The reason I am conflicted is that while I do deeply appreciate the use of known NPCs to flush out the zone as part of the Night Elf desire to be more active in the world (see the heritage quest line for that narrative beat), I firmly am of the opinion that making the new Night Elf home Amirdrassil is not only disjointed, but sends a very bad message.
Let’s look “Doylist” for the moment. The Dragon Isles has a lifespan of about another year. By anywhere from August to November of 2024, January 2025 latest, we will be elsewhere and everything having to do with the Dragon Isles will be abandoned. The Night Elf home should be in an area that “belongs” to the Night Elves - and that is Northern Kalimdor, not in a land that they had literally nothing to do with and will be obsolete the moment the next patch hits the PTR.
But what I struggle with is the message that Blizzard is sending - that it is ok to be an abuser: as long as you are regretful, all is well, and the abused should just suck it up and deal with your entire life being torn apart. To bring this to a ridiculous extreme, this would be like Ted Bundy saying “terribly sorry for nearly killing you” and being acquitted and going back to normal life while his surviving victims are left to deal with the fallout. Let’s remember, Bundy at least paid for his crimes. The Horde, who canonically slaughtered 9,000 civilians for no reason other than Sylvanas had a hissy fit, has been completely restored and their only complaint is that they are salty about Calia Menelthil - who is ONLY there, IMO, to ground the Forsaken to the idea that THEY are Lordaeron citizens (though frankly, IMO, I think it would be narratively more satisfying for Calia to have stayed alive, and willingly chose to stay with her now-undead people.)
In this instance the Horde, and the Forsaken” have gotten their redemption arc in a way that is completely unearned, because it’s not up to the Horde to decide they have been absolved - it is up to the Night Elves, and the Alliance to at least be given the opportunity to have a say. And this didn’t need to be a drag-out slog. It could have been little RP efforts of the Horde to make amends - maybe a coterie of Nightborne and Blood Elves with a supply of goods heading up from Winterspring, that have been intercepted by Night Elf sentries. You could have had flavor-text about how the Horde have tried to send emmissaries to the Night Elves that have not been successful. Perhaps a Tauren emissary in Stormwind and a Draenei emissary in Orgrimmar. Just…something from the Horde to the Alliance as a testament that they mean to stand by their words. And maybe from the Forsaken to the Night Elves the solvent for the Blight. That would have spoken volumes: “We destroyed your lands, but in reclaiming ours, we found a way to reverse the Blight, and have sent the solution to you in hopes to undo the harm we caused.”
But we get nothing. Just the Horde patting themselves on the back for “being better” and the Forsaken getting not only their own city back, but effectively (to my understanding) all the lands lost to them during the Fourth War, including lands the Alliance technically won.
In return, we get the Night Elves banished from Kalimdor and given a zone that has nothing to do with them, in a location that can’t be anything other than a raid zone and hub, beautiful though it may be.
A part of what I had really hoped that Amirdrassil was going to be was sort of the “Mother Tree,” especially seeing the Wild Gods’ interest - that it replaces Gha’nir and is something of “Yggdrasil” THE World Tree that connects the realms of Life and Death in the the Great Cycle, and whose presence rejuvenates and restores ALL the Great Trees and fosters more of them. Its home in the Dragon Isles ensures it is protected by dragons (as the source is protected by a dragon) and that there are Night Elves that have sworn to protect Amirdrassil, but is not the Night Elf capitol.
I will always maintain that the location where Teldrassil was remains the best location for the new Night Elf capitol.
- Of all the portions locations, Teldrassil is the one with the least amount of programmatic change. Let’s discuss the elephant in the room: it is absolutely possible for new trees to grow from the decayed stumps of the old. I have a crabapple tree at home that is doing just that. Even ignoring this is a fantasy world and a magic tree, so “logistics” shouldn’t come into play, trees can grow from dead trees. Also, all Blizzard would need to do is move the warfront into CoT, and Darkshore is already upgraded and primed for a “restoration of the zone” by Night Elf, Worgen and Draenei players but otherwise the quest flow is unchanged. That’s one revitalized zone, one repurposed zone and no additional modifications.
- Hyjal is the more popular of the two Cata start zones, but would need to be completely retrofit to be not just a capitol but the Night Elf start zone. It also contains a raid. It is also an awkward quest flow from Hyjal to Ashenvale and is missing the “Dark Shore” segment of the leveling experience. The entire 1-25? 30? quest flow for the Night Elves, and the 15-30 quest experiences for the Draenei and Worgen would need to be redone. So this is a complete rework of a zone that is already brittle due to the amount of phasing, the relocation of a raid, redesign of quest flow and impacts 3 races.
- Ferelas - while Ferelas is an interesting option, it too suffers from disrupting the quest flow (since this is also Tauren territory) as it is fairly further south. So you’d again have to reconfigure the zone, possibly remove the Horde to make the start area uncontested, which is unfair to the Horde, repurpose a dungeon, and reconfigure the quest experiences of three races.
Now, I am indeed assuming that Blizzard is going to preserve the racial start zones, even though Exiles Reach is a thing. This is because I am firmly of the opinion that the racial introductory zones is one of the best things about WoW. With the possible exception of GW2, WoW is the only MMORPG I am aware of in which the choice of your race impacts your initial experiences in the game. I firmly believe that starting the game from the point of view of your chosen race, knowing the story of your character before commingling, not only honors the roots of the RTS (where each race was it’s own campaign) but gives players several unique experiences in the game. One of the worst decisions Blizzard made was to “Riftify” WoW by making Stormwind and Orgrimmar the two major cities. IMO, each major city should have gone into rotation, and used that city as a focal point, like how Ironforge was focus during Vanilla because of how close it was to Blackrock. Blizzard should have embraced the diversity of their various races instead of trying to bury it by having everyone aggregate in a single location. (And for Horde, I apologize - I believe you always centered on Orgrimmar? So I posit, wouldn’t it be fun to hang in Undercity or Thunder Bluff instead of always being in Durotar?)
I know I digressed, but all of this is why I am so deeply disappointed if Amirdrassil is the new Night Elf home. It is far away from the lands of the Night Elves, in a zone that is going to be obsolete in a year. Narratively, there is no way the Night Elves could defend their remaining lands in Kalimdor, so they have been effectively driven from their homelands. And their aggressors are awarded with…a complete win - the Horde gets everything they wanted (complete control of Kalimdor, and lush forests they can despoil at their leisure), and the Forsaken gets everything back as-is, if not better.
This is why I hope that Blizzard is just repurposing some known NPCs and giving Amirdrassil to them but that the actual capitol is somewhere in Northern Kalimdor. I still believe that a new World Tree rising from the ashes of the old, representing the cyclical nature of Life, Death and Rebirth and symbolic of the triumph of Life over Fire and Destruction (which has been an ongoing theme with Night Elves) would be far more narratively satisfying, and frankly I’d roll another Night Elf for the chance to quest through post-War of Thorns Darkshore to clean that up.
All that said, this is my personal disappointment in the narrative development of the Night Elves. If you are excited for these developments, I am happy for you, and somewhat envious. I have not liked anything Blizzard has done with the Night Elves since Afriasiabi unilaterally decided to burn Teldrassil; and my feelings on how Blizzard has been trying to dig themselves out of this is like watching Mr. Bean repair Whistler’s Mother, with the results being more akin to an octogenarian’s “restoration of a now infamous fresco than an engaging narrative.
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I can’t help but disagree with your perception of the horde-side version of the last few years of story.
I don’t really see where the horde’s been redeemed at all, and in fact I don’t think the faction is redeemable at this point. BFA wrote the horde into a black hole from which it can’t escape because its immersive hook in the game, that you could play as a member of their races without being a bad person, is effectively dead because you can’t undo the fact that you’re canonically wrapped up in aiding in the night elf genocide without a hard retcon and reboot of the franchise, which will never happen.
Blizzard could try to write all of the “horde care packages sent to nelves get ignored” all they want; frankly, redemption is impossible and will never feel earned no matter what they try to make the horde do. I think making attempts would do nothing but continue to irritate everyone.
I also feel you’re underestimating just how bad Calia’s inclusion was looking for the forsaken. She was never necessary to ground the forsaken in Lordaeron. If anything, her being a Menethil is a tasteless appeal to “normalcy” that flies in the face of everything that made the forsaken what they were, both by being a reference to the monarchy that screwed them over, and her awful lightforged undeath state that doesn’t really touch on anything that made the forsakens’ undeath a compelling story and instead risked undoing it. She also came in the wake of the race losing their two most important characters without having properly set up anyone else as a replacement.
The heritage questline did a lot of heavily lifting just to try to bring them back to where they started, because ultimately all of WoW’s story up until now has been for nothing.
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There was no intention of there ever going to be player capitals to replace Darnassus and the Undercity. Blizzard saw no reason to continue to develop player capitals that weren’t being used. Darnassus was the least used and least defended player capital in World PVP.
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The thing there is it is a problem of Blizzard’s own making. They could of made other cities equally useful, but they opted to take the easier route to the detriment of race level identity. That said, Darnassus was always an awkward issue. It is isolated from basically everything. It never really had any lore anchoring, and was more a slight of hand to excuse magicking up an entire city from nowhere.
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I thought it was Exodar.
The only thing I can think off is to make Horde split into lesser factions and work from there. Because seeing how BfA was handled, it’s a miracle that there were no internal in-fighting. Because at some point Horde was sabotaging itself, regardless how you feel about people being responsible for it like Baine and Saurfang, it should still arise conflicts over it.
Not to mention the growing cultural gaps both within the Horde and the Alliance. And by that I also mean conflicts of interests, like it was shown with Tyrande confronting Anduin.
All that results in is a bunch of fragmented horde races and associated NPCs who were collectively responsible for helping Sylvanas after the burning, alongside the horde player themself. No amount of fragmenting or reforming can fix it. Nothing can.
I think one of the issues is that, for this story thread, there are two largely separate views of the Horde: The view from the outside (aka the Alliance/night elves’ view of the Horde), and the view from the inside (aka the Horde player’s experience) - and there are noticeable differences between them that end up making both experiences worse.
The inside view, the Horde player’s view, involves them getting raked over the coals because the BfA/SL story designers seemingly thought that another evil Warchief story would be a new and exciting and Metal™ experience. (Hint: it wasn’t.) Redemption? Uh… Hey, look, there’s dragons! Theissueisovermovingon.
The outside view, that of the night elf fans who Blizzard purposefully wound up as tightly as possible with their needlessly brutal, murderous, and irredeemable depiction of the Burning, involves… giving up. Yeah, they explicitly trotted out the whole “genocide” label, showed the survivors living in the streets for years and years, had the Horde destroy or occupy every Alliance-night-elf playable zone (Teldrassil, Darkshore, and Ashenvale - the rest are neutral zones), never bothered showing the Alliance the Horde’s response to Sylvanas loyalists (the loyalists in chains? Only there to make the Horde player feel worse. Not a single word Alliance-side), wrote a whole arc about Tyrande getting slapped when picking vengeance and thus picking the “Renewal” empty phrase instead, and now are creating the perception of the night elves being forced off of Kalimdor (whether they are or not, they look like they are, and so that’s what a lot of non-lore forumgoers are already assuming), but… but… uh… Look, a dragon! You’reallfriendsnowmovingon.
It’s the worst of both worlds - the Horde player feels they’ve paid plenty, while the Alliance player hasn’t seen any useful payment at all (from the Horde NPC faction). Of course both sides feel resentful - that’s the natural response.
At this point, I’d rather they just retcon the Burning. Even just retcon that there were civilians on it, make it an empty tree that burned so it more closely matches Lordaeron, so that there’s less unforgivable acts that need resolving. Night elves can still mourn the loss of Teldrassil itself, so even a lot of the current stuff doesn’t have to change. (And that’s depressing in itself - how few changes would have to be made, aka how little the current status matches what the inciting incident was.)
They can’t walk the story back with the current canon, and clearly don’t want to try to put in the effort to ease the tensions back down to the level where cooperation is natural again.
And I love the “rivals forced to work together against a shared foe” stories. I want the story to be that again. But with the specter of what Blizzard allowed to be explicitly named Genocide, that they deiced to make one playable faction consciously responsible for, hanging over the story, the current attempt falls flat.
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I think it’s better than trying to fix what is left of Horde if you truly believe it’s irredeemable. If it would split to Orcs and Tauren, Goblin Cartels and Zandalari Empire then maybe you could salvage something out of it.
The easiest way to dillute the blame got Goblins and trolls if they would all unite.
Another option is for Horde to embrace that it’s evil faction. If we’re evil then genocide shouldn’t phase us. We’re evil, we don’t care.
Two words…
Hell no.
Capital City wasn’t empty when Arthas razed it, slaughtering it’s population and raising them as Scourge.
Teldrassil burned and took a lot of people with it. That was two expansions ago. It’s a solid part of history and you remove any meaning from the world if you pull a Patrick Duffy on it.
While I think it is utterly impractical and poor form to try to retcon the foundations of the last two expansions, it is certainly a testament to how ill conceived it was go through with the burning if your fandom is still tossing this out as a valid solution to the discontent they feel about how things have played out.
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Its really just a problem that can’t be solved, so blizzard is just going to ignore it as much as they can, Ideally they should have forseen this coming a mile a way, but were too wrapped up in making cinematic moments and worrying that the alliance fanbase would feel bad about fighting the horde.
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The damage of rectoning the burning eclipses the damage of the burning. Atleast from what I could tell maybe? I dono, I still just want to know how-…any of that could have happened. lol
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Admitting fault would allow the playerbase to dogpile Blizzard and basically force them to wear a crown of lead, much as they’ve forced upon the Horde.
Ignoring the issue and just pushing past it, and not acknowledging it is how companies have learned to handle these PR disasters. What they’ll take from it is that they should not do it again, and what they’ll say if pressed on it, is that “It seemed like a good idea at the time” with some mild blame thrown at the Director in charge at the time, and how the scale of these projects means you can’t change course once you’ve started until you see it through.
Honestly, besides He-who-shall-not-be-named, the main fault I would put a hefty load of the blame upon, would be Golden for using language and terms that carry a lot of weight and baggage in her short story, and all for a bit of that delicious pathos she adores so, so much.
Populations die in Warcraft all the time, often for completely absurd and arbitrary reasons. And yet populations don’t matter because there will always be enough orcs, humans, dwarves, elves… always enough to fight in the next battle, or rebuild after the 29th war. So why then did they choose to suddenly cast the Night Elves as a race upon the cusp of their twilight, soon to be gone from this world for good? Oh woe, oh woe and weep for the children of Kalimdor.
Weep just as you did for the Blood Elves, who are fine. Weep as you did for the Tauren… who are fine. Weep as you did for the Draenei, who are again… fine. Uhhhh, but there’s only so many Gnomes… oh wait, they’re fine too. Huh. Seems like every time rocks fall and a mass of people die, some other people just like them dig their way up out of the ground to replace them. Rather odd that.
I believe with this next Patch, Blizzard is moving on from the Burning completely because acknowledging it damages their brand, so they won’t. And the second reason is because they’ve never written any race in Warcraft as actually being bound to a birthrate and deathrate. Not even the dragons, who couldn’t even lay eggs since the end of Cataclysm… because we’ve learned from this expansion that there are plenty of dragons. More than enough for any story going forward to include them.
And Night Elves will be treated much the same.
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Sincerely hoping that this is the ending of the burning of Teldrassil saga for really real. Not because it would be a good ending, because it’s not. But because - as someone else has said in another thread - Blizzard is probably viewing this as analogous to the LOTR elves going off to the undying lands to be in peace. Despite there being numerous Night elf populations throughout the world, Blizzard sees Teldrassil as the last bastion of Night elf civilization. All others are miscellaneous druid areas. Teldrassil was the Night elves. With their home gone, and with an inability to defend their lands or reclaim any, it is for the best that they go off to be free of conflict in the Emerald Dream, in Amirdrassil. I hope that they never touch a single Night elf storyline ever again.
Say it with me, in regards to story in Warcraft: No content is better than any content.
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