Don’t tempt me. I can’t guarantee that I won’t go to bat for Thrall just for the sake of it.
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Man, you can see it happening to us.
A gang of precocious adventurers who do incidental good for our people as we do good for ourselves: fun, exciting, plenty of room to be who we want to be.
A bunch of Champions of Azeroth who command armies and lead massive war efforts: wow, this wasn’t as fun as when we were killing Quilboars.
No character survives contact with the plot.
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i made up the exalted who were like, a titan experiment that uldir was used for. they turned beings of pure chaotic essence (faceless ones) into something else, a species of ??? humanoids (ill figure out what they look like later). they inhabit a place on azeroth nobody’s been able to go to on the other side of the world or something. they go and flex on everybody with their unique magic and technology built out of titan tech and old god wiggly stuff…
and they’re not exactly evil? they prank everyone by eating the remaining old gods, which freaks everyone out. mother goes like “bruh, i remember them… my children!” they’re really unified even tho there’s plenty of differing opinions among them, and they’re really strong because of it. a few people mess with them, which ends up with them attacking everyone else (tricked by losers called Sylvanas and Stinkthanos)
idk, like, imagine that. we’re just caught up in it, doing things specific to our class and regional questlines, figuring out what’s up with these cool dudes and what’s wrong with us… just some guys, vibing
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stoner fanfiction brought to you by sintagon
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Well, Taalva, the issue is that short of introducing a new character (or some how making Azshara a nelf again) you would need to create an entirely new character, and that runs the distinct risk of not wielding the same impact as one players have known since WoW was Vanilla.
It also really would not be making the Nelves that we the players know the victim. This remnant would be showing up to conquer the -Alliance- and Horde. This means -all- of both present. It would be the rough equivalent of a new, different nation showing up, much like the Eternal Empire in SWtoR.
im never even high… this is my constant
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So…Warlords of Draenor? But with Elves?
Why cant it be an actual villain that demolishes us?
We keep hearing about how the Void Lords are the big bad baddest, well show us, have one just roll over us.
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well, the legion apparently demolished us
we lost one battle so that’s enough, i suppose
Here’s a tough question, though.
Considering how being victimized and powerless is a grievance for a substantial portion of the playerbase, how do you make getting paddled appealing to them? We already don’t like being made to lose all the time. How would you structure it so that we lose, but are still active?
Its definitely a tough question, one I honestly dont know I have an answer to for WoW (its one of the reasons I know its highly unlikely it will happen).
I know I’m probably stating the obvious, but when it comes to suffering losses and feeling threatened by villains, I think the main detriment towards it is just Blizzard’s retcons/lack of consistency catching up with them.
Back in the day, being told we are on the brink of disaster by the Lich King felt real because we hadn’t experienced a full on war fatigue in our factions before. Every push into Icecrown took more and more losses and we also had less friendly toens to interact with as we got further. Eventually it was only safe to be on an airship.
But now we’ve seen this so many times that we don’t care anymore, because we’ve seen the results reversed almost every time. We’re running out of supplies and forces until we’re not. Stormwind suffered a ton of economic and military loss to the Scourge in the Northrend campaign, reflected in the Westfal storyline in Cataclysm. Yet several expansions and battles later, they’re still fielding the main fighting force to the Alliance.
Nothing matters. We’ve seen so many times that the plot will bend for whatever story they want to tell at the time that there’s never a reason to feel suspense. We’ve literally watched more void elves die in the attack on Nazmir than we saw get created in their origin scenario.
Bolvar could show up out of nowhere and start systematically eradicating every race on Azeroth but we’ll beat him in an expansion and suddenly any race he wiped out will “be on the brink of extinction” but still have a population big enough to be present in expansions in the future.
The same goes for any concept. The Void is allegedly dangerous yet Alleria uses it with no problem and experiences no drawbacks except for hearing whispers that do nothing to her until it is important to the plot. Arcane magic is addictive but we’ve only seen that in elves really, and human sorcerers never see any adverse effects.
Without any consequences we’re never given a reason to take anything seriously. The only thing they can do now is kill off characters to give us that impact and I think even that is starting to feel cheap and uninteresting.
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Arguably, having Tyrande using the Night Warrior Spirit to unironically use the Dead like Sylvanas wanted to do as a expendable army, and Malfurion using his knowledge as the first and most powerful Kaldorei Arch-Druid to bend the will of the Old Gods to the vengeance of the Kaldorei would be both a fascinating and horrifying expansion.
The Night Warrior’s legacy is feared not only for the fact the ritual almost always killed those who attempted it, but because the Night Warrior, once brought into the world, would cause untold destruction in both the enemy and the affected individuals’ own allies and people.
The Wild Gods may have affection for the Kaldorei people, but their ultimate charge is the natural world, not any one race or nation. Having Malfurion demand they explain themselves and the Wild Gods instead telling the ‘boy’ to stand down, they do not answer to anyone but their own, especially not a ‘mortal’, would be a huge slap in the face to everyone who has ever helped the Wild Gods or looked to them for guidance, and give the Kaldorei a damn good reason to turn their Druidism around from ‘we help and love nature’ back into the ‘nature serves our will’ angle from before the Sundering.
We’ve seen Kaldorei live on in various other sub-species: The Shal’dorei, the Quel’dorei, the Naga, Half-Elves. We’ve seen that old Kaldorei Empire cities lingered on after the Sundering and that large chunks of the population managed to escape destruction at the hands of the Legion, if not the Sundering. Having the Night Warrior tug Tyrande across to the other side of the world to find there’s a whole other continent pushed up to the surface of the world after much of Kalimdor sank, it’s full of refugee Kaldorei who have built their own new society and welcome her and Malfurion as heroes, if not their leaders, and are willing to ‘rebuild the Empire’ to save their distant kin from the savages of the Horde and ineffective allies within the Alliance could be a fascinating adventure.
Alternatively, we’ve seen that while the Bronze Dragonflight has lost their ability to accurately predict both past and future, there are ways to go forwards and backwards in time. With all their power and knowledge and rage that the Wild Gods refused to aid them and Elune was ineffective once more, Tyrande and Malfurion choose to go back in time to forewarn their past selves about what is to come.
Never again will they sit back and meekly guard a World Tree for the sake of beings who see their people as mere meat-shields for the World Soul. Never again will they allow Elune’s pacifism to leave their people vulnerable to disease, suffering and genocide.
Except their plan invokes the butterfly wing trope and … the world changes dramatically. Tyrande and Malfurion return to our timeline only to find it is gone.
After the Sundering, the Kaldorei were given their boon … and then rose up. They brought the Tauren, the Earthen, even the Mogu under their control and forged an army that would not only protect the World Tree, but the entire planet, by force if necessary. Illidan was let loose under the caveat he obeyed this new Empire and worked solely to fight and understand the Legion’s plots against Azeroth. The other races of the world brought to heel or driven to the brink of extinction if they posed even the slightest threat to the Kaldorei people.
Malfurion and Tyrande look upon what they have wrought and shudder. They meant to save their people from more atrocities, not to become the greatest threat to their world as they see the temples of Elune used as staging posts for slave-armies to march forwards to pacify the rest of the world, to see the Wild Gods bound, shackled and drained of power, reduced to little more than suffering, miserable batteries and linchpins to grand magical engines that reshape Azeroth’s natural wonders to suit the Kaldorei Empire’s rebirth.
Alliance and Horde, unaware that it was Tyrande and Malfurion who caused this event to take place, are pulled from the main timeline by the Bronze Dragons and must turn back the Empire before it can take over the timelines, as without the ‘original’ events of the timeline, Azeroth will not be able to resist the Legion, or worse yet, the Old Gods, and the Kaldorei Empire’s enslavement of the Wild Gods, the Titan Watchers and the Dragon Flights to empower their crusade is threatening to destabilize much more than merely the time-stream.
At the end of the expansion, Tyrande and Malfurion’s actions are exposed and the timeline is reversed back to its normal flow … but there’s still tens of thousands of Kaldorei from the alternate timeline left behind by the fluctuations and paradoxes caused by two version of the Night Warrior clashing furiously at the very end of the conflict, two version of a Goddess at war with itself, and two Arch-Druids twisting two variations of the Emerald Dream into and against each other, and the Night Elves must, regretfully, put both Tyrandes and Malfurions in stasis while MU Shandris and AU Jarod Shadowsong must find a way to lead their combined peoples under the banner of the Alliance in a world where the bonds between the Kaldorei and their allies is strained to their breaking points.
I fully admit this’ll be a ‘you stole that from Flashpoint!’ story-board idea, but the concept of these ultra-powerful people who have already thrown everything away to save the world and have their very powerful teachers and allies just … do nothing to save them after all their sacrifices, and then turn around and go “Okay, guess this is us now.” without even trying to use all they’ve seen, all they’ve done, all they know, to tips things back in their own favour out of that all-too-human desire to get their ‘fair due’ out of the world would make them both extremely sympathetic anti-heroes and really put the screws to both Alliance and Horde for everything we have done, and not done, for the Kaldorei people.
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I think changes to the world can still have impact. The destruction of Darnassus feels big. That doesn’t really mean it was good for the story–the reasons for the war in the first place are basically not there, and the aftermath with ineffectual night warriors and dead night elves willing to join the Horde was dumb. But just as a plot tool to make players feel like stuff had consequences, changing the world works. Looking out on the burnt husk of Teldrassil can make someone who leveled a night elf feel like they actually lost something meaningful, much more than dramatic killings of characters or villains screaming about how angry and strong they are. BfA had consequences, unlike many other plots which can be immediately forgotten once the threat has been put down.
The only other expansion that really had lasting consequences like this was Cata, and similarly, I felt those consequences. I hung out in Auberdine a lot when I first played the game and seeing it destroyed by the elementals does make you wanna kill that dragon.
WoW will never be able to really show “oh these people are on the brink of extinction” or “oh the armies are in shambles” because, well, we are the races and armies of Azeroth and unless we just stop playing we won’t be depleted (so maybe BfA was really good at showing how depleted the armies are, hurr hurr). But altering the areas we have an emotional connection to still works. They can’t retcon it and say “uh actually the ghost of Staghelm smiled upon us and Teldrassil is back”. What was lost is gone forever. (except to bronze dragons)
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I agree, and it’s just a shame that world revamps aren’t really sustainable. Takes too many resources to do it every time the narrative in a zone changes.
They really will need to address how narrative shapes the world around us. Probably won’t happen. They’re more interested in creating algorithm based content treadmills that happens to have lore than a breathing world these days.
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i would like them to stop destroying zones, though.
reverting the vale was a nice good step but silithus, darnassus, gilneas, kezan, tirisfal are basically either completely gone lorewise or just ruined beyond the point of use
i mightve missed some because im not thinking
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Yeah, changing the areas we care about can be a stick to make players feel loss (like Teldrassil) or it can be a carrot to make players feel like they did something meaningful. I can hardly think of anything that’d make the average Worgen player happier than seeing a repopulated Gilneas City officially retaken by the Alliance. And letting the Alliance keep Lordaeron in a non-blighted state would have been a huge boost to many Human players.
Also Kezan is not destroyed, just bilgewater port. Undermine is still presumably around, we just never see it.
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that’d be important if you could go to kezan outside of the dungeon
its destroyed for now
yeah but what about that SOUTH SEA expansion everyone always predicts we’re totally gonna go there and get player housing boats too and shadow hunters or something
Man, I feel like we’ve spent our shot on a island themed expac. A pity it was this.
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