Also, isn’t the Horde supposed to be about “making your way in a world where you don’t belong” and all that? Seems like that would be undermined by introducing cosmic sugardaddies granting them an eternal destiny.
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Ship has sailed. We’re going full cosmology. Titans leaned Alliance thematically and Elune prefers the Night Elves over all other races who worship her (evidently on any world to boot). Horde needs some cosmic crumbs.
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At that point they should just merge the factions then because we’d be left with the Alliance and the discount Alliance
Well, they kinda ruined the message of that thanks to the faction wars. It’s hard to give a crap about someone who insists they’re just trying to survive in a hostile world when Blizzard bent over backwards to make them the hostile ones, complete with the horde throwing out nukes and the big G word with Teldrassil.
Unless they invent entire new continents out of nowhere, I think only the Dragon Isles are left to explore on Azeroth. And sans Blizzard adding drakonids to the horde, there’s nothing left for the faction to explore, and they seem to have very little ties to universe-related themes.
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Nah they just need to make Anshe a thing parallel to Elune since they already missed the opportunity of Horde cosmic development in Shadowlands.
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I think the best way to deal with this is to restart the war and just delete the Horde as a faction. Then make Alliance self-delete soon after and the next game its just the individual races. Blame everything on the Horde and why it needed to go and have a fresh start.
Wait for lifelands I guess.
I still don’t see that being feasible, sorry. The alliance have already learned their lessons from post-WC2 about breaking up when no longer needed, and they’re “family” now. There’s no reason for them to spontaneously combust after wiping out the horde.
Even if they were broken up, that’s still no guarantee or encouragement that the individual races to be focused on wouldn’t still be majority former-alliance. There’s nothing stopping the game from forcing you to follow around a horde leader long-term right now, if the writers really wanted you to.
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Keep in mind that if we did this, we’d have to throw out Sylvanas Windrunner; Afrasiabi was in charge of her story for most of WoW.
Not entirely, just most of her WoW Story. She is a Character from WC 3.
True. But that still means axing most of Sylvanas’ story (her use of the plague, her suicide, her becoming Warchief, maybe her burning Teldrassil… so I wouldn’t have a problem with that myself, though I know others will).
We wouldn’t have to throw Sylvanas out. remember that despite Sylvanas being written by Afrasabi she was written as a r-word victim who got cheated out of vengence and a good story arc because of Afrasabi’s sick need to punish victims of SA. this feels like punishing the victim just because she couldn’t escape the abuse, there are many people who like her character and see her as a survivor.
Redeeming Arthas makes me feel just as upset as I imagine redeeming Sylvanas makes you. All in all no matter how they continue with this story it’s going to feel icky because it has to address the past and move on in the best way for the fans. I think at this point they are just hoping we forgive and forget the last 15 years… which is hard.
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Maybe the best thing for the Warcraft Franchise is to start over from Post-WC3?
So much of the lore has been handled poorly. There are certainly stories I’ve liked that has come out of WoW. I do like the fact that Elune is essentially a Death Goddess who defected to become the comic patron of Life (At least I hope that is the intent behind some of the more recent reveals).
But the manner in which the story has treated female characters, specifically those who had been victimized in some way. How the story uses trauma as a means to justify a powerful female character, instead of letting them be powerful on their own like so many of the Male characters (I have to mention how this has approach to story telling has negatively impacted Night Elves more than any other race).
Rebuilding WoW with a new engine, with modern graphics and animations. With gear and character emotes that can compete with FFXIV. Making the factions a mechanic for PVP rather than something you are locked into. Allow Alliance and Horde to visit each other’s cities except on PVP realms or flagged for PVP. Rather than splitting up your player base, let them populate the natural hubs in the game to encourage the game’s social aspect.
Write lore from a base of World Building. Develop cultures and let them be nuanced. Like male Kaldorei being content with their social standing in a Matriarchal system. Or showing the Orc Clans having rivalries within their consolidated holdings, while the Warcheif struggles to maintain unity (One reason I liked Garrosh’s development. Going from Frostwolf to a Warsong Warcheif would be a drastic change in political policy).
Ya’ll get the idea. Unfortunately, this is all assuming Blizzard can recover from their accumulated deadweight loss. They have has a monopoly on the MMORPG industry for so long, and even now it is hard to know how much other MMOs are really competing with them. From an investor’s standpoint, Square Enix stock is still experiencing peaks and valleys with an overall positive trendline over the last 5 years. While ActiBlizz is essentially flatlining, and in the last month is in freefall.
If that trend continues, we can only expect WoW to get worse while other MMOS like FFXIV will get better. So eventually, Blizz will have direct competition if they don’t already. However, they have had the monopoly for so long, when you play FFXIV you can SEE the deadweight loss from Blizzard and how it has accumulated over time.
Deadweight loss is a term used to measure the loss of “human capital”. Or in other words, innovation and creativity. You can measure it quantitatively on a supply and demand graph if you have enough accurate data. The problem is, as long as Blizzard’s top Brass believes they are a Monopoly, or have the Monopoly mindset of “Valuing great salesmen” rather than “Valuing a great product” we are not going to see any changes that matter.
When you already have a beloved and successful product, the goals of the company shifts. It becomes more about selling that product rather than making new and betters ones. Salesmen moves the needle on revenues far more and for much cheaper than a new and improved WoW would, at least in the short term. And I don’t see that mentality changing at ActiBlizz for a long time still.
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Sadly the same can be said for Tyrande right now even without Afrabashi.
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Albeit two different types of survivor
Sylvanas being turned into a Banshee was described as a “violation of her soul” and later had to regain her body after she got agency again, all after she survived genocide.
Tyrande is a genocide survivor also dealing with a crisis of faith because Elune is framed inconsistently capable of divine intervention (due to whatever hellscape story the devs have planned).
Weird how these grimdark stories of personal suffering are almost always assigned to women in the story huh lol
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She’s also dealing with Holocaust deniers in her own faction marginalizing the trauma and suffering she and her people endured.
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This is stupid, treating knowledge or a product as unusably tainted just because of the source has moral failings that aren’t about incompetency in making the actual product or reaching that knowledge, is logically absurd. This gets even more ridiculous when such is a collaborative product such as an MMO.
Removing his insert/reference NPC makes sense, but anything else no.
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hahaha the last time I pointed out the sexism in the story I was banned for a month because fanboys didn’t want to admit this franchise still treats women terribly… haha good times.
Don’t forget the previous team of writers brutally decapitated Teretha just for befriending Thrall…
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Almost every member of the Alliance is made up of genocide survivors. I think that the Dwarves are the only ones who aren’t depending on the clan.
Men just tend to be written to stoically deal with it to the point that they never even acknowledge it. It’s the opposite extreme.
The only male character who does is actually Genn, and he gets the same “wow look at how crazy they are!” treatment as Tyrande and Jaina do. WoW’s misogyny and its tendency to victim-blame are two sides of the same coin.
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I got banned for that too, maybe more than once, I am not sure.
I remember making a thread about Kaldorei Matriarchy, and that turning into an absolute shiitake mushroom storm of raging gamers malding over the very idea that women can be in power.
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Maybe if we talk openly about our experiences, maybe people here will realize there’s still hostility to women in these forums on a daily basis. Although the story forums are much better than the General Discussion…
It’s gotten better since the news about Blizzard came out… maybe it will stick?
If you think about it. Blizzard pitted mostly women against each other with thus narrative… Sylvanas fans are mostly wimen who were drawn to he as a survivor of SA, and they made her genocide the only matriarchal society in WoW and then they created attack dogs against both Sylvanas loyalists and Night Elve fans… the female playervase has been dealing with sexism fir the last 4 years in different ways.
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