Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from there.
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The dev team is on record as saying they are not adverse to ignoring things if it will prevent the story they want to tell, sadly. That is why we apparently forgot where the keys for the Vindicaar were for all of BFA.
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Guess the investment of a rather large playerbase falls out of consideration here.
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This is one of the huge problems with the WoT. Someone at Blizzard literally said ‘That’s not the story we want to tell’ when someone asked them why the Vindicaar was not present.
It’s horrible storytelling when you just toss things into the closet because they are inconvenient to the story they want to tell. Sorry, you created all these things and they need to be factored in when you want to create a story.
If you study the War of Thorns, there are so many logical fallacies that it boggles the mind.
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The Horde barely made it through Darkshore with just Malfurion and the civilians, with Blizzard having made considerably efforts to sideline Tyrande and the Night Elf army to give the Horde a chance. They certainly put less effort in keeping the Draenei and Gilneans out of the fight, and no effort into the other forces absent from the novels that you brought up. But ultimately Blizzard decided that the tree was going to burn, so Blizzard had to keep those forces out of the story to give the Horde the chance.
Or opposite, they would have had to write how the Horde defeated all of those forces and still burned down Teldrassil, because that was not a plot point Blizzard was going to remove from their plans.
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What’s annoying is that they could’ve used those assets to explain the Horde’s losses instead of “these few civilian night elves fought so hard” or “Malfurion is epic”.
Kinda like how they ignored Azerite for mage/shaman catapults.
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Azerite instead of run of the mill arcane fire would have been better, yes.
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Like I said… I don’t walk the venues you do. The only use I make of Dicord is to play Pathfinder games online and my presence on Twitter is virtually non existent as I’ve never seen any worth in being involved in the platorm. Where I’m not running into this sort of mockery is in the game itself. Most Horde players that I meet in game are civil and I keep language translation potions on hand in case they want to talk.
That’s another issue with the idea of the faction conflict overall.
The Alliance can’t fully unleash otherwise the idea of a Horde antagonist doesn’t make sense, as the Alliance is far more powerful through incremental power boosts and gains throughout the narrative.
The narrative would’ve been better if the Alliance could’ve fully unleashed itself and initiated the conflict, as they’ve got enough built-up motivation to do it prior to Teldrassil.
It would’ve made the Horde wanting to take Teldrassil in a sudden surprise strike as a deterrent to keep their super toys away from the Horde semi-logical.
Instead, the Alliance loses access to most of it’s toys because otherwise the faction conflict can’t be portrayed as a “wow, this is an actual conflict and who knows who’s gonna win??” despite that everyone knew from the start of BfA that Horde would have an eleventh hour revelation to scapegoat everything onto Sylvanas.
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One of the first ones that occurred to me was “If we can evacuate so many people by portal… why didn’t we do the reverse and pour alliance troops in via portal?”
I think they had a couple of goals:
- Remove Teldrassil, as it was really aged and they didnt want to put the mountian of work to rebuild it from scratch.
- Give Sylvanas an obvious Arthas march on the Sunwell parallel
- Start a war there is no chance of negotiating peace for
- Make the horde go through another soul searching “but who am I, anyways” …AGAIN.
With those goals they worked backwards, and ignored anything which would prevent those goals from being realized.
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I agree with points 2 through 4, but Teldrassil is still in the game.
I don’t spend a lot of time in sand dunes, I suppose.
No, it wouldn’t have - and we’ve been through this.
Not because it’s a problem for the Alliance to initiate conflict, I argue they should. The issue is in destroying the locus of investment for an entire playable race, and creating a presentation that defines that playable race as useless, and that’s just when we go to talk about Night Elves. There is a crater where Forsaken identity used to be, and that they are in limbo is well is not good for the game.
Destroying capitals was a bad idea, and under no circumstances, conditional or not, should it be defended.
I think the worst part is, Teldrassil is the narratively relevant of the two capitals that got destroyed in a footnote event during the prepatch but Lordaeron has never been brought up narratively but had all marketing and aesthetic design, while receiving the expansion opening event with the most evident Arthas parallels including it’s own Dead Scar.
If anything, I’d argue they changed course and made Teldrassil extra worse/Arthas 2.0 and shoved all the work behind Lordaeron being Anduin’s Arthas 2.0 into a closet.
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Well… it is, sort of. It is more like legacy content now, as in the modern game it is just a burnt out husk represented by a skybox element.
They definitively set things up so they never need to address updating it.
Hyjal, on the other hand, is waay easier to update if they go that route.
While the NEs certainly weren’t the only ones nerfed in weird ways during the WoT (seriously, we were operating like we just came out of BC) … there is some truth to this. I mean, my god, look at how much Blizz had to twist the narrative to just get the Horde the one victory they apparently needed to get to label them the villains for the entire story? After a decade of deep neglect and erosion of our character roster, racial fantasies, and faction identity … while the Alliance as Faction at least saw some sizable power increases in Legion alone, the two factions aren’t even really operating in the same genre of fantasy anymore on paper.
Blizz really pulled what they did with the Horde in BfA without allowing them Means, Motive, and only forced at best Opportunity. What horrific writing lol! Who needs luxuries like that?!
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If they updated Hyjal it was be phased in the same way, and the Cataclysm leveling zone would remain same as the Teldrassil leveling zone does.
My investment into the Night Elves was always tied to their culture and deep lore, not Teldrassil itself. Which is why I’ve found Teldrassil renewed my interest in playing my Night Elves, as it spun the narrative in a direction by incorporating my favorite element of the Worgen story which is legitimate grievance and hate for the other faction.
It helped that when they kept teasing there was going to be another capitol, Hyjal was a good bet and it’s official confirmation made me excited.
While it isn’t portrayed in-game yet, an inevitable world revamp creating Hyjal as a capitol interests me much more than them curing the Blight from Lordaeron and just recreating the old capitol.
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I dunno? With the whole new fast leveling experience, is that even really a requirement? Couldn’t they just theoretically create a New World-Old World situation where you can just phase into the “Current Azeroth” that is slowly added to. Its still “phasing”, but more so in a ESO style “adding to the map” fashion?
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BfA did more to restore
This is a debatable point. If through WoT NE got their return to form, then through WoT, and the subsequent horrors, violations, and weepy reminiscing the Horde were brought back to their standard as monsters of the universe with no one to blame, but themselves. Which, roundly has been pushed back on, and REEEEEd about endlessly, by its playerbase.
I’d like to see a current Azeroth makeover that isn’t dated like Cataclysm is, just creating zone-based storytelling building up new casts of characters to replace all the dead ones that don’t age like spoiled milk because it’s hyper-centralized upon an ancient threat that’s dealt within a patch
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