The quest should have been there were just a few Scarlets hanging around and they leave when you ask them to. You help them pack up but they only have a guitar and a few packets of ramen noodles and it’s the saddest thing.
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Nah, because even if they have a increase in membership due to disappointment in Alliance leadership, or any other reason to explain why they still have so many of their number; In Gilneas they were far feom the cathedral, surrounded by water with no ships, and holding a city and in territory they are not familiar with at all.
Reclaiming Gilneas needed to happen, but having the Scarlets be the obstacle didn’t. Scarlets have an opportunity to reinvigorate their numbers and crusade, but that should be it own plot line done with more tact.
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I don’t have proof it’s definitely Denathrius. I have clues that lead me to believe it is, though.
The clues lying around in no particular organization are… Denathrius clearly still isn’t done, we already had a light-infused Nathrezim, the Light’s Tyranny in an alternate timeline, interacting timelines thanks to the Primalists working together with the Infinites, bread crumbs leading to the Light’s and Order’s growing importance…
Oh right, Denathrius’ prison is in the middle of some light-infused hellhole where everything goes mad. And the final boss of the Gilneas questline turns into a literal Light Monstrosity. It’s definitely tinfoil hat territory, but I’ll eat my tinfoil hat if I end up being wrong. Gladly, and on live TV.
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I’m going to respectfully disagree with you on this point - how unfamiliar do you believe they were? Would they not have scouts? Would a city a mere few days away from the cathedral not be subject to intelligence gathering operations? It’s been more than a decade since the wall fell - to ignore an obvious open-door opportunity to increase their holdings would’ve revealed a stunning degree of incompetence, even for Scarlets. If there’s any inconsistency I would point out it’s the question of why did the Scarlets wait so long to make a move? for that matter, why did anyone? Given their proximity to Gilneas, it would seem to me the Scarlets would be one of the more expected occupiers for that region since they are all miserable, nasty people.
This being said, I imagine this scenario is yet one of many Rorschach tests given quest form in Azeroth - one argument isn’t necessarily more correct than another, and what you experience depends on your point of view.
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See what’s weird is the BFA-era Scarlet Pamphlets suggested that, while they did see the Worgen as impure, they wanted to USE them as a vehicle to radicalize the Alliance.
That would’ve been a cooler storyline. The Scarlets bow and hail Genn as the returning King, all the while plotting to bring down the Forsaken once and for all.
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What are you saying here?
Is it an ambiguous thing which Blizzard try to make sense of when they half heartedly wrote this section? Because if you’re saying that the scenario is like a blob of ink that any way you look at it is right, we can’t agree on that.
When you do not have an army to hold a whole city, no supply lines to provision your people that are there, no allies to help you, and with enemy territory between your base of operations and the foreign land you are occupying it will go badly. That makes it the wrong move.
You know what though, i think you are right. Because the Scarlets failing everywhere they go is totally in character and Blizzard has stayed true to that. It’s a shame there are more people that wanted something different for the Scarlets than there are those which know this is how it should have always gone.
Me, watching a villain made of Fire named Fyrakk who wants to set everything on Fire: Mm, yes. WoW is a very subtle and ambiguous story to experience.
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To me, WoW is at its best when it has a little of everything - I feel that’s its strength as a gigantic game world/setting.
Have a big knucklehead boss (like Fyrakk) that players don’t need to think about to understand. (And give him some good voice lines so that he’s a fun character on top of that.)
Have a cleverer boss (like Iridikron) sneaking around in the meantime, that the player would have to investigate - possibly over several patches - to understand.
I just feel that an event as big as the Reclamation of Gilneas needed at least more of the second element. Something for the players to read about, think about, speculate about, rather than ‘kill mob. done.’ I wanted explanations, motives, hints for later, but all this was is a bunch of ‘Scarlets evil’. Oh, really? How shocking. How exciting. I definitely needed that reminder, or I was going to forget that incredibly important fact.
And now I have no lore to chew on, to sit and reflect on, to conjecture and make predictions, and eagerly wait seeing them come true or get proven false - something to talk about on the forums, without which, all I have to fill my time here is to complain about what I didn’t get.
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Sigh, yeah, guilty. Kind of helps though.
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What I meant by this is I can see both sides of the discussion, even if I disagree with half of it. I could absolutely be in the wrong with my position, but it’s my own experience and thus it unfolds differently from my own point of view.
In my experience, WoW - even at its best - has been more He-Man than Lord of the Rings, I should think. There might be a place for more elaborate storytelling, but outside of a few brief flashes of brilliance in the last 19 years, Azeroth has proven time and again that it’s not that place. I don’t really find disappointment with WoW to any extent because that would imply expectations, of which I have none. I’ve learned to accept WoW for what it is rather than what it might’ve been, and if the time comes where I tire of it, I’ll just vanish…but as someone who’s played since launch, I find it highly unlikely that this will ever really come to pass. For me it’s just a bit amusement park with some interesting costumed characters I run across from time to time - visually engaging and entertaining in short bursts, but you can see through the illusion when you take the time to look, and I’ve simply chosen to to accept the illusion. This doesn’t make me right or wrong, it’s just my own choice.
I really do feel for those who want something more in-depth for characters they’ve loved and hated over the years, however. It’s likely difficult watching their evolution head in directions that seem more erratic than sensible.
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