The story beats still happen, but there’s an obvious canon vs. non-canon version.
We can see this with Bel’ameth itself with how one of the NPCs there is one the Horde was tasked with assassinating during BfA… Yet she’s alive and well.
As you can see, by scrolling up and reading Alynsa’s post, taking it as if every single available quest has been done by the player is ripe with its own form of inconsistency (and things that are mutually exclusive like siding with Sylvanas or not).
The basic plotline plays out the same whether your character was an active participant or not.
Nobody here is trying to ‘boycott BfA,’ I don’t know what you mean by that.
I remember some posters in the past have mentioned effectively doing that with their horde characters because they want to keep them “apart” from the horde’s storyline in BFA. It’s basically “I won’t level up or do quests on them until the expansion catch-up mechanics let me skip them so I’m canonically not there”. It’s stupid.
Well, their characters weren’t there.
That’s their roleplay choice to do within this roleplaying game.
Not really ‘stupid,’ it’s just how they decide to play the game…
Like, what?
Why come in here and randomly say people’s choices in how they play the game are ‘stupid,’ I don’t get that.
The WoT was the final insult of a guy who wanted to drag sylvanas through the mud one final time before he got kicked to the curb, so I can see why there are Horde players who wanted nothing to do with it.
Heck, even many developers found it distasteful but were stuck in the awful predicament of “make the thing or be fired”.
No, I mean specifically the idea that by not doing quests, that the horde player character is canonically not part of the events.
Skip what you want; there’s a ton I haven’t done, myself. But the game’s still going to have to run with a canon that you’ve been there for these events.
Other Horde player characters were part of it, but if I don’t do the questline my character never experienced/done it… So… Yeah?
The game runs by the idea that these events happened, not that your character was necessarily an active participant in it or participated in it at all.
As I’ve said previously:
So assuming that every Horde character has done every single quest canonically doesn’t work.
This is also a very good point.
As a Zandalari Troll would that mean all available Horde quests from past expansions were done by me also?
Did this Zandalari Troll take part in the Isle of Thunder?
What if I was a Nightborne?
Did I kill the Lich King?
Did I fight with the Alliance during MoP?
Of course not, not unless they used Chromie Time to travel back in the past and do those things.
If they didn’t, there’s no reasonable way why they’d be there canonically or would have taken part in those campaigns.
So no, we can’t just assume that your player character has done every single available quest canonically. Only the quests your player character actually did.
Y’know, like… Roleplay, or something.
I like how blizz has been handling those situations with certain characters reacting to you based on you having a specific achievement or not. It’s the best way to handle it from now on
But my main issue with that is the massive slippery slope it created. If I must be assumed to have taken part in the events leading up to the burning, shouldn’t I therefore also must be assumed to have proven myself time and again by having taken part in everything from Vanilla up to present? I’ll skip listing them all and let my previous comparatively short summary above do that work for me, but suffice it to say when I was going to go all the way down the list?
It’s a lot. Like, a ridiculous number of times we would be treated as having canonically saved the entire planet of Azeroth. And of course personally worked well with Tyrande, Malfurion and other Alliance leaders.
If we’re going to treat everything as having been canonically been done by the player, it would make less sense for the Horde player to be barred from walking into any city, because we seem to have a habit of being the sole thing preventing armageddon.
The argument that ‘all quests have been completed by the player character canonically’ kinda falls apart when you consider things like…
Lady Vash’j reacting differently to you based on whether you killed her or not, and other such unique interactions based on if the player completed something or not.
I’ll admit I came on too strong. I’ve been feeling especially bitter today for some reason.
But I’m not talking about roleplay. I think only the story matters. Like, I went through WoT not because I wanted to be a part of it, but because I knew the game would have to treat me as if I had whether I wanted to or not.
Yeah. Or at the very least, I’d say from higher-level Cata to now, because that’s when WoW’s storytelling began to shift more into a focused storyline.
So yeah, I’d say the horde player has flipped from being pro-night elf to anti-night elf a weirdly high number of times.
But that’s the key phrase I want to focus on here: “the horde player” and its place in the story. Not Sarm, not Alynsa, not Beerpersecond the hypothetical earthen monk next expansion. I effectively don’t exist in your game, nor does anyone else in mine. We’re all just sharing the role of “player character” with different ability sets, with subdivisions based on faction and race. We’re save files, so to speak.
I agree, which is why I disagree with holding every Horde player canonically responsible for the bad things, but not canonically involved in the good. It’s just too very selective for the sake of being very selective. Either I canonically did all of it, none of it, or just the most recent stuff (IE current expansion).
Being like “well, you did help push to Teldrassil, but saving the world? No, that wasn’t you” is a weird line to draw.
You are fine, Karebear!! This is a topic determined to make us argue and bicker, and you are hardly even among the worst culprits.
Though of course, canonically every single argument presented here is presumed to have been made by you. All of them.
Well, this is a roleplaying game.
That’s kind of been my entire realm of thinking on this, right.
Your player’s actions connotate to the outcomes they experience.
If your character didn’t act, there’s no outcome to experience.
Just a different mode of playing the game, honestly.
And it seems that the game doesn’t assume that you did that, at least not since BfA back when it was required content to participate in.
True, but you do exist somewhat within my game.
I can party with you, go out and find you, RP with you and so on.
I agree with what Kaerestae said earlier where there’s realistically a handful of ‘hero of Azeroth characters.’
Realistically at least one per class, since all of the class order hall campaigns canonically took place in one form or the other.
No, no, it’s all good. My reaction was shocked because I knew what my brain was interpretting your words to be wasn’t something I’d expect from you. That’s on me; still sick and my brain is maybe at 20% functionality, if I’m lucky. If anything, I should have been a teeny bit more diplomatic in my response, because it’s not like this is the first time we’ve discussed things. Sorry for my confusion there!!
I do find myself really envious, and I guess resentful(?) of people who are able to do that by just RPing away what the story expects out of them.
I ran into a hard wall with the BFA prepatch because, while I didn’t really have quite the same connection to my main that other people do (I was a troll back then and tauren mages weren’t yet an option), I did kinda try to think up some general character traits.
But then I became accomplice to genocide and I felt that made me permanently ineligible to view any horde character I play with the label of “hero protagonist” because how do you even do that after what Blizzard pulled, uuuuugh.
I even strongly considered changing to alliance, but it only embittered me more. Thought about vulpera too even though I actively dislike the race, but even though they’re recruited after BFA’s over, the time frame is so close that I still couldn’t rationalize it away. And $25-$30 feels like a lot bigger of an ask when you’re still swapping to either aesthetics or faction you don’t click with.
You’re good. None of this would have happened had I not dropped in like a bomb with my attitude.
That’s kind of my biggest problem with the roleplay of this game, honestly.
Blizz focused way too much on the factional divide as a method for providing suitable roleplay experiences and just assumed it would live up to that role.
When, it really doesn’t at all imo.
When clumping who you play with, what content you experience, the character choices you make, and a bunch of other essential stuff into a large umbrella you’re inevitably not going to like everything you’re forced with.
The War of Thorns was the worst case of this, wherein options were removed from your character.
I feel like options are the main thing roleplaying games should emphasize, but Blizzard largely boiled it down to one: Horde or Alliance.
Which often brings some form of annoyance and disappointment.
In a perfect world I would’ve preferred the main character to be an entirely neutral independent agent, perhaps with some affiliation based on racial option…
But your choices influence how your character participates in the content and you can change allegiances based on character action.
That’s the entire gameplay philosophy behind stuff like ‘reputations,’ which I feel has been thoroughly lost at this point lol.
It just sucks and it’s bad outdated game design, to put it bluntly.
Oh, and forcefully tying who you can interact with and what your character does based exclusively on race and no other options is incredibly bad game design and makes for an environment wherein the people in Warcraft’s universe feel like monoliths.
