That’s why I’m saying the Horde has gotten worse for succeeding in their genocide, though there seems to be a few too many tree elves kicking for it to be called a successful genocide.
They’re getting what you’re getting, only to a worse degree because Gilneans at least were humans. The cultures shift isn’t nearly as drastic as say the Blood Elves who went from “death to all who oppose us” to “a panda called our desire for retribution bad, let’s work with yet another human who slaughtered our people”
I have to admit the Gilneans in SW make me cringe. have since BFA. They are not even refugees, or displaced, Blizzard labeled them displaced refugees as if to drive a point home.
1 Like
Agreed.
Blizzard, similarly to the Worgen, gutted the Blood Elves after their starting zone. They were essentially vampire elves and then they just toned them down a lot. Also, as Alliance we had to work with Saurfang who was complicit in what happened in War of Thorns and Teldrassil so it goes both ways. BfA sucked for both sides.
Yep. It is insult to injury. The Gilnean people are resigned to living in the streets and in tents in the farmland area next to the embassy. You would never see Blizzard do this to the Stormwind Humans, it would be unheard of, they are our master race essentially. Look at all the leaders falling in line with Anduin and the one that isn’t, Tyrande is made out to be “consumed by vengeance”, even the Horde leaders now have to fall in line with Anduin’s ideals and beliefs.
3 Likes
Eh, I think blood elves fared a little better overall, at least until the end of TBC. You got the introduction with the starting zone and all, but the most impactful quest I remember was some addition in Thousand Needles (I think) of a blood elf alchemist that was seeking a cure for her magic addiction. She has you go around and collecting various ingredients, etc. and bring them back to her, and she experiments with it on herself.
At first, she’s excited because she thinks it’s a success. Then she immediately gets sick, turns wretched on the spot and dies in front of you. And you realize that, despite your best intentions, you ultimately helped accidentally magically poison her.
There’s a bit more in TBC’s Hellfire Something zone with that stopping point where blood elven travelers are explicitly there because they consider themselves on a holy pilgrimage for a way to sate their addiction. Even though nothing happens directly, their mere presence is a minor story message about their faith in Kael’thas trying to find a solution to their plight. Then later on in other zones, you can see the effects of blood elves having corrupted themselves by gorging on fel magic instead, becoming those felblood elves.
And it’s finally driven home during Kael’thas’s second boss fight himself, when he’s fallen from regal prince to half-wretched himself, thanks to that demon crystal embedded in his chest.
On top of this, their magic addiction was incorporated into their very racials, with the since-removed Mana Tap that actually damaged a target’s mana pool to give you a charge of mana that you could store, before consuming it with the Arcane Torrent racial. The in-universe reason for the silence was that of the player sucking up all of the magic in their immediate surroundings. Priests also had a (bad) racial spell to consume a random magic buff in exchange for a minor mana recharge.
Okay fair, Blood Elves got it better because at least they got to keep their racial identity through a whole expansion and see examples of how their condition affected them. What I would give to get that for Worgen lol.
Instead we get the starting zone, and then after that Worgen are just tea sipping Stormwind Humans who can wolf out every now and then. Nothing menacing about them, nothing showing the curse affects them.
Blood Elves NOW have experienced the same thing, what identity they had has pretty much been kind of dulled away. Ironically, Void Elves sort of stole their edge.
4 Likes
I got the feeling sort of they intended to do more with Worgen and Gilneas in Cataclysm but greatly underestimated the resource cost for rebuilding Azeroth from basically scratch to support flying, so those plans got scrapped and they never picked it back up. I mean the entire zone is just sitting there… empty. It screams abandoned project.
Supposedly, they planned on making Gilneas City an actual battleground where you fought to control the districts in a urban warfare type of deal, but because it didn’t work they just bailed on it.
Also, and I don’t know if this is confirmed, but supposedly they planned on adding a Gilneas district in Stormwind but because it “clashed” with the rest of Stormwind’s aesthetic they threw that idea away. Kind of sucks if you ask me.
We’ll see how long that lasts. Like I said upthread, void elves have muscled in on the psychosis niche as well, but did anything happen alliance-side to illustrate anybody actually falling to the void whispers in BFA? I know you can run into a few batty ones horde-side during island expeditions, but if I recall correctly, the body that Xal’atath inhabits was a former blood elf and she merely recolors herself to be voidy once she possessed the body.
Also yeah, people just love elves. If Blizzard wants to toy around with a creepy transformation thing, they’ve got the more otherworldy and flashy option right there to toy with if they do decide to make someone bite the dust.
No, but they had us work with Void Elves to attack Golbins where we open Void portals to suck the Golbins into… I won’t lie that was one of the “whoa” moments for me in BfA. I was like that is so messed up… those Goblins are just, sent to the Void. Forever.
That was dark and brutal if you ask me. Something I wish Worgen got to have too, alas, that is the whole point of this thread.
The raptor zombie void finger puppets were pretty messed up too. Umbric so calmly explains that this was totally intended as pure physiological warfare, too.
I admit I am pretty fond of Umbric, though. He surprised me by how complex he turned out to be. Also getting to beat up rich people profiting from the suffering of a world war is a win in my book any day.
1 Like
So the story progressing and blood elves finding a problem to their addiction is a problem now?
Oh no, not at all. Just that after they fixed their problem the Blood Elves just, to me, got kind of boring. When they were essentially vampire elves they were more interesting and fit the Horde theme of doing what they can to survive.
The blood elves as they were introduced had a really strong drug addiction metaphor. In fact, for a very long time, they were even called Crack Elves in the WoW data files, so the correlation was intentional.
The struggle was part of the appeal. Some people really felt it was a misstep back then to have the Sunwell reignited because it took away from that metaphor. I’m not sure if it was a story beat that should have lasted FOREVER, but it could have carried on a little longer. And it would have been nice if it was solved in-house, instead of having Velen swoop in at the end of the raid, drop a naaru into the well and suddenly free methadone on tap forever. In a way, it’s the same problem of the worgen suddenly getting their thing (mostly) fixed by a night elf out of nowhere in the starting zone, but at least the blood elves had an expansion to flex the theme before it got shut down.
This originally gave the blood elves a unique angle of how a lot of them could actually be way more monstrous than the horde, despite their traditionally civilized exteriors, because desperation can drive people to do things they’d otherwise never consider. But it also had some sympathetic reasoning for their struggle and why they behaved the way they did.
Edit: I feel bad for derailing the topic so I’m going to end my part of any blood elf chat here.
3 Likes
Having the Sunwell reignited so quickly was a mistake in my opinion. Personally, I felt the best time was during Wrath. As much as I liked the Argent Tournament, it did have a WTF feel to it from a story standpoint. I mean, a tournament there and now?
No, I would put the Sunwell patch in its place. Have it be a giant middle finger to Arthas. After all, it was he who caused so much of their suffering and forced them to destroy the Sunwell. It becomes a circle.
5 Likes
Onc the Sunwell reignited, the Blood elves basicaly reverted to the cultural norms of before. They basically became high elves, in most ways that mattered (aside from political affiliation)
…it is a real shame, as they had such a cool story. It fit well with the Horde.
This, tbh.
5 Likes
I will call you crazy unless you can give a plausible WHY. The only metric Blizzard cares about is subs and you’d have to show how adding worgen caused a plunge in subs.
Look at my OP. That’s why. You may be right that they only care about subs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t dislike writing a certain race and prefer to have them recede and fade away. That’s what I am saying, all their plans they had for Gilneas (the city battleground, Gilnean district in Stormwind, and an Alliance side of the Silverpine Forest quesline) got thrown out for one reason or another.
Then as I mentioned in the OP it seems many of the themes that were Gilnean/Worgen have been given to the Kul Tirans who have their own capital and kingdom while the Worgen are just homeless in Stormwind without even having their own flag anymore.
It looks to me like they are trying to strip away everything that makes them unique so they can fade Gilneans away and just make them Stormwind Humans who a few can turn into wolf people. (which lorewise will also go away since Tess Greymane made it obvious it is a bad thing to be a worgen).
3 Likes
It’s far worse to be Forsaken, but you don’t see them going away.
dont forget that with shadowlands worgen didnt really get a whole lot of new customization options, just some new fur colors and new faces and eye color, while many other races got body jewelry, new piercings, new hairstyles.
the biggest thing they did for worgen was seperate human customization’s from worgen customization. which they kinda had to do, because of the huge amount of new stuff humans got, worgen dont have enough customizations to be paired with them
I doubt it. Varian was brought back solely to be a warchief equivalent. Meanwhile worgens were cooked up and forgotten about so fast that you have to play the Forsaken’s early zone stories to get the whole Worgen story.
Personally, I think the entire Goldrinn link to Varian and in part Anduin is pants on head stupid. A lion spirit makes more sense than a freaking wolf, but Blizzard is obsessed with Vikings and wolves. Not to mention no one in Blizzard cares enough aboutthe Alliance to cook up an original idea for the faction. It’s easier to just copy Horde ideas and concepts. Furthermore, you could use a lion/wolf symbology to represent the faction conflict. But no, hurr durr wolf wolf wolf wolfy Wollongong.
5 Likes