BfA: What went wrong

Lore Story Forum
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The faction War was a major detriment to BfA as a whole. With the Azerite Plot, and the Third Party Bad guys (Naga, Old Gods, Drust, Blood Trolls, ect) we had more than enough to flesh out a decent expansion and not try to cram in a faction war.

I don’t care that there was “retaliation” for Stormheim. I care that it came right away. Alliance players waited years for something as impactful as Stormheim. If the rolls were reversed I doubt we would have seen the Alliance marching on Lordaeron because Nathanos tried to kill Anduin. We would be addressing it probably the expac after Shadowlands.

But because we just had to cram it in there. Just had to address it right away, we rushed the Naga, the Old Gods, and more or less breezed over the fact the planet is literally bleeding to death.

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Bfa was d.o.a when the writers decided to change it from a faction war expansion to some captain planet trash.

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Ladies and Gentlements, give this person the prize for the most accurate reply of the day

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There wasn’t, though, according to the writers.

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I’ve been informed through these very forums that Saurfang dwelling on the fact that Genn was not reprimanded for Stormheim was enough to agree to start a War based on the premise of “Maybe”.

Though I will admit that I don’t remember if that was in the book or the novellas, the latter of which I’m almost certain is non-cannon at this point, so who knows.

If they want to suddenly decide it wasn’t the reason for the war, then we’ve got larger problems, because now the Horde has the single biggest in game atrocity because they were bored on a Tuesday.

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They tried to do a faction war and hinted at “Both sides need to be careful of becoming evil.” Then decided to a pre-expansion event involving one side committing genocide.
Right there any chance of moral grayness goes out the window. One faction is fighting along for genocide, while the other is fighting for survival.

Liadrin gave us a world quest to kill someone trying to keep soldiers away from healers tending wounded.

What went wrong is that Teldrassil wasn’t properly explored, well the ramification.
The Horde side afterwards seem to acknowledge it in minor ways. This should have sent shock waves throughout the Horde. Orcs and Tauren should’ve been outraged at dishonorable act of slaying civilians. Blood elves should have pointed out the parallels to the Fall of Silvermoon and the Scourge. Highmountain tauren should have noped out of there, with the Nightborne leader being wtf.

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That was how Sylvanas convinced Saurfang to get on board with the war effort. But (a) it’s super-obvious that it was just a pretext, and (b) it was only one reason given among many as to why the Alliance couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t presented as “reprisal.”

Teldrassil never should have happened in the first place. As you yourself say in the earlier part of your post, they promised us morally grey and then failed to deliver it. Exploring the ramifications of a bad story decision isn’t going to make the decision any better.

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Alright, I’ll bite. Refresh my memory, what other reasons were there? Cause if we’re talking about not being trusted, the Horde had a laundry list of items that reach as far back as the Horde ambushing the Alliance at Mord’Rethar in Wrath, up to gunning down her own people that wanted to go be happy with their families that send up flags that the Horde shouldn’t have been trusted.

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Sylvanas blamed the Horde as much as she blamed the Alliance. Here’s the passage from A Good War:

    Anger flooded Saurfang’s mind. He knew he wasn’t hiding it well, but he didn’t care. “Are you so eager for another war? After all we’ve seen?” He slapped the stone figures off the table, and they clattered around the war room. His lips pulled back, baring tusks and teeth. It would take a thousand battles—no, a thousand victories—to even conceive of a total Horde triumph over the Alliance. The cost would be devastating. And what would the reward be? To spill some Alliance blood and burn some cities? Oh, how the Horde would celebrate as they picked through the ashes of the homes and loved ones they would lose in the fighting. “You are not Garrosh Hellscream. Why do you want to throw the Horde into the meat grinder again?”

    Sylvanas’s eyes did not waver, even in the face of his rage. “If I dedicated myself to peace with the Alliance, would it last a year?”

    “Yes,” Saurfang said curtly.

    “How about two years? Five? Ten? Fifty?”

    Saurfang felt the trap closing in on him, and he did not like it. “We fought side‐by‐side against the Burning Legion. That creates bonds that are not easily broken.”

    “Time breaks every bond.” Sylvanas leaned across the table. Her words flew like arrows. “What do you believe? Will peace last five years or fifty?”

    He leaned forward, too, his face inches away from hers. Neither blinked. “What I believe doesn’t matter, Warchief. What do you believe?”

    “I believe the exiles of Gilneas will never forgive the Horde for driving them away. I believe the living humans of Lordaeron think it is blasphemy that my people still hold their city. I believe the ancient divide between our allies in Silvermoon and their kin in Darnassus is not easily mended.” There was a smile on Sylvanas’s face. It was not a pleasant one.

    “I believe the Darkspear tribe hasn’t forgotten who drove them from their islands,” she continued. “I believe every orc your age remembers being imprisoned for years in filthy camps, wallowing in despair and surviving on human scraps. I believe every human remembers the tales of the terrible Horde that caused so much destruction in its first invasion, and I believe they blame every orc for that, no matter what your people have done to redeem yourselves. And I remember very well that I and my first Forsaken were once loyal Alliance citizens. We died for that banner, and our reward was to be hunted as vermin. I believe that there will be no permanent peace with the Alliance—not unless we win it on the battlefield on our terms. And believing that, answer this, Saurfang: what use is delaying the inevitable?”

    By the spirits, she is cold.

    Silence hung between them for a while. When Saurfang spoke, his voice had calmed. “Then we should talk of preparing for the next war, not starting it today.”

    “We are,” she said. “You are the only living creature I know who has conquered both Stormwind and Orgrimmar, Saurfang. You say a direct attack on Stormwind is impossible with our forces today. Is the same true for the Alliance? Do we have enough natural defenses in Orgrimmar to repel a surprise assault?”

    No, Saurfang concluded instantly. He rebelled against that thought, but every counterargument he could think of died quickly. Orgrimmar was more exposed than Stormwind. Its port was outside the city walls and thus was vulnerable. The civil war against Garrosh Hellscream had proved that. It would not be simple to crack open Orgrimmar again—Saurfang had spent years making sure of it—but it was possible, and he knew how it could happen. Draw off our navy, land troops in Durotar and Azshara, isolate the city, begin the siege from two directions, wait for the city to starve . . . “It’s my duty to make sure that doesn’t happen, Warchief.”

    “And if it does?”

    Saurfang laughed bitterly. “Then the Horde charges into battle and dies honorably that day, because there will be nothing else left for us but a slow death inside these walls.”

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Good lord I had forgotten how much of a reach that was, but you’re right. She does blame the Horde as much as the Alliance, but at the end of the day the war starts based on a maybe.

I’m so glad this expac is over. It’s a shame it wasn’t placed in an AU like WoD where we could shut the door and forget about it forever.

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I think this advanced expansion suffered from an extent do to Blizzard wanting to segue into the next expansion in some way but going too far. After all BC, Wrath, and Cataclysm largely had events happen like the Legion at the Dark Portal, the Scourge emerging in mass, and Deathwing’s return.

Then from that point forwards a story hook from the previous expansion had to be used in order to segue into the next. The faction of Cataclysm led to a naval battle for that stumbled upon Pandaria, Garrosh was used to set the stage for Warlords, Gul’dan called forth Legion, Sargeras stabbing Azeroth caused Azerite which began the Battle for Azeroth, and Sylvanas is the reason for Shadowlands.

Instead of just having things happen in the world they feel the need to have it all connect in some way. Which means once they decide where the story goes from Shadowlands and how it does, they don’t change that. They will change details in the expansion but the over all story direction for the future won’t change.

For example Warlords originally was going to end with Grom and the Iron Horde as the final antagonists but Shattrath was going to be the second raid with a Legion theme. Thus I feel that there was always going to that moment where Gul’dan entered into a portal to Azeroth in some way and the story hook of Khadgar hunting Gul’dan as seen in the Legion comic.

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Amadis has quoted the passage. And actually, I misspoke earlier. Sylvanas never actually mentions Stormheim when she’s persuading Saurfang to go along with her plan. He thinks about as one of the reasons he finally agrees, but she never pitches the attack to him as any sort of reprisal.

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Admittedly Sylvanas was basically spinning propaganda to make her conclusions seem unavoidable to Saurfang, but it’s a twisted sort of hilarious that as she runs down the list of Alliance/Horde grievances that are evidently so impossibly irreconcilable that war between them will forever be an inevitability, she conveniently omits that the blood elves seem to have roundly forgiven the orcs for burning their forests and killing their families, and that they don’t blame every Forsaken undead for what the Scourge did - even if some of them may well have outright done those things personally to quel’thalas as Scourge.

She’s selling this whole nihilistic “the peoples on both sides will never stop hating each other for past wrongs” schtick when her own peoples (living and undead) are obvious and glaring contradictions to that entire premise. Because even her current “people,” the Forsaken, have similarly gotten over hating orcs and trolls in spite of the devastation and loss caused by the former and having originally come from a place of centuries of culturally reinforced enmity, disgust and fear toward the latter.

She’s regaling Saurfang with all these supposedly impossible barriers to sustained peaceful coexistence that can never be remedied and he fails to even recognize that the Horde itself is home to notable proof against her entire argument. Elves and dead humans, conditioned and raised by generations of hostility and extensive lists of historical horrors to hate certain peoples. Yet they clawed past that and achieved coexistence because the time was right, the stakes were high, and changing how they thought about their old enemies was better than basically killing themselves just to keep those old hatreds alive.

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Even her bringing up the camps the Orcs were kept in stood against her point. Running Old Hillsbrad Foothills again, I noticed that it showed that the people who ran Durnhold Keep lived over in Tarren Mill. And the people of Tarren Mill are now Forsaken. Who are allied with the Orcs.

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In my opinion, the problem with BFA consists of two areas: The first area of failure is due to development time.

A game like WOW, a whole addon and all the stories cannot be rewritten easily. Especially since with the release of a game the second one is already started to be planned or even programmed, which takes about two years. So you had to change some points subtly enough that they still fit with the already developed material. Which limits the decision what you can do.

Also the cinemas take correspondingly longer, the Cinema-Team consists of 1 leader, 8 authors and about 20 renderers, so that’s it, such a team needs its time for so many cinemas of different quality and costs.

The second problem is that there was a change in the leadership and also some writers changed their positions or left the company.

Meaning even if we didn’t know exactly how it was originally intended, the plot wasn’t as you described it at the beginning, but originally it was Sylvanas who poisoned Vol’jin, also in the original phase it was thought that Sylvanas would become the bad guy and Vol’jin would survive, but stay hidden.

That Teldrassil wasn’t planned, well, bought, but I think that Lordaeron was planned at that time and that Ashenvale was in focus as well, because there was a strong focus on it, a warfront was mentioned as well. On top of that, a deliberate betrayal of the Alliance by Sylvanas was also planned at that time, because that would probably have been the spark that broke the camel’s back to MOP.

Also the book what we find was mentioned quite early in the beta and was originally part of a quest line that created a chronology in the areas, it was planned from left (Aszuna) to right )Stormheim).

And should reveal the plot of Sylvanas. But BFA was meant to be a war and in this war a united Horde would have stood against a united and angry Alliance, if you look at the descriptions of the Alliance, it was aggressive and inclined to wipe the Horde out for good.

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Well her story isnt done yet and all but likely she will get her own expansion later on.

I can sort of understand why they did it. I mean Argus was suppose to be a dead world. Having Mac’aree be a somewhat verdant plain was already pushing it. I do not want to spend an entire expansion in what would amount to be a lifeless and infernal hellscape!

If they really wanted to they will probably just end up resurrecting the Old Gods again.

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Source for this?

Outland was a dead world too, and it managed to have variety. They could have done something similar with Argus.

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that was the original plot back in legion, in one of the first patches. It was then changed during the beta.

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I have never heard this, and I was on the forum during Legion. Do you have a link?

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Maybe? But that just makes the Legion even worse chumps if they couldnt even extinguish life on their capital world.