If I were designing it, I’d take that as a challenge. Maybe I’d say something like “The Eredar who became demons wanted to keep a playground for themselves” to explain the less destroyed areas. Oooh, maybe they could shape fel into the images of trees and stuff! That might be cool and creepy.
Ooh! And there could be underground zones–like, the surface has been devastated, but the caves under the surface are relatively unchanged. There could be areas like Stonecore …
Anyway, I think there could have been alternatives to the whole planet being bare rock and green sludge, but they would have taken time to develop.
To be fair, Draenor was only shattered, what, 25 years ago? The Legion had 25k years to #### up Argus. Mac’Aree is the only ‘nice’ place left because in addition to being loaded with the magic of holy city, it was physically ripped off the surface of the planet and floats free up in it’s atmosphere.
I don’t have a witty or productive response, I just wanted to put out “elf fatigue” as a phrase. I wasn’t around for orc fatigue, though, so maybe I’m misunderstanding something
During Cata and MOP orcs were already everywhere, they dominated the whole focus and were actually promoted somewhere in every story. Also, after months of Siege of Orgrimmar camping, people got tired of orcs.
Then WOD came along and there was: MORE Orcs, which of course caused a “This is too much, boaaah, again” feeling.
A lot of good points brought up and while many have already pointed out how the whole xpac started wrong, I’d like to bring up also how it ended (wrong):
No straightforward, feel-good moment at the end for any side: As a whole this expansion was pretty devoid of them but especially at the end. It had powerful moments to be sure, but feel-good ones? Not so much. For all its flaws, bumps and potholes in the middle of a story can be glossed over if the conclusion is satisfying. Ex., most recently we only have to look back at Legion; it wasn’t perfect, but at the end, Sargeras is beaten, the Legion is defeated, yay! we won!! /happy dance
Contrast to BFA and we have:
Patch 8.2 Azshara - Yay! We beat Azshara,…oh wait jk N’Zoth is sucking her back and-ALL EYES SHALL BE OPENED huhh wait what does that mean now? Compare that to 7.1 and Illidan just straight up vaporizing Gul’dan…
End of the War Campaign at Orgrimmar - Uhhmm, what? So who won the war? Hmm, I’m not sure let me go to the forums… O.O
That being said I suppose 8.3 N’Zoth getting Kamehameha blasted by us the PC is something. But it feels off and it doesn’t really feel like a fist-bumping or feel-good moment for me because killing an old god wasn’t the reason why I went to war in the first place. Consider, this is the ending (in-game) cinematic to an expansion that initially has us going off in 8.0 to recruit allies for a faction war. And it sounds so bizarre even just typing that. Because killing N’Zoth should have been on the level awesome of beating Sargeras, but it just falls flat because 8.3 came at us so fast, moreso coming on the heels of a war campaign whose ending was already ambiguous enough.
Unpopular opinion: BFA’s story was actually good, if you consider the whole of Sylvanas’ story.
So, first, let me say it’s my opinion there were three primary driving factors for the BFA story
After the relative failure of Warcraft at the box office, Blizzard wanted to prove that their game medium was better than a movie for telling a good warcraft story. That’s the reason behind the incredible cinematics and top-notch story arcs (as written).
It’s a slider. BFA was never meant to be a huge story, but just to slide us from Legion to Shadowlands, while being as enjoyable as possible
Faction-clash fan service. I remember here on the forums that people were tired of H/A team-ups to kill whatever Big Bad at the end of each expansion (Deathwing, Garrosh, etc). We were clamoring for a return to the epic feeling of the original Warcraft RPG days, Orcs vs Humans, and plenty of opportunities to have at each other.
Where it all fell down was the execution. Last minute story changes to Sylvanas’ arc, the shoehorning of Azshara and the potential of the Black Empire, and the uselessness of the warfronts and island expeditions. The utter failure of the gearing system. All of these are mechanics meant to get the player engaged in the story, but after doing them once or twice, no one really cared because there were no stakes. I think they all started out as grand ideas (imagine warfronts as a PvP/PvE engagement where, instead of taking turns “winning”, either faction could win and then receive a week-long buff), but they just never could them work correctly or fairly.
Overall, I personally enjoyed the BFA storyline MUCH more than WoD or Legion (seriously, a planet-sized sword?? derp), and I believe it will have much greater implications for the future of the game.
No, but I loathe the Titan storyline altogether. They would have been much more menacing if they’d just have stayed gone. And Blizz could have left out the entire “stabbing the world” scene and it really wouldn’t have changed Legion’s ending that much…or the whole of BFA, for that matter. Sure, we ran around “healing” the planet (which, why was it only “bleeding” in our two new zones? I guess more failed mechanics), but did we actually DO anything about the giant sword? Is it going to be a permanent part of Silithis now? Just a really dumb idea imo.
While this isn’t part of the story per se, I do believe that for some reason they continually overestimate their ability to have a balance of players from both factions active in a given area at the same time. I have no doubt they’d love an actual “world warfront” where the outcome is decided by the efforts of the players, but the one time they tried a world PvP objective (in Azshara) the balance skewed so badly so quickly that they had to engineer a completely new objective to trigger in badly imbalanced servers.
Given that, it’s not surprising that they opted for a relatively toothless PvE-style Warfront, but then I think they shot themselves in the foot on Arathi by making it too easy (and with a bizarre amount of stand-around-and-wait) and then on Darkshore by so clearly half-assing it that it was ridden with bugs even for being less than half of what Arathi was. A lot of the PvE systems fell apart in this expansion.
Darkshore was 100% them trying to answer nelf players concerns about being abandoned, the initial idea was for an alliance offensive into Quel’thalas, Azshara, or the Barrens.
I legitimately have no idea why they didn’t just do Nelves vs Goblins in Azshara TBH, seems like it would give both sides something and was planned before then.
My guess is they originally planned for Warfronts to be a bigger part of the expansion, as per the datamined Silvermoon and Barrens Warfronts. The original version of Arathi fell flat, so they backpedaled hard on the idea, hacked together the half-assed Darkshore Warfront to support their sudden realization they needed to do something with nelves, and then abandoned the idea.
Ironically, I thought that the Heroic Arathi Warfront was much, much more fun and I think people would’ve liked it more if that had been the version they released initially - or at least had the option for it at launch.
Building off the comments here, I think the main problem with BfA was:
Presentation, presentation, presentation.
BfA had some good ideas in it, some logical drivers, some neat themes, some great cinematics, some awesome zones… but all too often they were presented in a slapdash, disjointed sequence - whether because the next chapter had to be pushed out onto live before they were done with it, or because the story was rushing headlong towards Shadowlands and didn’t want to bother fleshing out the gaps between the few plot points they wanted to show, or whatever the case may be.
The big detractors of BfA for me were:
No Horde reaction in the immediate aftermath of the Burning. Nathanos hesitated a second, Saurfang tried ineffectually to stop the catapults, that one orc child reference in Org said he felt bad… and that was it. Players were left to fill in what the Horde reaction would be, and well, the Alliance had just been primed to see absolutely the worst in the Horde. If the story was aiming for peace at the end, there really needed to be something here to show that not everyone was chill with what the writer(s?) brilliantly decided to describe as genocide.
Barely even lip service to the fact that the Horde had gone through Garrosh and knew what the dangers of a runaway Warchief with their own agenda could be. Seriously. Other than a few comparisons which are then quickly ignored/forgotten, there’s little to show how the Horde react to the same events playing out again - and while I’m 99.9% sure it’s just because the writers forgot/were too rushed to put in more, it creates the appearance that the Horde learned absolutely nothing from the rebellion against Garrosh, which is stupid and makes it harder to enjoy stories because the writers show that they won’t have the lasting impact/lessons they promised at the time.
Every major victory has a giant but also you failed stapled to it. Sure, a clear-cut victory in faction war would make the 100% losing side angry, but that’s the downside of a faction war: neither side can really feel victorious, so both sides will be bitter. Horde marched to and burned Teldrassil, but were instantly labelled villains and got to hear about the massive casualties they suffered just at the hands of the Darnassian guards. Alliance caused the destruction of Undercity, but because they failed their way into it, couldn’t hold the city they spoke of reclaiming, and got treated to the rows upon rows of dead soldiers and their weeping families in the aftermath, whose lives had been spent for almost nothing. The Alliance raided Dazar’alor, but only got there because of a massive suicide attack, got kicked out of the city immediately afterward, never got to use the fleet advantage the attack officially caused, and pushed the Zandalari firmly into the Horde when keeping them out of it was the stated reason for the attack. The Horde had to deal with a Garrosh 2.0 plot. Again. Joy. This list could go on forever, so I’ll end it there.
The all-out faction war barely covered the world. We got night elf zones and Tirisfal in the pre-patch and initial invasion, Arathi and Darkshore warfronts, and… mission table lore for the rest? Maybe, if they’re even canon? And Shadowlands isn’t promising much Azeroth-focused lore, so this will be a wait if it’s addressed at all…
Azerite? Who cares about Azerite? The factions are building grenades and bombs and weapons out of the stuff, but Magni only sends us after non-faction enemies to retrieve it. I was looking forward to clashes where Magni tries to convince the PC’s faction leader to stop bleeding out the planet to kill each other faster, but nope, azerite’s just a neutral grind and shinier-looking bombs used in conventional ways.
After stoking faction hate this high, the conclusion to the war… had almost no effort in it. ‘Look, Alliance, at how the entire diverse Horde is murdering civilians and eating babies! Oh, look, Sylvanas flipped them off and left. Now give those orcs a big hug or you’re crazy and consumed by vengeance!’ 'Look, Horde, at tantalizing hints of legitimate grievances against the Alliance but nah, baby-eating it is. Also go help Jaina. Also Sylvanas thinks you’re worthless. Go give the Alliance a hug! Baine does it all the time, an Baine represents what’s best in the Horde!"
Azshara and N’zoth are merely patch villains. Azshara at least was tied into earlier plots through Ashvane, but N’zoth was practically self-contained in his own patch. Ny’alotha was introduced and destroyed at the same time. Thought N’zoth would be a big enough threat to force the factions to drop the war and focus on him? Thought the faction war would be revealed to be triggered/goaded on by N’zoth’s malign influence? Thought he’d resolve any of the faction war plots at all? Nope! Just another tentacle-boss to punch as a diversion while waiting for a real story to start. (I’m holding out hope that N’zoth had a plan, survived or shifted bodies or something, and both he and Azshara can be villains later, but… eh, I’m fresh outta faith in Blizzard.)
THE BFA SALES PITCH- “The conflict will be morally grey!”
THE BFA REALITY- “You can play as either a N@#! grunt who was ‘just following orders’, or be the victim of a N@#! Grunt and will never be allowed to exact justice on your attacker!”
Well, yeah, most of what we know about BfA’s original plotline stopped before development, leaving us with the initial strings, developer comments, and deducations we could make.
I believe they had one plotline set, and dramatically rewrote it in the time between the BfA Trailer being finished, and the Blizzcon they revealed it, because Metzen said that his understanding of the plotline lacked the Burning and had a the Horde working together and not fighting each other.
I know it’s likely not going to happen, but I would have loved an expac devoted solely to the faction conflict. Not used as a jumping off point for what should be other expansions crammed into patches. Not a rehash of the story from a previous expac. Just 3 patches of war.
Maybe I’d say something like “The Eredar who became demons wanted to keep a playground for themselves” to explain the less destroyed areas. Oooh, maybe they could shape fel into the images of trees and stuff! That might be cool and creepy.