a couple months ago the shadowlands cinematic released and a bunch of people got mad that sylvanas was able to fight off bolvar so easily. in my opinion this is proof of a problem that blizzard has found them selves in with the story. now when i saw this i was like “Holy sh*t, howd she do that?” and i wanted to find out more. i think that this was the intended effect as it would take a idiot to expect people to just accept that sylvanas is suddenly stronger than bolvar. the whole plot of shadowlands revolves around her deal with the jailer so its kind of the point this gets explained, but it seems like they cant do a mystery like this anymore because the fandom will see anything that doesnt make immediate perfect sense and say " stoopid blizz screwing up lore thos dumassis" im very annoyed when there are mass complaints about the lore like this cause there just really dumb and unfair.
Did Blizzard do mysteries well at one point?
No not really but they did them at least better. Classic has a lack of centralized story lore but I’d say that lack of lore gave people more room to get lost and immersed in the world itself and the mysteries therein. Plus things like Old Gods, Elune, etc, were a lot more mysterious than they are now.
The first was Onyxia.
Well, the thing with Sylvanas in the Shadowlands trailer is probably more about the fact that Sylvanas can just do whatever she wants. She has been in the last 3 expansion cinematics and people are slowly getting tired of it. She destroys many things that people loved about the game (story) and she always gets away without punishments. It’s simply getting repetitive when they are only focusing the story on Sylvanas and her destroying things and always getting away with it.
Things that she destroyed are the Night Elves as a whole, the identity of the Horde, killed Saurfang, apparently also planned Vol’jins and Varians deaths and now she destroyed the Lich King. It’s also hinted that she is going to kill Bwonsamdi.
Characters like the Stormstouts are the wildcards in the deck.
We haven’t seen them pull any major moves yet but there is plenty of room for them to throw afew spanners in our way.
Since you mentioned the mystery of Sylvanas’ power-up, let’s look at the Battle of Lordaeron. This single battle had multiple sudden exponential power-boosts for characters: Anduin was suddenly able to single-handedly heal an entire army’s worth of people, Jaina was able to single-handedly man a giant magical ghost ship capable of dismantling the defenses of the Undercity, and Sylvanas got a vague Deathcloud™ ability.
All three of these went unexplained at the time, but the only one that was apparently meant to be a mystery was Sylvanas’, we’re just supposed to accept that the other two are able to do those things now.
Moreover, even when Blizzard tries to write a “mystery”, the execution often leaves a lot to be desired, to the point where it’s not even clear if it was intended to be a mystery from the beginning. When Vol’jin died so unceremoniously I, like many others, assumed that it was just Blizzard clumsily killing off a main character as they are known to do (RIP Cairne). Then so much time passed with literally no kind of hint that foul play may have been involved, that by the time it got brought up again years later in BFA, it just felt like a delayed reaction to the feedback that Vol’jin’s death got.
When dealing with a slapdash story like this, I think it’s a natural reaction for people to assume that an unexplained inconsistency in the story was just a Rule of Cool cop-out rather than a deliberate attempt to craft a subterfuge.
Jaina is literally the most powerful human mage and we been told this a long time ago Sylvanas is a legit mystery while the other stuff is you not paying attention to the story
If we accept the idea that she could do the boat thing because she’s the most powerful mage in existence, then why didn’t she perform any feats approaching that magnitude of power throughout WoD, and at the Broken Shore before she peaced out?
Would you kindly point out any time prior to BfA that Anduin, or anyone that wasn’t an ascended being/deity, performed a healing spell on the level of the one displayed in the BfA cinematic? And could you point out where they implied that Vol’jins death had any greater meaning before Battle for Azeroth? I’m open to being proven incorrect.
Apologies to OP for the off-topic reply.
Read the books and jainas boat isn’t even close to the most amazing magic done in wow her gettting rid of the blight sure was but did you forget when the humans mages wiped out a whole army of trolls and you seem to forget when anduin Rez his dad when he was 15 dude was always powerful on the light
I feel like Sylvanas progression is the only thing that made sense in this expansion.
She started by being able to stand vs Malfurion
Than she was able turn into a banshee and kill few people without touching them.
Than she easily kill Saurfand.
Finally she do the same with the lich king.
She didn’t go from a simple archer to beating the lich king just like that. In every encounter that she had, we could see that she was getting stronger.
Why she was getting stronger? Well we now know that she is probably getting her power from the Jailer. Since between all of her fight a lot of people died and all go in the maw, so that the Jailor got stronger and stronger directly leading to Sylvanas getting also stronger.
At least she didn’t go from needing a artefact in order to do a wave to controlling and teleporting a big boat and also freeze a giant part of the see like it was nothing.
If anything the power up of Sylvanas make way more sense than Jaina.
You can do mysteries in MMO’s and WoW. But it’s best that the mystery be self contained in one patch, so that people who want to figure things out can experience things all in one go without significant gaps.
Someone cited Onyxia. That was all pretty much self contained. You didn’t have to follow this mystery over the course of several patches and expansions, with months/years going by before getting an answer to a question.
The internet is also a different beast now. WoW hype and speculation is a business onto itself. Things that could once just be an innocuous references or a bit of foreshadowing now gets dissected, analyzed, repeated, and amplified and treated as definitive canon.
I think that longer mysteries can work, but - like any other long-running plot, really - they need to include a lot of little reminders here and there to reassure the player that this plot is ongoing and not dropped.
For example, after Saurfang was killed, the other characters remark on how strange that power is. That’s good. Those reminders can help extend players’ expectations and worries over seeing a plot resolved. When there’s no reminder, though, players can either be frustrated that a change is being ignored in the setting, or worried that this means there won’t be a continuation of that plot, and both of those can easily lead to complaints.
(If there was a similar ‘what is this power, I couldn’t counter it with my normal tactics’ scene after the Tyrande vs. Nathanos/Val’kyr-using-fancy-chain-magic fight, I think there would have been a fair amount less complaining. Still a lot, but not as much as there is now.)
I agree, i also believe a more “in the face” and cheesy presentation wouldve gone a long way before the shadowlands trailer, also i dont think the patch were the nelves were supposed to get revenge was the best way to introduce sylvanas’ power up just to invalidate Tyrande’s.
I think healing spells are one of the most inconsistent forms of magic in this setting. Thrall couldn’t heal or revive Grom, but could raise a dragon that died in a cata dungeon. I think a wrath quest had us reviving a pile of bones back into a person.
oh yea a draenei crusader, on icecrown if i remember correctly.
Whitemane is also iconic for reviving a crowd of people.
Sylvanas would have worked if anyone was questioning how she could do those things but until the final battle nobody was. The characters were all just acting like her holding her own against Malfurion or turning into a ghost thing were completely normal and expected of her, which made it seem like her power level was just changing as the plot required like every other character in the game. Blizzard gave us no reason to ask “how is she doing this?” when they have always fluctuated characters’ abilities before for no story reason.
If they had characters question it from the start instead of only doing so at the very end, if they had shown from the start that this was an actual in-universe change and not Blizzard deciding “actually she could always do that”, then it would have been set up as a proper mystery. Because until Jaina and Thalyssra got confused at the end of the story, we had no reason to think it wasn’t just “actually she could always do that.”
Xal’atath is a good mystery just like the new light mother. Blizzard is good to make mysteries and hype them(Yogg-Saron Box, Ny’alalotha) but their real achilles’ heel resides in once they took off the veil that covers it, the revelation falls so short to even the lowest expectations that you wish they never did it at the first place(N’zoth)
Fair points all, I suppose the BfA cinematic can just be written off as Anduin getting off-screen training from someone.