The morally gray death camps, yes.
I hope one day a retired blizzard dev will write a tell-all memoir of what exactly happened here. Was there seriously such a huge disconnect between the people writing the game’s story and the people giving interviews that they sincerely thought we were gonna have a “Morally Grey” “Faction Pride” expansion even as they were saying it?
Or did they know? And if they knew then why did they continue saying it for so long?
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I get the impression that the cardinal story is set in stone by the head devs and then the remains are left for Rhymes With Can-User to play with as he wants.
Which is why we get such a weird degree of cringe alongside our boring tropes.
i can see this, but also i think someone on the team wants wow to be seen as a dark edgy grimdark doomglower blooddeath setting, which is why they put in all these horrible things happening constantly and why im about 80% sure the story will eventually devolve to “genocide-is-okay-if” statements
Where are these camps located? I would very much like to see them and take photographs… to document… the bad things.
I don’t think the dev team for any Warcraft game ever has ever really gotten over the fact that they’re not working under a Warhammer license.
40k, for instance, only really gets away with the “Genocide Whenever” conceit because the main faction of good guys are space fascists and the playable races only get less sympathetic from there, which fits for a setting that is constructed entirely for facilitating matches of a tabletop wargame. It all but celebrates war and violence.
Blizzard, on the other hand, has wanted to have their cake and eat it too since about Warcraft 3. They want to be able to zug zug while also having the people doing the zug zug to be relatable and dramatic, and don’t understand why that hasn’t worked this entire time.
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I think they could have had their cake and at least nibble at it if they hadn’t called attention to it by making so many characters react to the horrors with semi-realistic horror, sadness, and even PTSD. Audiences often take cues from our favorite characters when it comes to how something is meant to make us feel!
Not to mention how every “faction war yay” storyline ends with an anti-war moral (that on its own could have been nice but tacked on at the end of a game that clearly wanted us to revel in how cool and fun the war was, comes off as preachy.)
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“What’s different this time?”
“We are…”
…
“The factions are the core of World of Warcraft.”
still votes for faction cold war stuff so we can make interesting lore where everything isn’t being burnt down… just occasionally some things get burnt down in places the faction’s don’t care as much about
Even then 40k started off as idiotic absurdist satire, but Games Workshop has unfortunately been taking it more and more seriously at face value as time goes on, so “it works there because” gets to be less and less of an excuse.
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I really don’t understand why they don’t have more ‘Dranosh at the Wrathgate’ moments. That was a perfect example of a “For the Horde” moment and epic rescue/cavalry charge - and it didn’t even include eating any babies!
Seriously, though, there are a lot of third party enemies that the Horde can go all blood and thunder against. Show the players why “Azeroth needs the Horde” instead of cramming that moral into dialogue while showing the (Alliance and too often the Horde) player the exact opposite.
But nooo, whenever Blizz takes out their cool Horde racecar toy so they can do the fun sound effects, they only ever use it to smash the Alliance horsey and then sweep them both under the rug rather than clean up afterwards.
Okay, I think I tortured this metaphor enough.
tl:dr = angry confused flailing Why can’t the Horde go all lok’tar on shared villains instead of just the Alliance?
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To be perfectly fair, Sylvanas used the same methods Garrosh used, patriotism, nationalism, selective reporting of the state of the outside world and good old fashioned lying through her teeth, but did so a lot more subtly than good old slap-head did.
Alliance flooding Orgrimmar with spies? Anduin wants to assassinate the leaders of the Horde, or the ‘Little Lion’ has no control even over his own spy-master. Genn fighting her in the Lost Isles? Again, Anduin has no control over his allies. The Horde sounded the retreat and the Alliance didn’t withdraw, and are trying to blame their failure on the Horde by calling them cowards, a line sure to get all the ‘horn-harr!’ types bristling in response.
And the difference between Sylvanas and Garrosh? She was good at it. She had decades, if not more, of practice on her Rangers in Quel’thalas, keeping inter-house rivalries in check while fighting off the Amani Trolls and dealing with the nonsense of Silvermoon itself. Then she stepped in as the leader of the Forsaken and painted herself the twice-martyred leader and matron of the Forsaken and champion of their beloved ‘Free Will’ mantra, while simultaneously subverting and converting anything and everything she could get her hands on.
There’s even quests about Crowns of Domination being used on Ogres and mentions of underground prisons used to ‘correct’ Forsaken pre-Cataclysm, and even after that expansion, good lord are there some hair-raising concepts that are teased but rarely explored.
Then she gets to be the Warchief and immediately starts going on about avenging Vol’jin and protecting the Horde, using the exact same scpheel she used with the Forsaken as somebody who has suffered like them, being abused and mistreated like them, but will stand up and fight with them for their justly deserved place in the world, regardless of who stands in their way.
And unlike the Players/Hero NPCs … most of the civilian and military population has only ever lived in one or two places in their lives, doesn’t have any working knowledge of the larger world and has only ever interacted with the enemy either by poking them with sharp bits of metal, or being poked with aforementioned sharp bits of metal. And that’s not including the decades, if not centuries of
“You did X to me, so I’ll do Y to you, but I’m totally justified OH NO THEY DID Z TO ME, THE MONSTERS! Do A to them now, for our people!”
that could be used to define 95% of Azeroth’s history post-Black Empire.
If you’re Pro-Sylvanas Horde, before she Team Rocket’s away, there’s a quest where you have to go beat the shizzle out of people who are calling her out on her nonsense, and post-event, both Alliance and Horde can enter Orgrimmar and see there’s a lot of folks actively cheering for Sylvanas being deposed, while others are mortified or outraged because they were lied to, or that their revenge against the Alliance got derailed.
I really do wish the Horde did a lot more wangsting over the Kaldorei and there was an active plot-line about Durotar and the Orcs and Forsaken going hell-for-leather to try and make amends but I guess Dommy-Mommy Sylvanas and her new Gimp matter more to Dansimpeur.
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fake sint reporting in
saurfang isnt a hero. though i cant prove it much anymore, i used to rp quite a bit of horde. it was a good 50/50 blend before gestures vaguely
idk man, you dont march your armies over the mountains of felwood to destroy a largely non-military settlement while that nation’s armies are elsewhere other than with the expressed purpose to wipe that nation out. the armies of the kaldorei weren’t home. lor’danel is a city of refugees and civilians. darkshore has little merit outside of being a staging point to invade teldrassil.
what point was there marching on the elves? with everything going for it, it was a planned extermination from the start. and saurfang played along until he got called out for being honorless.
the horde needs better heroes if they consider this large piece of garbage a hero
but this is fake sint so who knows the truth
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I think in the novella they released I want to say the plan was to invade, occupy, kill Malfurion, force a surrender.
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My favorite cherry on top of BfA was the fact that they fed us the whole “the Alliance will never let our crimes go so we have to wipe them out before they get a chance to retaliate” as though the current leader of the Alliance hadn’t been letting go of the Horde’s crimes for literally his entire adult life.
Like, they could’ve just literally said “we want to take the Alliance’s stuff for the lulz” and it would’ve tracked more than the line they tried to feed us.
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One person doesn’t make a whole rebellion. Are you forgetting Rokhan and all the soldiers that followed behind him? Saurfang wouldn’t have accomplished anything if he didn’t have half the horde backing him up, and since Saurfang is literally the person who led and started the rebellion, it’s plain to see why someone would think this way. The rebellion was even mostly formed before Baine was even captured, what, were they just gathering for fun before that?
Baine wasn’t with Sylvanas either, he was just following orders to protect his people. I’m surprised you missed how hesitant he was to follow her orders the whole expansion, his hands were just tied to where he couldn’t do anything himself.
In the end I feel like you are nitpicking here, you’re basically saying “The rebellion didn’t start because of this, it was just the motivation for the person who started the rebellion”. That’s basically the same thing, dude. (And this is still completely besides the point I was making.)
I think we can all agree that BFA was a poorly planned and written dumpster fire. The intent was always there for Old Gods but the team completely fumbled the faction war buildup. If BFA had been dedicated to a war, with the end patch built as a lead in to Old Gods in the next expansion (similar to how WoD led into Legion), we would’ve had a better expansion.
I mean this in the nicest way possible that the writers either have no idea what they’re doing or there’s too much interference from management - or both.
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This is enough motivation for me. Heck, this is the only reason. Lok’tar ohar-har! FOR THE LULZ!
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Hmm, I am sure I have heard this somewhere before…
The rebellion was not half the Horde. The fact that the Horde burnt down Teldrassil and killed those who were unable to evacuate was immaterial to anyone save Saurfang. The rebellion, such as it was and what little there was of it, only started to coalesce after Baine was imprisoned. Baine himself explicitly declares that the reason was the brainwashing of Derek Proudmoore, implying that the Burning of Teldrassil was in fact not a line too far.
The Horde didn’t throw out Sylvanas, inasmuch as they actually threw her out, for Teldrassil. They threw her out because she was mean to them.
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We’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you can’t see how poor of an idea it would have been for Baine to immediately rebel without a backing formed against someone who isn’t against burning down whole villages I’m not sure what else to say.
And again, it just feels like you’re nitpicking. There was a lot of reasons the rebellion formed, and Saurfang formed it, saying the events that led TO Saurfang forming it didn’t mean anything is rather baffling.
Though to be fair, blizzard’s writing problems definitely don’t help this confusion.
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