And who was there? I vaguely remember Cata, so maybe alliance had something like that coming to fruition, but most of my memories are quest for chasing Thrall’s soul for the cloak quest, followed by the wedding thing, grinding dailies in 4.2 patch, and odd story of the final act with magical mirror zapping Neltharion.
MoP is the infamous “lesson in patience” followed by a moralizing line how we need each other from a panda in the tavern.
BfA is a celebration of Thrall + Jaina leading to condemning interest of factions for the yet another “only together…” And finale where everyone silently listens to Anduin, and Tyrande again used to portray her as making wrong decision, 'cause you know, how could an ancient elf even dream about wisdom of a teenager.
Non of them were celebrations of the idea of factions. IMO on both sides.
Man, after the Teldrassil fiasco not even those “really really really really really devastating series of lost for the Horde” would look anything different from a White Knight Hero lawfully punishing the big bad brutes. That´s how bad BfA was for the Horde narrative, it basically made genocidal military campains against the faction a “lawful good” narrative.
My point was about cheap moralizing BS being forced down the throats of the players -especially the Horde players considering we were the “evildoers” at the time-.
Indeed there was no message celebrating the factions, it was but a single message about celebrating the Wrynn + Proudmoore empire with a side of Metzen self inserting as Thrall for a minute.
Leveling an Alliance toon through the BFA drought that place was a real fresh breath of sea salty air.
I only wish it went darker in some places. Like in Drustvar where you run into that town put under a witch’s stasis curse. Many of them are seated next to meals that have started to rot, and there are rats, ravens and insects picking at them.
I was hoping they’d all drop from malnutrition and exhaustion, and require immediate medical attention due to a rat that’s eating their eyeball. Some “I have a mouth butshe won’t let me scream” goodness.
But nah they’re fine and only sort of remember what happened. Which is okay I guess, this is T rated afterall. But for a sec there I was going to stand up and applaud because I thought they were going full Brother’s Grimm here.
I think sometimes they want to, but as you said, the game is rated T. There was a thread floating around here a while ago about how some of the Maw quests that start with items you can pick up or loot detailed how a survivor of Teldrassil was tortured. Well, the item was supposed to detail it, but they removed the ability to read the items.
It was a dead maw walker they tortured by making her relive Teldrassil again and again. And I wish they kept that in.
If you think it’s kicking the nelves when they’re down, fine, then make it any other race. Just give me an actual reason to not like the Mawtomatons. Them being gray, having a frowny face and being in my way isn’t really enough to go on.
I can agree with this. We really haven’t been given enough of a reason to really hate the Maw and it’s denizens. The Jailer is about as two-dimensional a villain as you can get. Even Garithos had more appeal as a villain than the Jailer; everyone loved to hate Garithos. I couldn’t even work up the energy to want to piss in the Jailer’s cereal.
I´ll confess I feel waaay more wary of the actual covenant leaders -hated the Archon with a passion for example- than the Jailor himself. He´s indeed a pretty terrible villain character, doesn´t inspire actual antipathy but actually curiosity.
Thrall, Baine, Jaina, and Anduin. Out of all of them the only one I remotely even find interest in is Jaina, and I’m pretty sure if she took her head out of her backside she’d remember she can use teleportation and portals. Yeah, the Maw supposedly prevents that, but it’s Jaina.
The Maw can keep her as far as I’m concerned. If she’s trapped in the Maw forever, it’s the last I’ll need to see her.
This area reminded me of a scene in another RPG that had a much better concept, if the execution lacked a bit due to the graphics. Spoilers for those who care about Dragon Quest 7 for some reason, but this sounds like the sort of thing you’d like:
One town you visit ends up being deathly silent, with weathered statues of people everywhere instead. There's only a single old man who tells you that the town is cursed and you should leave. When you spend the night at the abandoned inn instead, you're woken up by the sound of crying and go outside to find the statues faintly glowing, and interacting with them lets you see their final moments - they had all been turned to stone by a cursed rainstorm decades ago, and later learn that the old man is the sole survivor who happened to be away from the village at the time the curse struck, although one statue is unaccounted for. He left on a journey to find a cure, but didn't know that he should have moved all of the statues indoors, because by the time he found what he needed to lift the curse on the land, all of the statues were too worn away by the elements and could no longer be saved. He spent the next several decades living in the ruined town, torturing himself mentally over his inability to save them, and believing that the soft crying he could hear was the cursed villagers hating him for his failure. He gives you the cure and tells you to use it in case you come across another town that has a chance to be saved. When you use it on his town anyway, a single child emerges from a hiding spot he had discovered, where he inadvertently sheltered himself while petrified. And the old man only then realizes that in all of the years he spent hating himself, there was still one person he could have saved all along. The old man adopts the child and they leave together.
Oh, I agree. Jaina’s the powerhouse in that roster, because the others are pretty much wadded up paper napkins. I’d rather see Sylvanas hang though, she’s pretty much never done anything worth mentioning that wasn’t pure evil. The Jailor’s forces might as well be her army of plot armor, but I get to enjoy fighting it atleast.
There’s a pretty good RPG called Divinity 2: Original Sin. I’ve not played any others in the franchise so I can’t speak to them. But the Elves in that setting are more of the Wood Elf, antivegan variety, and can experience the memories of a dead person by consuming their flesh.
Sometimes this can lead to valuable clues or side quests. Or kinda silly stuff. It’s also led to some of the darkest ish I’ve ever seen in a fantasy game.
I agree with you on the part that this is the motivation the devs had in mind when the expansion begun but… yeah i really dont want them out of torghast they can stay there, im more motivated by the plea of the shadowland denizens that rescuing those glorified imbeciles.
All of them are so unlikable sylvanas was kinda doing us a favor taking them out so the narrative took a breather.
Can I see it? Yes. All it needs is a regime change to where a warmongering despot or psychopath was in charge of things.
You might claim, “the other members of the Alliance wouldn’t follow a tyrant!” That really depended on how much said tyrant could sweet talk them into starting a war because reasons.
“There’s someone out there threatening to kill us! We should kill them first!”
“Let’s claim these lands to appease our religion our our sense of entitlement or some other reason.”
Mmmm, yeah no. Sylvanas isn’t very interesting herself. If it’s such a bother give me back Jaina, and…Baine. Keep the other two. The Shadowlands populace too, I mean they’re distressed by somethings in the Maw, so I can dig being around their killing all of Sylvanas’ stand ins for her army.
Considering all of them are nothing but narrative cancer, that was an actual godsend. The actual redeemptive action made by Sylvanas on my book -I mean the story would VASTLY improve if we remove Blanduin, Tragicmoar, Former self insert Orc Glodilocks and Blanduin´s furry plot device Baine from it for a LONG period-.
They torture innocent souls to the point of disintigration, and use them to make weapons and armor, on and on again. Stygia is quite literally made from destroyed souls. The whole of the maw is built on that suffering. Souls who did nothing wrong, who deserve happy afterlives, instead end up being destroyed under horrific conditions, just so that there can be more mawsworn. That’s enough for me to want them dead.