“A lot of the time, if [players] see something in the game, they take it for granted that it’s the absolute truth,” says lead narrative designer Steve Danuser in an interview with Polygon. “It could be a book they read on a shelf somewhere, it could be something a drunk guy in a bar says to you at one time or another. Whereas in the real world, if you ran into a drunk guy in a bar and he says something to you, you’re not going to say ‘oh, absolutely, that must be the way that it is!’”
“It’s not that we’re trying to deceive the player, it’s that we’re trying to present them with, ‘hey, here’s this living, breathing world full of real people,’” says Danuser. “Like there are in the real world, and people interpret things differently and convey things differently.”
That means that Saurfang/Malfurion/Whoever was 100% wrong about the civilians doing the fighting and overpowering the horde during the War of Thorns. I was there. The civilians were not fighting – and we were specifically sparing them, as per Saurfang’s orders. We fought soldiers, in full armor and tabards. And we killed them by the score.
Maybe most of their army sailed south to Silithus, but the Horde fought soldiers in Ashenvale and Darkshore.
Also means Alleria was probably lying to try and spare her sister when she said Sylvanas forces were the most powerful and we should step aside and let her win.
Yeah. And I was there during the War of Thorns and the only times the night elves gave us any issue, were moments where Malfurion or Tyrande were directly harrying us.
They want to have what Bethesda/Zenimax have, and they have no idea how to do it. People think the answer is breaking time, but that’s not how Bethesda/Zenimax handle it.
They (B&Z) do it by telling players as absolutely little as possible about every event, then doing that again from multiple conflicting angles. It’s infuriating.
This is such a BS handwave. Blizzard has shown us lying drunks before - they do so very well in the Badlands questline. Where you play through the obvious hyperbolic lies of a bunch of washed up old desert alcoholics. It’s actually a great questline.
Likewise having quests deceive the player is nothing new. Bringing Kel’Thuzad’s phylactery to someone who turns out to be a deepcover CotD agent springs to mind. But they typically reveal the deception at the end of the quest or sometime else down the line.
This is just unprecedented horse poop. “Uhh actually all our NPCs are unreliable narrators. This is to make the world feel more real and not at all a tissue thin excuse to explain away blatant lore inconsistencies we forgot about”.
But the bottom line is that Bethesda does it completely different, and by the way, what characters can tell can vary, what the narrator character, so simply third person or else…just written and just happening in that moment, like your Click-Bait example above, that really happened anyway^^
I’m just taking the developer as he states it. I always wondered why a Good War lied and said that civilians not only fought us, but killed more Horde than we did night elves when the gameplay showed that was completely 100% false.
Now I know that we’re not supposed to take A Good War as factual.
I really believe that was to retroactively appease Nelf fans. Who, I guess Blizz thought would just be thrilled at the concept of having their lands ravaged and Capitol raised.
In the game the invasion only hits a wall when Malfurion makes a literal wall to stop it. I never got the sense the Kaldorei were supposed to be inflicting mass casualties and this was some nightmarish Vietnam x50 scenario. You pretty much bulldoze through everything then destroy the Capitol.
Which made sense. It wasnt even the full might of the Kaldorei you were facing and even if it were it was all the factions of the Horde essentially jumping just one Alliance faction. It wasn’t a fair fight by any stretch of the imagination. If six guys jump you there’s no real shame in losing.
A good war and also Elegy are Canon…and you know that, so you’re poisoning the forum even more…if you put it that way…and by the way, it was a Vietnamx50 scenario…this was even confirmed in 8.1 in the interview at that time.
I mean yeah if pointing out Blizz’s consistent inability to show instead of tell is considered being toxic to the environment then call me British Petroleum.
I can’t really argue with Blizz as they have final say on what’s canon. But their canon wasn’t represented at all in the game which, since it’s their core product here, really ought to be the main vehicle to present the story with.
