The Army of the Light shouldve been extracting more concessions out of Lorthemar and Silvermoon and squeezing them for all their worth in exchange for defending their precious light well.
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Eh, they can be interesting if you implement them right. One of my favorite fantasy IP is really leans into the “lawful” side of Paladins and how they mesh with the existing world building.
I think most tropes can be interesting as long as they can be implemented well enough.
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That’s certainly true. The problem is companies tend to overuse certain tropes and exclude other more interesting ones, even if they aren’t as well known
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Varian got the opposite treatment. He was Alliance Garrosh and then suddenly he was a pure and noble do nothing wrong and everyone loves him type character so he could be High King. And everyone forgot about his previous issues and characterization.
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Me personally, the only time i’m interested in the light is as an antagonist, i like fighting the scarlets and i’ll happily fight the light.
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I hated how Cata/Pandaria turned Varian into a mythical figure.
He was a hateable human thug in Wrath with believable (if infuriating) character flaws, and his paralell to Garrosh (just as Jaina was to Thrall) was cool. And as an Alliance (Draenei) main circa WotLK I enjoyed hating Varian because he wasn’t shoved front and center by the devs to the extent he was throughout Pandaria.
I don’t know which writer decided to pivot Varian’s character but I didn’t like the change that began in Cata and became very overt by Pandaria. Probably Kosak but tbh I don’t know.
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I also loathed how they made Varian Lo’gosh and Goldrinns favored. Such a stupid move on blizzs part
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God that was so stupid.
The fact that the writers made an infnitely greater effort to tie Logosh into Varian’s story and not, ya know, the Worgen who were a playable race was so freaking dumb — but also too much in line with Blizzard’s apparent apathy for Worgen as a faction.
I know a lot of Forsaken players have been annoyed for the longest time at Blizzard stealing Forsaken attributes/gimmicks/concepts and giving them to the Alliance(playable Alliance Death Knights, Calia, Darkfallen Night Elves, etc), but MAN did Blizzard ever pillage from stuff that should’ve been Worgen faction lore with Logosh and giving them to a human king. So dumb lol
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That was part of his “I’m better than every other race by being more special at their special thing” nonsense he had going on.
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As dumb as BfA was. Seeing a high def Genn always makes me smile 
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I’m of the mindset that during Cata’s development Blizzard regretted the decision to make Worgens playable but they were so far into the schedule that they couldn’t course correct in the slightest.
Even the starting zone for Worgen felt like a giant F-U to the vanilla-era worgen fans when the Gilneans solved all sources of the Worgen curse’s friction points within a matter of 1-2 irl hours.
This was during the peak of Blizzard’s Metzen-wank era so it’s not really all that surprising that this happened.
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Yeah, this irreparably damaged the worgen as a race. I get they wanted to do werewolves with transformations, but just essentially curing the curse was a massive mistake.
They really should have had Genn embrace and stay in his worgen form. And now it’s even worse with Tess leading since she’s not even a worgen.
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Taken in isolation — without the actual story context that Before the Storm, BfA and Shadowlands would later exposit ----- BfA’s cinematic trailer remains one of the best things Blizzard has ever put out, bar none.
And yes, Genn is the goodest boy!
(I wanted to link a screenshot from the BfA trailer featuing Genn in this response but I couldn’t)
I can believe that but I also want to understand why they resented their (initial) choice to make the Worgen Alliance in the first place? Not human enough? They didn’t like the idea of a monster race on the Alliance?
I agree, and also within Cata itself, the post-Worgen presence in the World revamp felt like a big F. U. to the Worgen/Gilneans. Originally if memory serves they were supposed to have a Gilnean district in Stormwind, but eventually that was moved to Darnassus and the “district” became one dinky tree. Also Gilneas city was originally supposed to be this “urban combat” Wintergrasp style BG but then they scrapped it and basically neglected the zone for 10 years, barring that one Wrathion quest where you go to random locations and assassinate Black Dragons for him)
Their presence in Duskwood was minimal, if at all, and the only other zone to meaningfully feature them was the Blasted Lands, which was basically disconnected from essentially everything else and also made a point to show how many who evacuated Gilneas died en masse on those crashed ships in the zone. Not exactly an empowering racial experience, lol
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Also they just gave up on their questline. I played the Forsaken side of the story first and it instantly turned my skepticism about newer WoW inside out.
It’s one of the better war questlines in game. With shifting battle lines and daring missions inside enemy territory. You’re also frequently arriving at the aftermath of some A Team Worgen’s handiwork who never show up in the story. Who I’m convinced was supposed to be the Alliance’s player’s doing and it was designed to tell a parallel storyline.
It also ends with the Worgen still decidedly in control of Gilneas with things being left as a stalemate. I assume to set up that EBG that never happened.
But they ran out of time or money or interest at somepoint. So you’ve a Worgen storyline that ends really abruptly and dumps you in Darkshore. And a Forsaken storyline that appears to happen in an unrelated parallel universe.
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You know what’s hilarious? Forsaken players in Hilsbrad actually have a superior worgen experience. Because they get to experience how brutal Ivar and his pack was against the undead. Laying traps, and using the forsakens tactics against them every chance he could
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The best Worgen content is somehow not their own. Another great bit is the Booty Bay questline that actually carries over the minor detail that a lot of Human Pirates you had to behead in Vanillia were Gilnean.
Well they kept that thread alive and now ya gotta battle a bunch of WEREWOLF PIRATES. And it ends with a fun full-scale attack setpiece in Booty Bay.
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Worgen’s sole purpose were to put a savage/monster race in the Alliance as per the developers themselves, I believe. Yet they completely forgot that the original iteration of the Night Elves were just as savage as what the Vanilla-era Worgen were shown to be.
To me, the Worgens served no purpose outside of a corporate checkbox that was needed to be filled for sales pitch purposes. Post-Starting Zone, what exactly was the story of the Gilnean Worgens? 90% of their plot was already fulfilled by the time the starting zone ended and the remaining 10% was the inevitable reclamation of their kingdom, but they refused to touch on this until the lolcow reclamation plot that weirdly involved the Scarlet Crusade of all people. I think Blizzard just shot their shot in their beginner zone and honestly didn’t know what else to do with them.
To me, the Worgen curse should have never been able to have been “cured” to begin with. Only something that you can control only at the best of times or when you are of a sound mind, but there remains that monstrous and violent spirit that can break free at any moment.
The Worgen presence in both Duskwood and Blasted Lands felt more of a “Well, we gotta stick them elsewhere in the world or else we wasted all of this development time for nothing”
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I started playing again in Legion so that was a bizarre experience. Start out fighting the Worgen tooth and nail in Silverpine. Then the Bloodfang show up in Hillsbrad attacking Southshore while you’re menaced by the Stormpike and SI:7 from the north.
And then I hit Stormheim so I just kinda assume there’s this big rivalry between the Forsaken and Worgen. And uh no. I actually saw all that content already. I assumed there was more because I only glimpsed multiple expansions worth of content but nope that was it. They don’t even come up in Cata EPL, you fight Stormwind forces there.
“Well bet there’s some cool Worgen stuff on the Alliance” I thought. But after playing through the half a sandwich worth of questlines about them in Duskwood and the Blasted Lands I shrugged and decided to go do the Booty Bay questline. And somehow that had all the crazy Worgen stuff I’d been looking for.
I seriously can’t get over how I found my cool werewolf content only by giving up on the Alliance storylines and deciding to see what the Goblin port city was up to.
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If I were doing it I’d have the Night Elf moon juice mostly work but Worgen are still at very high risk of going feral when the moon’s full.
To quote the authority;
“Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf
When the wolfbane blooms
And the full moon is bright”
So ya know they’d have a scary edge to them and it’d give the rest of the Alliance reason to treat them with suspicion. Because the subway scene from American Werewolf In London gets recreated with some Gnome in the Deeprun Tram every month.
But nah they’re basically just chimney sweeps with fursonas.
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It’s never meant what people think it means. The draenei were also meant to be “a monstrous race”