I never played the Horde’s BfA story, I think I made it about 30 seconds into Nathanos’ appearance in the first quest before deciding it was not for me. And don’t get me wrong, there was plenty wrong Alliance side that made me drop the game. However, now that Zandalari laser dinos are available and Nathanos is de-available, I figured I would go back and actually do the war campaign on a new character to acquire the Zandalari.
The only problem here is that everyone is awful. And I’m not even talking about Nathanos, I’m talking about the people who have little dialogue boxes you can click on which, with almost disturbing self-awareness, explain why decent people should not be doing the things they are about to do.
Rexxar was the first shock, when he sent me to kill “Kul-Tiran Invaders” on… <checks map> Kul Tiras. His dialogue box explains that he loves the Horde and will defend everyone in it to his last breath, but for some reason can’t understand why Jaina Proudmoore isn’t ready to forget what happened to Theramore. Fair enough, Alliance are the enemy, but the very next quest he gave me pondered whether peons were worth saving at all, before deciding that the Horde would probably need their labor later on.
Then there’s an old friend, Lilian Voss. Honestly, her conception is pretty good: trying to avert the most painful parts of reanimation, welcoming new arrivals into undeath, etc. She told me that she was more or less forced into this job and is making the best of it. The problem is she’s just a nasty person. She literally told me, the last quest she sent me on, that she “Enjoys the screams” in the air. We’re currently talking to this tidesage guy who is asking very reasonable and polite questions considering the circumstances, while she constantly peppers him with threats to him and his family in between moaning about how useless he is that he isn’t immediately doing her bidding.
We haven’t even really gotten to the content of the quests yet. Which, if it’s been a while, are an impressively rapid speedrun of the Geneva convention. I almost had to laugh when, on the one quest which had no Alliance enemies giving no opportunities for war crimes, I ran over an invasion world quest where in Lady Liadrin, paragon of the Light, demanded that I assassinate someone who was clearly labeled as a medic and in the process of tending to fallen soldiers, before he “rallied the Alliance forces.”
It’s this bizarre limbo of perfect self-awareness and complete lack of self-awareness. I’m honestly struggling to believe that a human wrote these quests, and they weren’t procedurally generated by some sort of zug-zug bot that was only fed Garrosh voicelines.
Literally everyone I meet whom I do not suspect of thievery from Sylvanas’ clothes drawer has a little dialogue explaining why they should know better than to do what they are doing before they enthusiastically do it. It’s like being calmly explained to by a train conductor that the train is about to crash if no one pulls the handbrake right next to him, and then he starts laughing maniacally while shooting everyone who walks up to pull it.
Is there… any payoff here? Any redemptive quality that will become apparent at some point? If it was just quest text I could get through it but most of these are fully voiced and it’s honestly getting kind of hard to will myself through listening to this.
I just want to be a laser Pterrodax 