Does this get better?

Even though that’s not my taste, I can honestly say I would prefer the story that fully embraces itself, even if that story is unpleasant in and of itself. I can consume media about horrific subjects if I believe the creator is honestly engaged in the storytelling process. Prototypical example being something like Schindler’s List. The central character doesn’t even have to be sympathetic, really, as long as I am not wondering if the creator identifies themself with that central character.

These war campaign quests have this strange cognitive dissonance that I mentioned, between the overall structure of the player as the classical protagonist and those very self-aware dialogue options contrasting with the characters we are supposed to see as allies then proceeding in a clearly systematic series of fairly obvious war crimes.

It’s honestly making me question whether the story people actually believe the excuses they give are palatable? That you can be a good guy/hero/champion and still do the things that were front and center of their story design. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the feeling I get is that they deliberately chose to display shocking material in lurid detail to exploit an emotional response without actually acknowledging what they are doing or engaging with it seriously.

The intent and narrative (lack of) awareness is what I find truly distasteful, more than the content.

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See, it’d be one thing if this was SWTOR where you join the Evil Faction and choose the Evil Alignment so you can do Evil Things. That’s fun if the expectations are set up there.

The problem here is Blizzard is still trying to act like the Horde is on moral parity with the Alliance and has a valid perspective while writing them doing nothing but wall-to-wall cartoon villainy. It is jarring, especially coming on the heels of years of writing setting Horde stories up to have a lot more nuance than this.

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Just RP in your head that you’re Jim from the Office and you’re surrounded by crazy people.

Rexxar: I will never forgive Jaina

Jim: For what?

Rexxar: Never…forgive…

Jim turns and looks into the camera.

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What is sad is it would’ve made things better had Rexxar been removed from that portion of story and the one carrying out this Lor’themar.

No, it’s still bad.

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No amount of minor changes for the BFA war campaigns for either faction could make them good.

The only change would be to remove them entirely and do something else with the story.

Would have been nice if the campaigns were more about falling in love with the zones and then hating everything when it gets partially destroyed or changed because the other faction are idiots if you’re so intent on making faction war a theme for the expansion.

Instead, we got Zandalar which was wonderful by itself but then had, quite literally, one interaction with the Alliance outside of the war campaign that was a side quest in Zandalar, so I can’t imagine why the zones were so great.

The campaign itself had no purpose other than to make Horde players feel bad for playing the faction they enjoy unless you’re really into war crimes or Sylvanas (or both) and had an arbitrary decision where you get to be Vol’ji- err, Saurfang’s rebellion friend again or just pretend to be his friend but you had your fingers crossed behind your back so Sylvanas gives you butt pats before you betray her anyways.

But hell, at least the Horde War Campaign actually felt like you were going to the enemy continent to set up and prep for war (even if you’re a terrible person the entire time), unlike the Alliance one.

For the Alliance, you’re getting harassed by the Horde like Saturday Morning Cartoons from Day One in the leveling zones and are baited into hating the Horde over and over and over again. The only zone that had a main story that didn’t cross paths with the Horde was Drustvar and that was, at least to me, the most interesting story in Kul Tiras. Too bad the zone still had small interactions with the Horde on its side quests, meanwhile the other two zones had actual requirements to run into the Horde and fight them.

The Alliance campaign itself was the most boring and frustrating thing to play, between the reactive Alliance at it again, basically just doing things because the Horde did something first. You’re set with this team that, while having decent NPCs to keep the story going, the actual missions/story beats themselves are a yawn fest and serves no purpose than to shove yourself into the Horde story that was clearly more fleshed out than the Alliance ones.

Alliance in Vol’dun? You’re there to interact with the Sethrak, something the Horde gets with their story. In fact, there’s… literally nothing to do with the overarching story with the war campaign for the Alliance??? It’s so DUMB.

Alliance in Nazmir? Interacting with the Blood Trolls (another Horde fleshed out story that the Alliance gets to participate in) and getting introduced to the raid tier that clearly had ZERO REASON FOR ALLIANCE INTERACTION but there was titan stuff in there so there’s Bronzebeard to “justify” their existence there at all, I Guess.

Zandalar is the only arguably part of the war campaign that had anything to do with setting up for war that didn’t feel like they were just taking parts of the Horde story because the writers were too lazy to write something coherent. Throwing Goblins into the void was also cartoon-y evil enough to where it made me crack a half smile for half a second before it disappeared because I remembered I was doing the war campaign.

I am forever pissed off about BfA because this was supposed to be the expansion that I loved and adored because I love pirates and nautical role play and they threw up this garbage at me and I will never forgive them.

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To respond seriously, I think that a lot of people definitely do. There’s this popular narrative that Horde Players™ all hated being the genociders just as much as Alliance Players™ hated being genocided, but that’s basically straight-up revisionist history; Horde Players liked being the genociders so much that they made an entirely new quest chain specifically to facilitate doing so unrepentantly.

I think they wanted to avoid the Spec Ops scenario where the game tries to make you feel bad for doing stuff you literally had to do to progress, but it sort of got crossed with their ever-present wish that they were making a Warhammer game instead, so we got “isn’t this bad awful thing you’re doing so much fun?”

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BFA genuinely makes me friggin’ depressed. None of my characters or character concepts are attached to the factions anymore. There’s just no joy in it. I don’t want to victimize or be a victim. The only reasons I am here is because of the community and the afterlife concept of SL.

Also the idea of Sylvanas getting redeemed after her actions in BFA make me want to vomit. I am literally running rogue-like content in SL to aid the victims of her cruelty in SL. Screw her and the horse she rode in on. Faction pride is dead.

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No it doesn’t but the good news is it’s a dumb video game and will never be anything more than a way to waste time so you can keep your expectations way low.

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For added emphasis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyZv4EghX_I

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Actually never mind yeah you’re right lmao

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Drustvar was easily one of THE strongest parts of the entire xpac.

Drustvar is overrated and Vol’dun is underrated.

BfA is mediocre, not bad. The non war-campaign parts were good (until 8.3)

Shadowlands is worse, story-wise.

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Horde sucks bro.

Alliance sucks because after the Horde spends an entire decade expansion sucking and doing horrible things, the Alliance’s response is, “I’m so sorry I made you do that dear. I am a terrible person. Just tell me what I can do to make it better okay?”

So Alliance inches out to be slightly better because at least you can feel some sympathy for them.

The second best thing I ever did was managing to mimic this guy’s speech pattern and tone so I could also Rogal Dorn my way through situations IRL.

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I agree. Drustvar felt like it was trying too hard and none of the stories in the zone really went beyond surface level stuff. I preferred Stormsong Valley honestly.

Vol’dun, however, got into the minutia of what was going on in the zone and for a barren desert it ended up being one of my favorite zones overall to quest in for BfA.

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I thought Zelling’s little arc was a good part of the Horde side war campaign. But overall it is not great, especially the totally out of character inclusion of Rexxar and Voss as Sylvanas lackeys which you mentioned.

To be perfectly honest, it’s not just these characters, but every character is out of character in the War Campaign/8.1. Even the ones that don’t really make an impression on the average player. Hobart Grapplehammer probably didn’t seem radically different to people who only vaguely remember him from Cataclysm, but he doesn’t really act that much like he did in Cataclysm. BfA Hobart’s more or less just a generic Tinkerer that could be the same character, but could just as easily be any number of Tinkerers.
I think the War Campaign and 8.1 were just a planned script with random names tacked on.

And at one point you have like a Scooby doo episode with Gallywix and Eitrigg, with Eitrigg in the role of cowardly great dane? I’m pretty sure that happened.

It was as weird and as OOC as everything else, but how dare you imply it wasn’t great.

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.”

I sincerely do not even treat any of 8.1’s WQs as fully canon since a lot of them are bugged in terms of dialogue. I’ve pointed it out before, but there are literally WQs where they tell you to rescue your own wounded, but the WQ involves executing the enemy’s wounded.

I’ve already talked about all the problems of BfA before though, and I spent two years hating it bitterly, waiting for it to get better only to just end like a fart.

So I’ll say the things I did like about BfA (though don’t mistake this as me thinking the expansion was ‘good’):

  1. The Zandalari questline, despite being post-WoD, has very few retcons, and most of them are debatable stuff regarding Zul’s motives, which we never really had a good look at.
    Also, on alts you have to do the leveling quests many times, but you only have to do the War Campaign on one main, so I actually found the Horde easier to play in BfA because the Zandalari story basically completely ignores the existence of the Alliance.
  2. The questline to take Fogsail Harbor was a 10/10 questline, and a perfect example of what the rest of the expansion should have been: A story of moral ambiguity, intrigue, and faction pride, all delivered with lighthearted zaniness.
    “Spike the rum.”
    Throws a spike through the rum.
    “I… yeah, sure. That works.”
  3. Naz’jatar. This is one arena where the Horde definitely won in terms of story.
    Despite already having her own stories with her brother and rescuing Baine, Jaina for some reason also needed to be center stage of the Alliance Naz’jatar story. And they Deux-ex-Jaina-portal’d her to be in both stories. The Alliance Naz’jatar story can be summed up as “Jaina does thing. Genn reacts. Ankoan stand by and say nothing.”
    The Horde, however, got a pretty varied showing, including everyone’s favorite teleportation master who doesn’t overstay his welcome in the spotlight (“Why hello!”), Thalyssra and Lore’themar, and the Kelfin who honestly have one of the better written stories of recent years and it’s criminal that they aren’t an Allied Race. Especially since they directly ask about the Horde with interest and talk about how they need something to move onto once they’re freed from Azshara.
    At least they hang out in Durotar now and aren’t completely forgotten like the Taunka.
  4. Mechagon. OK, so storywise, there isn’t a ton here, but it’s still fun.
  5. 8.3. I mean, it’s not amazing, but I definitely liked some elements of it like a return to Uldum and Pandaria.
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I’m a bit late to the party here, but… yeah. I reckon it gets better.

Feels a lot better to fight to overthrow Sylvanas and her ilk than it did to work for her. As the campaign goes on, eventually, you’re much less of a jerk.

But yeah this one definitely forces a certain alignment at the start. More than the Pandaria Horde story did, tbh. It wasn’t as good. But I feel it wasn’t all bad either.

I don’t think I completed the Horde or Alliance war campaigns all the way threw on any of my characters. I still don’t have Kul’Tirans or Dark Irons unlocked for example. Yet I like a lot of the side characters in the Alliance war campaign, they’re pretty enjoyable and don’t feel like they’re completely out of character or out of place like the Horde campaign characters like Rexxar or Voss.

Also I don’t have a source but I’ve seen it cited several times but originally the Horde invasion in Stormsong was supposed to be Quillboar. Yet someone at Blizz decided to CTRL+X the Quillboar out and CTRL+V generic Horde NPCs. Which makes sense when you do the questline and it goes from fighting back a Horde invasion to Quillboar all of a sudden?? Like they didn’t even bother to fix the rest and it’s all just so very bad.

I hated that zone but I also hated it because all the hostile mobs are so clustered together that I was constantly getting dazed off my mount and I’m forever salty about it. I didn’t actually properly complete the zone until I had flying unlocked and wanted to be an overachiever and get exalted while rep was ez peezee with the 100% buff to get the gryphon mount.

Drustvar was probably the best Alliance zone because it was just cool spooky witch stuff and creepy forest stuff that had nothing to do with anything. I liked it, I thought Lucille Waycrest story was better than Jaina’s haha. It was also just funny showing up as a big blue magic crystal space man and the locals are like THIS LADY HERE’S A WITCH but this guy, eh he seems fine.

The Horde zones I like more and have a better time leveling through them vs the Alliance though. I wasn’t a big fan of Nazmir but Vol’dun had all my favourite random side quests. Teach two Brutosaurs about love, open a ghost inn with some ghosts, steal treasure from skeleton pirates, help some turtles pledge themselves to a tiger god and so on. Actually felt like a random adventurer out in the world doing random tasks which is generally what I like about Warcraft. Which is why going back I like Drustvar because it’s back to being a random adventurer helping out the locals.

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Vulpera: “The Alliance legit sent purge squads into the desert and torched down our caravans! They tortured us! Why would they do this, Horde Friends?!”

Horde: “…Uh… You might wanna sit down for a minute…”

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