Experiencing the forsaken starting zone in Classic for the first time made me better understand their disposition

Lore Story Forum
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So I started in Cata, and tried playing a forsaken but couldn’t get around how blatantly vile they seemed at first impression. After 10 years of playing I really just saw them as nothing more than a plot device to give an edgy evil faction to the players and story. That is, until I played a Forsaken in classic.

The absolute tragedy that wiped out their people was hammered into you so many times throughout the starting zone, but in subtle more human ways. It reminds you what it must be like to have seen your people be killed off by a genocide, only to wake back up and find that you have to live to see the aftermath.

You wake up alone in a crypt, and you proceed down the road to find people just as lost and confused as you - yet with all memories of both life and death in tact - and you help them try to rebuild what they can with quest text fitting in the more human aspects of the forsaken tragedy as much as they can. I found the mage class quest glyph at the beginning to be a great example of this:

The corruption and evil that rumor says travels with the arcane is nothing
compared to the pain we’ve already felt. We are no longer victims, . We are the ones who control our fate. Sylvanas has paved the way for us–she has proven that our will is our own; that we are no longer thralls to that bastard Arthas.

I could just be rambling too much here, but I feel like over the years the actual backstory of the forsaken has been pushed further and further back beyond memory. These are people who actually experienced death, the thing we are all afraid of, and came back from it. Not only that, but in death they had to burn their own homes and kill their own people under the Lich King’s control, then wake up from it into a world that they don’t belong in filled with people who hunt them.

I dunno, I just feel like it’s easy to forget just how much the forsaken suffered compared to other races in WoW’s lore. It’s easy to write them off as evil tropes as I did for my decade playing this game, but remembering the story of W3 as I was going through Classic Tirisfal gave me a whole different perspective that I feel like has been lost over the years.

I guess I just want the more nuanced aspects of what it must be like to be a race of people who died, saw death, but were then forced back into existence to be explored rather than using them as throwaways when you need something bombed.

Edit: If all you get out of this post is “Eichendorff things the Forsaken are morally grey”, please refrain from posting for the sake of you and this discussion.

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With any luck, if Sylvanas took the Val’kyr with her, the Forsaken will no longer inflict undeath on more people, and they can be tolerable again. I had no problem with the Forsaken in Classic, at least, not any more problem with them than every other playable race. They all had their flaws. Though, I don’t think they should revert entirely back to what they were in Classic. Progress is important as well. But time for them to move on from what they were in Cataclysm to now as well.

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For all the flak BtS receives, it does a nice portrayal of several kind of forsaken, not only the tropey psycopath.

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Original Forsaken were great. They were understandable, and up until Wrath their path and the motives of their leaders were solid. After that Sylvanas slowly started to snap, the Forsaken got too power-hungry and/or bored, and their place in the Horde became a bit too solidly established, a position that only became worse as the expansions went along.

Their story just dragged and their identity became too intertwined with Sylvanas.

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Well I for one thought having the Forsaken build a literal concentration camp in Hillsbrad was one of the most brilliant, tastefully done things ever implemented into WoW.

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Eh. Its hard to take most of the Hillsbrad story seriously, imo.

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I completely agree and I should note that it was pretty much in Cata when they started to really trash the Forsaken identity. My first experience was them committing war crimes against the Worgen for seemingly no reason. Classic Forsaken and Cata Forsaken are entirely different factions.

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Yeah torturing innocent people to make a deadly bio weapon is sooooo cool and grey

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Don’t forget the plaguing and… growing human beings to kill them? But the real evil in Hillsbrad is that damn Plants vs Zombies minigame.

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This was the case even in Classic. The Forsaken have always been experimenting on living beings to try and perfect plagues and tonics and such. The scientists of the Forsaken work to understand death itself and a way to manipulate it.

Kind of interesting to think about in regards to Shadowlands, all these experiments they did were slow babysteps to unlocking and using the power of The Maw.

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No… the “human seedlings” were supposed to be POW’s doing “agricultural labor”. They were not supposed to be being tortured.

Warden Stillwater rejected the idea that the Val’kyr were the salvation of the Forsaken, and was doing experiments on the humans that were NOT approved. his experiments got out of control and started turning the forsaken gaurds back into scourge- he was executed for that.

Also, welcome to the forsaken OP. Would you like a blight cannister with your gas mask?

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People tend to forget Stillwater’s methods weren’t approved of, and often confuse what he did wrong was locking away one of Sylvanas’ Officials. Which of course is also a mark against him.

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Which is why we love it so much.

Can YOU smell that the Lok’tar is cooking!?

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Oh don’t get me wrong, I love the quests, but I don’t know how seriously some of them are meant to be taken lore-wise, heh.

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A problem WoW has had since forever! Lol. Sometimes they take the “quirky, silly quests” too far in a storyline that is meant to actually showcase character or lore progression.

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Yep. Some zones are sillier than others. Just look at other Cata zones compared to Hillsbrad like Stonetalon? Very serious. Hillsbrad? Very silly. Duskwood? Very serious. Redridge? Very silly. Its half and half.

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Or a zone like Twilight Highlands. War between Dragonmaw Orcs and Wildhammer Dwarves? Very serious. Quests involving the Wildhammer Dwarves just being about finding beer kegs? Very silly.

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I freaking love those Wildhammer quests tho.

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With the forsaken- it’s really good to have those lighthearted questlines. AND if you’re a player that likes the forsaken, but doesn’t really care for Orcs, Kingslayer Orcus will win you over. It’s perfect quest design imo.

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For all the flak Cata gets, the quest improvement to old zones was a huge boon to the game. When you are a fresh Forsaken player you learn a few things very quickly:

  • The Warchief of your faction, Garrosh, is very distrustful of your race leader.
  • Your race is a little weird due to experiencing true death, and the confusion of being a Forsaken has led many to try to “master” death.
  • You come into conflict with the local humans and you find out your faction’s best weapon is death gas
  • You end up questing alongside other races of the Horde and get to know what they think of Forsaken, but also get to observe their actions or their response to your actions so you get a feel for the culture of the Horde at large

You really do get a good feel for what it means to be Forsaken in just Silverpine + Hillsbrad, and that goes a long way to getting people to actually care about their character.

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