God, amen. Nothing makes me angrier than the line where he’s sitting there, looking out over a battlefield and thinking, “These kaldorei are defending their homes and families, that makes them fight hard! This is a good war.”
Like orchestrating the murder of night elves was just a good ol’ football game.
This, I can agree with. If you cut out all the bad stuff she did in BfA, then… I agree. If Teldrassil, Undercity, and the betrayal of the Horde were just poof, then… You know, yeah, I could see it.
Unfortunately, it’s really hard to look around the mountain of flaming tree trash that is the BfA narrative.
I don’t know, the feeling I’ve gotten from interviews that I’ve read is that Hazzicostas and Danuser are pretty happy with the BfA story. Maybe that was Afrasiabi? Maybe it’s Blizzard’s trademark “We can’t do anything wrong” mentality, but… I don’t know if it was just Afrasiabi.
Alright, hol’ up, let’s break this down.
Ehh… Nah. She has two lines then yeets herself into the Maw, not to be seen unless you choose Night Fae. Meanwhile, everyone and their mother is mumbling, “She’s going down a dark path…” Compared to Anduin, Bolvar, Jaina, Thrall, and Baine? I get the latter two were shafted, but at least every player sees them, and every character supports them.
However, Night Fae is the apology zone for night elves, so it makes sense to tuck her story away there. The levelling experience is too standalone for me to call it tailor-made, but if I had to pick a playable race to match-up with Night Fae, it’s the night elves hands down.
Let’s not get the confetti and champagne out. The dribble of story we got to do was one of the biggest back-handed compliments (if not an outright slap to the face), that being the atrocious Night Warrior tie with Nathanos. Darkshore was won off-screen, not even confirmed in-game. It was confirmed in a Dev Q&A, then a quick cinematic (that I still haven’t seen in-game because they almost forgot to put it in) was hastily put together. All of the cinematics were in-game puppetted marble-gargling.
Compared to how the loss was depicted? The loss had one of the biggest prepatch events, two novelles, and a warbringers cinematic devoted to it. In all of those beautiful Saurfang cinematics, night elves have 3 seconds of screentime, and it’s literally their being burned alive as window dressing for how sad the orc is.
It’s not that we lost, it’s how much of a show of it Blizzard made. That’s why it’s so hard to look past BfA from our perspective. I’m not saying the Horde didn’t lose, and didn’t lose hard. I’m not saying your character roster doesn’t need a significant boost. I just saying they turned the night elves’ loss into eye candy and spectacle, which really makes it feel worst.
And lastly…
In the same way that “many Thalassians survived Arthas’s attack”. 9/10 Thalassians were killed. Per the quest at the end of War of Thorns, those percentages were probably about the same for the night elves. Sure, that’s probably thousands remaining, but imagine living where nine out of every ten people to whom you were close died.
Markedly worse when those 9/10 were sent to be, at best, tortured and, at worst, destroyed for all eternity to be converted into weapons and monsters. Sure, we save some of then, but we are also forced to destroy others because it’s too late for them.
So, the fact that absolute numbers, we’re probably fine… Not really a consolation.
