With some Unit 731 and other Axis experiments tossed in.
What about the OP?
I’m still doing the Horde War Campaign, but I get the feeling that they were trying to make it so that a player could distance themselves from the warcrimes that were committed. You were gone when Lorash and his rogue buddies slaughtered Astranaar, you didn’t have to use the Plague, you were able to choose to support Saurfang or Sylvanas. All of which the Alliance was not given an equivalence.
When someone says a thing needs to be fixed, the implication is that the thing is broken or otherwise not functioning properly.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the faction conflict that’s so prominent in Battle for Azeroth. I’m even less thrilled with the treatment of the Night Elves and the conclusion to the Fourth War.
But I don’t think the story’s broken; I just don’t agree with some of the narrative beats as they’ve unfolded.
To answer your question: I don’t know.
I’d like it if:
- Saurfang lived.
- Sylvanas and Anduin fought in a pit while the Horde and Alliance gathered around and watched.
- They explained that the newly raised undead (not just Night Elves) that turned against their families and people, were in fact mind controlled or something that robbed them of free will.
Sylvanas being bad or not is irrelevant. She should never have been allowed to escalate things as she did. The Horde leaders, fresh off deposing Elisande and with Garrosh on their minds, should have shut that business down.
If that stuff happened, it’d be much better narratively, but then we’d have to find new ways to hit all the notes needed to summon 9.0.
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Or it could be seen as the scientific endeavour and discoveries that ran out throughout the end of the XIXth / beginning of the XXth centuries and that led up to WWI.
As for OP, I wish there was a way to fix some of the stuffs. But it won’t happen as long as Blizzard will fail at basics of writing : SHOW don’t TELL. As long they will not fix this, they will keep failing. Hard.
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Yeah, Pavlov was a sick individual.
I disagree. The Horde is currently peak stupid.
At this point, we followed a Character who serves herself. A Character that was placed on the throne through shenanigans we still are not clear about. Baine and Talanji are there with Voljin’s spirit but keep the information to themselves?
In BtS Sylvanas expresses lamentation for Voljin and Varian. She believes the Loa placed her as Warchief, and she laments her failure to save the Forsaken.
Cut to 8.3 and Sylvanas skedaddles. She cared nothing for the living and merely pitied the Forsaken. Contradicting her own inner monologue as well as her own words to Nathanos in private.
And the worst part: the traitor trash being set on their path by the Alliance High King, while Baine’s breaking point is Derek instead of the Burning of Teldrassil or Voljin’s information? Oi vey.
I dont know if BfA’s narrative can be saved. I’d prefer to just move on. What ever. Thank you, next.
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You don’t even have to do the jump from BtS to 8.3. Just during SoL :
Lady Sylvanas : Maybe you don’t care if your people die so long as it is honourable. But to me, this Horde is worth saving. Anyone who disagress does not deserve to stand among us.
(I’m expecting a “She was lying through her teeth” remark soon enough)
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I just hope they either retcon BfA or do atleast some closure to teldrassil because otherwise it’s going to leave a wound that will never heal.
Oh and I really really hope they just let us kill Sylvanas and move on with it…
That can (and will) be explained away as public lies by Alliance fans and Traitor sympathists who just want their Horde back.
However, in BtS, we have her inner monologues and private conversations with Nathanos that are contradicted in 8.3. These make her sudden shift ham-fisted and incongruent.
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Yeah, it was “worth saving” … at the time (not so much months later IU), when she needed it as a tool to ramp up the Death Toll of this war. Hell, even her recruitment of the ARs could be explained by the fact that all her other tactics seemed to prioritize prolonging and escalating the conflict (and adding a bunch of new people to the potential body count, and forcing the Alliance to do the same to compensate, is a pretty neat idea to pursue large scale death).
EDIT: Sylvanas has never been the type to go around just Banshee Screeching that we’re all just her tools and that we should “DIE FOR HER!” “FOR THE HORDE” is way easier to prompt people into rushing headlong into their deaths for her it seems. The “Horde” (her Alliance of convenience) was “worth saving”. Her "Mongrel Race of Rotten Corpses (her Bulwark Against the Infinite), also worth saving. Until our usefulness to HER ran the hell out; the Alliance became INCONVENIENT; and the Meatshield wasn’t needed to protect her anymore.
Judging by the comic, Sylvanas truly does value the Horde at some level. I wonder if she’s got a split personality from her trauma Arthas gave her.
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Did you do the prequests?
She did the same thing when in last fight.
It is mostly to point out that during SoL, we’re shown a certain Sylvanas. But later on, we’re told of another. The first one wouldn’t have bothered me as much if they applied the “show” instead of “tell”. What it does is incongruently create a disonance between her in SoL and her in 8.2.5
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Erszebeth, I very much agree. The writing for Sylvanas has been extremely inconsistent, and in some points conflicting opposites. Either she values the Horde or she doesn’t. Either she’s using them only as a tool or she actually does care about their survival. Even the purpose of renewing the faction war had things like this: initially she wanted to defeat the Alliance so everyone could be united (under her, of course), but now it’s that she was really wanting everyone to just kill each other to feed her Death-master. It’s not good writing.
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Yeah… I am just accounting for the incoming Alliance+Traitor arguments. Every word she utters is a lie to them.
However, I just dont see any good lore reason for Sylvanas to lie to herself in her own mind in BtS as well as to lie to Nathanos in private. Other than an incongruent and whole sale bait and switch on the part of the Devs for “dramatic effect” that just falls flat.
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Your problem Droite is $ucking up bad writing. All Blizz managed to pull off this xpac is suspending the suspension of disbelief Showing is subtle, making the writing more believable. Straight coming out and telling, this case in perticular, this is how it is 'cause words of god, instead of building up the suspicions of her words through “shows”, or even as simple as her change of view on the matter, creates a dissonance
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There is a certain irony to that.
As if Sylvanas’s goal to create a wound that will never heal effected the Players more than the Alliance.
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Yes … me predicting this exact thing would happen as far back as 8.0:
- That Sylvanas would betray and abandon the Horde
- That she was just using us, and would bail the moment we ceased to be of use.
- That she was Ogmot’s Shepherd.
- That the Death Toll was the POINT of this entire conflict.
I got all these things right … (while Sylvie fans continued to tell me that I was wrong, that she really WAS doing what she thought was best for the Horde, and me siding with Saurfang (because I recognized a sinking ship) made me a traitor Alliance lover). I don’t take pleasure in this fact, I would have truly preferred it go a different way … but at the end of the day all it took to see this crap coming was basing my interpretation of Sylvanas off of “Edge of Night” (and taking everything she said in public with a grain of salt since then).
Call it sucking up to bad writing if you want. Call it me just getting lucky (and there certainly was some luck involved, it was truly a coin flip). But, at the end of the day … nothing Sylvanas did this expansion shocked me in the slightest; and she’s still VERY much the same character I thought she was going into BfA. And if there was ONE thing I was consistent on harping on throughout this ENTIRE expansion, it was the expectation that Sylvanas was just using the Horde and Forsaken for some personal ambition (and was going to bail).
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Cursewords, I do think that’s what happened for a lot of players. Particularly for Horde main players but also for Alliance players who don’t want to see their faction turned into white knight goody goodies.
For me, although I play both factions so I can see the story on both sides, I main Horde and have since BC. This story in BfA, and particularly the forced complicit war crime of burning Teldrassil, affected me as a player. Not just as a Horde main but as a player generally.
Never before have I felt that one faction was more morally justified than the other, never before was I demoralized as a player because my own heroic story (as a mage belf) was ripped out from under me and replaced with “you’re bonafide evil now, no morally gray stuff here, no way out and no way to justify this”. I’ve been invested in this game for the fun of it, even when bad things like the mana bombing of Theramore or Garrosh’s unraveling happen in the story. But this… it changed the entire way I could view my character and because of that how I feel as a player.
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Boooooo! Lame.
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