The trouble is the humans were always there to be popped open like wild cherry capiri suns for the more interesting factions.
Seriously I imagine human fans as the sorts who assign personalities to deck chairs. Save for the Kul Tirans, though they seem to be born from someone at Blizz getting into sea shanties.
And no shade. I want to go hit up Boralaus and get ‘mom’s not just dissapointed, she’s scared’ levels of drunk while I scream sing “LEAVE HER JOHNNY LEAVE HER!”. It looks like the sorta rough, cultured places I love.
Stormwind on the otherhand feels like;
And this sort of thing is charming IRL because hey it’s fun to let go and feel like a kid again. Look me dead in the eye and tell me Anduin couldn’t replace Mickey Mouse.
This is what I find so baffling about the Alliance. Because the Orcs are the Horde’s frontman and are certainly at least Metzen’s favorites. Like I’ve never mained an Orc, never was a big fan of their faction in WC3, but I’ve listened to this at the gym because it gets me fired up;
I’m over in the corner freebasing Lord knows what with the elves and setting fires with the gobs. While I ramble to no one in particular about how beautiful spider webs and blood looks in the moonlight.
But I’m still proud of my mean greens and would never for a second hesitate to get their back. Same goes with all of the Horde. Somebody smacked a Vulpera with a rolled up news paper? Because they were talking about their fan art? Eh I see your point but we can’t pick family. A strike against one is a strike against all. FOR THE HORDE! Unleash the plague spiders!
And SW should theoretically be able to play that role so much better than the Orcs. They’re a very generic faction. Not even it’s fans argue against this statement. Which means it should be the familiar staging ground that introduces more high concept stuff like Draenei or Kaldorei.
But instead of being a canvass to paint on the blank beige wall is just the star of the show.
Corpsegrinder, no argument that that was a damned stupid thing to have shown and they were right to apologize for it.
There were idiots at a con. There are always idiots at a con. I’m trying to look it up but all I can find is a thread at MMO-champ with a dead link to the old forums. Again, from what I see there, it was a couple idiots who shouted a slur and yanked on her lanyard (Again, not acceptable behavior in any fashion, but not something I’d categorize as proof of some sort of anti-alliance bias from blizz, especially as they couldn’t react to it as it did not take place in the con but on the streets)
Oh no. The horrible former dev made a stupid joke. That’s much worse than destroying your faction and many of its major characters either because he had a half butted idea or he wanted to screw with someone else’s favorite characters over a grudge.
There is a particularly Anthony Bourdain way one must read Benedikt-emerald-dream.
Here, he wasnt saying that eating humans makes them more interesting. He was saying that the more interesting races tend to eat the boring humans, as if that is why they exist. Even on the Alliance side you have Worgen.
Ainhin you’re one of the strangest human beings I’ve ever encountered and trust me that statement speaks more volume than you’ll ever truly appreciate.
If SW was like you they’d make interesting baddies if nothing else.
Yes and that’s a problem with the way that humans are written. Much like the Alliance itself, they seem to be written to be passive victims. Proactivity is treated as a negative trait. The Scarlet Crusade are a bunch of fanatical psychopaths even though their origins as survivors of a zombie apocalypse who regrouped and fought back is very sympathetic.
When my child comes to me and says “Debbie got a fruit snack!” I say “Thats nice.”
Slowly they learn that what they really want to say has nothing to do with Debbie. Just say you want a fruit snack!
Commenting on Blizzard’s incompetence at writing a satisfying narrative for any of the Alliance races for over a decade does not require an appeal to our sense of justice to be valid. It doesnt have to be contextualized by anything the horde has. You deserve a fruit snack just because you want one.
I want Lordaeron and I resent that it was taken away from me and given to Debbie even though you knew it was my favorite toy and Debbie wasn’t actually interested in it.
Yeah it really would be nice if we weren’t just inundated with human aesthetic and human potential. Sure a lot of people like humans, but a lot of people also like the other races as well. As I’ve said before, I assume it’s just something about writing everyone on the alliance as humans an a human culture is just easier to write.
One of my biggest complaints with the new player starting experience, it’s pretty much all humans with tiny cameos from the other races. That’s kind of a sample though for the greater alliance narrative as a whole, a majority of it is humans with small cameos from the other races. They even made the genocide of the night elves more about anduin and saurfang feeling sad over actually using that to develop the night elves, maybe even using that as a chance to get them back to how they were in WC3, but they just end up getting forgotten and Tyrande just gets a pointless side story in Shadowlands.
Making jokes about the alliance at pretty much every blizzcon, this is about an attitude blizzard has been cultivating for years. They usually poke fun at or degrade the alliance, while never really doing the same to the horde, it’s a one way street in that regard. This is about the idea the developers project about the alliance being the joke faction at blizzcon (this being one facet of why the faction is in the state that it’s in today), these kinds of things stick with people to create this attitude of the alliance being the trash faction, because Blizzard never bothers to build them up.
Ignoring the past does not answer any questions, these problems didn’t spontaneously happen this expansion.
And yet in game for years now the narrative is heavily weighted towards the Alliance perspective. It might not be well done, but the story spends more time dealing with the Alliance and its issues than anything else. Horde gets ignored or is mined for use as a villain for the Alliance without much real thought put into their motivations.
So yeah, I don’t have much sympathy for the argument that because of blizzcon stuff that the devs favor the horde, especially when you only seem to pull out stuff from 2011 or before when I can look at the actual game and point out ways in which the devs are destroying the game for the horde in the last expansion or so.
Dont forget we just had a Death expansion where the forsaken had zero development. An entire death themed expansion. No army of forsaken came marching through the portal. The forsaken were figuratively sidelined by the necrolords. Chopped Liver.
Bolvar’s Death Knights. Bolvar’s daughter. Anduin, Jaina, Tyrande, Sylvanas, Thrall and Baine. Of those major SL characters only one is a member of the horde and he legit sat on his butt the entire expansion acting pitiful. He’s practically the horde interim warchief and he just sat there all sad.
Sorry, forgot Calia was there, doing basically nothing. She did nothing to further develop the forsaken narrative.
And other than the troll dungeon, there was nothing for the Kalimdor horde there at all. I just went with Maldraxxus as least bad choice, because none of them appealed to me at all.
And all the payoff for the Tauren not-heritage quest, where we get promised some Cairne time later, and now apparently Baine’s all “naw, I know dad is always with me, there’s no need to seek him out now”
We literally spent most of last expansion talking about Saurfang’s feelings with a bunch of even CGI cinematics, that is after an alliance race got the “privilege” or going through a genocide only to be ignored for most of the rest of that expansion. We spent most of this expansion talking about Sylvanas, even throwing characters under the bus for her narrative.
These aren’t “alliance” perspectives, you can say they are more character perspectives where they focus mainly on a few characters while ignoring the races in general, I wouldn’t even say Anduin is a very pro-alliance character, in Warcrimes he spent more time being concerned about Garrosh’s feelings than Jaina’s.
Why is it that the only time the alliance “won” was after the horde had a rebellion and split? The alliance has just been there to react to the horde in the narrative, as they did in Cata, MoP and BfA, these aren’t alliance focused stories, these are stories where the horde moves the story and the alliance reacts, then the horde rebels against itself.
This is all cumulative, how the developers act at blizzcon is indicative of how they write the story and how they cultivate a lot of how people feel about the different factions, as in alliance is the joke faction. This is just one facet of that and why there are so many more horde players now than alliance players and why this problem likely won’t improve at this point in the games lifetime.
