Wild Gods helping the Horde is fine since for some reason we don’t get any Loa or Elemental gods or anything to help the Horde ever, so something has to help the Horde sometimes.
On the other hand I think setting Ashenvale on fire and making it ugly like a giggling mean little kid who puts a magnifying glass up to ants to burn them with the Sun was bad though.
But wasn’t Lord Magmathar meant as a precursor and extension to the Firelands invasion of Mt Hyjal? That’s why he’s there?
It was mostly Cenarius that irritated me. Since he was literally dead because of demon-infused Grom, after all. getting him back was epic. Having him thumbs-up the orcs he’d charged at and raged on?
Not great.
I understood it from a mechanics standpoint but as a player and a fan, it was a blow.
I don’t think Blizzard hates night elves, I just think they don’t have any passion for them. They just don’t care, and that makes them think players don’t care, just like how because they like the edgy metal WC2 Horde they assume players must like it too
I also believe this about Darkspear after how Vol’Jin was treated and the complete lack of any response from the tribe once he died.
And it’s a pretty bad thing when writers don’t care about parts of their setting!
Yeah IDK. I thought Cata was stupid all around so idc tbh. Smashing all the zones, making them look like crap, turning the quest lines into memes instead of letting the players make them into memes themselves, Toxic Male Garrosh, Let’s Bring Back Trolls We Already Killed To Kill Them Again, etc.
Fr. Vol’jin dies, Darkspear one second later “WOOO SYLVANAS YESS!!!”
Firelands should have been spearheaded by an Alliance Cenarion Circle and Horde Earthern Ring. It was silly that the druids were fine with Ashenvale (their holy forest as well) being flattened, and silly that the Earthern Ring weren’t involved in stopping an elemental invasion.
Cenarius died because of his jumping to conclusions about the Fel taint within the Orcs, ultimately resulting in him actively pushing them to imbibe in Fel Blood again in a desperate attempt to save themselves from what he fully intended to be a purge. He was so convinced that they were a precursor to another Legion invasion, that’s exactly what he turned them into.
And considering it was Grom and Thrall that helped put down Manneroth, I’m not sure Cenarius is in any real place to be pissed.
Have you checked the emotes for ANY of the other races? Blizzard has a Multiple Personality Disorder when it comes to authorship. One of those personalities has Tongue in Cheek cranked up to the max.
“One good thing about the war… it put Kul Tiras on the map.” emotes are simply not to be taken seriously.
It was that personality that did ALL of the racial emotes, and it spared no one.
One… the Worgen are part of the Alliance.
Two… Anduin sent the Champion who’s pretty much worth more than an army all by themself.
I’ve talked at length about this, but I don’t think that they hate night elves so much as just… lack a passion for them. It’s sort of a chain reaction, in that they’ve needed to defang night elves for years in order to get them to fit into the role they have within the Alliance, that of the nature loving long lived race, and thus when push comes to shove, they just don’t have a desire for a focus on them. The writers like metal things, this can be seen in how they’ve treated Orcs and Forsaken, wherein a lot of their more nuanced themes have been worn away in favor of discount fantasy Klingons and nihilistic evil undead. And then on the other end of the spectrum you have Golden, who has favorite characters but not races or faction, and none of those faves are night elves.
This creates a perfect storm, where you have a race that the writers don’t really have a passion for, smack dab right next to the Horde, with tons of old stuff that the writers can use as a cheap emotional ploy when they destroy it. Basically, Blizzard likes to use long lived, fundamentally good races as fodder for their heartstring tugging and/or metal moments. See also: Dragons, and Draenei.
It also feeds into Blizzard’s chronic phobia of cultivating their original concepts. Instead, they allow them to either rot or fade into a more generic fantasy version as they scamper off to new concepts, which will also be left aside. Or they finish that plot far too soon. You can point to nearly any of the races as starting out with far more nuanced and interesting traits that were left aside because they were too much effort to write. Night Elves were just the first, starting in Vanilla, and the most obvious, especially in BfA.
This basically sums it all up. Thanks bro.
Because none of the elemental incursions took place in Troll territory.
Yeah but I meant like, ever lmao. Also they can just add some and also lots of things. It’s all made up its fictional they can throw some Loas and Trolls in there and make them heroic if they want.
The big secret about Loa and Wild Gods? They ain’t that strong. They’re like slightly tougher than a large mount. Getting involved just gets most of them killed.
I think at some point they even said that Night Elves were a mistake
I think this also speaks to the difference between writing games and writing other media which Blizzard (somehow) still hasn’t fully grasped. In a lot of media absolutely destroying the lives of your favorite characters is not just common, it’s a fun pastime. While that usually applies to individual characters it can also apply to groups or races, it creates tension and interesting dynamics.
Importantly, though, readers or viewers don’t identify with characters in books or movies the same way they do with characters that they essentially become in video games. I personally think that is at least partly a problem with the way people consume media in video games, but it doesn’t change the fact it is also a problem for writers of games that Blizzard has been pretty terrible at adjusting to.
I also feel like I should add this is especially true of an MMO, and to a lesser extent other RPG games. If the story of WoW took place over the course of a massive set of expansions of a Warcraft IV RTS game I think a lot of plot points would still be called out for being silly or forced, but there wouldn’t be quite the same depth of reaction to things that are especially bad for once race or another.
I always refer to Kosak’s old “faction favoratism” post because it was true then and it remains true in current WoW:
Suffering is the gasoline that drives our story engine. Why is that?
The Hero Factory
Here at Blizzard, we often talk about what we’re trying to build with the fiction of the Warcraft universe. The phrase “Hero Factory” frequently comes up across all of our franchises. We want the players to feel like heroes.
The primordial soup that creates heroes never tastes of rainbows – it’s a lumpy gumbo of suffering and evil. Heroes are born from darkness, because we desperately need someone to light the way.
It’s an unfair world that cries out for heroes. To bring order out of chaos and justice to the downtrodden is the hero’s call. Is it any wonder that Azeroth is an unfair place? It’s monstrously unfair. And it’s going to stay that way.
I doubt she is suddenly going to give back her power. If anything she probably gonna be more like Jaina, barely managing to step off the edge at the last second. Also, what did you expect? That Tyrande was suddenly going to start a civil war within the Alliance? If anything the Alliance has always been stronger(and more subtle) then that with regards to resolving internal conflicts.
You forgot the part where they tried, and failed, to reclaim their immortality, as well. Even though now, apparently, even the derivative Elves are immortal (or close enough) with derivative Wells and fancy trees.
I mean I’m not a huge fan personally except for female night elf casters especially mages. But no player race should be OPENLY hated by the devs to such an extent. Everyone has picks and chooses but millions upon millions of players play only night elves. Hating on them by burning down their whole city and starting zone along with making their racial leader powerful but kinda batty is just a bad call and will lose them money.
My guess is that the writers do it intentionally and the other devs don’t really care or are on board with it