True.
I only say ‘interpreted’ because by definition there was nothing in the original documentation sent by Anduin that stipulated what would happen in the event of defection, or whether or not defection would be considered ‘harm’ to one party or the other.
Then again, it was probably understood outside of the gathering that agitating for defection is enemy action.
There are more options. And let’s face it… if you pick Empire at the start you know you’re probably going to be a baddie with a British accent.
But it’s not accurate to say that you don’t have to skip content to avoid being bad.
You really, really do.
The Imps are pretty nasty people, we condone slavery, murdering your way to the top and mercilessly crushing all who oppose us even when they’re genuinely nice people who just want to live their lives in peace-- usually by way of superweapon.
The Sith Warrior storyline ends with you as the Emporer’s Wrath. You get to be the chief lackey of the man who is ultimately responsible for every crap thing the Empire does.
But they make it feel so good!
The Jedi we have to fight are usually hypocritical sanctimonious bastards that we can enjoy killing without feeling too guilty. There’s a never ending stream of people who are willing to worship the ground we walk on. Our superiors are usually people 10x worse than we are and make us look saintly by comparison.
The Imperials have the most fun!
And Quinn is my one true digital love. He’s so beautifully sithly for a muggle. Fight me on this. I dare you!
Except Calia isn’t part of the Alliance.
Sylvanas even uses this fact to her advantage when she kills her.
Sylvanas also fully recognizes that Anduin was not responsible for her actions.
I couldn’t recall whether or not Calia was considered part of the Alliance, so thanks for that.
But by encouraging the defectors to rally back to Stromgarde, which is Alliance territory, she’d essentially be implicating Anduin and the Alliance into harboring defectors, which is probably not a position Anduin wanted to be in and makes Calia look even more short-sighted than I originally remembered.
Doesn’t really matter to me what Sylvanas says since she’s not in any position to cast a final judgement on Anduin’s character. Neither am I, but since I know the entirety of the Gathering was an initiative that Anduin began and insisted upon, I’ll insist that he’s the one at fault for its outcome.
Eh.
I don’t like to hold people accountable for the actions of others.
Sylvanas made her own choices.
So did Calia.
Trusting Calia to behave was a big blunder. Anduin knew that letting her go was risky, but his compassion for her situation overruled his good sense.
I always enjoy it when we see the downside of character’s virtues. His empathy and optimism go hand-in-hand with naivete and guilt. He couldn’t ignore her desire to reunite with her family and he wanted so badly to believe everything would be fine if she went along.
The only reason I blame Anduin is because he was advised numerous times not to go through with it, and when he found himself outnumbered, resorted saying what amounted to ‘too bad, I’m king’.
I remember not too long ago in pop culture that there was another King who did that which no one liked very much and was all too happy to see him choke to death on poison.
Anduin was right.
His advisors were wrong.
Seriously.
Their argument was basically “Forsaken are evil!”
And not all his advisors were against it.
Velen agreed with him.
Shaw didn’t pick a side.
Seriously?
More of them were against it than were for it, since Sky Admiral Rogers was against it also. The King was 2-3, and because he failed to argue effectively, had to pull the King Card.
Any man who has to say ‘I am the King’ is no true king.
This is a character flaw in Anduin that the plot just glosses over and casts his advisers as if mistaken, not him.
Well if Admiral Rogers thought it was a bad idea…
We know she’s completely rational and objective when it comes to the Forsaken…
If her opinion didn’t matter, then why did Anduin ask for hers or anyone’s?
Anduin needs to avoid putting himself into positions that he can’t get out of without executive force. The fact he’s done it at all speaks to his inexperience, but the story treats him as if he can do no wrong. This is bad writing.
He told them what he intended to do.
They disagreed.
He listened to their arguments and dismissed most of them.
Because they were stupid arguments.
Then he told them to do their jobs.
His plan would have worked if not for Calia’s idiocy.
His plan allowed for too many things to go wrong that he couldn’t control.
Calia’s idiocy was just one thing. Anduin said he wanted to prevent anyone he believed would harm the Forsaken from showing up, but how could he possibly have known the intentions of everyone there? Any of them at any time could’ve done something stupid, and it’s just plot contrivance that they were all obvious enough to display enmity before being removed from the preliminary considerations.
And yet…
The only thing that went wrong with his plan was allowing Calia to go.
All it meant was that it was the first thing that went wrong. It doesn’t mean that Calia’s inaction meant nothing else would’ve happened.
There was the potential for something to go wrong. Something went wrong. So I lay the blame at feet of the person who put it all in motion.
So to be clear…
It’s not enough to blame him for his actual mistakes, you also feel the need to blame him for all the things that didn’t go wrong?
I think this conversation has run it’s course.
That’s a great straw-man. The Gathering was prone to catastrophe, and ultimately that’s exactly what happened despite the warnings.
I think the main thing is that the game never really pretends the Empire is ‘misunderstood’ or secretly good or any of that stuff. Like you said, you pick Empire, you know going in that you picked the bad guy faction.
What makes it satisfying to me (even though I don’t like being bad in video games, my darkest SWTOR character was a neutral sith warrior) is that the light side options, while often still pretty shady (as light/dark is relative between the two factions), it still feels like you’re at least trying to be good, just kind of failing at it sometimes. I don’t have to be complicit in terrible crimes, or if I do participate in them, if I’m picking light side stuff, the game frames it as you not having much choice in canon. Like, if you disobey or screw up too much in the Empire, you’ll be executed, and everyone in-world knows this. Because again, bad guy faction. So sometimes your character does something terrible, but it’s clear you’re doing so under duress, or because you’re so messed up from the prevailing evil culture you don’t even think to fight it.
And you know, you never really get lectured for it, usually you just see the results of what the Empire’s doing, and the game trusts you to know you just did something screwed up, and lets YOU guilt yourself (or not!) over it. You’re still a hero, people treat you as such. But if it’s something you think was terrible, YOU know you’re not. I love that, and it makes all the difference in the world for me.
The Empire OWNS its evil, even when it wanders into actually-morally-grey territory for its light side characters. The Horde - and the Forsaken in particular - has always been shady as heck (like, one of my early quests as a Forsaken was to poison prisoners of war to help figure out a new plague, that’s … that’s pretty evil), but we keep getting mushy and weak justifications to let the Horde at large avoid owning the evil.
Basically, the Horde needs to either make it clear they are in fact the bad guys (and I think it’s WAY too late for that to fly with most Horde players, as evidenced by how unhappy so many of them are with the story), or the writers need to stop forcing the Horde and its playerbase to do evil things just because whoever’s writing the ‘big’ story beats thinks it would be metal.
Anyone’s mileage may vary on any of the items on the list, of course. I count BtS because it sapped our ability to feel any pride in our warchief or enthusiasm for following her–unless, of course, you’re the sort of player who just likes fighting Team Blue no matter what the reason.
The book’s main purpose, as far as I can tell, is to bring Anduin to a point where he has no hope for Sylvanas ever being redeemed. Along the way, Golden makes him look as good as possible and her as bad as possible. It paints Sylvanas as running an Orwellian police state, which was not how Forsaken society was portrayed in the game up to then. And it’s the first time we get language about how her mission is to wipe out hope.
I don’t see how anyone who wants an at least semi-heroic Horde could read this and feel good about the state of the faction going into the next faction war.
The range of atrocity between the state of the Horde in Before the Storm and things like the slaughter at Brennadam just seem so broad that you might as well include anytime a member of the Horde did something as comparatively mundane as picking their noses in public or kicking a dog, that’s all.
Sure, but atrocities aren’t the only way to shame players for choosing the red team. They’re just Blizzard’s favorite go-to.