I’d argue 500 years is so many lifetimes for most of the races that it would just completely neuter the factions, honestly.
Not in terms of characters but their existence at all, more or less.
Which would have the ironic situation of leaving elves and draenei kinda on their own but also in this weird circle where at this point their various respective leaderships have enough points of contact that outright hostility would make more sense to gradually go down if anyone but Bliz was writing this stuff. Esp with the scarlet resurgence rumors.
Opening of the dark portal to today isn’t the time to reach legal adulthood for any of those
Basically it would only work with a writing team that wants to move on from the factions and not keep dangling it every other xpac before saying “psych”
Even then, even in a best case scenario, the only races that wouldn’t have to start from square 1 are those select few with ridiculous life expectancies. And since 2 of that very exclusively club are the Horde’s victims, that wont solve a damned thing on that front. Those victims will still be around. Not to mention, with how Blizz writes the individual races of the factions … I don’t trust them with most Horde races in such a non-faction scenario.
Not really. This is somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction. There is not a proposal on the table that Droite won’t find some way to shoot down, and it’s being done in the usual fashion. Although, that said, there is a point to it. (Although - I do want to pause here to note that Droite doesn’t like a faction scenario and doesn’t like a non-faction scenario for the same reason. So long as Night Elves and Draenei exist they are a reminder.)
This is why, again, something has to be done to reset and redefine the relationship that the Alliance and the Horde have with each other, something to recharacterize the conflict. Otherwise the Horde is not going to come close to being able to shake its image of being Azeroth’s Third Reich. It will always stay with them.
You already know what my thoughts are on how to deal with that, but it like everything else comes with trade-offs.
Meh, I’ve voiced similar thoughts myself regarding a time skip, although it was done under the impression that it’s still WoW and your character comes along for the ride. If the player character is assumed to be killed off and everyone started a new one in WoW2, maybe things would be a bit different. It’d still be awkward to have a few select characters stick around due to longevity while everyone else goes away, but personally I don’t really have much attachment to them anymore so
I’d be preemptively hoping for a factionless option if WoW2 ever did happen, though.
I’m not convinced that they would want to fragment their playerbase that much. That aside, just because you rebooted the franchise or picked it up elsewhere doesn’t mean that audience impressions suddenly are set to zero.
500 years in the future is a fun idea, but rebuilding the Azeroth we have now is probably the more viable way to go.
Yeah, I’m sure it’d be a stupid idea. From what I understand, Square-Enix has this issue a little bit because both Final Fantasy 14 and Dragon Quest 10 are MMOs, and the company’s basically competing with itself (not to mention, I hear DQ10’s just not good). It’s extra money they could have just been putting toward more FF14, or another game in the franchise.
Aren’t you inadvertently supporting Droite’s point about audience impressions not rebooting along with the franchise, though? Hers sounds pretty well set, and I feel that trying to redefine the conflict can’t wipe away the earlier impressions they’ve left.
The difference between my stance and Droite’s is that she uses this fact to shoot down solutions almost regardless of what they are. It’s an extremely pessimistic view that everything is bad and that nothing can change which I certainly sympathize with, but that I don’t find productive.
I mean, a 500-year timeskip could include an apocalyptic event in which all the current generation of WoW characters get wiped out, including the major Night Elves and Draenei.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea, or one that I’d enjoy—I’m not big on post-apocalyptic stuff, and I feel like it would be throwing the baby (world) out with the bathwater (messed-up story). But it could happen.
In order to mollify Droite here, you’d have to wipe out the Night Elves and Draenei as playable races.
Is that really where we’re going here? Where the proposals to fix the Horde have gotten so selfish that we’re seriously considering actually wiping playable races from the game, on top of the constructive, cultural death that’s already been imposed?
I’d like to note that I said elves in general, and didn’t specify any subrace, this also seems mildly unfair to Droite considering his positions before
It seems like his concerns were largely focused around the issue of only 3 core and 3 ARs effectively keeping their overall NPC cast in that kind of timeskip
I can’t believe this thread is still going. Honestly, Blizzard doesn’t care about the story, or what we want. They care about their bottom line. The story will take a back seat to PVE content. So it will never be driven from a perspective of racial identity, faction pride, or meaningful story telling. It will be driven from a perspective of “This would make a good dungeon and raid. How can we shoehorn the story to make this happen? What might we have to retcon or explain away?”
At this point, the only way the lore and story can be salvaged is a full purge of everything and starting from scratch with individual writing teams who write for a particular niche area of Azeroth, and who have a responsibility to maintain consistent with the racial and cultural identities of all the races involved in those regions, and who also consult the main writing team when it comes to putting together a comprehensive and meaningful story.
That will never happen. Not just because it’s a full overhaul of how Blizzard operates, but also because Blizzard just doesn’t care about this franchise beyond all the green it rakes in monthly. It’s a dead franchise. WoW might still be going strong enough, but the soul is gone.
I honestly have no idea what you’re on about, but chill with the nonsense.
My point is this. A timeskip will not allow the Horde to just magically escape the victims of the crap Blizz had them pull, no matter how many generations or hundreds of years they throw to the wind. It might scour the field clean on the aggressors side of the isle, by quite a few generations for some races, but the victims of those events will still be the same damned people. Because NEs and Draenei live for friggen ever. Rendering there being very little value in such a timeskip for most PC races or racial fantasies on the Horde (it doesn’t matter how much they change or time distances them from their events, time is just plainly a currency with so little value to who they hurt its price is muted). Thus, there is no value for MOST Horde races in this sort of idea.
Even that wouldn’t be enough. Trolls are still upset about events that happened over ten-thousand years ago - multiple generations have gone by. So again, unless the timeskip completely wipes out the Night Elves and Draenei as playable races, it would not satisfy you.
I’m not sure that this is the best argument to be making when their population of MAUs is in free-fall. Story is also not an easy-to-separate part of content. Story and Gameplay should compliment each other, and deficiencies in one harm the other. I argue from a financial point of view that these are dumb moves.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t change the fact that is what they are doing. We are literally discussing something that Blizzard will never consider to be important. They are going to sooner just pander with unsubstantial representation.
I am not against representation. It’s just easier to do than to write a good story. Rather than writing something that is captivating, mentally or socially challenging, or emotionally moving or significant… You can just say "Hey, this character is insert random group here "
Even if that character isn’t playing any significant role in the current story.
Eh, I think representation is actually kind of critical, at least in the context of the MMO itself. The idea behind the thing is to create an identity that represents you to some extent and explore the world with it. What happens when Blizzard routinely disrespects that choice or representation?
Widespread anger of the caliber that we’ve seen - and I’m just talking about the individual races at this point. It gets more intense when you get to immutable characteristics or fundamental aspects of how people were actually born.
The broader narrative isn’t what matters here. The one that matters is the one that the player crafts for themselves, and whether the game will let them do that, or whether it will insist on putting its thumb on the scale to regard certain choices in these fictional identities as “superior” on the basis of what Blizzard chooses to portray.
