Again Velskar, I find myself frustrated with you because you tend to say things that I agree with, but act as though you’re disagreeing with what I’m saying.
Notably this:
Literally every other expansion has centered on major, third-party villains, with faction war firmly in the background.
And if you’re honestly trying to claim that Mists of Pandaria and Battle for Azeroth were of better quality than, say, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King given that formula, well…
The issue with MOP and BFA was that they forced the faction war into PVE content to force everyone to care about it rather than leaving it as its own thing apart from the third party threats that PVErs typically go after.
Keeping the faction war “in the background” from your perspective, however, is not the same thing as taking it out back and shooting it.
Partly I don’t want it to be some assassination by the Horde because … well … I’d rather not spend another expansion as part of the bad guys in my own heroic story.
But partly because I remember some of the Worgen early quest lines and he kind of grew on me. Then Blizzard wrote him in so many directions it made my head spin - human potential and assassination attempts and grandfather to Anduin …
He’s served his purpose (shut up everyone in Oribos). I won’t call it a dealbreaker if he has to die, just please don’t make it so the Horde kills him. At this point in his portrayal I kinda just see him as a grandfather telling crazy stories on his porch.
That’s sort of the direction I was thinking. I personally hope Tyrande’s situation is resolved as showing her needing to do something to relinquish/share the Night Warrior power because a mortal simply cannot physically contain the power of a goddess indefinitely, without implying that she needs to give up on her pursuit of justice/vengeance. The message should be “don’t let vengeance blind you to your other needs, such as staying alive” rather than “wanting justice is bad”.
The Night elf playerbase doesn’t know what satisfaction would be. That aside, once again, the only population whose game/ story experience I genuinely don’t care about is the NEFPA.
Yeah, because PvP content has never been the primary focus of an expansion, even when the faction conflict has been the primary theme. Both Mists of Pandaria and Battle for Azeroth inevitably ended up being “Old God Expansions.”
No, it’s not.
I never said that the faction war should end completely; there are always going to be tensions, skirmishes, etc. That’s been a given ever since the Warcraft III games.
The problem, however, is when the faction conflict does get forcibly pushed into the main storyline to the point of ridiculousness, which was most certainly the case with War of the Thorns.
Then why are we disagreeing? If we agree that it shouldn’t end completely, then we have room to do things like show an onscreen conquest of Ashenvale or show the Forsaken taking back Lordaeron before we funnel those questlines into breadcrumbs towards relevant battlegrounds. You can have a completely disconnected PVE narrative taking place at the same time.
I’d rather he were not a martyr to a renewed faction war, and I certainly wouldn’t want him to have a heroic death, but neither do I particularly want him to get to just live out his days in peace.
Even if you excuse how he was written early on, there are still so many people that suffered and died because of his stubborn pig-headedness. I don’t know what kind of fate would be a just one for him in light of that, but if there are any characters in the Alliance who shouldn’t be getting a happy ending, it would be him.
I believe our point of disagreement was regarding whether or not lore should be connected with PvP content, faction war or not. For reasons I’ve already explained, there’s another good reason why that’s almost certainly not going to happen:
That’s not how Blizzard wants it set up.
They literally have separate teams/departments working on PvE content (raiding, dungeons, etc.) vs. PvP content (battlegrounds and arenas, along with class tuning for PvP combat). It’s why PvE content has become, essentially, “lore content” while PvP is…well, player-versus-player.
There’s also the format and structuring of that to consider; PvP is by nature a lot more difficult, because you’re going up against another human being, not an AI. There’s a very good reason why most PvP-based video games, like Call of Duty for example, prioritize combat over storytelling—if you were forced to fight a select number of players to advance the story, for example, you’d likely stop playing very quickly. And even those games’ Campaign modes (if they have any to begin with) feature the player battling NPCs as part of the story, not other players.
TL; DR: There are good reasons PvE = lore, and PvP = non-lore, and it has nothing to do with elitism, as you previously claimed.
Blizzard is not the arbiter of good storytelling - and the whole point for us being here is to provide suggestions for improvement. I certainly will not take as a given that Blizzard automatically has everything right - and I don’t think anyone here would agree that they do.
… and yes, I agree that PVP is by nature a lot more difficult. A big part of my critique is that the way they set up the faction war runs contrary to the motivations to participate in that competitive gameplay. I’ve watched lectures on why telling stories in PVP settings is more difficult, and what some of the ground rules are. I’m not ignorant of the restrictions - but I disagree with you that said restrictions preclude the inclusion of storytelling.
For more on that, I will again link this. It gives a window into the frameworks I use and the contours of precisely what I am proposing. A proposal for Warsong Gulch
Night Elf Forum Posting Alt. A term I did not coin (that honor goes to Cursewords … /salute) but one I use regularly to describe a specific subsect of the playerbase.
Skarm finished scooping up the last pile of blight, and dumped it into the cannister for disposal into the swirling green crater that was all that was left of Undercity(1). Wiping the sweat off his brow, he marched up to the (still open but at least re-built ) Gates of the Greymane Wall. Beside them was a series of several kiosks, all manned by various Horde races, some looked glum, some defiant, and some resigned. All were wearing placards around their necks that read ‘ME SORRY’. The orc stoically picked up his own placard and put in on.
The Horde commander overseeing the operation, Captain Notevil Goodforsaken(2), nodded grimly at the the last straggler to take his proper place and shouted “Time to open for business!”
The kiosk windows all opened, and the sheets of white canvas hiding their signs were pulled away, revealing, ‘FREE BACON AND EAR SKRITCHES’. From the open windows wafted the smell of the cooking bacon.
Quietly at first, and then louder and louder, came the sound of wet black noses snuffling, and padded feet running…
(1) Which then drained directly into Lordamere Lake, which was already suffering an up spike in three-eyed fish as it was, just from the previous levels of Undercity experiment run-off.
(2) Most unusually, that was his actual given human birthname.
Cairne’s death in a book. Saurfang being made MU Orc racial leader in a Tweet. Vol’jin getting gutted by Trash Mob in a questline that was already treating Sylvie as Warchief before he hit the ground. Gazlowe and Rokhan being made Racial Leaders in like 2 lines of dialogue each, that I could not actually find despite searching for them in game. To the point a lot of people think Wix is still the Bilgewater’s Trade Prince.
Lots of underwhelming, low effort, insulting nonsense lol!
Blizzard is the IP rights-holder and the arbiter of whether or not you get to pay-to-play the game to begin with.
Blizzard is also the entity which created, and now maintains, that system, and they’ve made it pretty clear that, again, PvE = lore, PvP = not lore.
This is something that even goes back to the RTS Warcraft games, where the (singleplayer) Campaign = story, and Multiplayer = just for fun
Within reason, of course.
Ok, don’t. I don’t think anyone actually made that claim, anyway.
No, but those restrictions do by nature make it more difficult to access that storytelling.
Which is the same thing in practice/realistic terms.
It’s one thing for a raid group to work as a team and discuss boss strategies on Denathrius, which are pre-programmed, so that the only effort goes into memorization and repetition.
It’s quite another to gate major storytelling and plot developments behind competitive gameplay between two (hopefully) intelligent human players, both of whom are constantly trying to outwit each other as if in a chess game.
One is far more exclusive, and therefore far less fun, than the other.
I mean, if you want to try to police a suggestions box, you do you, I suppose - but I reserve the right to not take you seriously if that’s the case. I’m obviously aware that Blizzard’s shareholders own the IP - and I raise suggestions because I feel that implementing them would improve their ROI.
Regarding your comments on PVP storytelling - I’m going to challenge you to watch the lecture referenced in the thread that I linked. Game developers have given thought to that challenge, and they appear to not share your ideas about it not being worth it to tie in lore to PVP content.
There are just different rules around doing so than there are for raid content. I’m going to have to ask you to step out of that frame of seeing things if you want to continue to have this discussion.
Do you remember back in MoP when they tied the Wrathion cloak quest line to PVP? A player had to win two different specific BGs in order to advance that story line. Oh did the feces hit the rotating oscillating device when that came out.
People were livid. I know of one player who never had a single HK and was proud of that. Then this came out and she was PISSED.
The one and only time Blizzard has done this and I seriously doubt will ever do again after that backlash.
Yeah, and to get in front of that - I believe that WoW does best when there is a wall between endgame PVE and endgame PVP. A raider’s gear should not work that well in a battleground. PVP gear should not be better than dungeon gear in PVE. A PVP-oriented questline should not force me to raid, and a PVE-focused questline should not force you to PVP.
Lore centered around the two should respect that separation. BFA again stumbled in that it didn’t do that. It forced that content to be expressed in PVE, and demanded that everyone care about it.
Hang on everyone - can we just pause for a moment because Kyalin and I have (I THINK) reached a line where we might be able to resolve some outstanding issues after BfA:
The Night Elves are “retconned” (via quest, or flashback, or whatever) to have taken Ashenvale prior to any formalized truce from BfA. They take it militarily (pick your poison, guerilla warfare, open combat, arm-wrestling, whatever) and we do see some of the imagery of it (some sort of small cutscene) but we don’t have to play through it (as in, a giant scenario/questline that blocks future campaign development) if we don’t want to do so. Warsong Gulch is adjusted accordingly.
I think the Horde should move their capital away from Orgrimmar - still leaving it as an Orc racial capital - due to the logistical issues they’ve had previously and losing their foothold in Ashenvale, plus there’s some symbolism in doing that (moving to a new council structure in a new city) but if it happens or doesn’t I don’t think it’s deal-breaking. I’m not sure either myself or Kyalin feel strongly enough about it one way or another, I just think it makes some sense and helps symbolically.
Tyrande “splits” (I don’t know a better way to phrase this) the Night Warrior powers across the souls of the Night Elves in the Shadowlands, saving them from the Maw. Doing this while in Ardenweald, with the Heart of the Forest at her side, her power regrows Teldrassil. I’m not certain about whether this needs to be a mass rez or not for the people, since they’ve stepped back a bit from how effective the genocide was, but I don’t have strong feelings either way. In a morality tale, she makes the decision to do this before going after Sylvanas and in the end kills Sylvanas after giving her the opportunity to surrender (justice winning over vengeance).
Before turning into a purple dispenser Sylvanas turns Anduin into a Death Knight. Upon our return from the Shadowlands, the nobles of Stormwind refuse to recognize his claim to the throne any longer and banish him as an abomination. In turn, the Knights of the Ebon Blade offer him a place within their order.
After the death of the Jailer, the feral Scourge on Azeroth are no longer feral. The ones near Silvermoon and the Ghostlands can be either retained or reclaimed via quests. Doesn’t matter. The Undead are now in control of the Plaguelands, Tirisfal Glades, Silverpine Forest, and Hillsbrad Foothills. There are some caveats for the Scarlets as well as Uther’s Tomb and some other neutral flight points of interest (it’s a game after all).
Bolvar - free of the Helm of Domination - joins the Forsaken to lead the race as the new Dark High Lord (title pending). His experiences on the Frozen Throne give him insights into their lives. Lilian Voss moves into a more permanent prominent position within the faction.
In a completely unrelated event, Calia Menethil is revealed as a traitor working for the Jailer and we get to murder her face.
Due to the loss of the Undercity and their need to be able to move to re-integrate a large now de-feralized population spread across the Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend, the Forsaken create a (pretty substantial) necropolis as their new faction capital. It’d be cool if it actually moved while you were inside of it. If not that’s okay.
The Knights of the Ebon Blade collaborate with the Forsaken in trying to reintegrate the former Scourge. They pick up some new members. Anduin gets to see the ex-Scourge experience first-hand as a new member of the Ebon Blade.
The Worgen rebuild/repair/reacquire Gilneas. They can take Tol Barad too. Genn is no longer leader (and not because the Horde assassinated him) and the new leadership embraces Gilneas - but is primarily focused on the Worgen, since the race in-game is the Worgen.
Turalyon sees the fall of “good” guys into the curse of undeath, with Bolvar joining the Forsaken, Anduin converted into a Death Knight, and Calia turning out to be a traitor. He calls to the Army of the Light and brings them to Azeroth. They begin forming re-education camps, which quickly turn into purging the undead, then purging any who won’t convert to worshipping the Light. The Alliance is onboard with the Army of the Light arriving, then skeptical at the re-education camps, then when Night Elves, Void Elves, Worgen, etc (but not Draenei) start showing up on lists to be sent to camps (read: NOT MURDERED YET) there is an open rebellion. A final confrontation occurs where Alleria kills Turalyon while the Horde and basically all non-Human (and some Humans) from the Alliance destroy the camps and kill Yrel and her leader, a prime N’aaru named Elune.
Also, after all is said and done, we get Knights of the Ebon Blade and Illidari added as cross-race factions. We can work out those details at a separate time when I stop daydreaming about it.
Does any of this sound reasonable?
//I know, Blizzard won’t do any of this. Lor’themar will likely go insane and become the next villain.
