Horde team up with Jaina in a patch while Jaina was still the final boss of current raid content. In the Saurfang cutscenes Anduin sounds like he’s losing the war but in the game he was winning. No other city raids happened except Zandalar which had no visible damage. When we returned to Darkshore, Summermoon’s corpse was still there, it hadn’t decomposed.
Why was this expansion such a hot mess?
Then the final boss literally comes out of nowhere and the final patch had basically nothing to do with anything previous. There’s STILL a giant sword in the planet. There was an Azshara side story thrown in the middle of it as well.
How come Jaina became Grand Admiral of Kultiras when shes basically been the father-murdering, orc-loving Benedict Arnold of the Kultiran zeitgeist for the past two decades?
Cause her mom said she was cool? Because Daughter of the Sea slapped? Seriously one of their best little multimedia projects. But it’s a song all about how treacherous her people believe her to be.
The whole story and war kicked off over Azerite(remember that thing?), which was supposedly “going to change everything.” It’s pretty clear they had a hodge podge of ideas instead of a story and trying to weave them together didn’t work out that well.
The whole “wait and see” thing was probably just a smokescreen because they had no idea how they were going to explain it all and the explanation we got was the lowest point of Warcraft history to date.
Everything bad about BFA begins and ends with Teldrassil. The second Blizzard made the Horde guilty of Teldrassil, they pretty much ruined the faction war. Which was, you know, the selling point of the entire expansion?
The implication that the authors were infighting behind the scenes could also explain a great many things. It also explains the narrative disaster with Shadowlands.
But seriously, Teldrassil basically poisoned the rest of the expansion and then the devs tried to fit like, 3 other expansions into one at the same time to distract from it.
On a realistic level it was because behind the scenes blizzard HQ was basically this
The fire, in this case being decades of poor oversight leading to a terrible workplace culture that finally went up in smoke with the lawsuits and the outing Afrasiabi and his Cosby suite crew. In such a chaotic environment, full of half completed ideas from multiple groups who were likely poorly motivated to care, it isnt a lot of surprise that the expansion was sort of janky, along with Shadowlands which came after and had the added dose of COVID to go with it.
It took until Dragonflight to really get their act together.
Yeah that’s the problem. You can’t. It’s impossible. The burning was one of the worst decisions Blizzard ever made for this game and it hung over the narrative like an ominous shadow.
Teldrassil wasn’t the problem. The problem was one side being forced to cannibalize itself again is. There is no worse feeling in a two faction game than one of them being said bluntly by the devs they are in the wrong simply for fighting at all. And that was the big mistake of Blizzard.
You don’t look like you’ve just bought the game yesterday.
We spent the entirety of Shadowlands discussing this very dead topic.
But in short, BFA was in a mess because Blizzard Creative itself was in a mess between Hasbro laying off record numbers amidst record profit and intramural spats being played out by sabotage of favorite characters.
For good or ill. We’re two expansions beyond BFA now. The coffin needs to be sealed and buried.
If you’re tired of talking about it, you can always just skip these threads. The “mute thread” button exists, so you don’t even have to look at it if you don’t want to see it. But the rest of us should be able to keep diving into the subject if we want to.
Yeah, you can’t really ignore Teldrassil’s effects on the story. It not only permanently poisoned a core fraction of the game, but it went on to help contribute to the ruining of the following expansion and everyone STILL has to put up with its reverberations even into Dragonflight.
It’s also a perfect representation of the type of “it had to happen this way” storytelling that makes the rest of BFA’s plot points feel awkward, where characters and set pieces seem slotted together without good reason because they needed to be there for whatever twist was meant to happen next.
I think I know what you mean by “it had to happen this way”—writers ham-handedly shuffling things around without regard to logic, consistency, or past characterization—but can you expand on what makes BfA/Teldrassil an example of it?
Trans-continental catapults, for one.
But also, to explain why they even got that far, Tyrande the 10,000 year old war veteran was written to leave her homeland unguarded so that the horde could blitz through it, spurred on by the premise of azerite that only existed as a story tool long enough to start the invasion in the first place.
Alliance metaphorically bungee-jumping in and out of Dazar’alor just long enough to kill Rastakhan so that Talanji could take the throne and then the alliance mourning the fact that attacking someone makes them hate you.
Thalyssra and Lor’themar being on the toilet boat specifically because those two would be the most amenable to work alongside the alliance when digging around elf ruins.
To a lesser extent, off-screen Wrathion’s Potion of Plot Development that he somehow knows you’re going to find for Ebonhorn.
You can’t really ignore Teldrassil as it was a huge hurdle the rest of the expansion had to jump over, and it stead it tripped, fell on it’s face, broke its nose, then exploded.
Overall, BFA was doomed the moment they decided that Sylvanas was the villain all along because it would need to spend too much time trying to justify why we would still fighting each other in time for the final raid and the following expansion. And they did all of it poorly.
Add the absolute nothing burger that was both the Old Gods and Azerite and you had a expansion that was honestly completely bloody pointless.
There was also the master tactical plan of the Horde to march southward until they knew Alliance intelligence would report that then immediately turning north to attack Ashenvale. Apparently, Alliance intelligence can quickly relay the Horde’s initial march but cannot do it when they turn north. Apparently the Night elves can get 90% of their military down to Silithus by boat in the time it takes the Horde to reverse course.
This is to say nothing about the Worgen who should have been able to help, ignoring the Draenei’s convenient excuse of being entirely too drained by the Argus campaign to spare any help whatsoever.
And then Tyrande, but only Tyrande, makes it back from Stormwind just in time to spare Saurfang’s life, carry her merked husband and only her husband’s lifeless body back to Stormwind while telling the player to, and I quote, “Make the occupation of my people as tolerable as possible”, while leaving the civilians still left in Teldrassil to their fates.
Alex “Not the face” Afrasiabi wanted the Night elves to suffer, and nothing was going to stop him from making that happen.
Hard to ignore Teldrassil but I agree, given what BFA was supposed to be about, to suddenly transition to a short story about Azshara which then morphs into another short story about N’Zoth made no sense to me. I note that Metzen left as Legion was rolling out but whether his leaving would have contributed to the peculiar BFA story I cannot say. I had a great liking for night elf characters but the burning of Teldrassil along with the lame night warrior story and the final judgement of Sylvanas left me with absolutely no desire to play my main or any other of my nelf toons. I now spend my time in classic despite its neglect trying to recapture something of what I enjoyed about this game.
Why? Your other quibbles with BfA are small potatoes next to this. Like Garusk said, everything wrong with BfA can be traced back to Teldrassil, because that one incident concluded the A-plot before it even really began. After the tree went up in flames, we were all just counting the patches until the next jointly deposed warchief, the next Horde rebellion, the next flimsy armistice.
Cramming Azshara and N’Zoth into the expansion certainly didn’t do it any favors, but given how unutterably atrocious BfA’s faction war was I welcomed the distractions. Well, hers anyway. His showing was pretty pathetic.
This might be true for the practical purpose of keeping the Horde and its core cast around, but the fact remains: BfA’s faction war is the worst story Blizzard’s writers have ever told; and however much internal strife influenced the disastrous form it took, they deserve the enduring flak they receive for inflicting it upon the canon.
