I swear, if I didn’t know better, I would suspect the writers were talking to the audience. Like when Blightcaller made a joke about how easily the NEs changed their allegiance. It was a nod and wink to the audience of course, but what about the orc’s statement? It felt weird and awkward, and I wish I knew what they were thinking when they wrote/approved that line.
5 Likes
actually, we do have some insight on that particular line.
basically terran explains that this random orc is supposed to represent and ignorant soldier that never encountered someone like malfurion.
2 Likes
Most orcs have been happily murdering poorly trained civilians of Ashenvale, at best some sentinel forces. Even a standard druid would be fairly uncommon and powerful against your typical grunt; Malfurion is basically a demigod.
11 Likes
Telling it from a horde point of view either way doesn’t explain this unfortunately.
6 Likes
But what about other 10,000 year old druids and warriors?
3 Likes
Rather rare in the general Night Elf population.
1 Like
Oh, and here I thought the population was, by and large, really old, and thus had few amateurs of any sort. Didn’t W3 have the Night Elves smack the orcs around and force them into a position where they drank demon blood.
2 Likes
Kicking the “fearless” orcs into self preservation mode is a pretty big deal… I think that’s the story people would like to see again, but the sad thing is the other races beside worgen and the players are no where to be found.
So it make the night elves seem like their own faction. At this point they are probably desperate for their lands to return to them and to heal the forests that they will do anything.
The point of view of a traumatized Troll soldier that had been the leader of a caravan and was now praying to Bwonsamdi not to take him. It wasn’t in the point of view of the Orc soldier.
4 Likes
I think a large part of the night elves plight is Blizzard’s inability to write convincing female leads. Its especially noticeable Alliance-side since there is no female Wrynn.
This, plus the Cataclysm-MoP habit of kicking night elves to show how mean the horde is supposed to be, as well as developing Varian at the expense of Tyrande and the night elves as a people.
And Elune. Remember she tells Tyrande to follow Varian.
BIngo. The writers from cataclysm onward are WC2 fanboys ODing on their rose-tinted goggles, interested in laying a type of orc that’s written to be raid fodder in every other fantasy genre so you don’t feel guilty killing them. Liked Thrall’s WC3 era Horde? Too bad.
13 Likes
I think that the night elves’ situation is likely due to a perfect storm of all the reasons mentioned.
As Droite says, the night elves have a lot of lore, a lot of unit types, and a lot of exposure during the game. So I can see a lot of writers thinking ‘losing a few unnamed characters won’t hurt them, they’ve got plenty.’ Land? ‘They’ve got presence in all of northern Kalimdor, a few subzones won’t hurt.’
There’s a lot of night elves, their buildings, their troops, and/or their themes in Teldrassil, Darkshore, Ashenvale, Felwood, Moonglade, Winterspring, Hyjal, and Feralas. Gotta balance that out somehow, just as other zones got balanced out between Alliance and Horde because of the starting imbalance.
And again, the night elves are the race closest to the Horde - closest to the biggest Horde capitol, the city that houses most of their playable races. So of course it’d be the easiest place for them to attack with the most troops.
So, for someone just looking at the numbers and spread of characters, it makes perfect sense to beat up the night elves.
But that’s really unsatisfying to night elf players. And, as was a common complaint during Cataclysm, the fact that so many of these areas were not just lost, but lost -to the Horde-, just made the defeat more bitter. Because no matter how many wonderful, polite posters there are (and I send hugs to every one of you), there will be that one jerk with a red background gloating about it - and those kinds of people are the ones that easily stick in people’s memory.
On top of that, for those same balance reasons, those lost zones can’t and shouldn’t be recovered, because that just restarts the need for them to be conquered again. It feels like that requirement to leave things be leaked into the game in one of the most frustrating ways - ‘yup, we lost, how about you go collect some flowers in the next zone to cool down. Oh, wait, we’re losing over there too. shrug’.
So, the night elves started with a lot. They still have a lot, despite those losses. But all they get is stories of loss, with the occasional temporary halting of loss and a tweet here and there saying they’re still doing great.
Going by tropes, I think their situation is closer to being the Worf Effect. The night elves started with a huge amount of reserves, so they’re the ones getting hacked to pieces to show how cool and powerful the antagonist is.
Their awesome, visible victories are few and far between - and again, only present -after- a big loss. Does it matter to the statistics of their success? Not a lot. Does it matter to the perception of their success? A ton.
I suppose that to me, this boils down to the feeling that there aren’t any influential writers who have a passion for writing night elves. They’re said to be powerful, they’ve got a lot of exposure, they have a lot of cool-looking troops and art assets - it all looks wonderful on paper.
But the actual experience is flat (Val’sharah, night elves hugging trees and not affecting the Alliance playable night elves at all, but with great art assets!), depressing (look at those reaching arms of the night elf civilians as they horribly burn to death! Hear their screams! See how sad Saurfang feels about it!), and sometimes even degrading (A Little Patience. I don’t think I need to elaborate.)
…Reading this back, I apologize for the wall of text. Hopefully it’s somewhat coherent.
32 Likes
Doesn’t help that said writers are hacks. Destroying is far easier than creating or building anything. Like you stated earlier, the Night elf story is a story of loss. And that’s depressing.
Blizzard actively encourages this toxicity though. Its not much of a surprise that there are metal detectors at Blizzcon now.
They don’t have a passion for anything that isn’t a orc, a human, or Sylvanas.
9 Likes
Perhaps, but I think that even a writer who doesn’t hate the night elves, who is just indifferent to them, might also go along with this writing because they don’t think it’s causing real harm when there is so much night elf lore/units/land remaining.
If they don’t have a serious connection to night elves, to emotionally feeling their losses and commiserating with the night elf players’ desires to -experience- their victories, then it’s easy to brush off the players’ comments as entitled complaining. ‘Because look at all they have! They won Ashenvale, didn’t you read the tweet? They got Val’sharah, they got Sentinel armies invading Suramar (which I did think was cool), they got to quest with Tyrande - and force the Horde quest with her, too! What more do you want?’
And that’s a big thing that frustrates me - it’s trying to capture the emotional impact of this story and convey it in a way that even night-elf-apathetic readers might agree with where we’re coming from, even if they disagree with the individual cases we’re complaining about.
14 Likes
I think one of the problems the Kaldorei suffer from is while they get a focus it tends to be a focus on what they have lost. It usually has to do with their once glorious empire. It sets them up to feel like a race in decline, like the not-so-proverbial survivors of Atlantis living in the ruins of their past. I honestly cannot think of a time when the story was about the Kaldorei as they are, going forward (unless it is about them loosing something).
With that in mind, when you Compound onto that the modern day losses they get and it comes out feeling like they are a punching bag.
14 Likes
I always refer to Kosak’s post when it comes to how warcraft is suppose to feel:
“In truth, a historical account of the Warcraft universe reads like a war crimes trial. Empires topple, leaders are corrupted, populations are massacred, entire civilizations fall to ruin (often at their peak of power)… Warcraft is a dark place. Just ask the Draenei: We trashed their homeworld and tortured its last uncorrupted children for tens of thousands of years. We’re downright cruel. I’ve never met a more sadistic team of story folk.”
EVERYONE has suffered greatly, every keep losing and always barely holding on. Humans, as a comparison had 7 nations+Theramore. Darkshire was lost to the Legion, Westfall is at best still an outlaw paradise and they recently lost Varian.
Now it is down to 3. The gnomes still only have half their city, the draenei were nearly massacred, AGAIN, in Legion and was only saved thanks to heroes. Lets not forget the trolls, who has always been WoW punching bag more so than the night elves.
WoW story is a story of loss, that is the point! That even with every lost everyone suffers you have to keep going. This is a “hero factory” afterall and so far, even one of the worse offenders of the night elves(Illidan) ended up a hero. Hell, it is actually amazing the night elves have all 5 of their most important Warcraft 3 character still alive.
While these thoughts are still rattling around, here’s another perception issue: neutral factions.
There are plenty of complaints about how A) night elves lost druids to neutrality, and B) how other druid races are shoved into night elf aesthetics for neutrality - part of the larger complaint that neutral factions are all Alliance-themed and the Horde gets ignored when neutral content is the focus.
I agree with each of those points, and they create a really annoying situation.
If a player is more annoyed about point B, then they feel like night elf lore is shoved in their face whenever they go to a druidic/Cenarion Circle area.
If a player is more annoyed about point A, then they feel like those druidic/Cenarion Circle areas aren’t contributing to night elf lore, because those night elves are just as supportive of the Horde as they are to their Darnassian relatives.
As an example, I started playing this character as an Alliance partisan druid in Cataclysm because I was ticked off that there was no comment from the Cenarion Circle about Garrosh’s incursion into Ashenvale. I didn’t expect them all to jump in on the Alliance side, but I wanted to hear about some grumblings, some anger towards Garrosh’s Horde, maybe a sternly worded letter -at least-.
(Actually, wasn’t it a bunch of Cenarion druids that were ambushed and killed by the Twilight’s Hammer disguised as Horde? Was there an official Cenarion response?)
I expect that’s a similar feeling that a lot of Alliance players have when looking at neutral factions. That these neutral factions aren’t providing anything for their associated Alliance race/faction because they happily sit on their hands whenever conflict with the Horde arises - even when it’s written as a stupidly black-and-white conflict.
And on the other side, this presentation isn’t good for the Horde. The tauren’s dual reverence of the sun and the moon didn’t get explored in druids - they became priest and paladins. Druid characters are still largely night elf, leaving the Horde without a clear, easy-to-see druidic tradition that’s all their own. So walking into Val’sharah or any other druid town feels like a jab implying the Horde are just hangers-on in the druid game.
So, neither side feels a claim to these neutral Alliance-themed factions, and each feels that the other side is gaining more from it than they are. Which leads to a lot of frustration on either side.
Additionally, and this ventures into weirder theories that have a higher chance of being clouded by my own biases, I think this situation generates frustration for Alliance players in another way.
Say a player runs into a night elf NPC dressed like a druid. Because Cenarion night elf druids and Alliance night elf druids have the same style, it’s difficult to tell if this is a NPC on your faction of not. For a Horde-race druid, they tend to have more distinction between their Cenarion style (mostly copied night elf stuff that doesn’t add to their own lore) and their Horde-aligned style (which typically is closer to their racial faction’s style than a Horde druidic style), it’s a lot easier to tell if they’re on your faction.
And because, by my recollection at least, there seem to be more night elf Cenarion druids than Horde-race Cenarion druids, it’s more likely that a Horde-race druid will be Horde-aligned than a night elf druid will be Alliance-aligned.
Edit: I wonder if this has any effect on the apparent apathy of Alliance players and faction pride of Horde players - when one sees a Horde race in the world, they are most likely Horde and will fight the Alliance, while when one sees an Alliance character, there’s a higher chance that they’re neutral and won’t lift a finger to help an Alliance player against a Horde one.
Once again, this generates frustration on both sides. Night elves feel that a portion of their culture was carved away and given to the Horde, while Horde are annoyed that they’re not allowed to have their own druidic tradition and keep having night elf stuff shoved in their faces. Alliance feel annoyed that night elf druid themes aren’t allowed to be Alliance themes, and Horde are annoyed that Horde druid themes aren’t druid themes.
I think this second point is getting better, as there’s more Alliance-aligned druid units participating in the war on the side of the Alliance and a lot of unique Zandalari druid themes, but I think the Cenarion Circle still needs a half-Horde makeover. Or fold the CC back into the night elves and create a new druid faction, balanced in theme from the very beginning.
17 Likes
I would honestly rather they did this, set them with a HQ somewhere truly neutral, perhaps on an island that currently isn’t on the map to avoid it being tied to either faction. Additionally it needs to be lead by a council represented by a member of each race, and Malfurion needs to not be on it. The neutrality thing needs to be done with as of BfA. He is a lot cooler when he is rooting people to death.
I would, however, argue the issues run deeper than just the Cenarion Circle. The entire balance spec has an Elune motif that only really fits the Kaldorei, and trying to make it fit other races feels bad for everyone involved; Kaldorei players feel their culture is being given away to others and everyone else feels like its being forced onto them over their own cultural norms.
10 Likes
That was my point in my last sentence. Blizzard is only intrested in a few things, so they spend the bare minimum of effort on races and subjects they don’t care about. WoD was an example of them losing interest in an entire expansion and leaving so many good stories to rot.
Now we get to see how sad Saurfang is again.
He’s clearly never worked for Games Workshop. Warcraft is the the children’s table of the dark fantasy genre. Even Bioware handles more mature topics.
No, its not. Warcraft is the same story repeated ad nausem because the developers love it that much.
6 Likes
That is because at the end of it warcraft is going to have a “happy ending”(relatively) and personally I am ok with not having everything be so grim dark. There is only so much of that I can tolerate.
As for mature topic, we have torture, murder, genocide and truth be told I think people still enjoy WoW story, aside from the most ardent detrators you will find in the storm forums.
Since Warcraft 1 the good guys have lost. Even the temporary peace after Warcraft 2 was followed by destruction of the very same nation that was the bastion of Light for the Alliance. But as mentioned I expect things will turn out better. The night elves will get a new home, the only question has always been when and what form it will take
I just hope we get to keep darkshore, and not set up a city, at least another stronghold. Maybe in ashenvale? I just don’t see this coming to fruition in game, maybe a novel.