"I Feel Lied To," Post-BfA Version

Lore Story Forum
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Moving back to Blizzcon 2017, here are Alex Afrasiabi’s remarks from when they were still keeping some mystery about the order of Teldrassil and Undercity.

https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2017-world-warcraft-battle-azeroth-panel-transcript

Alex: We are here today to talk about the Battle for Azeroth and prepare you for the coming war. Right now, we have all seen that incredible cinematic. We are from the get-go: battle lines are drawn, and what I like best about that cinematic (and it does so many things, so well) is that it reinforces the foundations of Warcraft; because whether we are fighting the Burning Legion, the Scourge, Old gods, Dragon Aspects, Elemental Lords, or yes… timetraveling Orcs, our hearts and minds are with our factions. We do what we do in this worlds, first and foremost, for the HORDE! … and for the ALLIANCE! — and that makes us the champions of Azeroth. The greatest hope the world has ever known, and also its biggest threat. But this is WoW. We don’t just get to watch awesome cinematics. We get to live them. Because to get to the Battle for Azeroth, you are going to have to go through the battle for Lordaeron.

Like the Broken Shore, we will pick up where the cinematic left off; and what goes down that day will change Warcraft history forever. Now some of you might be asking: Hey, Alex. Why would the Alliance attack the Undercity? It is a good question. It is a good question. Here is a better question: why would the Horde burn down Teldrassil?

Did Teldrassil fall first, and lead to the attack of Undercity; or was the burning of Teldrassil a response to the bold Alliance attack on Lordaeron? You will find out. Think about this: the stage is set for an Alliance-controlled Eastern Kingdoms, and a Horde-controlled Kalimdor with one great big sea separating the two continents — which leads us to our search for allies. In our quest for victory, we will seek out the Kul’Tirans as the Alliance, and the Zandalari as the Horde. Coincidentally, both of these nations have extremely powerful navies, which we are going to need to span that great sea. Let me leave you with this thought: no matter who fired the first shot, we are in an all-out war. It is our duty as Alliance, as Horde, to defend our people, our families, and our homes. This is the Battle for Azeroth.

So to recap: the Alliance and the Horde are in an all-out war. All hatreds have reignited. It is both factions strike at each other’s hearts. Now with the world divided, we seek out lost territories, and new powerful resources; and with no external threats, we turn our fury to each other. We fight for our faction’s survival, and our place in this world.

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This stuff is pretty bad. It honestly reads like they were promoting a very different xpac than what we actually got.

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Lord, what a trainwreck BFA was ROFL. This is awful to relive.

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From August 21, 2018 (about a week after BfA’s release):

https://www.pcgamesn.com/world-of-warcraft/sylvanas-garrosh

Blizzard has addressed concerns voiced by World of Warcraft players in the run up to the release of Battle for Azeroth, saying that it has no plans to repeat story beats that have been seen in previous expansions. In a presentation at Gamescom, producer Micheal Bybee says that “there are definitely other plans in store,” for both the Alliance and the Horde…

Concerns were mostly aimed at the fact that the current Horde Warchief, Sylvanas, was following too closely in the footsteps of previous leader, Garrosh, by very clearly putting forward the Horde as the bad guys, yet again.

According to Bybee, however, those fears are unfounded. He says that “the key thing is that it’s all part of a story thread that we’ve had planned out for a long time. The Sylvanas burning of the tree was maybe a low moment for the Horde, and the Saurfang piece was maybe a high moment, but those are just the first couple of drum beats of a very long story that we’re telling in Battle for Azeroth.”

“We’re super excited with where it’s going to go, and I can just say that we’re not going to do to Sylvanas what happened with Garrosh,” Bybee says. That should help to alleviate the concerns of Horde players who were worried that the unfortunate matter of that genocide would cast them as the baddies. It also more or less confirms that Sylvanas won’t follow in the footsteps of Garrosh in acting as the final raid boss for the expansion as well.

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Maybe they just genuinely think that the Horde and/or Sylvanas wasn’t evil in BfA?

Maybe it’s just their view of the whole situation? I’ve seen them mention it quite a lot that the Horde and Sylvanas aren’t evil, so maybe they just have a different definition of evil than most people (which obviously doesn’t make it any better, but still).

I personally feel like it’s kind of weird to have a faction start a war and commit genocide and then come out and say that they aren’t evil when they spent an entire expansion showing us the opposite, but with Shadowlands we learn that not only did they commit genocide, they also sent everyone to hell which makes their actions even worse instead of better.
Waiting for the story to play out has proven them wrong even further.

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Some tidbits from the Blizzcon 2017 fan Q&A session. Most of the questions were about gameplay, but there were a few interesting lore nuggets mixed in. All the quoted bits are from pages 2 and 3.

https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2017-world-warcraft-qa-panel-transcript

https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2017-world-warcraft-qa-panel-transcript

https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/blizzcon-2017-world-warcraft-qa-panel-transcript/3

(Note: I’m putting in the question about Jaina not because it feels like a lie to me, but for comparison and contrast with how they talk about Sylvanas. Also, I think it’s interesting that the questioner used the G word with regard to her and the devs didn’t correct it. Not that I think they think it’s accurate, but I think it shows that they’re happy to have players hate characters on the “other side,” even irrationally. And also, what’s that bit about “responsible for what the Horde is today”??)

Participant 14 : In the Battle of Azeroth, is Jaina actually a good guy? I mean, are we just supposed to forget the whole genocide of Dalaran?

Alex : Jaina is complicated, just like any of the other characters. She’s as evil as I am. Bad example.

Jenny : How evil are you?

Alex : As these guys. So look… if I am Jaina… as a character, Jaina is racked with regrets… looking over her past decisions and the things that she’s done, responsible for the death of her father, potentially responsible for what the Horde is today as a result of that.

What could she have done differently at Stratholme? Could she have saved Arthas? What about the Battle for Undercity? So if you could have unpacked all that, break all of those things apart, it has left a character that has some damage (and then not even speaking about Theramore). So one of the things we are going to do is explore that damage, explore those decisions with Jaina, and try to understand how she got to be the way she is, and hopefully pull her out of it.

So… no, she’s not evil. She’s conflicted, and it is something we absolutely want to explore.

Participant 17 : Hi there my name is Grant. With the Horde attacking Teldrassil, and the Alliance attacking Lordaeron, what are your plans for the starting zones in those areas, and also just some of the other leveling zones in the Eastern Kingdoms?

Alex : Starting zones are not going to change. In order to appreciate the burning of Teldrassil, you kind of have to understand what Teldrassil is first; and the wait time works in our game is that it flows by level. So you’ll still be able to start in Shadowglen, go to Dolanaar, Darnassus, Darkshore, go through all of that and then when you hit 110 — we will burn it all down.

The same thing for Lordaeron, and what happens there. You’ll still make a character in Deathknell, and go through all those cool experiences, and get to the place of a questgiver, and all the other fun stuff; and then we’ll see what happens; but once you do get to that point in Battle for Azeroth — where these events have occurred, the land around you will (of course) change; and potentially more. You know we have got a Warfront in Arathi that who knows what’ll happen there.

Jenny : Alright, another viewer would like to know: are the continents of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms completely split between the factions; and what does that mean for places like Silvermoon city and the Exodar?

Alex : Well, Silvermoon and Exodar are still Alliance and Horde respectively. Those zone boundaries are very tricky for NPCs to cross. We will have a fiction in place, obviously.

Those two are kinda the last bastions of their factions, and maybe a way in for those factions as well, and we will be sure to use them in this battle.

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Why did they feel the need to mislead us like this?I saw no sign of “gray” in this expansion’s story line.Just the Horde once again starting another pointless war after committing yet another atrocity against the Alliance before turning on itself with another pointless civil war with an evil Warchief with the Alliance helping out the “Good Horde” once again.Meanwhile the Alliance takes it’s place on it’s golden light-infused high horse to defend itself against the “unwashed savages” of the Horde.How boring.Does Blizzard truly think the Alliance is capable of doing no wrong so they have to hit the horde with the villain bat each time they fill the need to drum up faction conflict?

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lol the purge was genocide why do horde players have to make stuff up

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That’s probably a reference to the Edge of night. At least they didn’t lie about that.

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So umm Classic is looking real good after reading this. 15 years of content before hitting BFA and BFA part 2:Shadowlands

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The PR Team must of realised the expansion would be massively unpopular, but in classic Corperate fashion the guys making the crap refused to admit they might be wrong, forcing PR to work overtime.

I tend to get on most companies backs for giving PR and Marketing to much creative control, but this is a time when you really needed to listen to what they were saying. If PR is forcing you to lie about every single aspect of an expansion in order to keep hype, maybe you should rewrite it.

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This always seems to preclude really, really bad story decisions in recent shows.

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Movies, comics and games too.

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You mean the desire to get a “Game of Thrones” moment is what drives bad story? If so, I definitely agree.

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“So BFA WON’T end up with a Horde Civil War between ‘honorable’ and ‘dishonorable’ factions, the Alliance joining forces with the ‘Honorable Horde’ in attacking an Ogrimmar held by the ‘Dishonorable Horde’ that results in the Evil Warchief being overthrown, who then retreats to an alternate reality where, in the hunt for the Evil Warchief and their new allies, we’ll encounter old characters who were killed off in past games/expansions? Good to know!”

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This is actually what makes me believe in the “late in development story rewrite” theory.

Blizzard’s a big company, and with a lot of divisions, no doubt. At some point, they probably had a big “BfA Overview” meeting in which they outlined the basic way the expansion was slated to go, and then everyone broke up to work on their individual detail parts. This “overview” probably tracks with all of these pre-BfA comments we got about moral grayness, equal H/A representation, etc. It also tracks with some artifacts of dialogue we still have in the game, namely the odd tidbits Rexxar drops in reference to nonspecific actions by Jaina, or the bizarre rewrite of Brennadam to be a needlessly cruel Horde attack instead of a quilboar one.

At some point later in the development of BfA Alpha, I believe they tore out the whole script and rewrote it to the BfA we got, with its much starker black and white divides and no middle ground/gray area whatsoever. That, I believe, is why we have so many statements on the record that don’t jive with the final product - the non-Ion and non-Alex people they spoke to probably didn’t know that a lot of what they had originally been told had been (drastically) changed, and they were working off of the old description they’d had way back in their big meeting or whatever.

After that, you got slippery non-answers from Ion and Alex that were essentially PR damage control from the earlier interviews, muddling the most egregious misstatements and outright ignoring the ones they thought they could get away with (like not repeating MoP, which is technically true since Sylv wasn’t the end-expac boss). Then, they gave all those clam-up “dojo” statements and have basically not frankly communicated on the state of the story since.

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Yeah and they where making sylvanas super evil literally while travis was saying this stuff, it was a month into the whole sylvanas ordered the horde to burn brenndamm

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Basically from what we can see in all of these interviews is that Blizzard has a big problem in the management and communication as every head department seems to be unaware of even what the guys right next to them are even doing(without mention you can tell these guys have a big ego)

For worst it seems like they don’t actually respect their own work and creations as they see genocide(this goes to every playable race) as a good way to start a storyline rather than a thing they should avoided in this particular setting as a mmorpg isn’t the best place to move forward the aftermatch of such tragedy and most important the races of this game doesn’t need sell tragic to guilt trip the players to play with then or buy stuff related to them.

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The way I see it, they’re either being purposefully loose with definitions, or have a worrying sense of morality.

Though, I suppose they could just be given a really awful direction they’re told they have to go, like Brack told them Sylvanas has to burn down Teldrassil, and just trying to work around it.

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Imagine thinking sylvanas was never gonna be a villian