The fact that they said this with a straight face, right after those races did, in fact, “get over it” to work in class halls for all of Legion, says so much about how little they respect the story they’ve actually TOLD, versus the cool scenes in their head.
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BFA was such a big troll to all the players. When Sylvanas got promoted to Warchief, I was curious how she was going to fit into the position. Then the BFA cinematic dropped and we see Sylvanas lead the charge and rally the troops against the Alliance army at their doorstep. Even Saurfang rises from the ground and charges ahead with the Horde flag. Faction pride! Woooo! I wonder how the Horde was brought so closely together!?
Then the expansion drops and we find out that everything in the cinematic was a straight up lie. Sylvanas didn’t actually care about the Horde. The Alliance army at their doorstep was totally justified. Saurfang was just looking to get killed and he was pulling his punches against Anduin in hopes that the Alliance actually succeeded in killing the Horde.
…Faction pride! Wooooo! /s
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Fist bump moments bru
Feel the fist pump
Bless Pellex for this work.
Yeah, I certainly got suckered by the BFA cinematic, I hadn’t played since cataclysm but it revved up all the old engines and got me to come back. I think I’m only in for SL to see the conclusion of this mess.
Man, I was dead set convinced, upon seeing the BFA cinematic, that the attack on Lordaeron was going to be this logical consequence of an increasingly belligerent alliance and the Stormheim events, and that Teldrassil would be a tragic escalation. ‘The other way around,’ I thought ‘simply wouldn’t make any sense!’
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Syke, have one of the worst (if not the worst) expansions ever made.
nice one blizzard 10/10 would not like to get trolled again.
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I’ve been wondering for a long time about the accuracy of this translation. I finally got around to checking out the original version of the interview. Since I don’t speak Korean, I used Google Translate to get an alternate translation of the relevant part.
Q. It’s a story about Bfaa, but the Horde is evil and Earl [Alliance!] is becoming good. What’s the difference between Silva[nas] and Garrosh?
A. This is our mistake, we first released the content of Teldrassil and Lordaeron in order to make the game popular during Blackcon [Blizzcon?], which helped make Silva and Horde evil. Three animations will be released before Bfaa like Legion. We’ll cover a variety of characters here. In the case of Jaina, for example, her unusual side will come out. On the other hand, the normal side of the Horde will come out. Also, Anduin’s attack on Lordaeron is not something to be done for justice. Honestly, this is great to show the dignity of the king. The chief does not necessarily represent the camp.
And then I had an IM conversation with a coworker who’s originally from Korea. He looked at both the Korean original and the Google translation. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
Me: So, can I ask about the implications of some of it?
When it says, “This is our mistake” … they don’t really mean “mistake,” right? I mean, they’re not really saying they were wrong to do this?
Maybe it’s more like “That’s my fault”–but really meaning “You can blame me if you don’t like it,” not “I did a bad thing”?
Him: It’s more like “This is our fault.” It sounds like “We are responsible for this.”
Me: Thanks, that’s what I thought.
What about “which helped make Sylvanas and the Horde evil”?
That bit doesn’t quite make sense to me.
Him: The person who is saying this not blaming Sylvanas and Horde.
Me: Hmm, interesting.
Like “We forced them to do it” or like “This isn’t actually true”?
Or maybe you can’t tell, sorry 
It’s just that this whole sentence is weird
Him: It sounds like “We should not release the conversation between Teldrassil and Lordaeron in advance.”
Me: Ahh, I see!
More like “It will make more sense when you see the whole story”?
Him: Yes.
The person is not targeting or blaming certain people. The person keeps saying “This is our fault”
“We should not have done it” - This is the point.
Me: Okay. (I bet he’s not really sorry, though, because it definitely got people to ask a lot of questions and talk about the game!! )
One last question: when they talk about Jaina’s “unusual side” and the “normal side of the Horde” …
That’s “unusual in a bad way,” right?
And “normal” as in … relatable?
Him: Actually, it is more like abnormal way is more close
Me: That makes sense.
Him: I still have no idea about this entire conversation. I know it’s all about the game.
Me: Well, I can explain some of it if you want
Him: You don’t have to. I know it will be a long story. [LOL!! 
]
Me: Well, here’s the short version
I don’t know how much you know about World of Warcraft, but there are two sides, the Alliance and the Horde. They’re not supposed to be “the good guys and the bad guys”–they’re just supposed to be different and have different philosophies.
Him: I don’t know WOW at all.
Me: But just before that interview, the Horde (led by Sylvanas) did something really bad, and the questioner was worried that this meant the Horde was becoming “the bad guys.”
So when it says “the normal side of the Horde will come out,” I assume they mean that to be a good thing.
I mean, a bigger compliment than just “normal,” which sounds pretty neutral in English.
“What’s he like?” “Oh, he’s normal”–not a huge compliment
Him: So, you are Horde ?
Me: I have played both sides.
But ever since this story, I don’t enjoy playing Horde anymore. 
Him: Right. It is not a compliment in Korean too. Normal is just normal.
[snipped a little bit where I showed him the other translation from MMO Champion]
Him: This is not accurate. The statement is more indirect, but this is so direct.
Me: So you think the Google Translate version is better?
Him: Yes. much better. I see some mistranslations too. especially, this one Q. So Sylvanas is the bad guy, Anduin is the good guy? Horde is Evil, Alliance is good? What is different Sylvanas from Garrosh?
This is really mess up translation. LOL
Me: Yeah, I see that the first sentence there has no real equivalent
Okay, just to finish up, anything else that jumps out at you, or did we cover everything?
Him: I think that’s pretty much it
Me: Great, thank you very much!
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Posting for pellexs reminder.
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I’ve been following this thread for a while, and I wanted to share my thoughts as someone who returned to WoW during the first month of BFA, after a very very long break (~5-6 years).
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The story is far more engaging and integrated into the game than I remember it from earlier expansions, so I’ll give the story team credit for that.
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Players have become far more vocally critical of Blizzard than I recalled (it might be selective memory, not sure). Some of it is justified, but the hostile tone can be a deterrent and potentially prevents our criticism from being taken seriously by Blizzard. This thread is doing a good job by maintaining a calmer tone.
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If you read “Before The Storm” in 2018, there is no way on earth you’d think there was any pact with any Jailer. I’m mostly mad about the reconning of “Before The Storm”, because the book is still relatively fresh and tells of a VERY different motive for the 4th war. It shows Sylvanas’s thought bubble. In her own mind, the purpose of the 4th was to conquer Stormwind and raise them as undead:
"And in the bargain she would increase the population of the Forsaken. For all the humans who fell with their city would be reborn to serve her. Would that be so terrible, really? They would be with their loved ones for all time. They would not suffer the daggers of passion or loss any longer. They would need no sleep. They could pursue their interests in death as well as in life. There would at last be unity.
If the humans only understood how terrible life and all its attendant suffering dealt with them, Sylvanas thought, they would leap at the chance".
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There was no Jailer here. No pact. No Shadowlands. No big giant nihilistic scheme to kill entire Azeroth and send them to hell (Maw) permanently - on the contrary, she wanted them to stay in Azeroth as undead. This is what the 4th war was about all along.
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I would argue that this retcon is far worse than any interview Travis Day gave (he no longer works for Blizzard as per his Twitter btw), because this text is canon. Unlike some random sentence a staff member emitted in an interview, many eyes went over this book and approved it for release.
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Broken Shore. The book further confirms - through her thought bubble - that Sylvanas regretted Varian’s death, did not mean to abandon him, and that it was Vol’jin’s orders to retreat and not let the Horde die. This is different than the story Blizz tells now, that it was all part of her “plan” to rise to power.
“She had respected Varian . She had even liked him . And the specter of the Legion had been so dreadful that she had been willing to put aside the hatred that fuelled her now as food and drink had fuelled her in life. […] She had told no one the regret she had felt when, standing on the stern of her ship, she beheld the green smoke of the explosion below where Varian had fallen.”
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There were also a couple of paragraphs in the same book about how Sylvanas still had lingering feelings for Nathanos. This was also hinted in the earlier short story “Dark Mirror” (very well written story, I only started to like Sylvanas after reading it). This was retconned in “Shadows Rising”, claiming it was only a transactional, one-sided relationship - but I’d give Blizz the benefit of doubt and assume this is something Sylvanas can have a change of heart on.
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Long story short, I liked how BFA got me engaged again. I did not like being misled by the story team, and I did not like having a book I enjoyed reversed and retracted altogether.
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There’s a part of me that regrets getting invested again in lore, knowing that it leads to disappointment, due to the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, outright mistakes and retractions.
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This criticism comes from a place of love to the Warcraft franchise, love that I sustained for over a decade, even when I wasn’t playing. I enjoyed many novels and short stories. I re-read “A Road To Damnation” and “The Last Guardian” every few years when I was bored, they’re great. I still love Warcraft, which is exactly why it irks me when a character I just started liking gets her history rewritten, and her own internal monologues are reframed as a “lie” (?), to fit a newly-concocted narrative.
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Thanks for your perspective, Adarria. I’m glad you find this thread useful, and I completely agree with you about the retconning of BtS. I’m really starting to come around to the idea that the story of BfA was rewritten not once, but twice (or more) during the leadup to the expansion.
I have to say that I didn’t find the story being integrated into the game to be a plus; that only meant that it was impossible to ignore. You couldn’t just play the parts you wanted to play without finding that things you might want to do were gated behind stuff like the war campaign (ETA: for example, I can’t create a Zandalari character because I didn’t do the war campaign). The result was that I barely played my Horde characters at all for the entire expansion because I hated the main story so much and it was inescapable. Which is too bad, because parts of Zandalar look really cool.
But I’m glad somebody liked it.
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If you dump the entire pre-patch stuff, alter the war campaigns to being the Horde investigating Ashvane and the Alliance investigating Zul, and change the 8.1 Raid to being Azshara hitting both capitals and taking out Rastakhan (Horde raid) and Katherine Proudmoore (Alliance raid) leading to Xal’atah conning both factions into Azshara’s ocean floor trap to lure in the wearer of the Heart, we would have a fairly solid expansion without the animosity between players of the factions to the other faction AND the animosity towards the developers.
You would then have to retool the lead in to Shadowlands and do something about the warfronts, but that wouldn’t be difficult.
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After careful consideration, I had my Shadowlands purchase refunded. I’d probably still follow story developments through wowhead news articles, out of curiosity - but sticking around and playing feels like sunken cost fallacy at this point.
The official story right now is “Sylvanas conned you all”, and I don’t appreciate that. For over a decade of quests, stories and books, there was no jailer, no secret is evil scheme to send us all to hell that I somehow missed. I don’t like how the current story direction gaslights the player, I don’t want to support this anymore.
Hoping to have a good reason to come back some day.
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I’ve been banging on this particular drum since the Garrison days, but noooooo.
We need better writers. Blizzard insists they’ve come to understand how to tell stories in an MMO after bungling Illidan’s story in BC but they clearly haven’t.
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The “Sylvanas conned you all” is just such an easy copout that can really be applied to anything. So lets say we beat the Jailer but Sylvanas lives BUT, BUT here is the twist in actuality she was prepping us to fight against the Void lords and in fact has been a good guy/girl the whole time…
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My appreciation and long-term following of the Warcraft franchise is based on short stories, comics and novels, some of which are written by the current names leading the WoW story. Same folks. Pretty sure the current lead is responsible for “Three Sisters” and “Dark Mirror”, the Velonara secret hunter quests in Trueshot Lodge, all of them are fantastic works. These are the things that I LOVED in the Warcraft universe. IMHO there ARE talented writers on the payroll there. Perhaps that’s not the problem.
And some of those people suffer a lot of unjustified internet bashing by anonymous users (i.e. people hate-posting against Christie Golden about the Telsdrassil patch, despite the fact she joined company as a full-time employee AFTER that patch was long written. She’s in a team that doesn’t get to make WoW lore decisions at all). It’s important for me NOT to criticize anyone specifically.
The reality is:
- We don’t know who made what lore decision, and how much weight the words of staff member X has over staff member Y etc. Any finger-pointing is speculative and thus unfair.
- We don’t know how the decision-making process works.
- Maybe certain decision are driven by marketing or other non-writer types. Dunno.
I still don’t like the end result, regardless of what inner workings are responsible for it - which is why I’m skipping SL.
They can pull it off if they’re aiming for players who JUST follow the story through WoW voice-over and cinematics. If you read some of the novels and stories, you can’t fall for that. They’re written from an omniscient storyteller perspective, portraying Sylvanas’s own thoughts and feelings from within her head. You’d think that if there ever was a long-con with a Jailer, it’d cross her mind sometime in “War Crimes” or “Before The Storm” (this one happened JUST before the 4th war! It was the BFA prelude novel!).
Reframing a decade of gameplay and writings as “actually, it was all a lie” reduces the value and meaning of any ingame content.
Maybe I’m expecting a more cerebral experience from something that isn’t meant to be thought-provoking. Maybe I’m not their target audience anymore. I know most players don’t follow lore, some use addons to skip reading quest text. For them, whatever’s not in a cinematic never happened. When Blizzard contradict themselves, it probably doesn’t bother such players at all.
EDITS: I don’t speak English as a first language. Fixed typos and bad grammar.
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I may not always agree with the tone that people take, even if I understand the vitriol. A lot of great works and cultural pillars are getting reinvented by people who were not responsible for what made them great in the first place and hollowing them out with their own ideals and aspirations. When authors, writers, and filmmakers prioritize leaving their mark over respecting the cultural institution that these things are, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset about it.
I happen to think story-telling is a sacred thing, and it’s how we as people have been able to communicate virtues and values before we had a written language. I also happen to think that when modern-day myths like Star-Trek, Conan the Barbarian, Star Wars, Spider-Man, become popular that it’s not exactly and accident, and that those stories resonate powerfully for a reason, and taking part in that world is not to be taken lightly. That is absolutely what I feel like Danuser and Golden are doing.
Like Rian Johnson’s outing with the Star Wars franchise, an absolute disrespect to what came prior. My gripe with comics isn’t the fact that a hero may be re-imagined once in a while as much as their decision making leads to writers with little-to-no experience writing comics are given some of the biggest characters to write, then treat them like stepping stones. These creators are putting the franchises on a resume, not celebrating them as fans would.
While Golden may not have officially been on the Blizzard team, she’s been writing for them for at least a decade before getting hired for BfA. I don’t believe for an instant that she’s not kept in the loop, consulted with, or asked to opine on the story direction, or even feedback on the directions they’re considering.
We may not be able to pin certain things on her, but the criticism has to go somewhere. Afrasiabi’s been accused of throwing her and Danuser out as scapegoats and I’m not sure that’s any more or less likely. You’re right, we don’t know, but we can, and I do, infer.
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Interesting comparison. I’d like to elaborate on this.
This might be slightly off-topic, but I absolutely loved Rian Johnson’s latest movie, “Knives Out”. I think it proves he really is a brilliant writer, Johnson has the ability to make great art - an ability which is not reflected in “The Last Jedi”, for some unapparent reason (according to fans. I’m not a Star Wars fangirl and can’t form an educated opinion on this). Maybe one day he’d publish an autobiography, but otherwise it’ll remain a mystery.
I guess we’ll never know why his SW movie wasn’t good, but I suspect that much like the BFA-to-SL plotline, the factors are more complex than “good/bad writers”.
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I guess I just take the Occam’s Razor approach.
Speculating that the story was bad because the writers turned in a dud assumes a lot less than speculating that there were other, more nebulous forces behind it.
I think Rian Johnson, because he said as much, just wanted to subvert expectations. That assumes a lot less than something factor we might only hear about in some tell-all.
In comics, though, there appears to also be a lack of editing to rein in their writer’s off-the-wall antics. I don’t know what the equivalent for WoW would be.
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This is mostly me taking a guess, but Ryan has said in an interview that he first started coming up with ideas for Knives Out 10 years ago. Which means he’s had about a decade to work out the script and carefully craft the story he wanted to tell. It was also a passion project for him because he wanted to bring back the old “whodoneit?” genre of murder mysteries to the big screen.
Compare that to his work on Star Wars. Disney wasted little time after buying out Star Wars and got to work on Force Awakens almost immediately. Then there were two years between Force Awakens and the release of Last Jedi.
Moving production is a lengthy process which means Ryan needed that Star Wars script finished VERY soon. In another interview I believe it was stated Ryan wasn’t finished writing his script before Force Awakens was done filming, much less out.
So already we can see the difference. Ten years to craft the perfect story for something he was deeply passionate about vs a few months to craft a script for a movie that higher ups demanded be ready by a certain date to fuel Walt Disney’s Evil Empire of Joy.
This applies equally to WoW’s writers. They do not get to make the big, sweeping decisions. Where we go next is almost certainly chosen by marketing teams and higher ups. The producers, if you will. They’re then put on a tight time frame within which to work and get things done because the next expansion needs to be fully written by X date so they can release the expansion on Y date so they can make Z profits.
It is an unfortunate consequence of the monetization of story telling in our modern world that sometimes even great writers are forced to put out a sub-par product because they’re working for someone else. Not working for their own love of story telling.
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Disregarding the fact that certain characters went into very surprising directions, the movie was too artsy. It did not follow the SW formula fans expected and for a middle-of-saga film that is not a good thing. There is a time and place for art and subverting expectations and a SW movie trilogy is not that place.
They should have given him a stand alone film set in the SW universe and he could go ham.
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But how does that relate to the BFA story and people feeling the expansion’s marketing (prelude novel included) was misleading, in your opinion?
Let’s go back to the WoW topic, and not get into Star Wars too much.
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