Imagine thinking sylvanas was never gonna be a villian
Yea, cause that’s what I said. Not that they were directed to have characters to specific things.
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Friendly reminder that this will go much smoother if everyone remembers not to respond to Katiera and her inflammatory bait.
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Yes. There is a very obvious lack of communication at Blizzard. They also tried to say that there was no communication problems in one of the dev interviews.
Blizzard needs to grow up and realize they aren’t a small indie company anymore. Sadly, mismanagement seems to be really common in the multi-billion dollar dev studios in the last few years.
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Well… can’t have a communication problem if there’s no communication.
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By the way, contrast this (from August 2018) …
… with this interview with Steve Danuser, lead narrative designer, from March 2020:
https://www.windowscentral.com/world-warcraft-interview-building-story-shadowlands
Battle for Azeroth’s character arc with Sylvanas feels a tad familiar to how Garrosh Hellscream played out in previous expansions. How do you feel about accusations that Sylvanas is becoming a "Garrosh 2.0?"
One of the major themes in this expansion was expressed by Sylvanas in the opening words of the Battle for Azeroth trailer: “Ours is a cycle of hatred.” To demonstrate that there is a cycle, we created a story structure for Sylvanas that, on the surface, echoed many broad strokes of the road Garrosh took. A warchief promoted under questionable circumstances. A brutal act of aggression that instigated conflict. Distrust among the inner circle that led to an uprising. These parallels were intentional. But it’s within the nuance that we sought to show the story grow and change.
The Horde believed that, by putting the wise Vol’jin in place as warchief, their future was secure. But they hadn’t changed the underlying structures or practices that enabled Garrosh’s tyranny in the first place. The untimely passing of Vol’jin and a bit of manipulation in the aftermath of his death were all it took for the pattern to begin repeating.
Similarly, the Alliance found itself with a new leader after King Varian’s fall on the Broken Shore, but Anduin was so focused on living up to his father’s legacy that it blinded him to certain truths. Those blind spots proved costly and will be something he has to come to terms with going forward.
Once the plot was put into motion, the differences in the stories of Garrosh and Sylvanas began taking shape. The theme of change was brought home by Saurfang’s words in the cinematic that preceded the mak’gora: “Breaking the cycle.” Horde players were given the opportunity to see both sides of the conflict and decide which they wanted to follow. This time, the army that gathered at the gates of Orgrimmar didn’t raid the city; they caught a glimpse of what Sylvanas had been working toward the whole time.
So, is this their official explanation for how BfA is different from MoP? Because I, for one, still feel lied to about that particular point.
Also, Danuser seems to think that the theme of Anduin living up to Varian’s legacy actually happened in BfA, but I mained Alliance and I didn’t see it. 
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I generally do not like to wretch, or have bile churn in my stomach. But I still clicked on this thread, knowing full well that I would not come away feeling enthused and gleeful about the Story as expressed by Blizzard…
Going through it in small drips was comical. But looking at it all splayed out is gross.
I want to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt and say they were just trying to avoid spoilers… but they were luring people with a premise that was never there.
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completely agree with you, at least on the horde side.
For an expansion that was meant to be about faction pride. I saw none as a horde player. Even at the most granular level ignoring what happened at the start with burning of teldrassil and complete villain batting.
As a horde player, our faction couldn’t win simple 1 on 1 fights fairly. We didn’t have questing where horde leader took out a batch of alliance heros with just their skill or power, that would fill us with pride. Like how Jaina was freezing horde soldiers all around her.
Not only was horde pc made to play a villain’s role and constantly reminded of it, we also had to win every fight in a shady way.
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They called Sylvanas’s plans evil at a Blizzcon. 2018?
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Agree and honestly a shame that a company like Blizzard hasn’t grown out of that phase yet(like at the earliest in 2006 they have one of the most played video game in history and still run their organization without a solid plan!)
Besides I think some deparments needs to have their leash more short (Story Deparment and Marketing) or else we get the latest fiaskos of expansion that only survived because fan services(south seas ideas and Illidan returning)
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Artists lie.
This shouldn’t come across as a surprise.
Are you suggesting there is a marketing and sales component to art that straddles and rivals carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen? Heaven forefend…
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Yep. And as long as the masses keep paying into their sinks they can almost do whatever they want. Almost.
One day their reputation and status won’t be enough to hold public interest and will abandon them for something better.
If that hasn’t started happening already.
The Anduin stuff is particularly mystifying. It’s like they think they told a B-plot of Anduin failing the Alliance somehow…but that wasn’t in the story at all. It wasn’t even mentioned until after the “faction war” story was over. Anduin didn’t do anything particularly interesting at all in BfA. He suffered no consequences for helping Saurfang at all…Tyrande doesn’t even mention Saurfang as one of her reasons for being mad at Anduin. I don’t know.
I feel like the C-Dev team gets confused about whether they are answering questions about plot points for the most recent expansion, or the next expansion they are already working on behind the scenes and it all just sort of runs together on them and that combined with being intentionally vague just leads to these gobbledygook answers.
I mean the whole “She’s not going to be Garrosh 2.0” “We intentionally wrote her story to mirror Garrosh’s” thing is pure gaslighting. Everyone knew what Garrosh 2.0, MoP 2.0 meant.
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Really makes you wonder if they only put forth N’zoth as this expac’s final boss solely just so they could say, “Hey look, we didn’t kill Sylvanas… totally not MoP!”
Literally just throwing a major WoW villain on top of a dumpster fire to try and put it out. Terrible.
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Not to be a Blizzard shill but stuff like this always seems due to mismanagement and poor communication within the company itself. It’s being felt in every development team from Overwatch to Warcraft.
I genuinely believe that most of the devs believed what they were saying and were not acting on bad faith, I think the rug was swept out from under them.
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That’s true for most of them, most of the devs in these interviews are not part of Creative Development. Like the one producer who got lambasted for saying the Night Elves “had their revenge” when it was clear that’s not what she really meant.
But Alex, Steve, and Ion all know better and absolutely gaslight and mislead. For Alex especially it’s like a game to him. I think Steve has become the goto interview person for lore questions for the very reason that Alex keeps putting his foot in his mouth.
It doesn’t help that everytime Blizzard answers a lore question the community immediately plays the telephone game and things become “canon” because a Blizzard developer worded an off-the-cuff interview answer in a misleading way.
That said, it’s all Blizzard’s own fault. They should engage directly with the community on the lore more and not rely on vague misleading press interviews and carefully selected Blizzcon hype questions.
Remember the Lore Livestream that everyone thought was going to be a Q&A but ended up being not that? They need to do more of that, only with actual Q&A from actual members of the fanbase. Actually engage with the lore the same way the gameplay team often engages with the community on gameplay issues.
Just my opinion.
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If they would occasionally engage in official canon ways regarding the lore with the player base then they could easily say that other interviews and statements should not be accepted as such.
What casts doubt on this - I thought it too, that at the very least, the order of events in the War of Thorns was switched - is the cinematics. We know these usually take 6 months to a year to make. There are factors that either bolster this POV or take away from it:
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All of them were in production in tandem (as is common with these projects) - Blizzard blatantly lied; Initially I believed this. This scenario directly is in opposition to the one you mention.
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The main BFA cinematic was the only one finished at the time it was launched. This is the time these devs were doing their press junkets, and they were still very much on the fence about which way the story would go.
I’m inclined to go with scenario 2. I wonder if there were other mundane sub-factors in this scenario though such as a miscommunication between the cinematic and story teams, with the former making all the cinematics and then the story team going, “Well, they did all this work, and we have material - let’s just go in this direction!”
Occam’s Razor points to option 2 for sure though. We already know that regarding the burning of Teldrassil, they were totally flying by the seat of their pants. Thus, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that around the time of Cinematic #1, they basically had no idea where to take the story.
I don’t know if its a coincidence but in Old Soldier if Saurfang didn’t returned he and Zechan would have died the moment they went in range of Alliance archers and the Alliance army would have marched through their corpses. They showed that in the intro cinematic, arows striking Saurfang and Alliance army marches through a Troll.