It won’t be a redemption it will be a “Shadowlands is free!” moment.
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Tell me more about juvenile behavior.
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How dare people who paid money for a product draw attention to the fact that they were sold said product on pretenses that were dishonest at best.
The mature thing is obviously just to consume, consume, consume, in silence.
Why, I’ll have you know that when I go to a restaurant and order a steak burrito, and they slap me in the cheek with a chicken quesadilla, I pry the thing off my face and eat it peacefully, because it would just be childish to do otherwise.
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Yes. Its wrong of us to expect a company to take the complaints of its paying customers seriously. How dare those juvenile customers speak their dissatisfaction?!
Small wonder other MMO’s have had a huge influx of former WoW players.
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This was a slog to read through, and really brought up pleasant hopes I had for this expansion before having them dashed upon the rocks. Also the jailer thing to me came way way out of left field and kind of feels last minute? Could just be me though but it creates weird paradoxes in Syls motivations in previous expansions.
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No matter what Blizzard says about planning a few expansions ahead, Shadowlands absolutely could not have been in the planning stages during Legion. We see several ghosts and spirits of the recently deceased during Legion, despite Blizzard claiming Legion is where the machine of death broke so they should have all gone to the Maw. Most prominently is all the spirits you see in the Dream at the end of the Nightmare raid from both the raid bosses and people who died in Val’sharah.
Hell we even do in BfA. Like Lucille’s fiancee, his ghost was just wandering the chapel instead of being in the Maw.
Also Uther, while not recently deceased, appeared as a ghost in Legion’s paladin campaign and was very much still a human, not a Kyrian.
So yes, the Jailer seems like a very last-minute thing. All of Shadowlands does. If Blizzard really did plan it several expansions in advance as they claim, I guarantee it wasn’t anything more defined than “okay we’ll go to the afterlife”. There’s too many contradictions otherwise.
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Yep, my thoughts as well. Blizzard like think they’re subtle and clever with their writing, but they’re about as subtle as a train wreck.
My money is actually on Sylvanas becoming the new Jailer in some weird “I will save them from damnation” spin while at the same time gaining the power to become a Death Goddess that the Forsaken will continue to worship. That way, they don’t have to remove lines like - “Dark Lady watches over”. Just the sort of 100 dimensional chess nonsense Blizzard has been making her do.
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Arbiter is more important than the Jailer, because Arbiter sends souls where they must needs go. Ergo, Sylvanas will become Arbiter. Meanwhile the former Jailer (Bolvar) or Sylvanas’s simp (Natty ice) will replace THE Jailer.
Irony, look it up.
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Hmmmm that would probably give me a pure unadulterated aneurism.
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I really do wonder sometimes what the actual extent of Blizzard’s planning is when it comes to expansions and how they tie together. If WoD’s plot was instead about the Mongrel Horde I don’t see how that could have lead to Legion, and why they made that concept if they knew Legion was next. There’s also the fact that they planned for Thal’dranath to be the 7.3 zone instead of Argus, and I have no idea how you could involve everything in that patch onto that island instead. Why would the Army of Light show up, how would Sargeras be able to stab Azeroth, would the titan Argus be the final raid boss and how if so? Blizz planning a few expansions ahead also means that they knew they would do another faction war expansion and when while we were in the middle of MoP!
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If they made Warfronts pvp and release heroic warfronts earlier they could have saved the beginning of it. However Azerite armor was another terrible thing that held them back.
What I think should have happened, is that the war flares up again, they have zones change hands after certain Warfronts are captured by the respective faction. After all that would be a good reason for war mode.
8.2 can still be Azshara focused as the two factions fight in the seas and n’zoth can either be released secretly (I.E. we the players see but the other characters nor our characters knows.) However she doesn’t die or is saved by others. (I assume they have other plans for her)
8.3 occurs and Sylvanas official betrays the horde and fights the LK and then undead are released bolstered by the dead of the war by necromancers. IF they wanted to keep the Shadowlands going.
If they want the old gods, they could have visions still as leaders, veterans, and soldiers are getting messed up from the war as both sides start committing more atrocities. Shattering fragile alliances, one would say. The expansion would have ended on a low note rather than a high note which would be interesting.
This could have been amazing if they didn’t hamfist the big bad in at the end. But that again is because Warfronts, Azerite, and Island expeditions sucked.
I think the problem with the PvP aspect of it is there’s some kind of internal philosophy to accommodate purely PvE players, which is a fight that’s as old as WoW itself.
Having a zone that completely changes hands would fit thematically and fantastically with WoW, but would be anathema for PvE players who would feel they deserve to play in the zone without the need to participate in or be hindered by the PvP.
The grand experiments with Alterac Valley, Wintergrasp, and Ashran led to them both being practically instanced, the PvE objectives being stripped and the experience ultimately lobotomized.
Not anymore you remember those Island expedition bots use those if you need a 12 vs 12 situation.
This thread was hard to read.
100% this.
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I suppose that also might explain the odd comment about how we would “see the good side of the Horde” in the animations. I always figured they were referring to “Old Soldier” there, but it’s possible that the content of the Sylvanas video was different at the time.
Still not sure whether that’s what happened, but your theory is possible.
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Not saying that Jellex’s theory isn’t possible, but we had the shot of Sylvanas standing in front of the burning Teldrassil all the way back at BlizzCon 2017. So that image, which is either taken from or near perfectly replicated in the the Sylvanas Warbringer, was already conceived of well before that point. So I’m not sure how different a possible alt-version of that cinematic would’ve been. Maybe she wouldn’t have given the order to torch the tree but she was planned to be there for it well before… I’d guess all of these interviews.
The picture of her standing in front of the tree could have been recycled - the whole random flashback to Arthas is probably what changed.
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So I’m still poking at this, and I noticed a weird juxtaposition.
Here’s the by-now-infamous quote from Travis Day on April 5, 2018, talking to Invenglobal:
But here’s Travis Day talking to Blizzardwatch, also on April 5, 2018:
How can he make both of those statements on the same day? What does this mean for the state of the story at that time? The second one lines up very closely with what we actually got: Sylvanas (with help from some of her supporters) burned the tree, but parts of the Horde didn’t support her. But I don’t see any room with that story to say “Sylvanas is not evil” and that she is not acting in a “cruel, mustache-twirling evil way.”
Also, I remember there being discussion at the time about his little cheat of saying “You’ll come to the conclusion that Sylvanas burned the tree.” It seemed like a very deliberate hint that things wouldn’t be the way they appeared, especially since he preceded that by saying it would be “open to debate.” So this was part of what stoked the theories about anyone but Sylvanas being responsible, although as I recall, those theories had been going strong since Blizzcon.
One last interesting thing, in light of the discussion about a possible reworking of “Warbringers”: Why does he describe them as “two-and-a-half/three pieces”? Which one is the “half”?
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Better make sure this topic stays alive and running. With a new expansion about to release, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of new material to add.
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