"I Feel Lied To," Post-BfA Version

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

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. :thinking:

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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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