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.
And Saurfang could have had his honorable death in battle, and we’d have been spared a really annoying plotline.
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This isn’t true, it might be the case when you start out of nowhere but there is a reason why we have so much cinematics in BfA and why they all feature the same characters. When you already have the models done you can reduce the time greatly so the cinematics after the intro one didn’t take that long, iirc they mentioned that fact in the art panel we had last year.
However this is true, we know from Metzen that he worked on the BfA intro CGI and he mentioned how he was surprised with Teldrassil, suggesting that at the very least Old Soldier wasn’t in the works and War of the Thorns was either not going to be like this or wasn’t even planned one year before the expac reveal.
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No honourable death no glory no batle for Saurfang in Lordaeron. If he wanted to have his warrior death he was in the perfect place on top of the wall. He walks to his execution and they say-saw it a lot of times in the cinematic.
“There will be no glory today. Only pain”
“And yet once again i am deniyed it”
Removing his armour and the pendant symbolises that his warriors days are over, he wont fight any more.
“In Lordaeron you have the chance to claim my life. Maybe end the war.”
How he can have a warriors death without fighting?
Ehh, getting killed by the enemy army oughta count. But honorable or not, I kind of wish he had walked right into those archers.
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Those that died in Teldrasil got a warriors death?
“There was no honnor in that.”
Okay, okay. I’m just being flippant. Because I really hated Saurfang’s storyline, and it would have been nice to avoid it.
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I’m going to be honest, to me it feels more like they just lied about planning and writing expansions years in advance. The way the writing has been since MoP it really seems more like they’re just winging it as they go, that major story details aren’t actually decided on until just before the dev team builds the questlines/cutscenes to implement in-game.
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I think, as Moonweaver pointed out, you need to take into account that they have drastically cut down on the time it takes them to create a new cinematic if they reuse models (or use ones with similar skeletons). It’s entirely possible that they came up with all the cinematics aside from the intro (which, as everyone has noted, is extremely different from the rest of them) only after the story change was decided upon.
Moreover, I think the relative glut of cinematics is proof that they realized they were going to need to sell the “new” story direction pretty hard. Unfortunately, they put all their eggs in Saurfang’s basket, and given the role he had to play in BfA, it wasn’t enough to carry the story. Though I doubt given the way events unfolded that any character would have been able to do so.
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