I didn’t really feel these were that emotionally. Probably because we never had any real interaction with a lot of these characters, they weren’t characters we journeyed with for an entire xpac or characters that had compelling backgrounds. Maly may be the closest, but even he was only in the game for a few interactions, the same with Sindy. Veri we literally just met and was just given a sad backstory with no character development.
The same can be said about the Dragonmaw orc, whose name I can’t even remember since he wasn’t a past Dragonmaw orc we encountered before. If they were going to use a Dragonmaw orc it should have been Gorfax since Gorfax has already been stated to be trying to improve the Dragonmaw clan. Journeying to the Dragon Isles and making amends with the Redflight would have been a step in renewing the clan
While I do think that the questlines you listed (Veritistrasz, Blue Dragonflight, Dragonmaw) DID manage to land an emotional impact, and it is possible to build up a character in a small window of time if done well (I believe this was achieved) - you have a point regarding preexisting characters.
However, this point is moreso lent to Blizzard’s decision to shift the storytelling from a world-driven one to a character-driven one - as in they have decided to make the game about its characters rather than its setting like they did in the game’s beginning, yet their roster of who to use is growing slimmer and slimmer. I, personally, would welcome more of a return to smaller, more focused storylines like this, with new faces to suit the contained story. It adds life to the world when I know that there’s a population on Azeroth that exists outside the handful of people I already met.
But if you prefer the character-driven stories, then yes, there was much more they could do.
2 Likes
I suppose it says something about how well Blizzard uses minor characters that my first thought here was, ‘who in the hells is Gorfax’
Thing is, whole point of this questline was to showcase the Red Dragonflight’s philosophy (“One cannot deserve dignity, it is the right of all life”), and so the Dragonmaw had to be an old dying Orc. Gorfax couldn’t die since he was to be reaffirmed as the leader of the Horde Dragonmaw later down the line in the Orc Heritage questline
4 Likes
Yeah, it wasn’t actually about the orc at all. He was just a prop, annoyingly.
I don’t know, that sounds like most modern Horde content to me!!
1 Like