The thing is the Forsaken aren’t uniformly Lordaeronian at all. A lot are but you interact with Forsaken from Alterac, Dalaran, Arathi and Gilneas even in Classic. They’re just former humans who happened to have died in or around Lordaeron at some point.
What I’d love is if the heritage quest was based around forming a new Desolate Council. With Windy out the whole free will as expressed with the Forsaken basically inventing representative democracy seems like the best way to take them.
But it’s probably going to be Calia teaching them about the power of positive thinking and friendship.
That would be an awesome heritage quest, and really help develop them as a race, instead of tearing them down like the Worgen heritage questline… gotta love being told your race is just a mistake and that it will die out after one generation.
But you’re right, they will have it be focused on Calia.
Blizz has clearly never known what to do with the Worgen. They’re best presentation in game comes from the Forsaken Silverpine questline. Where they do come off as incredibly ruthless beastmen; they turn humans, they use ambush and even suicide bomber tactics, and are just relentlessly charging through battlefields. Even Slyvanas remarks they’ve been caught off guard because of how ferociously they fight.
I was taken back how you never experience this from the Blueside. I was picturing being involved in all these guerilla attacks you frequently only see the results of from that questline. But you leave Gilneas fairly quickly with the climax being that god awful quest where you’ve to wait in real time for a zeppelin to slowly come into range. Seriously I thought it was bugged st first.
And then the only real cool Worgen action you get is with Worgen Pirates in Booty Bay. You never get to be apart of cool worgen stuff. Only other stuff I could find was them rehabilitating ferals in Duskwood. Which isn’t bad persay but it’d be fun to stalk lonely roads in a haunted woods for non altruistic reasons.
I love this post so much. It is such a missed opportunity to have the Worgen be so much cooler than they are now, especially with Blizzard trying to just take away their identity and make them just furry Stormwind Humans.
I hate that the only time we get to see Worgen being vicious is if you play Horde, I love the Silverpine Forest questline, easily one of my favorites in the game. The worgen were great. I want more of that.
Even the Duskwood stuff was okay with trying to cure the worgen and finding Sven Yorgen. It had a sort of creepiness to it.
That is what I want from Worgen, savage and creepy. I want them to be dark. I want to see more Worgen vs Forsaken aesthetic. Undead vs Werewolves in a dark forest fighting each other.
Or hell, even now with the truce and Blizzard wanting us to work together, let’s see Worgen and Forsaken working together in a tense relationship where they clearly don’t like each other but work together for the greater good type of thing. Hunting in dark forests. Make them like witch hunter types with that sort aesthetic.
Man, I’d actually love to see some of this. I’m imagining both of them both reviling and being jealous of the other’s condition, as they talk about and compare the downsides of their respective curses, because a lot of the underlying fears of losing yourself (forsaken true death VS mindless state) and mental problems (depression VS anger issues) make them have more in common than one would think.
Also I kinda like the idea of a worgen chowing down on a deer while a forsaken noms another zombie, and the two of them are tossing condiments back and forth.
Edit:
Worgen and forsaken get in a fist fight. Worgen bites forsaken, causes a transformation that stops at the shoulder, wants to know why it didn’t go all the way. Forsaken goes “well that arm only lasted a week” and pops it off and starts digging in the dirt for a new one while the worgen sniffs out a new body part for him to replace it. Ends with a heartwarming pat on the back from the forsaken using the dismembered worgen arm as a selfie stick.
This.
Make them werewolves, not humans with an anthropomorphic wolf toggle. Have characters actually represent the darker aspect of worgen, they only have Genn right now being active.
Yes! Don’t get me wrong, I think Genn sort of does an okay job with representing Worgen because whenever we see him he is always angry and quick to jump to conclusions because he is highly emotional. That is how it should be! Worgen are highly emotional and quick to anger because that is how the curse is.
I just wish they showed that darker side of needing to hunt, and stalking prey in the forests. Make Worgen more ferocious and dark.
This is why I do like Ivar a bit, he is more about giving into the animal side and being more savage, which while I don’t think every Worgen should be that and give in, that is the core of Worgen. Even the Gilnean Worgen suffer from that need to hunt and kill because that is who they are now. We never get to see this in-game.
I am kind of mad that Drustvar got that whole dark witch vibe, I loved the story and zone it is one of my favorites of all time, but that whole aesthetic should have been what the Worgen got. They should have updated Gilneas and gave us stuff like that in my opinion.
Honestly I’d rather it seen taken a step further than that and make even some of the worgens’ allies not want to be around them either. Like, follow up the “at least you’re on our side” sentiment with an implied “(but we’d rather you not be here at all / put down afterward)”. In my opinion, them just being furry humans is only half of the problem, with the rest being that others also seemingly treat them that way too. It would make possible “prove yourself” arcs be more meaningful than…whatever the hell happened with void elves.
I love that Genn is quick to snap and is the aggression the Alliance needs.
It just makes it all the more disappointing when, in the Varian death cinematic, he turns back to human while still being in a high stress situation and in the process makes his reach even shorter when he’s trying to get Varian back on the ship. Like what was that?
I also 100% agree on the wicker complaint. I feel like Blizzard considers it more of a gamplay mechanic than lore, but it was a genuinely cool concept. It didn’t help that they didn’t want to stray too much from base druid forms. Bear form always felt off for a Darkspear. I think the aesthetic is still there if they wanted it to be different from Kul Tirans they could do it by giving it a more romantic-gothic twist. I love my guardian druid’s weird spike knuckles but I also do not know why he has them.
Honestly I feel like part of the issue is that the introduction of the playable worgen coincided with them also coming from the first group of humans in-game who finally weren’t just represented as bog-standard Stormwindians with a different tabard.
Consequently, the desire to have some human presentation that isn’t just more Stormwind copy-pasted elsewhere watered down the worgen side of things.
So they literally solved the one part of the worgen curse that’s an outright curse during the introductory quests by way of the Scythe of Elune and the ritual. If the worgen truly still had to deal with a fear of going berserk on their loved ones and allies in the heat of battle it’d give them some of the edge people want, but since the overpowering rage of Goldrinn was remedied by level 10 (along with Goldrinn just arbitrarily being chill and “over” his rage issue when he comes back to life), we’re predominantly left with Gilneans who look like wolves, but otherwise still act consistently like their old Gilnean selves.
Yeah I really like Genn being aggresive like that because he can’t help it, that is what the curse does to people. Whereas Turalyon is more calm, collected, and logical. Genn is angry, rash, and emotional because that is how Worgen are. The curse makes them that way and they have to deal with that.
High emotional moments easily will set a Worgen off and make them transform which is why, like you said, it makes very little sense that Genn turned back into his human form to save Varian hanging from the ship… he realistically would have stayed in worgen form.
And it isn’t the wicker stuff, it is more that Drustvar had this whole dark gothic aesthetic, with the witches and monsters in the forest. That was Gilneas’s aesthetic. They just gave it to Kul’Tiras because that was the hot new place we were going. Gilneans got cheated.
Worgen should have been the gothic Victorian monsters who use their curse to fight other monsters. They are now one of the creatures that go bump in the night and use that to their advantage to hunt other monsters.
Supposedly this was soft-retconned by Wolfheart (I only recently found out myself), but when the game text itself explicitly states that you’ll get permanent mastery over the beast, and the fact that you never see a treated worgen (that I know of) succumb and die anyway, it’s pretty functionally worthless as a theme and threat.
Blizzard toyed around with the idea of the cure being temporary during the WoD beta when Genn and various worgen were supposedly mentally deteriorating and going feral anyway, but they pruned the concept.
This isn’t true. It is hard for Blizzard to show the rage Worgen feel all the time in-game. The best example of this is how Worgen automatically change to their worgen form when they enter combat.
That is because high stress and high feelings of anger will make a worgen change in lore, and that is how they show that in-game. Now do I wish they showed more quests with Worgen lashing out and being more vicious and dangerous? Of course, I’d love to see stuff where it makes you go whoa worgen are dangerous… they are on our side but we need to be cautious around them. Quests that show that would be great.
Sadly Blizzard hasn’t done this. But I like Worgen being able to go back to human form because while worgen form is their true self, I think the Alliance should be skeptical of Worgen walking around in that form Gilneans should want to hide that part of themselves until they need to show it because it should be something feared.
In Wolfheart they state that the ritual isn’t a guaranteed success and that it actually can make a Worgen go mindless and lose themselves forever to the beast.
In the Curse of the Worgen comic Belysra states to Halford Ramsey that even though the ritual returned he and all the Gilnean Worgen’s mind so they could return to human form, they still were not cured. Anger will make them shift against their will.
I also am not 100% sure if this is stated in the comic or Wolfheart but I remember it is stated that even the Worgen who undergo the ritual, under extreme circumstances they can potentially lose themselves to the beast within. They can still return to that feral mindless state. So the ritual is actually just a quick fix to returning a Worgen’s mind and allowing them to have some control.
I admit I did really like the looming threat that the potion you were given to restore your mind was temporary. You could lose yourself at any minute. Obviously we know that won’t happen for gameplay reasons, but the idea being there is a scary one and I like that.
I do like that the Night Elves were the ones to save the Gilneans, and offered them the ritual I just don’t like how in-game they made it seem like the ritual was a permanent solution for control. I wish it was more like the potion, just a bit stronger which explains why they can return to human form, but there is still the possibility they could lose their mind after some time.
I think that’s because it originally was, if you look at the release dates of Curse of the Worgen (Oct. 2011), Wolfheart (Sept. 2011), and Cataclysm (Dec. 2010) itself. The starting zone came first, so the original canon is that it really was a permanent fix.
Sorry that you caught me pre-delete. I had removed my post because I thought I was subconsciously leaking my ill-received worgen thread into yours.
In the Darkriders comic the worgen also has to take a type of calming potion to control himself. It would be interesting if they explored other ways for worgen to manage their curse.
