As per usual, the writing in this expac makes the horde truly evil. Now, they always have been, but at least metzen isn’t there to force a tiptoe around it anymore.
The mag’har are a strange mix of industrialized and savage in that they are just as bad to the environment as they are to any non-orcs. They turned their lands into a junkyard where you can also get enslaved and your skin turned into a loincloth. From reading the npc and quest text, they seem like if garrosh was carbon copied dozens of times, which apparently people are ok with now.
The scenario starts out with a laughing skull orc sneaking up behind you and telling you he wouldn’t know a thing about skinning people alive, then whispering that he does know how to do it and can demonstrate if you want. The other orcs all talk about blind adherence to warchief hellscream or them wanting to slit the throats of the lightbound orcs.
you meet genderbent thrall who hates the draenei because they wanted her to go to Church while she just wanted to kill everyone and blow things up instead. you meet lantressor, who for some reason is still stuck in a mine after three decades. All of the npc orcs talk about blind adherence to warchief hellscream and killing of orcs that now worship the light. By quest text, hellscream says genderbent thrall is a hothead, and (not even joking) the way to calm her down is to go into a literal 1930’s germany-style ghetto where the orcs imprison ogres and ethnically cleanse them of those who wish to challenge the supremacy of the orc race.
you get to the camp, and the only ogres not attackable are the docile ones huddling around a campfire. you also get an earful from genderbent thrall about how oppressive the draenei are, as you slaughter ogres wanting out of genuine slavery. genderbent thrall screams how the orcs will be forever free as she kills the ogre leader to quell an uprising of her slaves. genderbent thrall then tells you about how fanatical the draenei are while flanked with a half-dozen orc npcs whose flavor text is along the lines of “my life for hellscream” or “all who oppose hellscream must die.”
you then get to meet the draenei army. The orcs take this as an unprovoked attack despite less than a minute ago you were helping their champion kill one of the draenei emissaries and the leader of their ogres in the name of orc racial pride.
you meet the draenei general. This supposed unthinking fanatic pleads for the orcs to stop polluting the atmosphere and then to just get along. No, really, this leader of an army pleads like a hippie “why can’t we all just get along.” genderbent thrall screams “whatever, whatever, I’ll do what I want!” as she kills him. On the corpse of the draenei is a copy of Laudato Si; which says that through the light, orcs and draenei will have racial harmony who can then work towards creating a planet that isn’t dying from pollution caused by the iron horde’s old machines. THE ABJECT HORROR.
you are then tasked with “raining hell” on the draenei army who decided to come to the aid of their slaughtered detatchment. Despite just killing an entire platoon of the draenei army, the ogre allies of the draenei, and an emmisary of the dranei, the orcs still consider this an unprovoked attack. you kill the draenei and lightbound orcs with a giant cannon that makes the dranei and lightbound orcs fly into the air with ragdoll physics.
yrel then appears and tells the orcs that if they would just stop fighting, they would not be killed. yrel says they will not stand idly by as the enviroment is destroyed. The orcs still consider this an unprovoked attack again, and hellscream ends by saying it is the light that is polluting the world and not the orc’s smog billowing machines and logging.
The scenario ends and you get an updated model of the vanilla wow orc epic mount. After you get back, the orcs are still all saying “my life for hellscream” as well as discussing their various fantasies about dismembering “false” orcs that abandoned savagery. generbent thrall has flavor text about committing ethnic cleansing against the draenei on this world too.
For about 20 minutes, I basically just saw orcs be slave-holding, brainwashed, mass murderers all while screaming “I know you are but what am I” in the direction of the draenei as if the orcs have some unresolved guilt.
What the crap was that?
