im just gonna rp that i died in mists anyway and have been in shadowlands a while
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Your character’s timeline has always been dependent on your level.
The Destruction of Teldrassil does not happen for your character’s timeline before you’re level 110.
The timeline of Exile’s Reach ends at the equivalent of Level 20 old scale.
You go from Exile’s Reach directly into mainline BfA, you skip over Teldrassil and the Battle for Lordaeron entirely and Anduin says nothing about them. That’s Red Shirt Guy’s point.
I’m not sure what people are missing here? 
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What the hell did I just read? This had better be a timeline thing for low levels.
The Horde needs to own the fact EVERYONE helped burn so many people to death. Bonus points if they also have pride in it.
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So what you’re saying is that the Forsaken started out Chaotic Neutral with Evil tendencies in Vanilla, went full blown Neutral Evil in Cataclysm, and after BFA are changing to Chaotic Good?
I can see that dramatic change in direction but holy smokes are the writers going to have their work cut out for them. It sounds like Germany in 1946!
Red Shirt Guy is a bit wrong.
From Exile’s Reach where your character goes is up to you. It only carries you to level 10, so you don’t go directly to BFA.
This is only true for old players, new players are forced to go to BfA without exception
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I am more surprised that people are surprised. Blizzard does stuff like this all the time. The whole forsaken ‘protect the living’ thing sounds kind of cringe worthy and forced though. Blizzard just don’t seem capable of finding a middle ground.
Anyway, Blizzard retroactively changing details so they can portray things differently to fit the tone they want now. They have done it many, many times before. More news at 11.
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This is completely unsurprising, tbh. If you’re a new player, you don’t learn about Theramore either. You hit 80, get sent to Varian’s throne, told the Horde are bad and going to Pandaland, and then you go to Pandaland. There might be some offhanded mention I didn’t notice, but having just gone through it I realized nothing about Theramore’s really brought up. You just know you’re at war, so go fight it.
There’s precedent for blizzard glossing over things that happened in the pre-patch, especially if they’re important to the lore but don’t directly impact questing zones. It’s just a shame that new players won’t know why Sylvanas is so hated by both sides.
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The more you think about BFAs story the less it makes sense, the more the plot starts to be filled with holes.
It’s like how The Horde attacks Stormsong, Brandensbrook, then they retaliate, then Rexxar responds to the retaliation as if it came out of nowhere and Bradensbrook didn’t happen.
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I’m not sure it’s as bad as people think, though not exactly for the right reasons. The Kul Tiras and Zandalar questing experience, removing the war campaign, is almost entirely divorced from the faction war, barring the out of left field whackiness that we get in Stormsong. And even the war campaign barely references Teldrassil at all… in fact I can’t think of a single instance of it off the top of my head. This was actually a complaint I voiced, and something I called, way back in early 2019. They were sweeping Teldrassil and the War of Thorns under the rug, because removing it gave them a much more nuanced and ‘morally grey’ faction way.
So I feel Red Shirt Guy is jumping the gun here, Blizzard wouldn’t need to remove any references at all, because there barely are any.
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A friend of mine wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened. No, as in Nomi trying to make cheese actually caused the Burning of Teldrassil.
*Again. Committed genocide again.
…while I get this?
Ignoring the reason that the Fourth War started is kind of…poor form. It’s not just a case of making things easy for players to understand, either: The War Campaign stops making a lot of sense if there’s not that information available.
And, yeah, that’s going to really shock some players. I have a friend right now - bless his heart - who only started playing a week ago. They’re Horde, and they are still in the “both sides have done some bad things” camp.
…man, Wrath is gonna be a shock. Cataclysm, depends. Mists is gonna be bad. Draenor is gonna be bad. Legion is iffy. But Lord help him for Battle for Azeroth.
I agree with your assessment. I’m also more than a little annoyed that it reached this point, and that this is the hamfisted way they’re handling this.
If they just stopped writing the Horde as people who have a hankering for baby stew, they wouldn’t have to hide the dietary habits to new customers who keep wondering why there’s so many pacifiers and rattles outside this store.
I think the intent is a mixture of a content deluge and a marketing thing. Throwing all of the information at people is going to be confusing, especially if you look at all of the information. It’s already weird enough dealing with, say, the state of Westfall after the war against Arthas, then after that, going to the war against Arthas.
And, yeah, it’s a hard sell to get people new to the game - people who ostensibly want to play as heroes - to just accept the fact that that’s their starting point. What do you tell someone who asks about that? “We immolated an entire civilization because someone wanted to kill hope.” It’s dicey at best. And the obvious - yes, obvious - thing that they should have anticipated after doing this. If you’re going to include a shocking, traumatic event, then you need to be prepared for the fallout.
The problem is that there is no possible way this is going to work.
New players are going to find out fairly quickly about the Burning of Teldrassil. Invariably, someone’s going to mention Sylvanas Loyalists or the Night Warrior. People are going to joke about it in Trade Chat. Someone’s going to RP it on an RP realm. It’s…it’s going to happen.
I’m curious how Blizzard plans to handle players who feel like there was a bait and switch. If I joined a softball team, and no one mentioned “By the way, we like to punch kittens in the face”, I’d be pretty upset, especially if I finished the season with them.
What’s their plan for the players who suddenly realize they’re “the bad guy”? Do they think these people will want to continue to play to “redeem” themselves? Do they think these people will reroll to the Alliance? Because they have to consider the fact that these people will just stop playing altogether.
I hope I’m proven wrong about this. I really do. Because “keeping a secret” of this magnitude is just a very, very, very bad idea.
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So they can get lost in Snug harbor? That makes no sense, and who starts something at the end? We don’t read books from the end or watch movies backwards, so why start an MMO at the equivalent of the current end?
Have they given thought to just using a bunch of magical time-traveling dragons to fix things? Somehow, that seems like the less stupid way of handling plot revisions at this point in time.
“The bad dragons did it - here’s the actual universe” -Chromie
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Wrath won’t be too bad of a shock. You’ve got a few questlines that talk about Arthas, mainly in Icecrown but also a couple scattered through the two entry zones.
Draenor, with no knowledge about Cata and MoP is just… Yeah, that’s a bad hit right there.
Legion’s basic story is pretty self-explanatory; demon space aliens are invading with their demon alien space ships and we gotta stop them. Bizarre when you think about it, but not as jarring as some other entry points.
BfA tho? It’s been a while since I did the BoL scenario, but I know that’s right where you start currently. If that doesn’t change… You literally start as a Horde player being sieged by the Alliance. They tell you Sylvanas is a criminal and will answer for her crimes, but until you decide to look into those crimes, all you have to go on is blue team fighting you. Once you remove the context of why the Alliance are there, Sylvanas almost looks… Heroic there. Questionable with the plague and necromancy, but still fighting and giving time for her people to escape.
They need to so some “the story so far” cinematics to catch you up on the most important, concise details of an expansion’s backstory. I don’t think anything else will work.
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They didnt remove anything, if you are vet player, you get the bfa stuff like normal, this is only for new players who have a different intro
The War Campaign and Azerite stuff was just tacked on anyway, both Kul Tiras and Zandalar stand on their own without them. Hell, even the zone that relies on Azerite the most, Tiragarde Sound, just treats Azerite as this new and powerful weapon material, and something that needs to be investigated even though the player character is right there and capable of explaining what it is.
I’ll say it again: BfA is a mishmash of two different expansions, now that it’s not longer current content they’re just getting rid of the stuff they stapled onto it.
I’d be interested to see what Red Shirt Guy considers ‘references’ to Teldrassil, honestly, because none come to mind in the current expansion that aren’t explicitly part of max level content that a new player wouldn’t do or see.
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It’s Brennadam, actually. Bradensbrook is in Val’sharah and is a neutral town that gets attacked by Night Elf ghosts from Black Rook Hold, not by the Horde.
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This SCREAMS to me that they’re going to replant Teldrassil. They don’t want to mention it being burned down in the level 1 story because Night Elves are getting it back.
Judging from the concept of the Undead “tirelessly striving to protect the living,” it sounds more like they’re turning Undead player characters into Lawful Good.
At this point in time, it looks like they’re trying to save face by doing a complete 180 on Undead because they regret having done the Burning of Teldrassil from a publicity standpoint and want to sweep the whole thing under the rug as if it never happened.
Hence why they’re probably going to kill off Sylvanas in the Maw raid and have Calia Menethil become the new Forsaken racial leader or something.