The Horde quests gives you an amount of Civilians to find. You can’t advance until that number is met. You rescue the entire amount you are set to find. The Horde player is shown in game successfully rescuing every civilian the game sets you up with. And there is no time limit involved.
The Alliance player has to find 982 civilians. There is a time limit as well. Three minutes. 180 Seconds. That is 5.45 Civilians per second.
The Alliance player is set up for a brutal failure. The Horde player is set up for a guaranteed success.
You want to argue lore results, well that will always be wishy-washy with a Dev group that embraces retconning things at their leisure. However the in game depiction of these quests tell the tale for gameplay and the gameplay is the experience the players get first hand.
I wouldn’t call it “winning” a battle. At best, a draw. At worst, a lost for the Forsakens, whom are not even allowed to grief since it is straight up swept under the rug. Never to be brought back up. Apart from being made fun of.
What are the forsaken supposed to grieve about? Losing some blighted sewers? They will get a new actual city soon anyway while I can very well see the night elves never to be mentioned again besides if it’s for further mockery or rubbing salt into the wound.
Focusing on in-game loss is only half the issue for Night Elves… The other half is the portrayal of the race itself. It’s the whole identity of the night elves being systematically stripped away to the point where I feel like I am being punished for ever identifying with the virtues of the Night Elves to begin with.
It’s not only their identity, but also their people, their home, their lands and thus their future. Knowing that nothing good will ever happen to the night elves. Knowing that they are destroyed beyond recovery.
I found it really annoying that the only Forsaken commenting on Lordaeron (that I’ve seen) are a bunch of them making fun of one guy for missing his garden there. Really? Where’s all the Forsaken who remember the place fondly, whether from their previous life or as the symbolic place they reclaimed their freedom and forged their new nation?
Such delusional is amazing. Brill is a pile of rumbles, played out off-screen. Undercity is a pile of rumbles too. Your delirium about Forsakens getting a city soon enough isn’t backed by anything. If you ain’t getting a new city, we ain’t (even tho it is mentionned that Tyrande is regrouping all Night Elves in Hyjal). As for incessant whining of Night Elves never being mentionned again, I invite you to take the backseat (even tho it shouldn’t be like this at. For any races.). Some races are in dire need of a spotlight to develop them further.
People like you and me are a part of the playerbase they don’t like and want to see gone it seems like. I don’t know why, but BfA couldn’t have made it more obvious…
He is the only one ever bringing it up. That situation is for me twofold. 1- Laughable 'cause he’s the only one bring it up and he is laughed at. 2- Even tho it is sad, that team represent what’s best about Forsakens. I freaking love that squad. If you got a Horde character, I invite you to do their quest in Nazmir. Even if it’s just 3-4 quests, it is worth it.
That said, if there was more Forsakens bringing it up, the annoying part of that interaction wouldn’t been as bad.
again, I am not saying the amount of loss in BFA is even remotely comparable. That being said, both races lost so much for so little.
Night Elves doesn’t have an exclusive claim of lost in this expansion. To act like such is ignorant and disrespectful to others that have lost loved ones and homes in the fourth war.
As mentioned by Ersebeth, you don’t even have to save those civilians in the Horde quest to progress.
And I totally acknowledge that the Horde scenarios is totally more positive in outlook and less bleak than the Alliance one- as it doesn’t rub your face in the fact that not everyone is making it out, but that doesn’t mean that it was a clear victory. Tone is definitely important and tone was expressed through the quests.
But no matter how it was presented tonally, the reality was that a lot of Night Elves made it out of Teldrassil, and not every person in Undercity escaped unscathed. Materially, they lost their homelands. Many Night Elves struggle with their faith and the Forsaken were quite literally forsaken (again) by the one person they’d been rallying around.
But honestly, Gilneans/Worgen got it worse than either and haven’t gotten any attention. We don’t even have to save any Gilnean/Worgen in any quests and there’s fewer of them left than Night Elves/Forsaken.
Part of the problem of the forsaken narrative having always been Sylvanas and to a lesser extent Nathanos. Sylvanas being shown as not caring for the loss of UC or focusing more on getting Zandalar involved in the war as opposed to the forsaken civilians’ existence. They were foreshadowing the fact that UC and the forsaken civilians meant nothing to her.
Lillian Voss (while she appears out of nowhere in the Forsaken narrative since she was a neutral NPC until BFA) was the only sliver of story showing someone caring about the forsaken as people, which was limited in the story to Amalia Stone and Zelling.
They needed Voss or another NPC established earlier as part of the forsaken narrative to properly show sympathy for the forsaken civilians cause the story plan did not allow for either Sylvanas or nathanos to be able to do it and the one brought in was off being part of the war campaign.
Or I could easily go on a rant about Blizz not caring about Forsakens at all, aside from using them as mustache-swirling villains.
I would agree there tho if it wasn’t for the entire Forsakens Cata experience, which shows us their desire of taking back the lands of Lordaeron, announced by the Deathguard by Brill’s bridge and the quest The New Forsakens
That said, I do agree entirely on the characters tho. I wouldn’t say that Sylvanas is syphoning/draining the Forsaken’s narrative, but more likely draining the resources that would allow the development of other Forsakens character (which we have a plenty of) that would allow other takes on the narrative.
I only did it once and I couldn’t advance until the number was meet. Maybe there was another condition to advance I never saw or the quest got changed later. I only did it when first available and I won’t ever run the scenario again.
I am less worried about lore numbers (They Retcon things too often to consider any of that set in stone) but more off of the game play experience. That is why I consider the night elves worse off by far compared to the forsaken, the ##### game play that was delivered.
That is also why people making “don’t pre-order” threads don’t bother me and people railing against them irritates. This isn’t a problem of the night elf fans creation or a problem they asked for. It is a problem that is 100% of the devs creation, one I feel they should have known better than to do, and one that if they intended to still do at least have a plan to make it worthwhile in the x-pac you did it in and not let it taint the next x-pac as well.
We’re of the same mind. I find myself hardly caring about impactful event on population, the supposed genocide of Night Elves in BfA, when said population hardly matter at all in WoW. Had I been a Night Elf player since the beginning of WoW, I think Blizz saying 8.1 being our vengeance and experiencing the lackluster “vengeance” would’ve been my biggest beef. Heck, I’m mostly an Horde player and I thought it was a laughable attempt to represent vengeance.
I am not that familiar with the particulars of forsaken questing, does all of that precede Godfrey blowing Sylvanas’ brains out in Silverpine or come after that?
Most of the endearing quests and such that people talk about the forsaken/Sylvanas usually seem to come before that event. I had always considered she came back changed from that. Given the Shadowlands reveal I am wondering if that is when a deal was struck with the Jailer? We have Edge of Night for the narrative of the suicide attempt in Icecrown, but no narrative I am aware of for Silverpine’s visit to the Shadowlands.
Iirc, when the Val’kyrs rez her up in Silverpine, she speaks of a place of darkness. Of nothingness. Then a light, which is her Val’kyrs and she comes to fruition that the Val’kyrs are the future of the Forsakens. And she does say that they will never stop fighting for Lordaeron.
The problem is that they made it as dramatic and as tragic as possible, with all of these innocents also having to suffer in the maw forever just to completely ignore it then. Almost like it’s intentional to make night elf fans feel even worse about it.
I actually thought 8.1 being the only revenge we will get would be the last nail in the coffin, but turns out they can make it even worse by rubbing salt into the wound and saying that instead of a peaceful afterlife, most of them have to be in wow hell forever.