afaik from everyone above me is going about it, i could be wrong since… well i haddent played the game since last year and going off what others say. Was even guessing during the reveal of ‘infinite afterlives’ the return of those scenarios from legion as a sort of extra ‘thing to do’, but nope. man i would kill for a brandy.
That’s the kicker to me, seriously, it’s almost like they’re trying to make this as bad as possible.
If they had the Jailer’s forces attacking other afterlives, with very small boss events like Legion (even cheaper to make than full scenarios!) it could have at least added some meaning to what our characters are doing.
Right now it’s basically just… go fight to advance to the next Thrall/Jaina/Bolvar/Sylvanas/Anduin soap opera chapter.
Little slices of the afterlives that they’ve talked about for almost (or more than) TWENTY DAMN YEARS!
I could probably rant about this all day so I’ll stop now… for now haha
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Before I stop though, honestly, how could anyone possibly have thought this was a good direction to go in?
“So the afterlives – you mean like, the ones we’ve hinted at since Vanilla? I think that’s a great idea, people will love to see their —”
“No, no… just four new ones. We’ll tell players the stuff they hoped to see never existed.”
…
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I’d be willing to bet money that originally 9.1 and 9.2 were planned to have afterlives featured on other race’s beliefs, and bring in more old characters, such as Cairne.
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The one with the all the psuedo-Christian references (terminology, angels, halos, etc) that mirror elements of the Silver Hand and other Paladin orders, the same Blue/White/Gold color palette as the Alliance/Church of Light/Silver Hand, with Covenant abilities best suited for Priests and Paladins, and the one where the principle conflict revolves around the former head of the Silver Hand that deals with recurring themes of devotion to a higher power, falling from grace, etc. There's also a sword there that drops with with Silver Hand symbol on it. Honestly, just change the Arcane damage type dealt by various abilities to Holy, and you'd be pretty much done. Not to mention the various relationships between Paladins and the Titans to the point where the Silver Hand is named after a literal Titan's weapon. Tyr (of Tyr's Hand fame) was a Titan Watcher that was a warrior who wielded the Light and was, for all intents and purposes, a Paladin so it's not like Titans and Paladins don't have history or related imagery either.
Just like if there were a zone where there were constant references to the language and imagery of Shamanism, the overarching color-scheme was red and black spikey leather/hides, we got two handed axes with the Earthen Ring symbol on them, the abilities were overtuned for Shamans especially, and the zone plot was about Cairne dealing with matters of honor and making the ancestors proud; people would rightfully call it the Shaman zone.
Edit: Someone else also mentioned the Elysian fields, which has been largely co opted by popular media as Heaven. I.e. idyllic pastoral lands floating in the sky among clouds as populated by winged figures in togas.
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I see what you’re saying but the Titans are also very greco-roman themed and styled as well. Elysian fields or realm of order and arcane is kinda like two sides of the same coin in this regards. So I’m not saying you’re wrong, it’s that it’s all very greco-roman themed.
lmao i know right
They could have just omitted the whole part about Taurens and Shamans in the book but they had to explicitly go out of their way to make sure we all know its all dumb and fake.
Anyway it looks like the only correct religion and god in WoW is the loa of kings bwonsamdi.
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imagine using the afterlives as a staging ground to obsessively chronicle the inner turmoil of a genocidal monster
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If only those stupid little Dark Trolls never progressed into Night Elves. Wish you could still be hanging with da loa now eh?
It’s almost sad that the troll’s god of death cares more for his people than nearly every other deity on Azeroth combined.
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I know, right? Who saw that coming?
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Speaking as an end-product of that evolution, I’m pretty okay not being beholden to the whims and mercy of the Loa.
What? Mueh’zala doesn’t care about trolls at all. He torments and devours their souls in the afterlife. If you meant Bwonsamdi, well, he’s supposed to hand troll souls over to Mueh’zala for eating so uh… not sure how far that, “cares about his people,” thing really goes. Sure, that’s changing now, but after how many troll souls were nommed into oblivion?
Bwonsamdi stopping even a single troll soul from going directly to the maw unjustly makes him leagues better than Elune willingly allowing genocide to occur on her main worshipers.
And yeah maybe Meuh’zala is still the loa of death, or did Bwon take that place? Don’t know, stopped playing shadowlands before I did that dungeon.
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Ehh…
“Smarter,” or, “More Informed,” might be the better words here. Likewise, the Night Elves aren’t her, “main worshipers,” but her favored peoples. The writing is stupid, but to entertain it for a few moments, I think one has to factor in the Night Elves’ relationships to the Ancients as well. Keep in mind that without Ardenweald, Cenarius, Ashamane, Avianna, etc… would never be able to return. The sheer damage this could have on the Night Elves specifically should be as devastating to them as the Trolls losing their Loa forever would be to them. On the same note, it’s not as if Elune went, “ehhh… its only a few minutes of excruciating pain burning to death before they’re off to my sister. They’ll be fiiiiine…” She put them into a magically induced slumber so they’d feel and fear nothing.
The writing is stupid and just another example of them bending backwards to redeem Sylvanas, but I’ve done my best to entertain it there. I also feel dirty for doing so.
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Y’know the sad thing is Shadowlands could be totally fine when it comes to regards with the story and established lore. There are things I do like in the expansion and just wish it wasn’t saddled to such a poor story and disregard to the existing setting.
Shadowlands could have simply been another realm constructed by the Titans, similar to the Emerald Dream. The Pantheon within the Shadowlands is another group of Titans that choose to remain behind in the Shadowlands to do their Titan jobs. The different afterlifes could simply be ones shaped by the events that have happened across Azeroth, it makes sense since the current realms are all bogged down by boring Azeroth characters anyway.
There isn’t some dumb soap opera with Anduin/Sylvannas/Thrall or whatever. Instead Sylvannas never did any of the crap she did in BfA and something something happens and now she is leading the Horde forces into the Shadowlands to stop budget Thanos. While Bolvar leads the Alliance into the Shadowlands to also stop this bad dude.
You and your friends aren’t some special maw walker, you’re all just big dumb adventurers off to literally fight death, which is honestly in line with WoW’s whole rule of cool over the top story telling. We’ve fought space satan and cthulhu, lets go fight death itself now for cool loots and mounts.
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It’d certainly feel more organic to the story that way. The idea that the Scourge became inspired by the diversity of the Shadowlands would make some more sense then, given that Sargeras himself is a Titan and thus one could expect certain individuals in the Legion to understand enough Titan technology and methodology to make the Scourge a corrupt version of their work.
Odyn trading his eye to peer into the Shadowlands might be somewhat trickier unless it was explained, perhaps, as his attempt to see if he could find the Titans there.
As far as the story goes, I think it would’ve been good in this case if the Jailer had been some remnant of the Legion that had managed to infiltrate the Shadowlands, had been imprisoned there, and used that presence to basically work on building the Legion a new kind of weapon; the undead. The Lich King could’ve been the fruition of all that work.
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Trolls have been getting genocided for tens of thousands of years in Warcraft history. It’s pretty standard practice in WoW storytelling to contrive a reason to have the players storm into a Troll city, wipe out scores of the inhabitants and beat up a loa or two while we’re at it.
What’s happening with Elune isn’t good writing, but let’s not act like how Blizzard handlesTrolls situation is really all that great, either. Afterall, Bwonsamdi was himself a hair’s breadth away from being cast as a villain that orchestrated the whole last war.
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That or the Jailer was some sorta cosmic death force that was attempting to crossover into the mortal realm and take it over. So the Titans defeated him and jailed him when they ordered his realm, the Shadowlands, and placed their Eternal Ones in charge of it.
Sargeras would have then known about all this, placed a Dreadlord in Sire Danatherius’s place to gain control of the weapons and powers the Jailer had welded for his own cause.
Then when Sargeras and the Legion was defeated and the Titan pantheon sealed, something something happened that caused the Arbiter to break and the Jailer now acquiring the sigils which were created by the Titans to power the Eternal Ones and order the Shadowlands or something.
Liek just some crap posting on the forums is all it takes to make the story just a wee bit better than it is presented now :\
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That is a great idea and it gives me hope that it will be retconned to being that, with the “First Ones” being what the afterlife called the Titans. Then we can pretend none of Shadowlands happened when we leave.
The First Ones bothered me the most because they’re practically a complete copy of the Titans in WotLK, and because being a “seventh force” meant there was no escaping this terrible writing and we’d have had to keep zooming out on the cosmic chart to tell the exact same story but delivered by a worse writer*.
Also the grimoire thing ticks me off because they’re using “unreliable narrator” as an excuse to push their poorly conceived lore out into another chronicles but have wiggle room for when people inevitably point out how it makes no sense or doesn’t work in the WoW universe.
Why would I want to buy a lore book that doesn’t even give me concrete lore, anyways?
*I don’t like blaming “the writers” because I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, could be Bobby sending an email out demanding they write exactly this way for all we know. I’m using “writer” as a nebulous term referring to whoever pushed this cold turd out in the company, so not necessarily the writing team. Unless they did >:0
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Even better if the Titans meddling and ordering the Shadowlands to their vision is unnatural and ultimately was going to fail and break one day. We are now dealing with the fall out of their singular mindset to bring order to everything. Which could be a fun return to some of the theories in Wrath about how one day we would have to fight the Titans because the mortal races deviated too much from their vision and which would cause them to want to purge and reset life on Azeroth.
If screen writers are so up their butt trying to subvert expectations honestly the Titans becoming our enemies would be a good one. We just helped them, only for them to turn on us.
remember that what you’re seeing is a first draft, they didn’t even think about the long term plot before they pushed it out
everything to make a good and compelling story is there, they’ve just settled for less. which like, considering everything, that’s the company motto.
“we don’t need to try.”
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Yeah and Altielle nails it — hoping for good retcons, because we know retcons will come, seems to be where this IP is at.
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