Their price is two civil wars, the independent killing of one character (Garrrosh), the flight of one character (Sylvanas), the independent undermining of the city, (possibly) repeating the path of an obvious antagonist (Scourge).
Our price is a battle shame twice, the loss of territory is final, the loss of territory is not final (1-1.5), the betrayal of a part of the race and ten years of waiting.
M … demon. How to balance the suffering of one (albeit a grandiose) race with the more or less collective suffering of a faction? Attaching the Lightforged Orcs specifically to the night elves (let’s look like the Scarlet Crusade) and destruction … I don’t know. Unless Mulgore is similar in structure to Teldrassil.
Nor should the Horde’s pain be extended to the night elves alone. Genn dies, Tyrande escapes? Shandris will be Nathanos? And another ten-year wait. Gr … And you need two civil wars. It will be difficult to balance this so that everyone is offended in the same way.
@Sarm , conditional Med’an? It seems that he is not in the canon, but the events in which he participated are valid.
I have to lean in favor of this too. This is not something that Blizzard I feel can “fix”, and the screentime, that I presume would go to Forsaken or Night Elf development, is sorely needed in other areas regarding both.
If you see it this way, I guess. It’s not like Blizzard has books or short stories or anything to address important things like these so it’s understandable
These items are disjointed. It’s kind of like saying that the person who smashed up your car has settled accounts with you because they crashed theirs into a tree. Neither one is made whole - and it certainly wasn’t our fault that they crashed their car into a tree. It’s just that instead of having one broken car, we have two.
Now if you want to argue that someone ought to fix the Horde’s car, I agree with you, but bandying about what the Horde went through as a block for them settling accounts with us doesn’t connect here.
Important things shouldn’t be addressed in books. Books should be side stories, and critically, they shouldn’t be repositories for the kind of presentation that Blizzard is for whatever reason afraid of putting in game - like Night Elves being competent against the Horde.
I’d rather have things addressed in books than not having them addressed at all. I’d be happy with the Night Elves getting literally anything in a book as opposed to getting absolutely nothing (well besides the destruction of their souls).
Well this also never happened in a book, and certainly won’t be now that they’re close to extinct and lost their zones. And with how the whole thing was glorified
They can give that dancing trolls tribe to the Alliance. Like, trolls will say that Horde was asking only the war from them, so they decided to start a new life on a Darkshores as Night Elves ally.
Same as NE Dark Rangers.
And I have a problem with setting the bar this low. It is not acceptable to me that our good moments are hidden in books while the bad moments are given immense marketing budgets. That our victories turn up on screen matters to me, and I’m not going to fall into the trap of negotiating away a critical part of the experience just because people are wanting to be unfair towards us.
Yea, but we don’t have any good moments at all, so does it matter?
I’d just appreciate a single, just a single positive thing to happen to Night Elves, but nothing is in sight besides more misery, and that has been ongoing for over 4 years now.
That’s just what happens when the writers set a goal for themselves to remove Night Elves and everything Night Elf related from the game and story entirely. Now it’s just Darkshore left, give that… 2 or 3 years maybe. Until the Horde finds out that there’s nothing keeping them from conquering it.
But the Horde will need compensation if we destroy Orgrimmar, Bilgewater Harbor and take Azshara! And it is unlikely that they will accept as payment a receipt for numerous sufferings plus interest for 10 years. However … you can just take it all and show your tongue. Isn’t it possible?
The reason why I don’t like the idea of them going back to the night elves is because, whether the unnelves are liked or not, they’re now also periphery forsaken content. Letting them go back extends a level of sympathy that goes against the whole forsaken “the living don’t trust us” shtick that prompted just about everything they’ve done from vanilla to current WoW. And it’s sympathy that the actual playable forsaken can’t benefit from, because they (along with the horde at large) more than earned their villainy cards at this point. So why waste that story time on the undead nelves when they fought against their living counterparts too?
This simply isn’t true. Elegy is chock full of examples, and so is A Good War. The former also directly refutes claims that the Night Elves are out of the game here in the manner that you repeatedly elevate - but I don’t exactly blame you for having this impression because I understand the problem with shoving all of this information into books: people don’t remember it, people don’t see it, and it absolutely doesn’t have the impact of visual information, and the gap isn’t even close.
So again, I’m not going to negotiate my own position down on this. I’m not settling for table scraps. It is important that we be rehabilitated on screen, not in some book that only a half of a percentage of the playerbase will even read.
If the Horde can do it, why can’t we? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.
Not that I advocate for taking any of the areas that you mentioned - but my point here is that the people who have convinced you that we have to give up even more to get what we want have been using a double standard.
If you cross reference a lot of the artistic decisions Blizzard made in BFA with what they are doing in SL, it provides visual evidence that Blizzard has adopted a Formula > Innovation strategy when it comes to their more artistic decisions.
This isn’t really new when it comes to story, but it is new when it comes to artstyle. Before BFA, every patch Title was unique. With it’s own font, boarder design, color pallet. Since BFA, the only think unique about Patch Titles is the color pallet alone.
I fear this Formula > Innovation strategy regarding the artstyle is only a symptom of the overall creative network at Blizzard. Patch Titles, Armor and Weapon design, Narrative plot points, character development… All things Blizzard intends to develop from a template, rather than the well thought out manifestations of a creative mind.
This has always been a problem at Blizzard since being acquired by Activision, but never have we seen it overtake every facet of their creative process like a slow growing cancer.
So, no matter how much we bicker here. I really don’t see the Warcraft franchise getting better from this point on. Which is a very sad thing for me to say, as it has been my favorite franchise since I was very young. Unfortunately, my favorite franchise is dead. Perhaps not as a game, or a community, or as a cash cow to be exploited by big business, but certainly in heart and soul.
Eh, I think the storytelling in this game has always been questionable outside of individual zone stories.
As far as the factions go, the problems were obvious since WOTLK had the Horde act chaotic stupid then Cata writing ultimately heavily downplayed the Alliance role into the factions ramping up hostilities. Stonetalon Garrosh was an accident, after all.
Varian being this ridiculous Thrall redux ubermensch who, unlike the opposing meathead he was portrayed to have similar issues to in WOTLK, started the Stormwind human centric, walk back on meaningful moral greyness that plagues Alliance storytelling and got to be wise and cool and go out in heroic sacrifice.
I just recently learned that Blizzard came up with a clean way to do it. Apparently a “cure” for the mutation caused by the WoE will be found. So in one swift stroke, all NEs, PC and NPC alike will revert back to trolls. You’ll just log on one day, be Horde side, with Sylvanas back as your glorious leader.
That should be fun.
I did not pay much attention to the game dev studios back in early 2000s, so I only have vague memories about:
following the success of diablo 2 and its expansion, a bunch of people from blizzard north were fired. Later on whatever was left from the north part of the company was merged into 1, with no more “north” and “south” division
I vaguely remember rumours about the company firing a lot of devs after the work on TBC accets was finished.
For both of those things sources are needed to double check, I am not even sure where to look it up.
Interestingly enough, people do frequently tell good things about individual quest lines, short stories for cinematics, or individual character interactions.
But the further the devs going from the stort format with clear narrative structure, the fewer positive comments I see about them. And expasion-wide ones (or even bigger) are almost never praised.
Now, the question is, will the devs accept their Purpose (be blessed), or will cling to the free will (which did not work out so far like ever, in their case).
IMO Varian is a character that embodies the downfall of the original alliance concept in favor of “following this one with human potential”. Current devs are doubling down on selected few characters to follow, instead of the world and its societies.
Still a better story that what is done by the devs so far IMO.
Wouldn’t surprise me. Not even the complete removal of the Night Elves as a playable race would surprise me once they’re done removing them from the game entirely.
They did say that we couldn’t play High Elves because there aren’t enough left, the same could be said about Night Elves now.
The fact that you’re not only okay with this but even defensive of it is indicative of why no one should even consider your opinion when talking about WoW. You’re on par with Katiera and Zerde at this point.
as NE Dark Rangers.