In Vanilla/Classic WoW you get the feeling that your efforts from leveling genuinely assist the race you chose at the login screen. You fight off bandits, gather supplies for settlements, root out corruption, uncover Defias and Burning Blade conspiracies. Stop Dark Irons from bombing dams and bridges, confront the Horde’s dark past in Blackrock Mountain. Etc. You roll a character and become a hero to that race.
What you don’t intend to do is become a hapless victim for an over-dramatic cut-scene where your homeland is invaded, most of the people you help are butchered, and your capital reduced to ashes. You don’t intend to roll a character of Thrall’s new Horde and then be forced to go along with Garrosh or Windrunner’s asinine plots to murder innocents and ransack the land. You don’t play World of Warcraft to have the World be ravaged by a D-List villain in the form of Deathwing just so a bastardized version of Thrall can come in and save the day.
Victim of a fruitless faction war. Victim of inconsistent and theme-destroying cartoon villains for leaders. Victims of the writer’s obsession with tearing down a world in order to garner a cheap shock from their playerbase. I want to be a hero of Warcraft, I rolled a character to be as such. People did not roll Night Elves and Worgen to be refugees. People did not roll Orcs, Trolls and Tauren to be mindless henchmen for cartoon villains. People want to play Warcraft to save Azeroth, not be victims.
Well it’s not just about playing as a victim. We’ve all been victims of the attacks of the Scourge, the Legion or others.
But something that really bothers you is when you don’t get any payback against the villains because it’s a player faction, meaning that they can just do whatever atrocities they want but not see any punishment for it.
If you are referring to Lordaeron and Dalaran in Warcraft 3, or Stormwind in Warcraft 2, I’d argue that those spaces hold less emotional significance for players because they are ultimately a collection of maps where the player controls armies in, rather than a fleshed out game world where a player controls a single character and interacts directly with other players and NPCs.
Warcraft 3 is specifically a linear narrative filled with a cast of characters who we only control in the gameplay portion. We have no control of where Arthas goes and what he does in the narrative, nor do we invest heavily in areas that are ultimately maps in an RTS rather than zones in a MMORPG. Emphasis on RPG, and all the player investment that entails.
I know, I mostly agreed with your post. I was just refering to the whole Teldrassil thing and blizzard wanting us to forget about it because they don’t want to give us revenge against a player faction.
Give it up already. the Horde players are NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR LOSS.
The only thing to blame is the scriptwriting that set these parts and events for the various NPC’s. Just as you don’t get credit for the heroics of Varian and Jaina, the Horde players are not responsible for the actions of the NPC, so the idea that you are entitrled to some form of “payback” from them is ludicrous to the extreme.
The players aren’t but the Horde is. A difference sure but in the end the outcome is the same. Somebody has to answer for it and unfortunately that means the Horde players get slapped in the face again because they were the villains.
Fun Fact: Originally, the role of, ‘Savior of Azeroth,’ and, ‘Substitute Earth-Warder,’ was meant to be played by Med’an, but due to extreme player backlash surrounding the character of Med’an, that was cancelled, and they put Thrall into his position at the last moment, with minimal changes.
I was thinking earlier that a big part of my fading interest in WoW is that for me, a big lore nerd, a major part of my enjoyment of the game was the idea that I was doing all these things to defend my home. I’m fighting the Burning Legion/Scourge/etc. so that my homeland can be spared all that horror and continue to live in peace. But that’s not the case anymore. The Night Elves lost their home. As did the Worgen before them. As did the Gnomes loooong before them. Loch Modan is still just a puddle, the beauty of the Loch itself gone forever. The Stonewrought Dam, that we protected against sabotage pre-Cata, is still blasted ruins ten years after Cata. The Barrens are still divided by a massive, fiery chasm. Half of Durotar is still flooded.
Everywhere I can think of that mattered to my toons on both factions are just…ruined. A lot of it is the eternal damage from Cata, and the newer stuff is from the various wars and conflicts we’ve fought since then. Regardless, it’s hard for me to find the same enjoyment in the story when I realize most of the homes I used to fight for are now wrecks.
Couldn’t agree more, OP. I think the essential difference between the story in Classic and the story in BfA is that then we felt like active agents in the story. Now we feel like passengers.
Classic has tons of weaknesses compared to modern WoW. But, evidently, its strengths outweigh those for most players. And its greatest strength is that it feels like the players matter. Give a player a choice between actually playing a game with other human beings vs. basically being a camera for the NPCs, and most will take the former.
I don’t care how polished the cutscene is. I didn’t start playing WoW so I could watch Saurfang do stuff. I loved it because it allowed me to create my own stories, with other players.
On the other hand OP, you don’t want a stagnant and never changing world (or if you do that’s why Classic is here). Races shouldn’t be immune to negative storytelling just because they are playable. If players identify so strongly with their played race that’s a credit to the game’s immersive qualities such as they are.
I think what really bothers you and bothers a lot of people (quite rightly) is that Blizzard should not have broached the topic of genocide the way they did (very cavalierly), especially a genocide perpetrated by playable races on playable races, especially not the way they went about it, and especially not the way they have treated that topic for going on an entire year since it happened. I believe Ion was being very wise when he called it “exploitative.”
I’m not sure how they will get themselves out of this, but I hope they approach story beats like that with a little more forethought next time.
Quest designs and other faction components are but external circumstances that is based on the political war & other troubles. I think its up to you to sort of visualize how victimized your avatar came to be as how you see it fit, because in real life we are victimized by some sort of absurdity and that’s part of living. Apply that to your avatar, get the feeling to what you felt victimized and etc.,
PS: For instance, with Vencio I feel victimized to be considered a pawn for the faction I am blindly fighting for, when in truth it caused Vencio nothing but mental distress, cynicism and questioning everything.
I like your point but just as in real war context can’t be helped.
I think it’s fair to say a lot of us didnt play the game to be a soldier but to start an adventure. Over the years starting with cata, being a soldier was no longer just bound to your faction war master and a few quests. But being a soldier became the theme.
Quests that involved you finding rare artifacts or uncovering secrets of the land and finding hidden shrines were replaced with quests that simply said “Kill 12 horde grunts and report back to me”
Quests that involved you helping towns deal with local problems being the real footmen were at war are replaced with no context outside cutscenes.
Compare classic ashenvale to current (cata ashenvale) The entire stonetalon,ashenvale and ashara are one big battle field that involve you killing and maiming endless waves of other soldiers as some super murderer. Uncovering enemy warcrimes and in turn committing your own.
Almost every quest in those 3 zones involve killing members of the other faction.
Silverpine forrest and hillsbrad on the other hand is actually a decent questing zone in current WoW and an example of how other zones should be treated.
Yeah, but the in universe story Faction needs to be punished for it.
Tbf, the Forsaken are largely consistent as monsters even in Vanilla, they just dont show it as often to Horde Players. They’re presence in Kalimdor was almost always to spread sickness, and they were the only Horde race close to the notoriously brutal tauren supremacist Grimtotem tribes. They captured some people from other races for experiments. The civilians have never been written to be evil, the authority however has always been.
In the context of back story, yes. But there is a vast difference between back story that informs the lore versus events deliberately put in motion by Blizzard to victimize entire playable races in the current plot. As I mentioned before and will try to explain more adequately now, World of Warcraft is at its best when it has the player genuinely feel like their efforts make a difference and that the progression of their character is tied to bettering and safeguarding the lands that character originated from.
For example, in Classic a Dwarf character can start humbly by culling Troggs and collecting boar meat for local towns, to halting Dark Iron plots and Dragonmaw remnants, to infiltrating the Dark Iron capital and storming Blackrock Spire, and finally stopping Ragnaros from causing untold devastation as he did in the War of the Three Hammers.
But from Cataclysm onward Blizzard routinely chooses to ignore player agency and involvement by having mass destruction, corruption, and slaughter happen to people and places without having any chance for players to intervene and be heroic once again. Deathwing destroys the world in an opening CGI. Garrosh and Windrunner get to run rampant in cut-scenes with no objection or intrusion permitted by players, even up to their deaths with Garrosh. Horde players are forced to be villainous henchmen until the plot demands otherwise. Alliance players are forced to be victimized innocents unable to halt or repair the damage done to them.
Now is unavoidable tragedy realistic? Sure. But this is a heroic fantasy MMORPG that once focused on player progression and cooperation to achieve great feats. Those feats used to entail feeling like a hero. I don’t think a lot of people feel heroic about the War of Thorns, Theramore, or Cataclysm. And as far as tragedy goes, Blizz is pretty bad at handling it given how inconsistent and awful the character drama they try to write is.
The PC is an exposition tool, you’re not meant to be the center of attention, you’re meant to see the world around you change and adapt to its circumstances and it’s your job as a player to determine how your own character reacts to that, the former RPG element was long abandoned and good riddance.
While Blizzard didn’t do a particularly good job at it, I don’t agree that playable races should be impervious to casualties (and I’m saying this as a Worgen player), it makes storytelling dull and predictable.
What I don’t like is when critical plot lines are dropped for the sake of exploring a new expansion. Gilneas was never brought up again save for a throwaway line or two, you don’t see people or quests reacting to their loss, their struggles to rebuild and how that resentment shapes them as people. And if Teldrassil is shoved under the rug because the writers don’t feel like dealing with the aftermath then that’s every bit as awful.
Wanna go for genocide? Cool, go nuts. But commit to it, don’t drop it at the earliest inconvenience to push your next cliche “we must team up for the greater good”.
Ei, this is warcraft we are talking about. Anyone, Horde or Alliance, who have played since the RTS know that your faction can and will be beaten to a bloodly pulp if the story calls for it.
Even after you quested in Vanilla usually you didnt leave the zone better than you found it. Sure you killed some of villains but the things you did only solved the symptoms not the main problem. Heck, big loaming threats were everywhere.
Loss after loss isn’t fun, its depressing. I, and others I’m sure, are tired of losing with zero chance of a recovery, much less revenge. What’s the point when you know you won’t get any satisfaction in the end?
There is something horribly wrong with the story direction when the only “development” we get is loss and destruction.