I find myself referencing this quote (see below) from Bo Bell a lot lately, and I always have to search for it in the story forum and then C&P. I’m going to put it here as its own thread so that I can just link to it in future. Of course, feel free to discuss it as well if you have thoughts.
Bo Bell worked on the original creation of WoW. The question is in a Reddit AMA, from a user named Qayindo, who had two questions, so I’ve snipped the quote below to just the relevant parts.
Then they should man up and directly tell the playerbase… The narrative driven people on Horde that boght the WC3 experience wouldn’t have been cheated on the product they adquired from Cata onwards. Their current model of “wait and see” just to deliver to some of us something we aren’t interested in playing IS borderline false publicity and literally taking advantage of customers.
Aye, I read that way back. I’m glad they decided to keep them because to be frank, they seem like the most interesting part of the Warcraft universe and the only thing that really made it stick out to me from other fantasy settings. I wouldn’t of bothered with WoW otherwise, though I came to like Blood Elves, some Human Characters, and Night Elf Demon Hunters later on for various reasons.
The rest could of died in a fire for all I cared…though Gelbin and Gallywix are slowly starting to make me like Gnomes and Goblins.
I wouldn’t mind them writing the horde as evil, except that they lied through their teeth about it leading up to the expansion’s release, with all their “wait and see”, “don’t worry horde, you aren’t evil”, and “the story is morally grey”.
We weren’t self hating though, at least back then. Thrall was proud to lead the horde, and the reason he sent grom to cut wood was because grom’s leeroy jenkins tendencies got him into an unnecessary fight despite his explicit orders to avoid it.
The Self Hating part really started in Cataclysm, when Metzan started to have less on an influence on the plot.
I have contacted a valkyr to resurrect this thread.
I think OP brings up great information that is important to discussions about where the forsaken are currently, and how they ended up getting there. In my opinion, a lot of the writers that came after this initial point decided to try to forcefully change the forsaken into a “scourge-2” style group, despite how it goes against everything unique to the forsaken, and what is presented in their core identity.
It’s important for people to know that the forsaken were not intended to be here from the beginning, as this post shows.
Were you using the Unread tab to sort them? There’s a Dismiss button to clear all unread threads so that really old stuff won’t pop back up, letting you keep them to more recent posts.
No, I think it was my fault. I accidentally posted to this thread when I had it open to quote from, instead of to the thread where I wanted to quote it. I deleted the post, so it’s gone now, but that still bumped the thread to the front page.
I have contacted a valkyr to resurrect this thread.