My favorite quote
Saurfang and Sylvanas, the Battle of Dazar’Alor, and Jaina’s narrative arc are all stories that the team consider successful.
Edit : Alliance players might get a real choice too ! (You know, more important than naming a boat). I just fear that this choice will be to follow Tyrande against Anduin only to be shown that the boy king was right all along.
I personally have an issue with the statement that members of the horde remember going down “dark paths before”, because I feel like it doesn’t matter if they remember or not once they’ve already gone down that path again. It’s not like the horde is verging over a moral event horizon and needs to pull back, because the pre-patch already pole-vaulted right over it and kept going. Nobody deserves a kudos for ending atrocities that they helped start in the first place.
the second corrupt Warchief in under five years might suggest that the Horde they have been playing under for a decade or more is broken, and not worth defending. Hazzikostas is aware of the parallels to Garrosh’s story, and he says that the Horde is too.
“There are a couple of references here and there,” he says. “There are more coming.”
That’s what we all want to hear right? “We are going to MoP2 this flaming dumpster even harder!”
No they said : " There will not be a trial where she is in chains. Sylvanas is not a character who would find herself in that situation … ever.”
So it is not MoP but MoP without the trial, here is all the nuance!
I think ultimately the key thing that needs to be avoided to prevent an MoP 2.0 is that the climax of the expansion cannot be a Sylvanas raid where she is still nominally the Warchief and commands any meaningful percentage of the Horde’s forces.
The main question is whether they felt they had to say that, or if they are just that far out of touch.
The thing is even if Sylavanas became the true hero at the end and she is not killed or confronted, it would still have felt like MoP 2.0 for the most part of the expansion.
Both, honestly.
These kinds of interviews - especially when they’re with general-audience outlets and not specialist ones - are just PR. They’re trying to draw people’s interest towards the game. Grimly reflecting on their mistakes is not something that’s going to happen.
That said, I also really don’t think they know. They see the subscription numbers remaining more-or-less steady and assume that means they’re doing a good job - nevermind that most of those players don’t engage with the story at all and don’t care about what’s happening.
i don’t know if we can trust the same company that lied us so many times before.
like “you will be surprised by who burned the tree”
or “anduin is trying to prove his manhood and is attacking lordaeron for the wrong reasons”
i only agree with the jaina arc, probably the only good thing (in my opinion) of this xpac.
everything else is just… uhg.
Anyway… i do hope that we see more division in the alliance and they let us choose revenge. i think that blizzard will be surprised by the number of people who will choose that.
but… if they aren’t going to let us raid sylvanas, the message that blizzard will be giving is “genocide goes unpunished if you are a fan-favorite character”?
Yeah, it is too late for it to no be Garrosh 2.0. I mean are they going to leave Sylvanas in charge? The would leave Horde players with the villain bat and I’m have a few doubts Alliance players would be that enthusiastic either.
Now avoiding another, “Alliance punishes the evil Horde” moment would be good. But that is just trying to make things worse.
Or a player faction.
Too many players had complete opposite perspectives of Sylvanas before BfA so anything involving her was going to get people angry. I’m definitely not saying the Horde story is good, just that judging Sylvanas’ story specifically is extremely tough.
Oh, Blizzard considers the most poorly thought out, reused, Deus Ex Machina quest stories to be their best?
Talk about being high off their own farts. They couldn’t grasp a coherent plot if it burned down in front of them.
Nah, she’s just going to quit on her own after she’s done using the Horde to accomplish her own goals.
There is not a chance they keep Sylvanas in power considering how many Horde characters they’d have to get rid of to make it work.
In before it’s not MoP 2.0 but WoD 2.0 “Azeroth is freeeeee”.
Except that’s already been done once before in Warcraft III
Grom gets the demon blood band wagon going, goes on a genocidal rampage on another planet, and in the end manages to undo what he started. And the guy is revered as a hero to Orc’s.
Some more choice quotes:
(Presumably by “these characters,” he means Jaina, Saurfang, and Sylvanas, since this is right before the article says those are successful storylines.)
So … they really are going to delete the accounts of players who choose wrong?
I … I feel ill.
It’s just awe inspiring, really. That such an awful, plot hole ridden mess of a story could be pushed out onto a AAA game. So I guess he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Honestly, I’m willing to admit that the stories of the zones themselves, and Jaina’s initial launch arc, were both some of the best writing I’ve seen from Blizzard in a while. Even the zone I thought was the weakest, Stormsong, was quite good and interesting.
It’s the overarching stuff, the meta-story, that thinks its pants go on its head.