Yup, no one is arguing that this story thread really pushed the boundaries of absurdity with how certain leaders reacted. The reason Derek was the breaking point was simply due to Blizzard wanting to let Sylvanas do what she needed to get done. So, Baine needed to remain convenient until he was allowed to not be. Same goes for Lor’themar and Thalyssra in Naz’jatar.
Fact of the matter remains that Sylvie’s personal narrative took precedence over the Horde’s in this expansion; no matter what those fancy cinematics would suggest. This resulted in a scenario where Horde actors who should have acted in response to the atrocity of Teldrassil, did not act in response; because it would have gotten in the way of Sylvie accomplishing her “true objectives”.
Its sucks … but honestly, I don’t care anymore. I spent the last year and a half complaining about this exact thing. That the “honor Horde” rhetoric was just lip-service meant to placate WC3 fans until they were done letting Sylvanas take the faction for a joyride. I’ll view BfA through a meta-lens, which doesn’t make it more palatable … but it does allow me to continue enjoying my faction and characters. This is also reinforced by the fact that on a meta-level, the NEs and Alliance lost nothing of tangible value from this ride; even if on a story level they lost quite a bit.
They lost a capital city that few ever visited, and you can still visit. They lost questing zones, that you can still quest in. They lost two characters of C Rank at best. A Warden who only gained a name for being a WC giver in Legion, and a discount Feathermoon who’s entire run so far began and ended in a short story. They also lost a power fantasy of being more powerful than the entire Horde combined, when that fantasy being preserved continued to come off as increasingly arbitrary.
On a meta-level, the NEs lost very little. The rest of the Alliance lost even less than them.
Nitpicking here but using money from Jaina to buy weapons, supplies, and stuff doesn’t mean that the Alliance helped Baine in retaking Thunder Bluff. As a matter of fact when Varian found out about it he was pissed, so yeah not an Alliance endeavor.
Yeah, when you minimize everything and refer to it as the “meta-level” no one loses very much at all. Just like, on a meta-level, the Horde loses very little too.
I didnt care that baine was in stormwind, what ever the guy sucks, but this pissed me off.
“Once known wrongly as sunwalkers” such complete crap.
If baine doemst responde with something saying “no, sunwalker is correct.” He be the largest disgrace to the horde ever. A faction of super flawed chacters and he will be the worst.
We lost 3 A and B list characters from an already very depleted roster. With how absolutely Hero drivin most of Blizz’s writing is, if your PC race does’t have strong representation … your PC might as well not even exist in the grand scheme of things. The Horde is riddled with underpowered, underused, and underdeveloped reps … and either through death or some other means … that list of actually developed characters got a whole lot smaller in BfA.
On a story level there is no one in BfA that lost more than the Kaldorei; even the Forsaken. I’m not sure they are to the level of destitution the Darkspear are at, but they certainly would be a second place finisher. However, they as a PC race are also in no threat of being rendered irrelevant going forward. There truly is nothing more important in WoW writing than developed, powerful reps … and that is one thing that the Kaldorei and their playerbase are not lacking in.
The tricky thing is the issue of Sylvanas being someone that the Alliance wanted gone in particular, but she was the one continuing the war most of the other leaders didn’t want.
Besides that, negotiating so that the enemy has to weigh things against additional costly battles is not a bad move.
But how does that actually effect the game on a meta level though? Can you not play your goblin shaman if you don’t have a goblin leader? So what if the Horde lost Sylvanas and Saurfang? On a meta level, it doesn’t really stop you from enjoying or playing the game. Therefor the Horde didn’t actually lose anything.
If anything the game suffers from focusing too much on a small cast of characters and their actions being written like a novel you have to play 15$ a month for, whereas in earlier WoW expansions the game world felt great because the characters in the game and the quest lines were part of the world just as the PC was. If anything removing that sort of cancer sounds pretty based and Horde biased to me imo. Alliance can keep their “”"""“characters”"""" if it means Horde gets a strong player-driven narrative going forward.
As I’ve already said, I would rather have had Malfurion or/and Tyrande die at Darkshore than lose those hundreds of nameless Night Elf civillians. And I would rather have Jaina die than go back to her pre-Theramore peacemonger self. What even was the point of that?
The Alliance is stated by both sides to be winning the war ‘on every front’. There is no way they aren’t going to accept a peace deal after Darnassus, without at a minimum, Sylvanas’s head on a pike. It is also, particularly after two major damaging wars instigated by the Horde in less than ten years, laughable that they would accept any scenario where the Horde wasn’t seriously defanged when the Alliance is in a winning position.
It lessons the potential relevance of my faction going forward into future expansions. It lessons potential stories that can be told with such a faction. It means we are more likely to end up in expansions like Legion, where the Horde was merely a footnote in a story with Alliance themes; starring Alliance characters; and focused on grand Alliance moments. Blizzard also has an absolutely terrible track record when it comes to building up Horde reps as replacements. Hell, Saurfang became Orc Racial leader in a tweet for goodness sake.
We aren’t going to see strong player driven narratives going forward. WoW has never been that sort of game, even in Vanilla. Vanilla’s charm was its community and its world exploration, but the overall narrative was never on the PC; it was on the world. We aren’t going to see a shift back to that form of storytelling either unless Blizz decides to invest in an anticata style expansion. So, as a result, PC racial representatives are some of the most important elements to a PC racial narrative. It takes years to build them up, and without strong ones what you should expect is essentially to be able to mechanically play the game; just don’t your PC race to feel very involved in it.
You are the same one that tells me the “underdog” vanilla Horde had “limited story potential” and “no reason to leave the Barrens” and yet Legion, the expansion everybody complains about having no Horde story, is the exact expansion which had tons of story potential for the “underdog” old school Horde.
That old school Horde had every reason to leave Barrens and fight the Legion. Blizzard simply chose not to do it.
The potential of the Horde story has nothing to do with some law set in stone. It’s up to Blizzard. A better group of writers or developers could take the exact cast of the Horde as it is now and think up good narratives for them and to build them up.
At the end even with the combined might of the the Alliance and the rebel Horde they weren’t sure they could take the portion of the Horde still loyal to Sylvanas. While at one time the Alliance were winning that doesn’t seem to be the case at the time when Saurfang challenged Sylvanas.
The Horde didn’t surrender, and the Alliance didn’t win, both sides agreed to stop fighting. So I’m not sure how you would expect the Alliance to defang the united Horde when it was questionable that the would be able to defeat only the portion still under Sylvanas’s command, even when they had help from rebels.
People will still be playing Horde, in fact more people than play Alliance, even if there is no Horde characters. Did nobody play Horde during Legion? People were still playing Horde a lot during that expansion.
On a meta-level, it’s not that big of a deal.
The community is player driven content. You make your own stories in the World of Warcraft, everything else is set dressing. Even when you don’t play on an RP server you can create immersive and fun moments. And if you do play on an RP server you can create stronger narratives than anything Blizzard is capable of creating. But only if we don’t have 4 different version of Orgrimmar with different Warchiefs and quests where you go back in time to interact with Garrosh or Varian. That’s what all these “storyline” quests have gotten us: an extremely fragmented narrative.
jaina always has been someone who wanted peace for the world. the point of all of that was literally a redemption arc and healing.
if she went warmonger, well, we probably could win the war over the horde and then a random world threat shows up and kill us, unable to stop it alone.
That’s literally all what this story is about you know why?
Because we can’t-delete-the-horde.
what bring us back to the question… what was even the point of the faction war in the first place…
Sigh.