I’ve been through it and I’m not upset. We all don’t feel the same way. I’ll say what I said before:
As a survivor, I don’t see the issue with the quest. There are dark moments in this game and needing to keep timelines intact is important to the lore. Alex herself even understands that. No one can hide from what was. And it shouldn’t be glossed over. I think it’s important to remember the evils that were done as a harsh reminder for the future.
This qiest doesn’t have us participating in the act. We return the Dragon Soul. Then we listen to Alex’s reaction. Which, I feel is lacking. There should be more to her response, her feelings.
We know she understands what must be done. And we know she said she’d forgive the Orcs for it. But more than teeth grinding and “I understand” should be present.
I wonder if that’s why they did it. To properly address these types of dark moments and show they aren’t afraid of the difficult ones.
Within the context of what the bronze dragons do, it’s perfectly reasonable to maintain what happened to Alex.
With respect, the Bronze Dragonflight has been more than willing to make changes. See the Blue Dragonflight existing at all. The Night Elves knowing about Broxigar pre-WC3.
That being said, the Bronze flight doing this isn’t really much of an issue.
The quest being what it is at all is the issue. And it seems like that’s being overlooked.
They can have the Bronze Dragon quests exists just fine without writing a quest that involves a character getting raped. Especially when they have shown in the past to change those aspects of the story. See Garona.
But why should we bury the darker and horrific events? These events shaped who these characters are and what happened in this universe. Why remove that? Why shouldn’t we be confronted with the difficult things and be shown how they affect those characters and ourselves?
I understand if people are uncomfortable and I respect that and feel a quest skip is a good idea for those people. But I don’t feel this should be removed, glossed over, forgotten about again. It’s an elephant in the room for ages. They’re confronting a dark past and not retconning something important. That, to me, is a good thing.
I don’t want people to forget my past or gloss over what happened to me. I’m not something uncomfortable that should be erased or avoided. Nor is this, imo.
Because this is a fantasy game that people play to have fun, and making the player feel bad isn’t the way to go.
If you want to keep these moments, there ARE ways to do it without that. Have us come out of a time rift to a scene between Alexstraza and a Bronze Dragon.
Don’t have the player participate in stuff like this. We’ve just gone through multiple expansions of players feeling like crap because Blizzard wanted to try and take on “darker themes”.
It resulted in a lot of Alliance players feeling completely left out in the rain over Teldrassil, and it resulted in a lot of Horde players feel like utter crap because instead of being honorable warriors the Horde was nailing civilians to the wall.
Didn’t skip anything, I directly addressed it. You’re just acting like a pretend lawyer when you yourself can’t use the jargon correctly. You said yourself these cases are hard to label, and here you are, acting like your label is the only correct one and everybody else are meanies for virtue signaling
You’re just wrong dude
Have you heard of s*xual coercion? Real life courts have discussed this, that consent under coercion is not consent at all. Ergo, a form of SA
Blizzard themselves addressed it for what it is. You’re ignoring and downplaying what actually happened. And yea, it’s pretty weird hill to die on. So you can what, prove your ignorance?
You don’t know what you’re talking about and trying to use smart words to dance around the act. Poorly, too.
Here is the text of the novel from Tides of Darkness which references the events.
“As long as Alexstraza thought there as hope for her children she would serve them by producing liter upon liter of dragon eggs. And as long as she and three of her mates were their captives her children would serve them as well, in hopes of one day freeing their mother.”
The Orcs are treating Alex and her consorts the same way I imagine the humans in this game treat their horses or Orcs treat their wolves. They’re treating them like mounts and breeding them.
I’m not sure how I feel about this because it’s opening up a weird can of worms with logic. If I’m upset about how they treated Alexstraza should I be upset and question if my mount trainer is supplying my mounts ethically?
What I’m getting at is what is Alexstraza, is she a person or an animal? Because right now dragons seem to be this in-between and if dragons are that… should I be upset that I’m riding a dragon? Should I treat them like a person and not ride them as a mount?
Mounts is kind of weird in a gameplay sense because many of our mounts ARE sentient.
But it gets something of a pass because it’s just a game mechanic for the sake of variety.
But if you see how mounts are treated in the lore, many of the people with said mounts treat them as sentient allies and life long allies. See the Dwarven Griffon riders over their Griffons, Taelia and her Griffon, etc.
Keep in mind that Chromie is the same person that treated her own cross timeline assassination as a minor inconvenience.
Still this is the weirdest line people are drawing. When we’ve ensure so much more horrific things throughout the course of WoW. Like statistically and legally our characters have done so much worse than maintaining a history that must remain.
That doesn’t sound like a good reason to me. We’ve dealt with a lot of dark themes in this game. We helped a Forsaken who made a woman more docile by cutting into her brain. We helped kill everyone in Stratholme and helped Arthas. We stole the Dragon Soul and helped destroy the world and wipe out millions of people. We helped the Horde destroy an entire training ground of young druids.
This game is full of darker themes and is not a G rated game. I don’t think it should be treated as one.
That would be glossing over it and doesn’t have an impact on us like this does, though.
We aren’t participating in what happens to Alex. We are returning the Dragon Soul to keep the timeline intact so we don’t all get wiped out of existence. What’s happened to her is already happening when we return it.
As a Nelfs who hated what they did with War of Thorns, this is no way comparable to that. You want them to ignore a huge piece of history because you’re uncomfortable. We don’t touch Alex. I don’t even think we see her. We keep the timeline intact. We learn how the Bronze make these difficult decisions and have to deal with it. I don’t want to be forgotten or glossed over. I want people to deal with it.
I can’t see them as just a mount,when you own the responsibility of a mount it become part of you ,and you it just as a hunter with his pets that bond can’t be broken.That’s why my water mount when it was change hurt bad to me it couldn’t doing what it did best .
Ehh, if you give somebody a weapon knowing they are about to hurt people with said weapon, you are complicit in the crime. And we actually know exactly what we’re doing.
I’m fine with timeline shenanigans, but this subject is just tone deaf with the direction blizz is trying to move away from
Y’know there’s such a thing as respecting animals. They’re sentient, they’ve got feelings. They experience trauma. They can mourn.
Our dragons in the dragon isles specifically requested to be ridden, or allowed themselves to be because of the adventure we find that they wanted to share. They are your companion, not your “animal”.
Dragons in this story are people. And you SHOULD be caring about animals just as much tbh.
I can’t see this making it live when we’re all familiar with the fruit bowl thing. Like this is that mentality to the literal extreme and there seems to be a massive disconnect with the wow teams that this even was pushed to a PTR release.
FWIW I agree with most of the changes they’ve made. But if you’re willing to cut ties with a years old voice actor for false claims against him for this same exact thing…why? Like who thinks this is any sort of logical.
That’s a big yikes from me.
Bringing some of the worst aspects of humanity to bear in your story doesn’t make it nuanced, it shows that you’re incapable of writing without relying on shock value and narrative crutches.
Story line criticisms aside (believe me, I’m there), this shouldn’t have even made it on the vision board when they started talking about this patch…this ain’t one person failing. This is entire teams.
I really do think the game is growing out from them now.
It’s the classic argument and time travel trope of “If you can go into the past, do you kill Hitler?” The first answer is “yes” because of the things you know he will do. You are doing a good thing. And in every instance where people wrote about a similar scenario, something worse happened.
It’s not pretty but we’re doing what we have to do.
