Replaying BfA's certain parts is painful

Lore Story Forum
41

Oh, indeed. Hence my use of “should.”

For example the whole story Sylvanas used to rope Saurfang into buying the latest war should have been presented has the sort of justification utilized to convince the Horde at large, but it wasn’t. They apparently needed no convincing whatsoever. She merely offered up this (flimsy) explanation that the Alliance would always keep attacking to Saurfang, while the rest of the Horde mindlessly followed her without even needing to be sold on why they needed to start fighting and dying again.

Consequently, it results in the Horde looking like a host of bloodthirsty monsters who kill and torture and destroy for the sheer thrill of wronging others, while only a handful of individuals at the top meant to be “relatable” to the player are played off as actually having to be convinced that maintaining an eternity of one’s families and friends dying horribly in unending wars is a worthwhile pursuit.

It’s like the Horde protagonists are written as having in-universe motivations, while the Horde masses get written as if they know about and are party to enforcing the whole idiotic “it’s called WarCraft so we’ve gotta always be at war.”

It’s an unfortunate situation when one of the player factions is written to behave collectively in ways that seem to necessitate them somehow knowing subconsciously that they’re in a game with themes of perpetual conflict that have to be met. It makes the protagonist characters feel like they don’t even belong in their own faction when they take the slightest interest in maybe not just committing to throwing their own people into the thematic meat grinder for virtually any reason whatsoever.

The Sylvanas situation makes it particularly glaring because it makes her outburst of disdain for the Horde feel like a forced and unnecessary angle for her ouster. Instead of finding out the Banshee Queen’s true horrific intentions with the war being the catalyst to rejecting her leadership, it was a “she talked dirt about us” moment that turned the Horde masses against her. Which comes across like apparently - unlike their own racial leaders - the Horde as a whole takes anti-Horde rhetoric seriously enough to cast her off, but evidently they would have been totally down with the idea of their Warchief propagating a war that deliberately maximized casualties on both sides and got most of them killed in the process.

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42

Amadis, no amount of expressing sympathy or sorrow for what happened has earned us any amount of goodwill. Instead, we’ve had well over a year of players demanding that we be punished - sometimes cloaking their desires in “fairness” and sometimes not, but the end result is always the game. People want to use Teldrassil as a club to beat us into contrition, to make the Horde and its players grovel to every whim they can think of.

When people start to take an event that really was a tragedy for everyone concerned, and then use it as a weapon to try and justify absolutely everything, you shouldn’t be surprised when it starts to lose its impact. We are tired of being told we’re monsters every day, by fellow players and Blizzard alike. You get to the point where, eventually, it feels like there’s no value in trying to be reasonable or understanding because it doesn’t get you anything, since you’re going to be painted as evil bastards no matter what you do. All that this has done is pushed us into defending what very little we have been left.

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43

TBH it is more the alliance that is to blame because of anduin being in charge and just being anduin.

(WTB someone like Mengsk or something as “High King”/Emperor who would use the scourge or something to lure them towards Orgrimmar instead or old god minions or what have you)

Same with jaina, she had to remember that green D*** is very convincing.

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Finally playing an Alliance toon through BfA and did the Horde attack on Brennadam quests. I can’t say I’ve come across anything quite so cringe-worthy in this game. Not just because it was a totally ridiculous villain slamming of my favored faction but because it felt so frickin’ out of place considering the rest of the zone’s storyline.

What do I mean? It strikes me as odd that once you’re done and driven the Horde out of Brennadam you’re dispatched to attack the local quillboar. Kind of seems like a sudden jump from one ship to another, doesn’t it?

Oh yeah. The Horde attack on Brennadam was originally done by quillboar and not Horde, but since this was suppose to be a faction war oriented expansion at the start, the felt they needed to add some faction shenanigans and their effort included this half-assed insert.

Yet, curiously, there’s no equivelant where Alliance attack anything in Zandalar.

Gray vs Gray indeed. :roll_eyes: :lying_face: :face_vomiting:

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45

As an alliance only player I agree with your sentiment. I actually maybe dislike what some alliance players are wishing for more than you do. I don’t want to play the bad guy nor would I like players to be punished for how blizzard decided to make the story.

I don’t think a win for some players necessitates a loss for others. blizzard should just give nelves a win without anybody losing.

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46

i really don’t understand what was the purpose of that, the alliance player didn’t need any more reason to want to fight the war, but not, we had to double it down. that forsaken randomly torturing a woman in the basement, just… why?.

hmm sounds like you are probably a horde player in disguise.

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47

And I will defend that, too. I will point out whenever I can that the Horde players did not set Teldrassil on fire themselves. And I will protest all the posts saying that the Alliance should genocide the Horde back.

But I will not side with the weaponized apathy logic of “I’m so numbed from Alliance posters that I can claim anything I want under the name of not caring any more.”

And frankly, Blizzard hasn’t even told the Horde players that they should face consequences for Teldrassil. Yes, Blizzard has made the Horde look weak compared to the Alliance. Yes, Blizzard has made the Horde fail at almost everything they did in BfA after the War of the Thorns. Yes, Blizzard is doing everything it can to paint Sylvanas as never having cared about the Forsaken or the Horde. But none of those things are actually related to Teldrassil any more than the Battle of Dazar’alor was. Unless there’s something new in Shadowlands, the Horde player isn’t ever actually told they are held accountable for Teldrassil nor that they would be punished for it.

And there’s nothing Alliance posters here can do about that. So if you’re worn out from Alliance posters being unreasonable and demanding things that will never happen, just ignore them.

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48

Garithos and Jaina in the purge of dalaran didn’t do it alone either. What’s your point. Both sides are full of war criminals.

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The Purge should’ve happened immediately after Theramore

#ChangeMyMind

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50

Are you also going to paint the Night Elves as war criminals because they attacked the horde in 8.1?

Daelin Proudmoore, for example, often gets described as such but looking at it now, countless lives could’ve been saved if he was listened to.

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I wish the purge was a mass-casualty event so I could stop rolling my eyes every time it gets mentioned.

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52

You do realize that Daelin Proudmoore wanted to kill more Orcs than Sylvanas killed Night Elves, right? By whatever count that doesn’t make less deaths over all.

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53

This, honestly. Unless you were a Sylvanas adamant loyalist that is.

I mean, it’s the Story forum, it’s meant to be seen from a Story perspective. Never did I mention ‘‘Players’’ or that ‘‘they should feel bad’’ (sorry you felt called out, not sorry :P) It’s more of how badly they handed the fact that everything presented in-game is ‘‘friendly terms’’ yet they told us it’s not over yet.

And this, even though those races (sans Taurens I think?) also participated in attrocious acts we only see Goblins, Forsaken or Belves being carried around as ‘‘Loyalists’’. Heck, in MoP orcs were clearly enjoying Garrosh’s bloodshed yet they were seemingly forgiven too!

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BfA is painful in general regardless of which side I try and play because it only rubs in my face how much Blizzard beat the horde with the villain stick and then fed players drivel to try and pretend it didn’t count. Even playing Alliance annoys me and there is no way to avoid that content in BfA.

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55

I kinda feel bad about Teldrassil. The game at least made me pave the way for it. I was indirectly responsible.

The rest of the war campaign though was pretty unremarkable. You do some iffy stuff but ultimately not much I found all that questionable given it’s a world war.

The rest of the stuff I see Alliance on here angry about was actions of the Horde that I could not see, engage in, hear of, or even suspect on a Horde playthrough. There’s even some stuff like Deathstalkers murdering civilains in Astraanar that outright contradicts the Red player’s experience.

I can’t really feel anything for stuff that might as well have occured in a parallel dimension for how connected I was to it.

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56

You just hit the nail on the head. The character who’s portrayed as a deluded bigot who’s extreme prejudice leads to his own daughter abandoning him is now proven as retroactively right.

“Remember kids sometimes you can’t trust the others no matter what! Listen to the old powerful men who tell you to kill 'em” is a ‘lesson’ Blizzard should be ashamed you can now read from their story.

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57

Not going to claim anything I want, I didn’t mean to say that I support thinking like “I don’t care anymore so Teldrassil was fine.” It wasn’t. I’m just not really going to be moved by appeals to it much anymore.

But your third paragraph is kind of what I meant by the “asymmetrical disappointments”. Alliance players, understandably so, want a direct link between the Horde’s disappointment and their own. However, Blizzard’s slipshod storytelling means the ship has sailed on this - lots of other punishment was built into the story, just not this one. I am pretty sure we will discover in a year or two that the Teldrassil event was changed significantly close to launch and they didn’t have time to re-storyboard until closer to 8.2, which is why references to the event are so conspicuously absent in the story.

We have been punished. You have been punished. No reasonable people should be advocating for additional punishment - and yes, I realize that Blizzard has put themselves in the very difficult position where it’s hard to resolve Teldrassil without impacting the Horde again. They’ve also ensured these wounds will remain fresh through their choice of the next expansion, which is why a thread like this that goes digging up old outrage irks me. We already have enough of that.

I’ve adopted a purely Team Spite position of refusing to play along with Blizzard’s emotional manipulation. It’s why I was entirely indifferent to the return of Thrall, their desperate retcons of Sylvanas, and all of the other hackneyed stuff they did to try and move me to the position they wanted the players to be in.

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58

Holy hell did they miss the target on this one though lmao.

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59

See - this is where I take issue. When people associate themselves so closely with their faction (Horde or Alliance), everything seems unreasonable, and it all becomes personal.

Yes, Alliance players want the Horde to be punished. Why? Because Alliance characters have suffered horrible atrocities, and these are characters which players identify with and cherish. Is it the Horde player’s fault? No.

So, when the Alliance players claim that the Horde should be punished, it gets interpreted as the desire for Horde players to be punished by way of proxy. This isn’t true. Just like how when the Alliance suffers another unspeakable autrocity at the hands of the Horde, Alliance players feel like they are personally being dealt another defeat that they’re never going to ever get justice for. It’s exhausting to have any passion or attachment to this game.

It’s why the faction war narrative (the way they’re driving it) is such bull. You can’t have Faction 1 do something horrible against the other without there being repercussions or consequences, because that isn’t fair to Faction 2 (which suffered the attack). But if you punish Faction 1 too severely, it isn’t fair to those players in Faction 1, because it wasn’t their choice in the first place.

Yes, Alliance players are going to continue to demand that the Horde face real punishment (not the loss of its leader - who is actually out to get everyone), like reparations or loss of territory or something else. There’s been loyalist npcs in chains in Orgrimmar; that’s a start, but the issue is - the Alliance never sees it.

There isn’t any pay off for Alliance players. Just like with Teldrassil, all of the story juice is provided through the Horde PoV. All of the reactions to Teldrassil were focused on the Horde. Saurfang got the cinematic, not a Night Elf. Saurfang got to fight Sylvanas, not an Alliance player.

You can say “There is Alliance pay off, they “won” the war. They “won” back Darkshore,” etc etc. But the issue is, again, we don’t see any of it. Horde players at least see the aftermath, as grim and disheartening as it is.

Yes, another Horde warchief got smacked down, and the Horde got villain batted, but the Horde at least gets focused writing and lots of content and multi-media material devoted to it where it counts.

That’s progression, that’s story. They at least have agency in being able to take sides in a conflict and question their moral compass, and even join their leaders in grappling with what the ‘true’ version of the Horde is.

Alliance players were told to shut up, accept blind forgiveness, and follow Anduin on a path towards peace that few wanted, when there has been absolutely no pay off for the whole war in the first place.

Alliance players weren’t given an option to side with Tyrande and go against Anduin, or even express discontent with the terms. Big things might happen in the story, but the Alliance never gets to see it in game, or have any physical contact with it.

Even Zul’dazar was a wash because it didn’t have any lasting weight: we killed a king that absolutely no one on Alliance side had any clue about, unless we had Horde toons and played that story. Like, yes - raiding an enemy city and killing their king is a big moment, but it felt hollow. Scepter of the Tides what? No one had seen that before because it was a Horde side campaign thing.

Blizzard is god awful at show - don’t tell, and it really bums me out. This whole faction conflict has been the low point in Warcraft for me.

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60

You said a lot of things here, and I can sympathize completely with the “never seeing it” complaint - our complaint is more that the Horde faction is shown to be horrible monsters, but only to the Alliance, never to Horde players. Like Blizzard wants to amp the Horde up to be pure evil, but is afraid of the response they’d get if they openly did that, so instead they do these passive-aggressive story bits that end up being worse because now it feels like the Horde is outright evil and Blizzard is trying to dupe us about it (clumsily, too, as it’s not hard to figure out what the other faction sees.)

But the point I wanted to make is that I believe a lot of Horde players take issue with this “even negative attention is good attention” stance I see coming out from time to time. Most of us would agree, I think, to be benignly ignored rather than actively trashed. Legion was annoying because the Horde was relegated to the background to a pretty significant degree, but that was MUCH easier to tolerate than being the front and center antagonist for an expansion.

Besides which… I’ve seen non-player, openly-antagonist villains written with greater depth than Blizzard wrote their player faction.

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