tbf to Amadis, the end of WC3 was nelves realizing “hey, we don’t have the authority or right to police the world alone, we need to work with others.”
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Honestly if this Night elf makes it out of vanilla SoD alive, I could see them joining the Druids of the Flame, not as a druid but as a standard rank and file member of the cult.
The original Druids of the Flame felt that Tyrande and by extension, Malfurion were ineffective leaders that led their people to ruin. Fandral did blame them for his sons death in the end. And of course the new cult carries that view, but this time with the ‘death based world tree’ and how they failed to prevent Teldrassil’s burning context. Not so much the War of the Shifting Sands and the WC3 & Cata era conflict with the Horde.
But at the same time it is a bit silly to expect that all night elves had that same world view following the battle for mount hyjal.
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it’s interesting, so that automatically makes it hard to believe the current writing team had anything to do with it
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Yeah, never understood why beings 1000’s of years old with “supposed” unmeasurable wisdom(as druids are known for) would ever bend the knee to a bunch of humans who do literally the same things orc’s do.
Would make so much more sense for the NE to align with Shamanistic Tauren and a select few Orc/Trolls.
Also never understood why the NE never got any flak for the part they played in the Sundering and events that happened after.
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They have druids and shamans in their ranks, plus Azshara is literally right there. Strip-mining Ashenvale and provoking the nelves is 100% a choice.
And thats not even addressing that the majority of that wood was used to make weapons of war to further provoke them instead of survival.
Why do i feel like the new “official” reasoning is going to be something very lame?
Its hilarious when people try to pretend that the rest of the Alliance cares about nature. Humans and dwarves especially are a blight on the natural world, it just happens the Eastern Kingsoms most of the time so Blizzard ignores the idiosyncrasies.
Nelves have always matched with Trolls, Tauren, and Shamanistic Orcs more than they do with the Alliance. Even the Warcraft 3 music was similar.
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I was always hoping Blizzard would add retroactive things to flesh out WoW. I just never expected it in this manner! I was always thinking like “oh here are new dungeons that were set in this time period/here are quests” or use the Bronze dragons to show us other events that were concurrently running.
Not that I particularly hate Season of Discovery, I just don’t have any interest in it and prefer these lore revelations in the retail version!
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“The Night Elves could tell that the One True Lord of All Azeroth, the fabled Anduin Chirst, had been born from the human kingdoms, and their greatest duty was to bow before him.”
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She’s most likely dead, otherwise I think she would have resurfaced at some point in time.
And it is nice to see not everyone agreed with it at the time, a problem with warcraft is that most of the time whole nations are almost hiveminds with barely any disagreements about what the leader/s are doing.
I can agree with that, although personally I’d like it explored in free short stories taking place at the time. I’m still happy we got anything at all though.
Essentially it’s this: The orcs kept lumbering and this pissed off the nelves, so the nelves (and historical allies) heavily weakened after the third war joined the Alliance.
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You would think, but we still have characters that were intentionally left alive never to be seen again. Goriona is the main one I keep bringing up. And she was from Cata.
You would think she would’ve resurfaced during Legion (shaman order hall campaign), BFA (island expeditions or the Vexiona stuff in 8.2 and 8.3) or hell DRAGONflight. But nope. Even the Dragonflight codex restates that her fate is unknown.
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Big this.
I am kinda conflicted.
On the one hand, I like that they are “recontextualizing” lore in the past - filling in information. There are a lot of gaps in the lore. It would be nice to fill in those blanks in minor ways that do not affect the overall story much.
On the other hand… I have no interest in Season of Discovery. Kind of… unpleasant… having this new lore stuff over there in a different version of the game. If it was non canon, I would say “Have fun SoD-ers!” But if it is canon at all…. that is kind of a bummer. Just because I will miss out on new lore tidbits, unless I get into SoD.
(Or just rely on people like Gornur to share the SoD gossip)
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I’d honestly be okay with Blizzard creating a separate set of canon for another version of the game, but I’d want to see some major shake-ups.
For example, another version of WoW with a Vanilla in which the Night Elves and Forsaken are neutral. The Horde can continue as noble savages on the path to redemption without being dragged down into the deep end of the moral spectrum. The Night Elves don’t need to get de-fanged and turned into purple High Elves. Hell, add High Elves to the Alliance and Goblins to the Horde as additional playable races. Make Ratchet a Horde town, ruled by Gallywix leading the Horde’s Goblins.
Maybe instead of Varian missing to wind up split into two halves by Onyxia, he’s just… there. A normal human king. Hell, have Tiffin there too. WoW’s Queen need to stop dying off screen all the time. Imagine the sort of story that could be told where Tiffin and Prestor each are trying to influence Varian to make policy. Onyxia would no doubt be vexxed that Tiffin’s able to break Varian out of her influence at all.
Make it even spicier. Let Alliance players choose to support one or the other. Obviously we’d known that Tiffin is the, ‘Good,’ choice, while Onyxia is the, ‘Evil,’ one. Drag some nobles into it while you’re at it. Maybe those with Onyxia know she’s a dragon and are working with her because she’ll grant them nigh immortality by transforming them into Dragonkin or something. Conversely, the Church could be supporting Tiffin.
Maybe over in Ironforge, Moira is actually Morgan, the son Magni always wanted. A hot-blooded prince of the dwarves eager for glory in conquest being the one pushing Ironforge’s imperial imperative in the Vanilla era would make for some very interesting story-telling. Hell, have him kidnap and marry the Dark Iron Emperor’s daughter or something if we want to set up that sort of plotline.
I think it’s worth mentioning that these little lore tidbits exist to give context to the new gameplay elements of SoD and place them in the game world.
That night elf NPC for instance is involved in the acquistion of runes for a bunch of classes.
They’re not just writing new lore - they’re writing lore for gameplay elements and sprinkling it on top. I think the alternative, making new gameplay pieces but not putting them into a lore context at all, would be kind of lame for SoD players.
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She isn’t killed in the questline, as she just drops the key the player is after and runs away when her health gets low. Night Elf players have a chance to get the key without even having to fight her if they tell her that they side with her.
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The problem is that the Tauren were in extremely tight with the Orcs, so that wasn’t going to happen. The RPG books had young tauren and night elves joining in ecoterrorist activitties against the goblins in StoneTalon but there is no lore support for such cooperation ever happening.
Medivh’s dance party including the Horde, who Jaina remained allies with as well.
Despite them being tight with the Orcs Malfurion still taught Hamuul and the Tauren Druidism, and still saw Thrall in friendly terms as we saw at their reunion at Hyjal during Cataclysm.
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And Tauren Druids returned to help burn Teldrassil down… I was one of them.
Discussion is about the time period after Warcraft III’s Battle of Mount Hyjal, which would have lead to an entirely different history if Blizzard had focused on the Night Elves’ commonality with various of the Horde’s races. So we weren’t talking about the War of the Thorns or your role playing.
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The Night Elves of that period have no history of interaction with any other of the Kalimdor races and during the WOTA, they held them all especially the Tauren with the utmost contempt. It took Jarod Shadowsong to bind a temporary alliance against the Legion and that did not stick after he left the scene.
The Night Elves interacted with several races in the time between the War of the Ancients and the Battle of Mount Hyjal, including Mountain Giants and Furbolgs, as well as the Highmountain Tauren. We have a lot we don’t know about what the Night Elves were up to for ten-thousand years or who they interacted with besides small snippets of history like the War of the Shifting Sands.
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We know what they didn’t do… lift a finger as the Kalimdor Tauren were being exterminated by the local centaur.
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