Twinkletorch, thanks for clarifying. I do agree that NE fans have every right to be infuriated at “A Little Patience.” Having someone older and more experienced say something stupid in order to make your chosen hero look wise is a cheap and lazy storytelling device that I’ve never seen actually work.
But this bit sticks out to me…
I don’t think that’s “a trope that fits high elves instead.” High elves are just as old and wise, if less military, and their prominent NPCs aren’t presented as bouncy schoolgirls either.
And put a little more clarity on it: I often feel like people writing incidental elves at quest hubs fall back on a vague generalized notion of ‘pop culture high elf’ rather than a necessarily warcraft 3 or even Tolkien high elf, regardless of whether they are kal/quel/sin’dorei, but it sticks out the most to me in the first case.
I think this sort of general, not-particularly-Warcraft-yet-very-WoW trope fallback can be seen in all the races, but that night elves are the worst sufferers of it for various reasons. My speculation is that the tendency to just go “eh, generic fantasy” for writing Alliance leaves some of the quest writers going “hey I had this idea, need an elf, oh! Elf! The alliance elves are purple, that’ll work.”
I have no idea if this is actually true, but it’s what it feels like to me, similar to when I meet new RPers in WoW that do just that with their night elves. And blood elves. And void elves. On further thought, it’s probably not productive to be speculating on why it happens at Blizzard given I can’t do a thing to fix it.
I’m not really surprised. It’s Gilneas all over again probably. Blizzard loves to have these big shocking expansion opening moments but then doesn’t like to follow through with them a lot of the time.
OP pretty much hits the nail on the head when you consider the following:
Chris Metzen himself worked on the Battle for Azeroth cinematic, in fact it was his final project for the company. He later came out and said that he was as surprised as anyone at Teldrassil, claiming that he’d had no idea who was responsible for burning the World Tree.
In addition to Point 1., there’s the fact that, as we all (should) know, Lordaeron takes place after Teldrassil…yet developmentally, Metzen had already completed work on the cinematic before the War of the Thorns was written and put into game.
Which is why in the cinematic, you see Saurfang happily rallying to Sylvanas’ “For the Horde!!!” while during the in-game scenario you see him openly questioning her: one takes place prior to the War of the Thorns being written, the other takes place afterward, despite both scenes taking place at the same time.
For a game with as much longevity as World of Warcraft, that’s some extremely sloppy writing.
Jaina’s a pretty big piece of the puzzle. Blizzard themselves labeled her a “warbringer,” and in her short she tells the spirit of her father that shes “listening now.” However, she never earns this moniker. Aside from the removed event Rexxar still mentions, the worst she does is give Talanji the stink eye from the balcony. Then Jaina “Warbringer” Proudmoore goes on to argue in favor of giving the zandalari time to mourn, rescue Baine, and reassure Thrall that peace was possible this time. Some “warbringer”
Not to mention her suspicious movement when Anduin mentions Teldrassil while theyre confronting Sylvanas in the throne room. I don’t think Jaina was ever responsible for Teldrassil, but it had to have meant something at some point.
And speaking of Warbringers, am I the only one that noticed that Sylvanas’ short was the only one used for an in game cinematic? It’s not like Jaina’s was her arrival to Lordaeron. Almost as if they rewrote the start of the war and double dipped with hers so they only had to remake a warbringer instead of a warbringer and a tree burning cinematic.
Maybe that was the first she even heard of Teldrassil burning. Did she even know about the war of thorns? It would be funny if she just joined the attack on undercity without even knowing why the alliance was there. Maybe that would make her a “warbringer”.
As much as I want to pin Blizzard on their inconsistencies, I’m not sure about this one. We’re guessing in this thread that Lordaeron was supposed to have come first, which means there was no way to make Jaina somehow complicit in Teldrassil. The question boils down to how many of the assets and sequences were already completed when the change in story direction occurred - it’s rather much easier to re-record voice lines and change on-screen text, so that confrontation could have been about something entirely different to begin with. Her guilty flinch might be in reference to whatever it is she was originally supposed to have done, and not Teldrassil. It’s impossible to know without knowing what else Anduin might have been saying at that moment.
Heck, it might not even be guilt; maybe it’s supposed to be grief. Remember how many people were sure that Anduin was having a “One Ring” moment when he first saw Azerite?
No one is “guessing,” it is a proven fact that the Battle of Lordaeron was planned out long before the War of the Thorns storyline was ever written, if for no other reason than the fact the initial announcement cinematic for the expansion was the first thing released.
Was wondering when you would show up.
No, Katiera, it doesn’t “fall apart,” for the very same reason I explain above re: the announcement cinematic.
Of course, the fact that you can blow off something so important as rewrites with “SO what” is pretty much in line with every other comment you’ve made in threads like these.
Look, I want this to be true as much as anybody, but I hesitate to call it a “proven fact” without some kind of hard evidence in this direction. We have a LOT of bits and pieces that all point in the same direction, and I’d even say we have a good amount of circumstantial evidence, but I personally wouldn’t say it’s factual without something like the discovery of the early BfA story board or Blizzard employee statements.
You literally have nothing no facts no proof nothing wod has rewriting and we know about it heck we know about the rewriting about the qillboar blizzard isn’t afraid to admit about rewriting
Sylvanas was always gonna burn the tree they wanted it to a big reveal all you fell for it there was red flags all over since bfa was announced
Now that I think about it … maybe he WAS supposed to be having one? Do you think there’s any evidence that the nature of Azerite was changed in the rewriting?
It does seem really weird that Azerite ended up being pretty much an afterthought in this expansion. It looked at first like it was going to be driving the whole story.
Azerite was probably the original driver of the story’s conflict. It also couldn’t just be written out by the story team because it was the new artifact power system the gameplay team had designed.
This is why I despise the WoW iteration of nelves. They watered-down or removed the traits I found most interesting and made them unique either out of laziness or to pander towards the lowest common denominator. They also got depowered and a forced alignment change to patch them into the Alliance.
This is also why I think hiring Dave Kosak seriously damaged the narrative of the Alliance, much less night elves, dwarves, and several other races. His stories are often reliant entirely on the “generic elf trope” or “generic orc trope” that anyone who’s ever played a fantasy kitchen sink will recognize and wouldn’t work in a setting that has a unique take at generic fantasy settings like The Elder Scrolls or Ebberon. He also turned the Alliance into the stereotypical fantasy party, complete with a human leader. I get that some people like not needing a functional brain stem to enjoy the Alliance “story,” but start off with a more complex story and then work your way down.
There was some effort in BfA to “bring back” the Warcraft 3 traits of night elves, and the Dark Irons are a welcome change of pace, but they went nowhere with it because either they didn’t want to put serious effort into anything that wansn’t Saurfang feeling sad, just threw something together with a quickness to appease the fans who are still upset over Teldrassil. Not to mention Moira is basically an Anduin clone now. I’m pretty sure the only people who like her are Anduin fanboys or people who think Wonderbread is a culinary masterpiece.
BfA showed me that I should get into AAA game story writing. The bar is seriously that low. I could get clubbed in the face with and get brain damage during a protest tomorrow and still throw together a more compelling story than BfA’s or Shadowlands.
I’m talking about the role Azerite was supposed to play in the expansion story, and whether it changed at any point. What does BtS have to do with that?
“Way before”? It came out in June 2018, and the expansion dropped in August.
Also, we don’t know whether there were any rewrites in BtS, or when they were if they happened.