If it’s any consolation I think Blizzard made a terrible mistake making it Sylvanas vs. Night Elves and I firmly believe they would not have gone down that route if they could change it now that Afrasiabi is gone.
Sylvanas will continue to be part of the story after 9.1. That’s inevitable, anyone arguing otherwise is borderline delusional. I only hope Blizzard finds a satisfying way to do it.
Except logic and the fact that there are far too few left. Also that again, their 3 zones were wiped out.
Their satisfying way of doing it (for themselves) was giving Sylvanas a justification, letting her escape justice and spitting on the Night Elves as much as they realistically could. By having the night elf souls destroyed, by making Tyrande lose against Sylvanas in Ardenweald and by making her sleep for the rest of the patch. How could they even double down on that? Making Tyrande die? Well who cares if she’s going to sleep for the rest of the expansion anyway, she was supposed to find some justice and not lose again as her final act.
They’ll have Sylvanas return to the Horde as if nothing happened and find ways to disrespect the night elf fanbase even more, for example with a long awaited world revamp where Ashenvale is now a Horde zone.
Since they were going to justify Sylvanas from the very beginning, they could’ve atleast tried to make things better for Night Elves instead of obliterating the souls, making Tyrande lose and then sleep and that’s it. Night Elf story concluded for the expansion.
But since they want to spite Night Elf players, they are doing all of those things.
If they could they’d remove the race from the game and give the Horde the undead night elf model or something.
@Ethriel, you have no options on how the Horde can be put to shame on a construction site? Purely in terms of delirium, since everything will still be bad.
The Forsaken desecrating Alliance lands and Alliance dead isn’t a new thing and the Night Elves aren’t the first victims of it.
As a creative person try to envision a scenario that allows the Night Elves to have some form of reconciliation but also doesn’t strip thousands of fellow Warcraft players of their favorite character and faction leader.
What does that look like?
Too often in the Story Forums we just criticize the writers. We have to remember to put ourselves in their positions. Especially when you have someone like Alex Afrasiabi who decides to retcon over a decade of Forsaken and Sylvanas lore to fuel their own crusade to turn Sylvanas into a villain to repay Garrosh being turned into a villain. Now you’re a writer post-Afrasiabi who has to bring some resolution to the mess Afrasiabi left without alienating large swaths of the playerbase.
What do you do?
Do you have a way to humiliate the Horde in building?
The Horde cannot possibly be more humiliated than they are with a boring, pointless, feckless, irrelevant cast of C-tier characters leading them in a “council” of peacemongers and Anduinified Alliance sycophants.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
They are still great builders, albeit immoral. Goblins, at least.
You need some kind of competition in the social sphere or something.
Demon. How to be great builders without using stone too much?
The Forsaken as they were written from their inception were always narratively unsustainable and the buck had to stop somewhere.
I agree it was unsustainable as written, but Blizzard could have taken it in a direction that actually evolved the Forsaken and Horde relationship without A) involving the Night Elves or Alliance and B) without forcing Sylvanas into a Warchief role that was obviously incredibly ill-thought-out that they are still trying to recover from the poor decision making that went on there.
It is inherently unfair to take a race with 17+ years of development and fundamentally change them because suddenly they are “unsustainable.” That’s a creativity problem. Nothing more.
Writing the Forsaken in a way that wouldn’t inevitably involve the Alliance would involve changing them and their origins so significantly that I’m not sure that they would still be recognizable as “Forsaken” as we know them.
The truth is that there’s still a reasonable narrative continuity in Warcraft that goes back all the way to Warcraft 1 and changing anything fundamental would probably have to involve changing a whole lot of other stuff as well.
The ship has sailed for this, I would’ve:
Absolutely none of those things have happened or were close to happening, and none of those things would’ve come in the cost of Horde players unless you count trolls like Erevien that would insist on keeping Ashenvale.
This just shows how the writers are not just incompetent, but have malicious intent towards Night Elf players. The fact that I could write a story that’s so much better for Night Elves without bothering other races as a non - professional shows that you don’t even have to be a good writer to do it, you just have to be a writer that’s not hostile towards a race and that’s something Blizzard doesn’t have.
It doesn’t just make the writers bad, it also makes them bad people for wanting to make a fanbase suffer just because they don’t like what they like.
Also I might just make this into a thread later on
It should be noted that these three things you listed are beyond the sole purview of the Night Elves.
I disagree. Having the Forsaken grow to understand how important their relationship with the Horde was would have virtually required a continued animosity toward the Alliance.
Entangling the Horde and Alliance stories in BfA is what has led us to this moment of irrational storytelling. The Horde playerbase is forced to rescue Jaina after having just fought her as a raid boss …what less than a year before SL launched? Absurd.
I don’t get your point, are you saying the jailer should win, or that the Night Elf souls were rightfully obliterated?
We’re most likely going to defeat the jailer in the end, so might as well let the Night Elf souls that were tortured (and in my take, not obliterated) help us do it. I’m not saying that the Night Elf souls should single handedly defeat the jailer, but the way I would’ve written is that Tyrande shares her Night Warrior powers between her people and we launch a massive assault onto the Jailer at the end of the expansion and defeat him, and the night elf souls could defeat those very NPCs that tortured them.
Me? Personally?
I do a hard ret-con.
I publish a letter saying, “Look, we realize we’ve mad multiple narrative mistakes, many of which have been motivated by the petty melodrama within our team, and you the fans deserve better, so we are doing a Deus Ex Timey Wimey reset + fast forward so we are in the same spot chronologically with certain narrative beats undone”.
Or even smaller, post BFA there are two issues:
Create a questline where 80% of BFA has actually worldwide N’zoth psychosis, revealed during the Armistice Peace Talks after we defeat N’zoth.
Punishment is a method for atonment, because it is penitence. That’s actually, in theory, supposed to be the point of prisons.
The Forsaken’s position in the Alliance’s historical heartland meant that the Alliance was always going to be involved in some way. So changing the Forsaken from their inception at a fundamental level in such a way that wouldn’t involve the Alliance would require either
A) The Forsaken’s main zones are located somewhere with no connection to the Alliance, or
B) The Alliance’s connections to its history are completely and totally severed to the point where they don’t care about anything that happened pre-WoW
The first requires a radical rewrite not just of the Forsaken’s backstory but of large chunk of Warcraft 3 in general, and the second requires butchering the Alliance’s connection to its own historical narrative.
Neither of these are desirable, so by the nature of their location alone the Forsaken were always going to end up involved with the Alliance in some way.
Now being involved with the Night Elves specifically? That’s obviously something that wasn’t inevitable.
I’m saying it’s weird to list those grievances as specifically Night Elf related grievances given that the fact that those things happening are the incitement for this entire expansion.
I can’t imagine that establishing a precedent where entire expansions are retconned if players whine enough on the forums would be toxic to the setting
This is the only solution to the whole situation.
That would require them to have some sort of self reflection and it usually also takes being a decent human being to do so and to apologize and fix your mistakes.
Because it’s basically the entire Night Elf race that was obliterated there. Sure orcs were obliterated, trolls were obliterated… but that’s it, it’s not that they were obliterated as a race, but as individuals of a race.
I am the sweatiest, most obsessive Kingdom of Lordaeron fanboy on these forums and I’m pretty sure that even at the height of my grief I never genuinely suggested that Blizzard retcon Warcraft 3.
I have some nostalgia for Teldrassil from my early days playing but i agree. Despite the nostalgia, i’ve always thought Teldrassil was a strange place for the capitol to be. And it made the Alliance positioning on Kalimdor feel really weak. BOTH of the Alliance racial capitols on Kalimdor were situated on islands off the coast. Whereas in the EK the Horde’s races both had mainland capitols.
The idea of Hyjal becoming the new Night Elf capitol is way more exciting to me than simply regrowing Teldrassil. To me that would be pretty boring honestly.