Honestly, it really isn’t a good feeling to have my opinion of why we’re here effectively confirmed.
Figure this out, writing team:
- Writer’s apology.
- Bad story data.
Keep repeating those until you figure out what they mean.
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Metzen also voiced characters like Ragnaros, Hakkar the Soulflayer (vanilla and Cata), Neferian and many others. He even voiced Varian a few times.
So I wouldn’t say that because he voiced thrall he was a horde fanboi solely on that alone.
I mean there is a joke that Metzen voiced half if not most of the cast in vanilla (I mean 3 of out of the 6 big bads) 
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Guyfu
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I just heard about this topic yesterday. Part of me perceives that it’s awfully convenient for the current writing team to blame how Sylvanas has been portrayed on someone who was fired and since been demonized. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen employees blame things on other employees who have departed the company.
As for Sylvanas, it’s my perception she’s a loose cannon. She destroyed Gilneas. She used the plague when specifically ordered not to. She pursued her own agenda instead of helping the Horde fight the Legion. Her career as warchief mirrors that of Garrosh, more concerned with personal agenda than with the Horde. The character is different, but the story remains the same.
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I don’t think so. Eastern Ashenvale or Stonetalon would have made a better Battleground. Having a battleground right next to a major city really doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve harped on it before, but I really feel like our faction war to end all faction wars would have been better with more… Actual war. And less walled off to the new continents. I know I get a lot more invested on a visceral level when it’s, say, Stonetalon Mountains instead of a place I met less than a month ago.
The warfronts were great for that (and the old god incursions). It’s NICE to know what’s going on outside of the Expansion Island box.
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It doesn’t help that Alex bragged about writing Sylvanas for years and really took over from Kosak when he [Kosak] moved to Hearthstone.
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Metzen wasn’t really a Horde or Alliance fanboy, he was a Warcraft fanboy, he loved the world he helped build and it was that enthusiasm that tended to carry him through. Cataclysm and all the Thrall stuff was, per his own admission, him trying to work out his IRL issues through the writing, coupled with Titan spinning its tires. For someone like Metzen, Titan not going anywhere likely had a huge impact on his mental health, coupled with his marriage issues and health issues at the time.
This is a guy who was tearing up as he stood on the Stormwind set of the Warcraft movie. He loved, and likely still loves, all aspects of Warcraft he helped make, he and the original main team that helped build Blizzard and the initial world just unfortunately let the wrong kind of people into their circle and when they needed to focus the most, were distracted.
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And this is why I am angry that the film removed his cameo. I can understand it for pacing reasons but seriously… why.
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The War of the Thorns pre-patch event entirely soured me on Kul’Tiras. While I understood the narrative reason for the Alliance seeking naval reinforcements against the potential of the Horde recruiting the Zandalari fleet for its war, I didn’t see any reason for my character in particular to go there with Jaina. Reasonably my character would have stayed on Kalimdor, like the rest of the forces fighting there as per the mission tables. The Darkshore Warfront was the only thing that kept me from taking a break and skipping the rest of the expansion. Though I will admit I enjoyed the Nazjatar content.
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At least the new Kalimdor book drives home that the mission tables were likely canon (in broad strokes). And we finally know what the other Alliance Kalimdor races was doing, which was evacuating refugees.
Blizzard did a disservice to their big concept of a world at war by immediately packing us away from most of the actual war.
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It did feel good after years of questions of if the mission table missions were canon or not.
Dark shore warfront only made sense to me if Teldrassil had not been destroyed. A staging ground for invasion. Otherwise its just a patch of ground on the edge of the world, of interest and value only to night elves. The Horde and forsaken had much bigger fish to fry in the wider world war.
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It only makes sense if you think the Horde taking over an entire zone with rogues in one day or night period (if at night, the Night elves as a nocturnal race are supposed to have an edge) isn’t a plot-forced moment that exposes how stupid the War of Thorns was.
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If the night elf army was actually present you would have a valid point. I agree it was stupid but probably for a lot of different reasons.
Doesn’t matter if the army was present or not. You don’t take over an entire zone and easily re-enforce it on one fell swoop. If it actually worked outside of plot we’d see a lot more of it in Warcraft’s history.
Even the dreaded Blitzkrieg was one flank away from a complete rout.
The whole success hinged on a dues ex smuggler’s route that somehow could support an army, that the night elves knew about… Well, authorial fiat is an important part of fiction, but the goal is to make it so you don’t see the wads of glue holding the wallpaper over the plot holes.
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I’m pretty sure they originally planned for it to be that way, but those plans got derailed by a combination of a change in story direction and the lukewarm reception of warfronts. If you look at the way they talked about their plans for BfA at the previous Blizzcon, they were saying things like Exodar and Stormwind would be the last holdouts of their respective factions on their continents and this would be important for the war.
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That would have been cool. It just boggles my mind that we had “sweeping changes” and pretty much minimal coping with the repercussions of those changes.
For real, now that we’re basically reset to Status Cataclysm on Kalimdor as far as we know.
It’s easy to imagine that what we could have gotten would be better… I do actually think that War of Thorns could have been pretty cool, with better plotting and some actual effort to deal with the story fallout instead of blazing off with fancy cinematics focusing on Saurfang’s manpain and Sylvanas not explaining or foreshadowing much at all until the final chapter.
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Not surprised. The Sylvanas stuff came out of nowhere after she was portrayed as fairly heroic in Legion and the BfA cinematic that was made months in advance. It wouldn’t surprise me if the original plan (if there was one) involved Genn convincing Anduin to make the first strike because Genn came off as fairly sinister in that cinematic too
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