Well what does this say about the other devs though? I mean did not one other manager or upper staff dev at Blizz say “Hey Alex this story is a bunch of BS. What’s going on?”?
I don’t get it. Blizzard has some of the worst business practices I’ve ever seen.
Alot of fans and the player base fed into these ideas of the cosby crew being “rockstars” during their cruel reign. Even in this thread, people wax poetic about one Dev or another who “must have been a good person”.
But now that there is information out there about chaos that led to quite literally one of the biggest deals in the gaming industry, one does wonder :
Who knew and what did they know?
Everyone was going along with it, and for quite a long time. I don’t paint everyone with the same guilty brush of the worst crimes - but to paraphrase Jaina, the higher ups who were aware and looked the other way have blood on their hands, even if they kept their hands to themselves.
Yup I was just thinking about that. How many hands did the planning have to go through and everyone just said “ok”? For the love of god people actually had to develop that mess and just rolled along. WTF. So you devs really care about the game and you just went along with it, huh?
Makes me really think about when watching Ion during some of his interviews where he acts all passionate about the game. Sorry I’m not buying it anymore.
Don’t forget people outside of the story team have their hands on the story as well. Teldrassil was specifically mentioned as being from (I believe) marketing with the story team needing to fit it into the narrative.
The key word you used was business. Though we would all like to imagine these are all passionate people creating art, at the end of the day those positions are jobs. Various of Blizzard’s writers have talked about how they’re handed the plot points they’re supposed to flesh out, and that’s what they’re paid to do. Like in any other work, if they refused to do it Blizzard would have just contracted someone else instead.
Now that we have confirmation of this though. How much leeway do they still have in this story ? Writers can’t get a sound, healthy fresh start off such a miserable narrative. If they ever acknowledge that this entire arc was the result of toxic external circumstances, to me it sounds increasingly likely that they might mass retcon it. What do you think ?
I was championing this idea with the Discord people today and it’s surprisingly unpopular. It’s the only solution I can see that would work at this point. Retcon the Horde’s culpability in a genocide completely away and soften the impact the burning had on Night Elves at the same time. Sweep it under the carpet and forget it ever happened.
Such as make all Zovaal’s hints on free will, freeing us all, complaining about being shackled to the Grand Design as well as claiming that all will serve him a hint that he is an Avatar of the Drowned God(explaining why Orbs of the Drowned in Nazjatar are Necromantic Magics) and Mortal Souls contain his Limbs that he is trying to free by wiping out all Life and said limbs are able to control the Mortals to initiate the Burning of Teldrassil putting the blame squarely on his head?
Furthermore that might hint that Yogg-Saron, Mueh’zala, G’huun and Vol’zith the Whisperer are also Avatars of the Drowned God with Yogg-Saron being one that was implanted within a Voidspawn created by the Void Lords!
If that’s the case let’s hope the Drowned God is the Next Expansion’s Final Boss as such a villain is the culmination of all his Puzzle Box’s Whispers(taunts is more like it) and killing him would render all Avatars under his direct control Brain Dead(though I doubt his 6 Rivals would run on the same rule as they might see their complete Avatars as actual people and worth something even as a potential avenger of their demise).
Are you applying for a position there?
This sounds like the type of low effort solution they would go for to make their life easier with none of the necessary steps to make it right for the playerbase.
This is one reason WoW’s story never flows organically. All of the major story beats are dictated by either a higher up or someone from marketing and the story team has to really contort to fit some ideas into the story.
The reason Afsriabi was allowed to get away with this is because he was high up on the chain of command and could make the call. No one on the writing team was going to protest because their job was more important than a fictional character
Yet it still sounds like the best solution. That stuff did too much damage to the races, characters, worldbuilding overall, up to the very reliability of what we see ingame. From now on we’ll be aware that everything we are shown might eventually turn out to be part of a great plot set up by great cosmic forces waiting to be introduced in future expansions. That’s so bad
How? The story elements are still there in the game.
The players that lived through it still had to experience it… just waving their hand and telling us that nothing happened and doing nothing to fix it is just for their own benefit.
If there’s one person who embodies everything wrong with Blizzard and Warcraft, it was Afrasiabi. Of course, he wasn’t the only one responsible.
Seriously, several of the female characters are poorly-written in various ways. For prime examples;
(On a related note, why does Sally Whitemane dress like a dominatrix when leading the Scarlet Crusade in life… then wear belly-baring PLATE ARMOR in undeath?)
Alexstraza is also pretty awful with an outfit that makes it impossible to take her seriously. Ysera is slightly better but not by much
If I had the power to redesign her costume, it would be this deep red queenly dress at the top with the same shade as her wings but instead cloth and frills at the bottom it would be her wings that are hugging her waist and folding around her legs like a dress.
Yeah, she would be keeping the wings even in human form.
So when she wants she could look like a queen and when things get serious she just unfolds her wings and starts kicking butt.
I always found it odd she was half dressed like that but her model was a re-use from Sylvanas
This is largely why letting the Marketing team have too much say at the table is cancerous to game development.
Because you gotta make do if you can’t show off your legs? Showing some skin can be empowering despite some people thinking the only way to protect women is to force them into a Burka, but that’s a topic for another thread.
Exactly, why is it that showing skin somehow be taken less seriously?
Even the toxic masculinity bros take off their shirts before getting face to face with their counterpart.
The Jailer has been intimidating us with his glorious nipples for a year now. There is something afoot.
Well I’m not sure how much of that was really his choice, his clothes seemed to be tied to the Arbiter in Oribos.
It doesn’t seem like he enjoyed being a shirtless dude, since he puts on his clothes the first chance he gets.
As opposed to say, Garrosh or Illidan or Croman.
While I dont doubt this one bit, Sylvanas has literally been doing crazy evil stuff since becoming Undead all the way back to the Warcraft games which a lot of people seem to forget. You even have lines of dialog in vanilla from Undead who broke away from the Forsaken talking about this. You see Forsaken doing some pretty horrible stuff to captured civilians in BC. The first major Alliance and Horde conflict that started in Wrath was over Alliance finding out what she was doing in Undercity. To top it off the plaguing of Gilneas…
With all this and more (which I just don’t feel like writing out again) Teldrassil is not really out of character for Sylvanas by too much.
So that’s the secret.
All of these shenanigans were so the Jailor could finally get a shirt in his size.