Yeah no idea why they did this around the time of Cata. Tyrande was mocked for sounding a bit “trollish” even during the WotA dungeon that came out. Where she should’ve at least retained some of her Suramar accent. Whatever that was meant to be anyway.
I would imagine this is probably due to the voice actors feeling more comfortable saying certain lines and phrases in their more natural accent. Sometimes it happens subconsciously.
I see we’re doubling down on the “blame the last guy” idiom to make up for continuing this garbage storyline.
I think it’s mostly people avoiding having to admit that from 9.1 and going forward, which would be entirely new content conceived by Dansauer and co…well sucks and is going to do far more damage to WoWs worldbuilding than help it.
It’s a uncomfortable truth most don’t want to swallow
Danuser is responsible for a lot of bad writing but he’s also just a scapegoat because he’s the lead and its easier to yell at him for the bad story than it is to yell at the faceless people also responsible for the mess
There was more than that. They still had to deal with all the fallout from Teldrassil, the Night Warrior, etc.
And seeing how quickly Dansuer and Co abandoned all those, we can get a pretty good idea on how they felt on those.
Is this Blizzard’s strategy to regain player trust? They had better hope what comes after Shadowlands recaptures player interest, because they’re going to be out of scapegoats.
Danuser, as the current lead, almost certainly has all story content go through him for approval and editing.
Afrasiabi was already in charge for Warlords of Draenor, Legion, and BfA. While Metzen had his hands in all of Blizzard’s franchises before his retirement, he had been focusing on Titan and Overwatch as one last push of effort there before the stress was beyond the point of health for him. So I do not know where this idea is coming from that someone else had a story going before Afrasiabi stepped in when Afrasiabi had already been calling the shots.
While this is true Metzen was still involved enough with WoW to work on the cinematics with the last thing he did for the company being the BfA one.
Because we know Metzen was surprised that Sylvanas burned Teldrassil.
ie Afrasiabi waited until Metzen left to push that
About thirty-five minutes in Metzen explained how the idea to burn Teldrassil and make Sylvanas dastardly came from up top from the game team - which we now know that person at the top being Afrasiabi - and then later the story team was asked to express these ideas that had been decided on, rather than having any actual role in directing where the story was going:
Yeah the writers don’t really have much input on the major story elements of WoW anymore. Metzen may have when he actively worked on the game because he had seniority and was there from the beginning but none of the current writers have that kind of sway and just do what whoever in charge tells them to do.
We have no indication that the team working on the BfA intro cinematic were told anything beyond something like “the Alliance is attacking Lordaeron. Make it cool.”
Shouldn’t it be…you know be the opposite? Why is the game team making story decisions? The whole point is to make the GAME work around the STORY…not the other way around
No wonder this game has so many inconsistencies
It should but unfortunately it is not always the case. I brought up how R&C Tools of Destruction was pretty much in the same boat as say BFA. The original writer put in a few things. The executives at both insomniac and Sony liked some of the ideas and basically forced the newcomer to include those in the story. Given the general reaction to the mere mention of the burning of Teldrassil in the reveal trailer, my guess the higher ups at Blizzard saw it was a “good thing” to go with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-TX-UBkskM goes into a lot of detail of what went down behind the scenes for Tools of Destruction. However it is split up among the different sections of the video. It is around 2 hours long though.
Another example would be Shadow of Hedgehog. He made such an impact on the Sonic fanbase that the higher ups at Sega basically forced him to be in Sonic Heroes. Even though Shadows creator, who was the lead writer for Adventure 2 and sonic heroes (which focused more on gameplay over story) wanted him to stay dead following the true ending of Adventure 2.
Executive meddling is a thing.
This isn’t as uncommon as you think. The story of big budget games is often micromanaged to hell and back and is usually the worst for it. WoW has just been really bad about the last few expansions because it is clear whoever is making the calls for the story is just way out of touch with what the players want.
BfA is probably the best example again since I can’t think of many people who wanted a faction conflict story after MoP handled it. But the old guard seem to be really invested in the faction divide. Which is kinda why I believe the Sylvanas thing slipped through. The old guard are/were mainly horde players heavily invested in the faction war and probably thought teldressil was “cool” and a good way to reiginite faction tensions and pride only for it to backfire in their faces because… the modern WoW player isn’t all that invested in the factions anymore.
Not helping matters was they made the boneheaded decision of making the Horde the aggressors. Again.
The story doesn’t sell, the gameplay does. We’ve known for years that most of the player base doesn’t give a crap about the story as long as they have a cool raid boss to smack around or a cool zone with rewards to explore.
To wit, the person who replaced Metzen in Legion formally was Lydia Bottegoni
Who was previously a producer on Disney, including Coco
You know, the movie that led to disney trying to trademark Dia de los Muertos?
The woman who published a “diversity article” last summer that refused to use the words race/ethnicity, instead referring to people as “colors”, and then edited the document post-fact to include the word “race”?
Not exactly a beacon of ethnoracial sensitivity and prudence.
That was when WoW was at it’s peak
I do not believe it’s the case anymore, or at least it’s not longer 80-20
Would bet with as low as numbers are, it’s closer to 60-40
I been asking myself that question too. To me Bell sounds so bored compared to Tali. I think it’s because I’m so use to Tali’s energetic enthusiasm. Lol 