To me it feels like the whole thing doesn’t make sense. Her plan was apparently to cause as much death as possible, fair enough, but her actions/intentions would actually achieve the opposite of that? Let’s see here:
We were told that her original plan was to kill Malfurion and occupy Darnassus, but that would’ve ended the war prematurely. The Alliance wouldn’t have dared to start even a single attack against the horde. How would that have caused more deaths in the long run?
In Lordaeron, she wanted to kill the Alliance Leaders with the blight trap. Again, this would’ve probably ended the war instead of causing more deaths, right? Why does she choose to do something that would end the war and go directly against her plans of causing more deaths?
Then in 8.2.5, instead of having the Alliance and Horde fight and cause several more deaths, she instead accepts Saurfangs challenge which doesn’t even make sense for her since she is not an orc, why would she honor a traditional orc duel?
I’m probably also missing a lot more things, but I think these examples make for a good start. She has some kind of evil plan to become immortal or whatever her goal is and she achieves that by causing as much death as possible, but her actions (or atleast her intentions as we’re told) would achieve the absolute opposite. Are we going to see some massive retcons soon?
“Wait and see” says the Developers, oblivious to the fact that players don’t like being strung along for 2-3 years to go through the course of an entire expansion to find out if the pay off is worth it.
It’s called hubris drunk hacks thinking they can craft a better story than those that came before them. “We think we can tell MoP’s war story better.”
All of BfA has been Alex, Steve, and Christie stroking their own egos, when the Blizz Drones aren’t, and thinking that they’re creating a literary masterpiece.
We are. But its important to note that he didn’t have the freedom back then that he does now. Metzen was keeping the three of them in check when he was around. He wasn’t perfect but compared to what we get now Metzen was a gift from Mother Moon herself.
Word. I’m still less-inclined to pin anything on Alex. He’s not the one on twitter self-inserting himself into Nathanos or referring to Anduin as their “son”.
Danuser and Golden are both an endless pit of cringe.
Darnassus could of still been burn there no way the Alliance would of let that city stay in Horde hands have a major Alliance attack to reclaim the city then set the tree on fire making it look like an accident you wipe out any Alliance forces in the city and you hurt the Alliance miltary in one move. Saurfang if he had kill Malfurion would of weaken any reason she gave to burn the tree.
Lordaeron i do not think was a trap for Alliance leadership look at how the battle play out till that battle no one had counter the blight on the field. Jania appearing and using her father ship to blow a hole in the walls who could of plan for that Sylvanas is smart but no one saw that coming. Lordaeron is more useful as a Fortress for the Alliance to attack then for the Horde to lose in a trap that makes no sense given the fact most of the Alliance forces were outside the walls by the time the blight is set off at the end. So i do not think the battle was a trap for Alliance leadership but a battle that the Alliance would throw most of there forces in to take the city and if plan right the Horde could of kill most of the Alliance Forces in time but Jania show up.
As for Saurfang and the dual it hinted at that the war had already did what she needed also there is a old god about to cause trouble so there alot more people about to die so the war being over does not change what about to happen. Though to be fair the whole story is bad overall and them saying this has been plan for years is not any better in my book it just retcons or them adding things to try to force a story noone wants.
How long has the Alliance dream of retaking that city and how long do you think the Forsaken had plans to keep it from Alliance hands, out of all the Horde Capital City’s that one is the one the Alliance has always had there eyes on. Also the Forsaken most likely had alot of those traps and other things in place for years in theory given how much the Alliance likes the Forsaken. Still the Super Blight Bomb as i call it i think was a last restort tactic to keep the city from the Alliance and not a trap to kill Alliance High Command cause to be fair no Alliance leader should of step foot in that city till after it was clear by there forces just to be safe.
The Horde could of done that at Darnassus but it would not of stop any Night Elves or Worgen Forces from tring to free the city there also every chance the Horde would appear to make a mistake to let the Alliance retake the city then have the tree go up in flames and make it appear like an accident well that how i would do it if i want to kill alot of forces at one time.
The biggest plothole in my eyes is why she didn’t help the Legion wipe out all life on Azeroth if securing as many deaths as possible was her only goal.
Much like with Garrosh before her, it’s obvious the story with Sylvanas has changed direction and even ultimate destination several times over the course of the last few years.
As much as they’d like to pretend this was all planned as far back as Wrath and everything has been building up to this, that is only true in the loosest of terms and the fine details have changed from expansion to expansion and team to team.
Of course Sylvanas’s actions don’t line up with what is now being said to be her ultimate goal. It’s likely that this only recently became her goal, perhaps as recently as when production started on Shadowlands and they realized a completely new and never before heard of big bad might not sell as many pre-orders as slapping Sylvanas on the box would.
Honestly if I didn’t know better I’d have assumed this story was rushed. It’s twists and turns look like someone hastily resolving plot points to make a deadline.
Those cutscenes are expensive, time consuming affairs that take awhile to craft. So clearly those points of the story had to be a known quantity for awhile.
This has really been a bewildering affair. Teldrassil retroactively makes sense with her kill count goal in mind. Lordaeron makes sense only if Windy knew of the incoming Deus Ex Proudmoore. Her deciding to fight Saurfang and then leave when doing literally nothing at that point would’ve led to a huge body count makes zero sense.
It can only ever make sense retroactively. Which is crap storytelling for a medium like this.
It’s pretty clear that whatever the writing team intended to do with Sylvanas and these last 3 expansions (Legion, BfA, SL) changed, a lot, multiple times. They probably wanted to turn Sylvanas into a proper upright Warchief at first, then went back and decided to make her a villain’s pawn, then went back again and made her some evil mastermind working behind the big villains themselves.
Ëlësåna, I know we don’t agree on much, but I absolutely agree that the plan doesn’t hold together. I’ve had that feeling from the very start, but I had some (small) hope that it would all make some sense once they explained what her real plan was. Now we are left with two possibilities, both of them silly:
We still don’t know her real plan, and on the third time around, they’ll give us an explanation that is actually coherent.
This is all we’re going to get, and it’s ridiculous.
(ETA: Well, I guess there’s also the option that they’ll give us a third explanation that’s just as nonsensical as the first two.)
Seriously, I feel like I’ve been here when I run D&D. I have two adventures that aren’t meant to go together, and I’m short on time, so I come up with a flimsy story that’s supposed to lead into the next plot point and hope that the players don’t notice that it makes no sense. Sometimes I can get 4-5 people to not notice, or at least to play along for the sake of the campaign. Multiply that by 100,000 on two different “teams,” and I would be foolish to expect to get away with it.
As soon as I thought the writers had a story in mind, we keep getting more stuff that make it look otherwise. There’s so much going on and they are hamfisting it into a single story beat that isn’t supporting all the weight.
If you look at BfA as a whole now, it completely lacks any direction. It starts with the faction war that is sold on Azerite being the key to everything, then the war objectives of WoT being contradicting. Then there’s the retaliation in Lordareon that seems to only serve as a temporary ‘recruit more friends’ pause. There is the plot with G’huun which was mostly filler. Finally it looks like things are back on track with the main story with Dazar’alor, but immediately after that, this Azshara trap plot shows up while the Saurfang/Baine story is going on at the sideline. Once those are done, Saurfang is dead and Sylvanas flees to carry out her plan, there’s a “Oh, yeah, N’Zoth! Gotta finish that up.”
And we are supposed to believe this huge mess was some how Sylvanas’ master plan years in the making. Yeah, okay.
The statement was they view continuity as a means of enhancing the story but won’t allow it to tie their hands creatively.
Which I sort of agree with. There’s been a lot of stuff retconned that I think the setting is better off without.
It’s changing entire stories that kinda lose me. Like apparently there was a whole other scene in Edge of Night the reader just wasn’t privy too. Which in itself would be a lame and lazy move but in this case it wasn’t even a necessary one.
Windrunner dies again, albeit briefly, in Silverpine. We are not shown what she’s doing in the afterlife then so that’d be the perfect time for her to conspire with the Jailor. Hell it’d make more sense then as he’d know she already left the Maw once and is about to again. Be a good time to bargain.
But that death came at the hands of Lord Godfrey who straight up one shots her. So I guess maybe they want to avoid remembering that part where she goes down to a level 20 something dungeon boss.