Teldrassil's burning was a short-sighted decision on the writers' part

[Pellex-hyjal (Pellex)]

@Hardwire-velen

Sadly, I think they expected to get their rule of cool “Red Wedding” moment and then go on as if an Azeroth-shaking event hadn’t happened.

Yeah, they were really fixated on comparisons to the Red Wedding, so I’d say that was in their minds for sure. But what I still wonder about … Hmm, this is hard to put into words …

So, the reason they thought the Red Wedding was cool and wanted to “make their own” was tied up with people’s reactions to it—their own reactions, if no one else’s. The reason they even wanted to recreate the Red Wedding was because they wanted to recreate some kind of ideal reaction from those who experienced it. So, what was the reaction they were envisioning, and why did they think the burning of Teldrassil would create it?

There was this quote from Ion Hazzikostas:

https://www.pcgamer.com/wows-game-director-responds-to-battle-for-azeroths-elf-genocide-drama-and-rocky-pre-patch/

“I mean… think back to the internet the evening after the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones aired. How many people were like, ‘I’m done with this. I’m never watching this show again! I don’t understand how they could do this?’ It’s because they just watched something they had an emotional investment in struck down before their eyes. That’s part of good storytelling.”

It sounds like he thinks nobody actually quit watching GoT because of the Red Wedding–that the emotional investment drove them to say that in the heat of the moment, but that they actually came right back desperate to know what happened next, because they just couldn’t simply walk away. And he might be right about GoT, but does he really not see the difference between watching the death of some characters you might love and being made to feel personally responsible for the destruction of a beautiful city? (Either because you failed to save it—an experience they went out of their way to create—or because you attacked it with no reason except “My leader said to.”)

@Carmageddon-hyjal

GoT is episodic television. You experience it in one hour chunks. Perhaps a few times if you really loved the episode. But it keeps progressing forward. WoW is a game where the players experience a small amount of story content over and over for months.

I loved the Red Wedding episode. I doubt I would have loved it if I was asked to watch it again and again for six months without any sense of story progression. I would have liked it even less if I was expected to be in the story as a member of one of those two factions. Imagine being asked to be a doomed Stark over and over again for six months. Or a despicable Frey. Yet that is, in essence, what Blizzard did to its players this expansion. Blizzard, you have stuck us in the middle of the Red Wedding episode for almost a year now!

Having feelings in response to art is a good thing. Having bad feelings is powerful. Having bad feelings that you are forced to dwell on over and over for months because thats the way this medium works…that’s not fun.

Blizzard seems to not understand the consequences of how this game is actually played and how that causes the storytelling to affect players profoundly differently than in a television show or a single player RPG.