Thank you. I’ve been losing my mind trying to remember where I heard this information before and I could not for the life of me find anything about it.
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I wouldn’t want them to retcon Teldrassil, in fact I think it opens up potential for the future.
Now that BfA is over, we oddly enough have more reasons to hate each other than before prepatch. So justifying the faction split should be easier.
Potential for the Night Elves? No.
The only reason why Teldrassil was burned was because they needed a reason for Saurfang to become sad and for Sylvanas to become more powerful. That’s literally all there was as we’ve seen that the Teldrassil revenge plot ended in 8.1, and then Teldrassil didn’t have any impact on the peace treaty either.
Also, Tyrande wasn’t even part of 8.2.5 so there’s your future potential.
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yes actually. you can get a new home with modern art assets.
they havent given you one yet but nonetheless.
only civilians were in the tree so all your heroes should still be out there somewhere too.
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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. Whether it’s the devs or the writing team, they really do not seem to look beyond whatever the next big cinematic moment is.
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Man its just so obvious that Teldrassil deliberately burning down was just too big a move for blizzard to handle. Its completely gacked any sembelance of future balance between the factions.
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It’s still a genocide though, and we lost 3 zones and only got 1 back.
Also a new home? There’s absolutely 0 chance this is happening, like 0,0%. Blizz would never do that unless it’s relevant for the new expansion, such as an expansion hub but they’d never give the Night Elves a new home if they just recently destroyed their home to force them into stormwind.
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teldrassil was grown in less than 4 years, if theres gonna be a timeskip after sl they could
Why do you do that? The point was that these NPCs were Not big lore characters and low tier NPCs. It was a simplification to deliver a point.
Don’t be that " Ackchyually " meme guy.
Oh noes. We lost anoter troll bruddah 
It’s about the fact that they’d never waste that development time for the Night Elves
I don’t think they wrote themselves in a corner because they decided to burn Teldrassil, I think they wrote themselves into a corner by HOW they decided it and HOW they forgot it happened afterwards.
Just saying ‘‘Hey Sylvanas is evil and so is the horde y’all!’’ was lazy and careless.
Also the fact they gave 0 importance to that during BfA’s entire storyline was just ridiculous.
You don’t just start an expansion with the genocide of a playable race, toss a lazy boring warfront and a cutscene in it and call it a day, you need to ACTUALLY adress this bomb you planted on your narrative.
At the end of BfA all we had from Tyrande and the people who went to fight on Darkshore is that ‘‘tyrande is consumed by vengeance’’, you have to actively hunt for lore on other medias to have some closure, like the book.
Something this important should be IN THE GAME, we’re paying to play the game not to have a broken jigsaw of a narrative that we have to pay more for books and comics to have what we where promised during the expansion’s announcement, hell, the entire REASONING for Sylvanas to start the war was in a short story that was out of the game, and this was crucial plot.
Also the repercussions of this thing just killed any chance of factions to have peace in a convincing way. The Alliance has the night elves angry with the fact nearly all their race is dead, and on the Horde you have the zandalaris angry with the Aliance cause their city was raided and their king was dead because of a war they didn’t want to join before Talanji became Queen.
BfA single handedly brewed so much new bad blood between both factions we’re gonna have to wait for decades in game to have even a shot at peace.
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They did this before with Theramore.
They made a pre-expansion event that involved watching Theramore get blown up, and then it was barely acknowledged at all during Mists, unless Jaina was specifically involved and by then she was leader of Dalaran and was temporarily back to Peace-Mode so it was just used as a foot note to explain her being angry.
So it looks like yes, Blizzard totally intended to start things off with mass destruction but then do nothing to actually follow up on it.
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I wasn t on wow much when that happened. But from what i gather this time was Theramore on steroids.
This time it was a playable race nearly wiped out. And while you can argue Theramore was a strategic target since it was a huge stronghold beneath Orgrimmar s nose, Teldrassil happened just because Sylvanas wanted.
And this pattern blizzard has of tossing shocking things without adressing them is very irresonsible and childish
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I mean the scale of it certainly went up as the unyielding whinging has proven, but the events are practically the same functionally.
Horde attacks and Alliance city and wipes it out. Major cause of either a new war (Fourth War) or reigniting a cooling one (Horde-Alliance War) all for th purpose of showing how evil the Horde Warchief is and lay down the ground work for another “Horde finds themselves” plotline.
The events themselves were just supposed to be wow moments. Based on interviews the game devs just wanted wow moments and cared not how they happened, just that they did and didn’t care that much about the follow up.
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you clearly dont understand the word genocide
Blizzard doesn’t want total peace or war. They want to flip the switch every few years.
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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.”)
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I really do believe N’Zoth was supposed to play a role here.
There’s a lot of events in Astranaar, Brennadam, Voldun and Warfang Hold that don’t match up with the player experience.
In a Blue playthrough in Voldun for example you just scare the Vulpera away with totems. But on the Horde side they’re going full Empire on Endor and firebombing them for no adequately explored reason.
Likewise the timeline with Brennadam doesn’t really add up in the Horde playthrough. You do attack a Kul Tiran village, but it’s a military target. The final boss is a big Alliance azerite tank, you’re not fighting a civilain militia. Likewise in Warfang Hold you fight Kul Tirans using Old God magic, up to and including summoning a big squid to f with the Horde navy.
Seeing as the game encourages you to do two playthroughs with the achievement and mount reward, I think the idea was to show this wasnt adding up.
Tin foil hat time; part of me believes they knew BFA was unsalvageable. Core features like Azerite Armor were busted from the world go, and big new gameplay scenarios like Warfronts and Expeditions never felt polished and were irrelevant halfway through the game.
BFA sold well enough, and they had Classic in '19 to show growth for the shareholders. So why not just let this turd sink and focus on moving a better product by 2020’s 4th quarter? Itd explain why N’Zoth felt hastily dropped on us in the third act when everything else was just a SL prologue.
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It would have been simple to have named the Shaman and Mage at the catapults, drop said names in one of the intro scenes for the Alliance, then put those two as the two commanders of the force destroying Brannadam in Stormsong.
There is a huge number of Horde NPCs taken out by the Alliance throughout BFA. A little legwork on the writing and quest writing to tie a number of them to Teldrassil would have went a ways to tempering the Alliance anger over it cause it would have felt like some progress towards settling things.
The big fish still would have eluded us but instead of being completely stymied on it, there would have been some small progress.
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