To be honest, while I completely feel for Night Elf fans and the unfortunate trend of them being shafted, and I’m happy they get something, I have so little interest in Darkshore even without the “Bad Guy Factor” that I still haven’t bothered to watch the cinematic.
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Tell her WE ARE COMING! /toss = Epic
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I’m with you there. I feel 0 motivation to do this thing as a Horde. Like seriously the Horde is being villanized to such levels that all that’s missing is having orcs raping night elves on the streets Goblin Slayer style and trolls kicking nightsaber puppies around.
It’s embarassing to see! I was never a big fan of Malfurion but…I don’t feel like fighting him cause he’s in his right.
And to add to it death camps and Blizzard ignoring the fact that if Night elves could just refuse to be raised, there would be no Night elf death knights O_o Like…major plot hole…
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hopefully it never gets to that point, i prefer not having a horrible panic attack
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I totally hope it won’t. But judging from the fact Blizzard doesn’t seem to know what tone it wants I doubt this is the worst we’re gonna see.
Like one second you have Horde troops raining on Brennadam empaling mothers on walls in front of their children and…on the same zone you have kul tiran pirates cussing like kids cause you can’t say the f-word.
I’m obviously exagerating, they will never get to Goblin Slayer style of dark stuff but the way they are presenting it makes me feel like I’m reading something that came out of an overly edgy teen’s mind who wants real REAL hard for people to think his story is mature.
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Overall I liked the cinematic.
I thought the Alliance stuff was fine. It was good to see Tyrande and Malfurion on Kalimdor. The last few seconds of the cinematic made me feel like a fun battle was looming. I am hyped.
As far as Horde themes:
I did not like how the Horde minions were represented as weak - but against Malfurion, I can understand.
I don’t feel the villain vibe others do.
To me, I see it as the Forsaken being in a position where they must be at the forefront of the Horde. Orcs had their time, the Darkspear had their inclusive moment, and this is the brutal and cruel reign of the Forsaken.
The Dark Lady is Warchief. She has commands for the Horde. Her Forsaken are the most loyal and willing to carry out her personal objectives. Especially with Nathanos in command. Their show of force at a Warfront will be vicious.
People like to say that Sylvanas and Nathanos are simply liars when they say “For the Horde.” But I think there is more to it. I think it humbles them. They are spiteful jerks - but they still better pay lip service to the Horde if they want their goals achieved.
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I’ve largely kept my peace on this topic because my personal opinion is somewhere in the range of what the OP describes. Intellectually, I know this is something the Night Elf fans probably deserve, and so I shouldn’t begrudge them that. On a gut level, I hate it. But it wasn’t until I thought about it a little bit that I realized why this (and something else, which I’ll get to below) bother me so much.
The Terror of Darkshore and Umbric’s raising of the Void Rex are two things that are just dark enough to have an interesting flavor to them, but aren’t so dark that it overwhelms the presentation of the event. In both cases you have an Alliance figure doing something that would ordinarily be pretty nasty, but the presentation of them is such that Alliance players can feel good about corrupting a loa’s children or burying their enemies alive.
Think about if the roles were completely switched - if the Horde corrupted the eggs of a Wild God and entombed some random soldier to die in a gruesome way. What do you think you would see that was different from the Alliance version? My guess is this - you would see the event presented in such a way that makes you sympathize with the horror the victim is suffering. That as an Alliance player you’d feel angry and as a Horde player you’d feel guilty. This same dynamic played out in the War of Thorns - killing the NE mobs laid on the pathos so thick it was jarring.
In a nutshell, the Alliance now gets to do cool, darker things without having to feel bad about themselves. The Horde can seemingly do nothing without the writers dragging the player through doubt and guilt.
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I’d share a Kermit sipping tea pic at this moment for the lulz, except I physically can’t do that on this forum.
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Funny thing is. The Horde does evil stuff with no proper motivation and the player feels guilty because he never signed up to be a cartoon villain.
Now when it’s the Alliance doing bad stuff, the whole story bends over to give them proper motivation and make the player feel like a hero avenging the inocents.
Seriously it looks like “Moraly grey” by Blizzard’s books means. “Making the Horde player feel like crap and then making the Alliance player feel like the big badass hero killing monsters”
The biggest irony is that what sets WoW apart from other fantasy settings is the fact that races that used to be portrayed as just monsters are heroes of their own story here. But now they are not even that.
Even on our own story, the horde player is the villain.
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You didn’t enjoy the unending “sobbing/crying” background sound track of your victims (you monster) the entire time you were questing?
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That’s been the complaint from the start. The Horde is written doing completely evil things for no reason so the lawful good Alliance can slaughter them to the last without feeling bad. This is literally a repeat of late cata and MoP without the charm. The worst part is blizz is likely going to give us SoO v2 in response to Alliance players crying Horde bias and their declining raiding population.
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I thought this was the alliance cinematic and the Lost Honor was the horde cinematic. Which… isn’t a huge improvement.
Few thoughts on it, but most of them are indifference to various levels.
-First and foremost, it’s hard to take anything associated with warfronts seriously. They don’t advance the story since no one actually wins, and they ultimately devolve into a bi-weekly event I do once per alt (for the 370 epic). I spend more time in the zone farming the pets and mounts than in the scenario.
-Darkshore as a zone is a bit of a wash for me since I never really quested in it with an Alliance toon. I did some of the Vanilla version years ago, but don’t remember much of it. I never did the Cata quests for it. So, I have no real attachments to the zone itself.
-The story and lore leading up to it is just more “hate the Horde because they’re evil”. I’m basically desensitized to that at this point in time.
-It’s hard to take Malfurion seriously when I had to keep saving him from a Shade of Xavius all through Legion. Maybe don’t charge headlong at the guy known for his cunning and deception?
I think my feelings are best signed up by imparting this simple bit of knowledge:
I have rarely logged onto Della for more than 5 minutes at a time since I hit 120 on her. I have no desire to participate in the current Horde storyline. I don’t even have a desire to run reputation missions Horde side. I’ve only done a handful of them since hitting level cap. I just don’t want anything to do with it.
I don’t want to assist Sylvanas in any way, shape, or form, because the writing team has failed to deliver her story to me in a way that actually gives me even the faintest feeling of enjoyment to be had in it.
When she’s dethroned I will happily pop back on my Horde mainstay so that I can actually experience the storyline, knowing that for every unpleasant thing I’m railroaded into doing, I can rest assured it will eventually be put right. Until then? No thanks, I’m going to keep playing my Lightforged Pally, I don’t have any misgivings about what I’m forced to do when playing her.
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Oh she totally did. Trust me, we went to snob school together and… well, let’s just say she made the Principal’s List.
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Thank you! ![:clap:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/clap.png?v=6" ":clap:")
Nailed it
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Warcraft monsters have always been monsters. Always will be. No orc, troll, or goblin has been wholly a hero and could hold no candles to the dozen or so options the humans get, and to a lesser degree the other races around them. All they have is Thrall, who at best is a neglectful father. Not a great paragon of society.
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Just posted this in another thread but it seems to be relevant to your OP since it lays out what I think the issue is and how it went wrong.
Ideally, both sides would be the hero of their own stories with the other side being a legitimate threat. Similar to how Vanilla was laid out.
I think the new writers have lost sight of the fact that the factions players have a smaller POV when they play through the game, than the over all story that they seem to be focused on. Outside of Saturday morning cartoons, every actual story will have each side as seeing themselves as the heroes.
As the Defenders quote went “The thing about war is, it only works if both sides believe they’re the good guys.”
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I agree With you jack, and think you raise a good point.
I have to wonder though, how could they become detached from that fact? It’s all over the marketing to the game for you to “pick a side”, especially for this expansion. You would think that they would completely understand that players tend to be biased or loyal towards either the horde or alliance exclusively.
I think it would happen naturally if they didn’t also want one of the factions to be the villain of the expansion. Any side you pick, you would be able to identify with. or, the side you identify with would be the side you pick. But as long as each side is the hero of their own story, it is possible that either side is eligible to be picked.
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