Sometimes I wished Modern WoW learned a thing or two from the past expansions where all the characters had the spotlight in Mists of Pandaria, Wrath of the Lich King and Vanilla. So far it has been a mess of things ether the horde gains more spotlight or the alliance does and same thing.
It’s just blizzard doesn’t know how to do a fair balance in story telling what past 3 that I just mentioned.
And MoP wasn’t really balanced. There was even an extra patch just for the Horde story.
I think the issue is that Blizzard is not good at juggling different, simultaneous stories. They have always done things more serialized. Like how the RTS games story was each races story taking over at the end of the previous race story. When they try to tell stories that are supposed to be happening at the same time, they still approach it like a serialized story. They write one side of it and then try to figure out how to fit the other around what is already written. They have never seemed to be able to write the whole thing as one cohesive story.
As frustrated as people are with TWW’s first patch being Alliance focused it might be the best that they do it this way. Alliance players know what a jumbled mess it is when a story is written for the Horde and then they attempt to fit the Alliance in around it. Flipping back and forth does mean some patches wont be for you (this one is not for Horde, next one is not for Alliance). But at least the story wont be a chaotic mess of jumbled story arcs that only happen because they have to fit around the already written story for the other side.
https://i.imgur.com/FGg32fG.jpeg
Gee, it’s like they should have figured this out in advance. And maybe not slapped a faction-specific companion onto such a major expansion feature without having a plan. How hard would it have been to just give us an Earthen companion?
That wouldn’t work either. We got people complaining about earthen being Alliance content, even those earthen share no relation to the ones we met in Northrend, or the the alliance dwarves
Edit: They probably picked Brann because he’s the least offensive character on the alliance roster, and I don’t know many people who actually hate the character.
A Niffen, then. They like going underground.
(And I don’t disagree that the Earthen are kind of Alliance-flavored, but they’re still less so than an actual Explorer’s League character. They could also have offset that a little by giving your delve companion some faction-specific dialogue, like “I’ve been hearing about the Horde/Alliance—you seem like cool people!”)
Or they continue following rule of cool. Ultimately, we will likely get another faction specific companion in Midnight with a decidedly Horde bias and continue with this trend of switch for the forseable future.
Like this feels like complaining that say the Exploring Azeroth series starts with a decidedly Alliance when it ultimately ends up being 2 Alliance, 2 Horde and 1 neutral at the end of it all.
This wasn’t rule of cool, per their own words. It was lack of planning.
Or its both. They thought Brann would be an excellent partner(regardless of anyone feeling the Alliance being favored) and was initially thinking this would just be a one tier thing but realize “hey this type of companion should be an entire expansion thing” later on. Blizzard is allowed to change their minds when presented with new information on a wholely new system they wanted to implement.
It isn’t both.
Considering how poorly implemented Delves were initially and it taking blizz two months to get delves in a playable state for most players, rule of cool definitely wasn’t a factor.
They just realized it’s too late to do anything about the companion system, so they kept it as is
It is. Brann made sense as a delve companion considering his history as an adventurer and as a fairly popular character in both WoW and Hearthstone.
That’s not my definition of “rule of cool.” Not every story decision is “rule of cool.”
Like that is literally rule of cool. Brann made sense as someone most people know would be delving into dungeons/exploring etc more so then probably any other character in WoW.
Brann isn’t cool.
In Zerde’s defense, his north star is “me like alliance, alliance good, blue good,” so it is Rule of Cool to him.
If you care about consistency, world-building and overall writing quality, it is indeed that hard. Else you get careless retcons and worse.
I feel it was watered down by the war narrative of BFA. The first act was all Alliance vs Horde to pull in the “i want war in warcraft” crowd, and I think Zandalar needed a deeper dive that would have been possible if it had been treated like Kaz’Algar. Horde characters would take the lead while the Alliance would either not really be involved or have a token presence at best. In such a scenario, I wouldn’t be complaining about faction representation because I care more about the story being told and plot points/decisions made, which is why I find such sentiments nonsensical.
Yeah I can see that, though I think there was a massive amount of potential in the Gorian Empire that was tossed in the bin because Draenor was in an alternate timeline. You could probably probably use ogres in a similar way the Earthen were used in this expansion, as the point of entry before you go into the deeper parts of the story.
No idea. I just saw some hate on the forums for her and Toddy. Some of the dialogue was odd but that’s more on the editor than the person providing the voice.
Hahahahahaha (quest writers and world-building is usually okay, though)
I can’t imagine hating Toddy either. She was fine. Don’t see anything hate-able about her.
I say ignore the idiots, and bring us more Toddy and Naleidea.
Oh, I agree. I was a bit miffed Naleidea made the equivalent of a small cameo in the Delve questline (with the most unnatural-sounding dialogue, to boot). I figured her and Toddy would make more appearances so that the exploration isn’t just all about Brann Bronzebeard (and this comes from someone who likes Brann). I would have liked to see the three collab at some point. Bring Harrison Jones along if you want to make the classic 5-man party between the four of them and the player character.