Oh yah anything with Marty Stu Nathanos was trash.
I’m referring more to the isolated zone quests, stuff like helping cursed troll pirate skeletons start a mutiny and steal some treasure. Helping another troll start an oasis inn with his cursed ghost friends. Help two Brutosaurs find love. Raise my own Triceratops. Stop a necromancer from putting people’s souls into golems.
It was all just it’s own little adventure that I felt like I was back to being a basic adventurer.
Did nathan come up that much in questing? I know he gives the intro for almost every world quest, but my memory for the leveling experience is murkier
Only for the war campaign stuff iirc. i don’t recall him showing up for any of the zandalar zone quests
You’re definitely stuck with him if you do anything in Kul Tiras and the main war campaign. He does tell you off when you start any of the zone quests for Zuldazar but I don’t remember him being all in my face for any of the zone quests.
Yeah he was pretty much there just for the War Campaign quests, but the thing was he was there for -every- War Campaign quest. It wasn’t a War Campaign even. It was “Help me get my senpai to notice me” every step of the way. It barely had anything to do with the faction conflict and everything to do with how the writer wanted us to help him live out his power fantasy of snuggling with his virtual Sylvanas body pillow.
I don’t even think the war campaign was about that. I remember reanimating Janina’s brothers corpse and something to do with a magic wand. Both sides were so incredibly stupid and forgettable
What’s really funny to me is at the time Blizz put out a PR article patting themselves on the back about look at all the strong female characters we have leading.
Yet you seriously spend like what? A few minutes with Sylvannas at most compared to the hours spent with Nathanos. I bet if someone timed it, almost all of your time is spent with the most annoying edgelord.
I started taking the Fraidy Cat debuff everytime I got his BG que because his opening monologue about how much we suck just got so grating.
They made Garona pretty hostile at first, too, though I think they patched out her voice line of “GET BENT”, which made go wtf? the first time I heard it.
Nathanos really did make the Horde War Campaign a miserable experience.
Alliance War Campaign: “Alright, we’re going to go here and do this thing. Everyone ready? Let’s go.”
Horde War Campaign: “Hey you miserable sack of crap. You worthless piece of beetle debris. We have a mission, even though I know you’ll screw it up phenomenally. Now get on the boat and don’t touch anything. I don’t need you idiots causing the boat to sink.”
I loved him. He’s unadulterated forsaken through and through. I’m tired of everyone in the game treating me like I’m the chosen one instead of a problematic murderhobo who somehow got the boss’ attention.
The biggest problem with Nathanos is he kept acting like he was Top Dog in the Horde because he was the Warchief’s boytoy. Despite the fact historically he was just a Vanilla Quest Giver that got a glow up.
It’d be different if Nathanos treated players with hostility if we had anything but his own boasting to go by about his own importance.
I didn’t think the Alliance war campaign was too bad. We didn’t really do that much, true, but it was kinda cute to see little squads of alliance races doing stuff? A draenei got to make a heroic last stand in a cunning gambit, dark irons got to manhandle some goblins, Void Elves got to make, uh, spooky purple portals which I guess is their thing.
I guess my more positive feelings toward BfA also have to do with being almost exclusively an Alliance player, and we’re used to our faction being dumb and having no identity. It wasn’t really a shock to have BfA portray us that way, because we wouldn’t be playing Alliance if that was a dealbreaker. I played through the Horde war campaign on my goblin hunter and yeah, it was worse, but I didn’t have a strong emotional attachment to that character anyway so it never really got to me beyond rolling my eyes at Rexxar suddenly going from a basically neutral bear pal to grr jaina has gone too far!!
I don’t mind Nathanos being smug, it’s that he’s this random quest giver that replaces the character people already know and like.
Imagine if they did this to Alliance.
Blizz decides, with the death of Varian it is up to iconic Warcraft III The Frozen Throne character, Tyrande Whisperwind to lead the Alliance.
Except you’re going to spend all your time with Steve Moonsorrow. Human archer that was taken in by the Kaldorei and was so amazing and good they made him General of the Sentinels. Tyrande personally invoked a powerful ritual to imbue him special moon goddess powers making him one of if not the strongest character in the all the Alliance. On the flip side, since it’s Alliance he’s Ned Flanders nice to you.
Excuse you. We threw Bilgewater Cartel surveyors into the screaming madness of the Great Dark Beyond simply for occupying a beach.
I think it also helped that after Jania just took her ball and went home in Legion, her coming back to BfA and us getting a competently written follow up to her actions all the way back in WarCraft 3 with her siding with the Horde against her Father and everything that entailed politically and personally…we really did come out with the better end of the deal compared to historically. And especially compared to Sylvanas who got tossed off the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down.
I do not have a problem with gruff characters that don’t treat me special.
I do have a problem with the special boy / gary stu of the week talking down to me, “canonically” more powerful than everything except the word of god, because that same word of god decided that this character was whom I would be forced to listen to (but almost never interact with in any real way) for an entire expansion (let alone what came after).
Nathanos didn’t come across as a too cool for school, rough riding, salt of the earth big boy. He felt like Blizzard’s misguided self insert / monkey’s paw response to players complaining about how the setting and our role in it was reaching fetishistic levels of inflation. There’s being treated like a normal person, and then there’s an abusive C.O. who’s disdain is only matched by his plot armor.
Maybe that’s just me I guess. I can see why some people appreciated it for what it was… I just couldn’t take it at face value.
This is the main reason I find difficulty understanding people who like Nathanos based solely on the reason he doesn’t worship the ground we walk on. He feels like the opposite extreme to me, no better than characters who constantly praise us.
I would have found Nathanos less irritating if a majority of people didn’t out perform him on a regular basis, so he would have at least had some ground to speak on rather than being a chihuahua.
But then again, Blizzard did basically force Tyrande to go super sayan mode to make him feel Inconvenienced and kill one Valkyr so really who’s the real winner in this argument?
This is the other half of what I didn’t want to scrunch into an overlong essay on a character better forgotten.
The man talks about everyone else like he’s ever done anything, like, at all, whilst simultaneously choosing to selectively ignore that basically everyone else around him (at large) has at least had the screen time and in fact participated in their own accolades.
Which wouldn’t matter if Blizzard was making the character as like… A parody. Or a comedic relief. Or was ever put in a context that drew attention to this. Blizzard just seemed to think he was that cool. That his attitude was enough at face value to just sell his entire role.
… And I could use that as commentary for like, Blizzard as a company but that might be unfair to the rank and file whom I’d like to believe aren’t like that.
Edit; Despite a lot of my burning ire to the whole thing, I don’t want it to come across as exceptionally combative, I think it’s fine to just enjoy the guy at face value for his attitude. He’s just not for me.
Interesting reflections on BFA! It’s funny, with Shadowlands having passed, I’d sort of forgotten how unpopular BFA was. From where I’m sitting, BFA next to Shadowlands is like comparing a gold nugget to a clump of dirt… but contrast can make a bad thing look good next to something worse.
Personally, I enjoyed BFA tremendously - in fact it’s tied with Legion as my second favourite expansion in Warcraft History, but I think a lot of my enjoyment was for selfish and subjective personal reasons.
I think what I loved most was the character development and roleplay BFA gave me. I had built this character, Sarestha, to be a strong Sylvanas loyalist. I don’t want to dominate this comment with those thoughts but the TL:DR is Sarestha was a Scarlet Crusader in life, and the only way she was able to reconcile this extremism with becoming undead herself was to see the free-willed Forsaken as the true heirs of Lordaeron - very distinct and different from the Scourge. This obsession with free will as the fundamental difference between Scourge and Forsaken led her to idolise Sylvanas, who she saw as a visionary saviour who freed and redeemed the people of Lordaeron.
Anyway, naturally BFA was challenging for Sarestha as she needed to build her identity with the things that she believed in most, her nation and her Queen, being stripped away. The character conflict it created for Sarestha to see the Forsaken massacre the Kaldorei without provocation (at least a security motive could be ascribed for things like Gilneas, Southshore), but even more so to see the champion of free will, Sylvanas Windrunner, bend the mind of a newly raised Forsaken to her will, was tremendous. It ended up taking my character down a totally unexpected storyline of resistance and renewal that was absolutely tremendous and ultimately led to the creation of a guild - Lordaeron Unbound - that really defined my RP experience for quite some time. So on a personal level, that conflict had me on the edge of my seat, though I understand that was because it uniquely fit my character concept.
There were other things I loved though. Perhaps the zones most of all. Personally I tremendously enjoyed Kul Tiras - I wish Stormsong had built more on the Tidesages/Azshara arc because that was about the only part of that storyline I enjoyed. But Tiragarde’s political intrigue, Drustvar’s mystery and aesthetic, Zuldazar’s even cooler political intrigue, etc… There’s not a zone in BFA I didn’t at least PARTIALLY enjoy, and next to Pandaria it remains my favourite place to quest. Not least significant is the fact that I’m a big fan of the factions but not necessarily of the faction war - so having faction specific quest zones that, with the exception of Stormsong’s bad bit, told their own stories and built up faction LORE without necessitating faction WAR, made me really happy - I enjoyed it tremendously.
Island expeditions and warfronts were a fun thing to do - a bit of an alternative to just doing the same 5 dungeons all the time - gets a bit repetitive if you ask me. Warfronts were waaay too easy but the format and the rewards were something I enjoyed tremendously - with work they could’ve been tons better. Perhaps the most overlooked part of warfronts is the zone updates with modern graphics - something I’d like to see more of over time, as new Darkshore and Arathi are stunning.
Where BFA fell flat was ultimately the execution of the story - a story that utterly demoralised both factions, and made most people resent a part of the game that used to be central to it - faction identity. I’m hoping a cold war vibe will see that recover… I guess time will tell. I still love the factions but there’s no doubt whatsoever that it sucked for Alliance folks to be massacred without any real reprisals (killing Rastakhan, a guy who had nothing to do with Teldrassil, felt broadly irrelevant to the actual grievances Alliance players wanted revenge for). It also sucked for Horde folks, always painted in the early days as a union of the oppressed rising up and growing strong together, and overcoming their demons - to become absurdly evil AGAIN, which cheapened all the development of Pandaria as the Horde struggled to find its identity, did so for like 2 expansions offscreen, then went straight back to Garrosh time. That was, for many, a fatal blow to their morale that may never be recovered. I hope it can be.
Leaving aside the demoralising nature of the war - the other thing was that BFA should’ve been two expansions. They tried to tell a war story AND an Old Gods/Azshara story, and ultimately managed to tell neither in a way that was remotely satisfying - both felt absurdly rushed and incomplete - an enormous waste of potential all around.
In a funny way it’s good to talk all of this out again - I’ve been so focused on how much I dislike Shadowlands - broadly speaking there’s pretty much nothing whatsoever I enjoy about this expansion and I hope never to touch it again - that I forget to discuss BFA… an expansion that had a mixed impact on me. Overall, I like aspects of BFA, and I hope to see some of them rise again without necessitating the bad stuff.