You know the war they just had? They called it the War of Thorns not a term that meant “A Series of Night Time Exercises.”
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What speculation? We have Chronicles for element sake. It specifically states that the night elven sentinels efforts: “resulted in a long-sought period of PEACE AND TRANQUILITY.”
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I don’t know if you noticed Zerde, but thats not very interesting or descriptive.
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“Long Vigil” is extremely descriptive. It’s not particularly interesting because maintaining a watch where nothing happens… isn’t.
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So… What, you think the Night elves are lying when they say “We mostly waited for ten thousand years with the occasional war against satyrs and Qiraji here and there”?
That is the point, for 7k+ years the night elves had relative peace. Not every point in Warcraft’s timeline has to be interesting/something we need too much details on.
Heck, we even have a time skips from Warcraft 2-3 of 10 or so years with the same description.
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7 thousand years of peace, with no major internal or external struggles. Yeah, seems reasonable, not like anything can happen in the amount of time it took human civilization to develop from barely understanding writing to coding computers.
I don’t need a lot, i just need something more then “The night elves just stood around, we swear they were doing things to help the world but refuse to tell you what they did”. It’s lazy writing. It’s the cheap way of making a fantasy race seem “Old and Wise”. It’s also copying Tolkien without any context of what Tolkien did, you know, actually fill out the long histories.
The Long Vigil isn’t inherently bad, it’s just implemented in the most lazy way possible.
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I could have seen the Night Elves being the “Forsaken of the Alliance” being more stand-off-ish and prioritizing their wants. I think that would have been a cool twist: Forsaken as the “death” race and Kal’dorei as the “life” race. And while these two motifs are perhaps over-generalizations, it could be an interesting juxtaposition: the Kal’dorei are about life and nature but xenophobic and distrustful of other life.
Edit to add: it’s also odd that In 7k years, all those lands we’re just now discovering weren’t previously found. However, I suppose it may be attributable to a Kal’dorei attitude of “don’t go exploring lest you find trouble and invite danger like our ancestors did via experiments with Arcane.” Basically, I can see the 7grand years of quietude based around a fear of inviting wrath which they recently overcame. As if the entire society went “hermit.”
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Without war/suffering there is usually not much reason to expand/innovate. Add to that you probably needed a LONG time to heal the world from the Sundering.
They told us what they were doing, they were looking for signs of demonic activity and the druids slept most of the 7k years away to help the forest and stop the corruption. I expect the night elves killed a rogue demon/satyr or two that popped up every now and again.
We get lore based on how much it will end up being focused on in game. Considering I doubt the Long Vigil will ever be a focus, I am quite ok with the lore we got and willing to let my imagination fill in the blanks.
I expect Blizzard would rather spend their resources on new lore/lore that is relevant for future content.
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We already have Forsaken Night Elves?
The night elves enjoyed thousands of years of overall peace because the Sundering effectively put a giant ocean between them and every other nation that could potentially challenge them. With the tauren and centaur isolated to the plains, the night elves and furbolgs were really the only mortal races in Kalimdor’s forests. The furbolgs - along with the myriad immortal denizens of the forests - were their allies in protecting Hyjal, so aside from the remnants of the satyr and the Qiraji, there was really nobody on the continent with the means or motivation to threaten them.
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Was gonna respond to zerde, but this caught my eyes more. He isn’t saying Elf Forsaken, he is saying they were supposed to be counterparts and foils to each other. 2 reluctant allies to their faction with their own agenda’s, one themed around death and decay and the other life and growth, one active is pursuing their goals while the other more passively waiting them out, one with a flawless form of immortality, the other requiring constant repair to their bodies, One who had a crisis of faith, the other devoted to their goddess, one being a young nation who emerged from the remnants of another, the other being a long standing one.
The idea of the night elves and forsaken as foils was from my understanding part of the original plan. Certainly more engaging the Forsaken vs Worgen and orcs vs Night Elves.
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I think I know what you mean. In WCIII there was a Night Elf vs Scourge thematic, life vs death. It seems that they wanted to repeat it with Darkshore even if their “new allies” seems to be ridiculous.
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Not just life vs death, the themes the two would embody is what makes it work as rivals. What their doing in darkshore doesn’t encapsulate the feeling they should be going for, as they are using the forsaken as literal scourge analogues at this point.
A forsaken vs night elven story shouldn’t have been the forsaken slaughtering the night elves, but 2 fundamentally different societies clashing.
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Touché!
Though R. Happy did a much better job encapsulating my thoughts.
Well, it’s called “the Long Vigil”, not “the Long Strife” or “the Long Campaign” or something equally war/conflict-related. I’d assume that things happened, but that in the long run it was more of a maintenance of Night Elven society in their lands, possibly a couple border conflicts with the centaur and quillboar, something with the tauren maybe, naga maybe, expeditions into Desolace and Stonetalon where they establish a few outposts and settlements. The early years would be a great upheaval of Kaldorei society, given that it’s near-immediately after the end of the War of the Ancients. There’s some recovery to be done and damage to fix. Some may dare leave the forest to explore the rest of Kalimdor, but most are fairly comfortable within their forests, so some of the expanded territory settlements were either lost to local threats or simply abandoned and reclaimed by nature. The druids are sleeping at this time if I remember correctly, so maybe some nefarious force tries to prevent them from waking up. You know, stuff like that. A lot can happen in 10,000 years.
I speculate that nothing too bloodthirsty happened because of the nature of the name of the period, but also that it wasn’t an idyllic, perfect period with absolutely no conflict at all either.
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Just a suggestion but maybe you shouldn’t use real world situations to evaluate the validity of the series of events in a fantasy game. It’s make believe so in that light it’s entirely possible that they went thousands of years in internal peace.
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Just because you find it uninteresting doesn’t mean it’s not true.
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Vespero, True and Good are very different things.
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I could buy this argument if we were talking about periods of, say, 50 years to 2 centuries. But you got to be out of your mind if you can tell me with a straight face nothing of interest could have happened in 70 centuries.
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