Vanilla was fine since it was all just world-building stuff. TBC is when it got bad.
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Sorry, villains aren’t allowed to have feelings. 
But…yeah, I didn’t really see an issue with that scene personally.
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Jailer is the best villain across all media then 
He didn’t even have a personality or a plan to hate, which oddly made him even more hated. 
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tbf WoW was being developed alongside WC3, maybe even beforehand.
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People simply don’t realize that Sylvanas was always evil and selfish. I implore people to go play on era or sod and do the eastern kingdoms horde zones. You’ll find out that 2004 forsaken and by extension Sylvanas were very evil and brutal. Classic forsaken quests literally have you going around helping dudes concoct a plague and feed the tests to dwarves and humans. In Hillsbrad you literally start a massacre and kill farmers, peasants and councilmen. Not soldiers, but civilians. There is a deathguard that requests you give him 30 human skulls for his “collection”. The list goes on.
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Yeah the voice acting is brutal. Not just the lines but how they’re delivered, like they use the first take every time.
Seriously! Dragons are arguably the most iconic fantasy creature, awe inspiring and terrifying, and these dragons have none of that they’re like gumdrops. Gumdrop dragons. As one guy put it “they had a whole expansion based on dragons and not a single person was eaten by one”
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Wish we could go back to this. I never really had an issue out the Horde leaders going wild and taking the war to the Alliance it was mainly just when they started siding with the void and the jailor and such that they lost me.
The lore/story has always been trash, the only difference now is that it has transitioned into full on dumpster fire lol.
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Yup. Honestly, I can’t help but chuckle every time people come along and claim TBC was so great, even though the expansion was rife with retcons and clichés.
I think the main reason TBC was so popular was the introduction of Blood Elves… and here we go again, countless inconsistencies arise, both with Blood Elves and with the Draenei, and it goes all the way to Illidan. Story-wise, the expansion was a disaster.
Of course, there are good moments here and there, I won’t deny that, but overall, WoW lore is and always was really poor. The basic concept has potential, yes, but the execution is catastrophic, especially culminating in expansions like WoD, BFA, Shadowlands, etc., where it’s even worse.
Lore is as “cheesy” as it has always been.
Honestly DF has been a breath of fresh air compared to everything since MoP.
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Evil/amoral and selfish wasn’t ever the problem.
Submissive and gullible was the problem. Because that’s exactly what SL made her.
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I like the stories.
TBC really did jump the shark with the space goats and alien ships and all that stuff which kind of ungrounded an otherwise fairly normal sword and sorcery with low steam-punk tech aesthetics world. I can accept blaming that on youthful indiscretion on the part of the devs, a one-off mistake because they were confused by their own success and didn’t have solid plans.
The game hobbled on fine with that stuff and even achieved its crowning moments in terms of not just playerbase and wider cultural relevancy but triumphs of storytelling as well in Wrath and later MoP* and the advanced technology issue was mostly ignored until Legion when we had to contend with it again though it was in a wrapping it up way, at least until the third act where it started to get weird again when we got to Argus and the yin/yang of lightforged draenei/void elves appeared for no good reason.
*say what you will about Cata and MoP having problems, they were game-play problems, problems with balance, tuning, too many daily quests and the grind, not with the story, the lore, the theming. WoW has always had these issues with balance and the gameplay aspects having their ups and downs, what made it endure was the story wasn’t totally broken.
What really sank the property was the second shark jumping which was BFA basically and then SL of course which to a mature property with a certain feel to it like WoW, established lore like WoW just didn’t work with all the retcons and thematic incompatibilities.
I’m not sure it’s right to call her selfish historically. She was in many ways pretty self-less, she was driven by revenge of a personal nature yes, but also understanding of the suffering of others she called her people and helping and guiding them. I wouldn’t call her a paragon of self-lessness or anything but she was a leader with leadership qualities that included concern for others.
The problem is she was at the beginning a kind of “necessary evil” type of evil. She and her people were ghoulish, ghastly, brutal, but they were against this greater threat, the scourge and they were a powerful ally for all of Azeroth but especially this beaten down group of immigrants and outcasts called the Horde and specifically for the Blood Elves after they were left a broken people on the edge after Arthas’ destruction of their lands.
So you kind of laughed and tolerated it because she was an anti-hero type character and the whole game was kind of cartoony and it’s lore not like super serious 40K or LoTR lore.
You wanted her to get vengeance as a player because you could sympathize with the elf she’d been in life, a great person, cut down, brutalized and yet overcoming it as she overcome Arthas’ control of her, she was a symbol of overcoming adversity, of throwing off the shackles of oppression up through the end of Wrath and I think a lot of her lovers like me first knew her then as that person. So she was very compelling as that. And this was a time where there were no other female racial leaders. She was using the enemy’s tools against them in many of the evil things the forsaken were doing, it was also implied in the lore at the time that the influence of the evil of the scourge hadn’t vanished entirely overnight from most of those freed of Arthas so they had some lingering habits, compulsions, practices that weren’t entirely freely chosen in malice.
And she was like Arthas a tragic story, a tragic person. And I think that’s what it really boils down to, she was popular for the same reason people found Arthas interesting.
Then Cata came, suddenly she no longer has a revenge motive that makes her look so righteous and necessary, she’s doing kind of weird things and Garrosh is calling her the b-word in a cut-scene that was later removed. She’s no longer in many ways the person most of us fell in love with, sympathized with, saw as a bad-as girl leader in a sea of men.
But her reasoning is still sort of understandable or at least the issues can be brushed off to focus on Garrosh as the bigger bad, she’s trying to hold her people together and she’s under a Warchief who is racist, who is speciesist, who is an Orc supremacist and who demands everyone else justify their existence and membership in his horde so she does some conquest and commits some crimes and tries to bring some stability and future for her people. She pushes back on the Alliance and related kingdoms who she considers to have abandoned her people in life (the high/blood elves) as well as her people in undeath (the forsaken) as she not incorrectly believes they see her/her people as monsters who will pass on eventually and her/their lands as belonging to the living and there was some encroachment in the plaguelands.
It settled down after that and really had no reason for her to spark up again, except for the retcons introduced by SL that she killed herself at the end of Wrath and was now a captive and enthralled to this Jailor guy.
And it’s very telling those two races again rise to be part of a problematic arc in the lore with the introduction at the tail end of Legion of Lightforged Draenei and Void Elves in some pointless yin/yang callback to TBC. Which leads us into BFA, into cosmic struggle nonsense, into SL and the jailor and the multiverse and the end and death of objective truth in favor of all magical sides are bad except in moderation.
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It’s great to see someone who actually understands why some of us enjoy(ed) Sylvanas’ character so much. You don’t see that often enough around here.
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Yes, the lore is cheesy now which is why it doesn’t really matter anymore.
WoW’s lore was never incredibly profound or deep, but it’s like having a really good burger. Something simple that’s just done well and with passion, it’s satisfying if not life-changing. Warcraft’s RTS lore was like that, and you see it flash up here and there with Legion probably being the height of it for a lot of people. WoD could’ve been like that too if not for the time-travel alternate universe trope.
It’s subjective of course, but there’s like…a window of quality that’s been missed since Legion. There were even a few times in BfA were it was great, but obviously it was overshadowed by where it wasn’t. Shadowlands was vindictively bad and DF just feels like a weird generic inoffensive slop that has little to do with World of Warcraft.
You hit the nail on the head. Sylvanas will always be my favorite character in the WoW universe.