Now I may be giving the devs way, way too much credit here but the one thing I think we can agree on is BFA was a disappointment.
Forsaken and Nelves lost a lot, their allies also lost a lot, any ‘victories’ feel pyrrhic and the game’s story is in a hurry to move on even as a lot of grievances threaten to go permanently unaddressed.
And I’ve been thinking - maybe BFA was trying to make a point about war?
Think about it. Anyone getting a feeling of glory as this wraps up? A feeling of victory? Because personally I’m so tired of it all that the prospect of fighting in the setting’s 9th Circle of Hell sounds like an outright vacation.
It’s likely it was all just bad writing. Hell I’d say it probably was. But part of me thinks - maybe this is making a point. It’s a brutal, miserable affair wherein no one really wins, horrible things happen and the world quickly tries to turn the page as it’s easier to move on than fix everything that was ruined.
Again - likely overthinking it but - well, food for thought.
Nope, because it all boiled down to the godd**ned ‘‘Let’s be friends and beat the baddie!’’.
And I swear to god if I have to listen and see Anduin mumbling about peace or anything of the sorts I’ll personally stab my eyes with 2 forks. And cut my ears with a saw.
/nuclearRant
On all seriousness though, yes I agree. I didn’t get a sense of victory, not even in the Warfronts which by the way was casually answered at Blizzcon with a ‘‘Oh yeah Alliance won both, next question’’.
Bad writing at its finest my friend. I never liked the fact that they sold this as a Horde vs Alliance thing, when in reality it was S̶a̶u̶r̶f̶a̶n̶g̶ Deadfang 2.0 and his friends vs Sylvanas.
I knew going in, one way or another, that’s how this was going to end. Neither faction could have a solid victory because in the end things would have to return to the status quo. People floated around the idea of no factions or new factions after this but I always felt that was unlikely - as that sounds like a completely different game.
The Battle For Azeroth in the end was certainly a Shakespearean story. In the sense it was a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. But perhaps that was the point? Is BFA actually a morally upstanding game showing that war only ever leads to misery and dissappintment?
Probably not. It’s probably just crap and I’m going full English teacher on it but once I had that thought it started to make more sense.
See Siege of Orgrimmar, it was a clear Alliance victory, where Varian could have dismantled the Horde.
Misery? The only real loss was Teldrassil, the rest is negligible. Disappointment? That’d be the whole expansion, not its theme lol.
So did I, my good friend, and in the end I gave up and accepted the fact that no matter how epic it can be to see Jaina Frost Nova an entire Horde ground battalion + airships. Or her teleporting bombs to the middle of ships, the story was just crap.
I missed Cata through WoD so I never played Siege of Orgrimmar. But seeing how Varian decidedly didn’t dismantle the Horde I kinda doubt he could’ve. I’ve at least seen the cutscene - all the Horde’s leaders and an army is there that sounds like a risky blood bath even if you’ll likely win.
Suggesting the loss of the Undercity was negligible is reductive at best, inflammatory at worst. That and Tirisfal have been my favorite zone in game for 15 years. I don’t exactly burst into tears everytime I see the place but revisiting it in Classic and knowing it’s inevitable fate doesn’t inspire positive feelings.
Finally I don’t think everything was a disappointment. Zandalar was wonderfully done. The Loa are some of the more fun and memorable characters they’ve ever had in my book. The allied races were a neat idea. I thought Nazjatar was cool until I did the dailies a billion times for Rank 3 Memory of a Lucid Dream on several toons.
For me at least the biggest disappointment, outside the removal of PVP vendors, is over the story. It seems like so much was upended and destroyed for ultimately little to nothing but again, perhaps that’s the point.
I dont think the game is in a hurry to move on to the next expansion. Having loose ends gives Blizzard wiggle room to cover those loose ends in a future expansion. I think BFA main story was pretty decent, imo.
I didn’t mean it as negligible from the player’s perspective, but rather from a Story perspective. Was it as tragic as Teldrassil? Nope, and both events got forgotten pretty quickly.
Of course, Art, Music and tiny bits of story were amazing as always, but most of the expansion was a whole lot of crap. But I am not going there since this is a story forum.
Just enough Alliance presence in the Horde capital to get Horde players angry that the Alliance got that far, and just enough toothlessness of those Alliance characters to get Alliance players upset that it means nothing for them.
What’s more tragic is up to perspective really. The Forsaken aren’t directly framed as sympathetic as the Nelves for much the same reason a bunny getting run over is seen as sadder than a rat suffering the same fate despite them both being rodents. One’s nicer to look at so it’s sadder. They still however lose their home, are stuck languishing in the bleaching Durotar sun then have the one person they thought they could trust most publicly disown them before heading off on an evil fart cloud. Who also I’m pretty sure left with their only means of species continuity but tbh I thought ‘we’re zombies can’t we just bite people or something why are angels involved?’ since seeing new Deathknell so I’m not upset that’s being glossed over.
I also don’t think discounting the beautiful art design is not story related. Dazar’Alor is a work of art in my opinion. I especially love how you learn about the city - it’s caste system, economics and civil unrest issues - very organically. It was a nightmare logistically but an ancient city that’s grown over millenia probably would be laid out in a nonsensical manner.
But I’m not here to argue the redeeming qualities. What I am suggesting is that it if not purposefully then accidentally kinda makes a point about war.
And if that was their goal, I think the remaining issues would be highlighted by post-war squabbling over the unresolved issues, rather than trying to ignore them.
I think Blizzard messed up hard when they had the Horde burn down Teldrassil. It seemed they forgot for a moment that this was a two faction game.
It kind of set the tone for the rest of the xpac for me and honestly both the Forsaken and Night Elfs have been gut punched pretty hard. Both have loose ends that need to be tied up, and I when the whole Celia thing happened as far as I could tell it up set more than a few Forsaken players. Or how they said that Tyrande got her revenge after 8.1.
There is also the giant sword in the planet that I guess we’ll throw a blanket over and say it’s fine.
If I had to wager they’ll pull a WoD and just swipe it under the rug like most of it never happened.
The Burning of Teldrassil was kinda the warning light for me. I figured it would be some sort of mystery as to how it burned down. How it might happen was quite the topic of debate here if I recall. Then Windy just nukes the place and it’s, World War 4 for a couple of months.
I’m not suggesting the writing is good. It’d still be bad even if this was specifically the point of the story.
The ‘Meta’ point of BFA was to set up Sylvanas as a faction uniting threat, nothing more and nothing less. The entire plot was driven towards ‘you’ll never guess what Sylvanas did this time!’ in such a blatant and uninspired way that it still surprises me that anyone thinks there was a larger point to BFA’s narrative.
There’s no message about war, or politics, or even simpler things about the nature of the struggle between good and evil. BFA was just a narrative vehicle to get as many players to hate Sylvanas as they possibly could do they could build an expansion about an abstract concept (in this case the afterlife) around a familiar face.
If that was the whole mission statement then why even give the option to side with her? Why are there still players on her side who think this will work out? I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that was the case Illidain turned out to be in the right despite doing unambiguously evil things in BC.
Blizz isn’t exactly known for nuanced writing. Thrall’s Moses allegory is as quiet as the Doomhammer. I’m unconvinced of that take because, at least for me, they managed to make me thoroughly dislike her as far back as Edge of Night. I outright hated her as a lifetime Forsaken fan by Before The Storm. Was it just to get non-undead players to hate her because this seems like overkill in that department.
Initially they were not going to give the option to side with her. It only came up when enough players complained when the mission to save Saurfang came up on the ptr. In some cases their attempt to make players hate Sylvanas backfired and they had to deal with that somehow.
(For instance like with me, who hated her as far back as Warcraft 3 but ended up siding with her more and more throughout BFA.)
I find that claim dubious. WoW players are the Maw of complaints all the time always. They added a new method for questing into the game just because people were upset?
Because that feels like a planned, experimental feature we’ll see more of down the line.
I’m just telling you how it played out. It was not initially implemented on the ptr that you could do anything but save Saurfang and then when they did add the option not to they also added a joke option to just go take a day at the hot springs instead.
What made it to live was just the option to tell Zappie-boi no and then end the quest by telling Sylvanas about it. The ‘loyalist’ quest chain, for what it was, then evolved from there as a few tacked on speech lines for Nathanos and ended with the only true difference being at the very end.
I doubt any of it was planned for when BFA was first launched. Be as dubious as you like.
BfA was not framed as pointless insanity driven by mutually uncomprehending foes, where peace was always an option if only we had eyes to see.
BfA was framed as an existential battle between the good guys (Saurfang & Anduin) vs the bad guys (Sylvanas, Azshara & Nzoth). The fight against Sylvanas is a just war, and so is the fight against Nzoth, and we’re supposed to feel glorious in our FOR AZEROTH patriotism in both cases–and from what I can gather from the OP, we mostly don’t.
That’s a failure w/ the writing, not a meta-point about conflict.
From a meta point, BfA does address many meta issues that will definitely impact the game going forward.
It gave a formal climax/end to open war between Horde/Alliance that’s been going on since the Broken Shore invasion.
It set up other plotlines for future conflicts/foes or at least gave them time to stew after their introduction in Legion. Sylvanas’ growth in power, the Void vs Light as big themes, Azeroth’s World Soul, mysteries of WoW’s afterlife, etc were all at least alluded to in BfA. Shadowlands does feel like a more natural progression out of stuff explored in BfA, than it does out of Legion.
Possibly related to point 1, but the Horde roster going into all future expansions is very different from what it was before. This expansion lays out the how/why.
Just a couple of things I could think of off the top of my head.