Well look at it this way, they took Teldrassil from you, allowed a main character to commit war crimes and genocide on the Night Elves and burn their city to the ground, but at least we’re getting a dancing mini-game at the Darkmoon Faire.
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GOOD feature
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strange that it appears in retail after someone from Pepsi made the same thing months ago.
In the wake of all the negativity, I figure I’ll flip the throwback switch.
Cataclysm was such a nothing burger to me. There was nothing there that held my interest. It’s when I first left the game and figured I’d never come back. I saw Mists of Pandaria and wrote it off as shlocky Kung Fu Panda cash in. Yes, I knew all about the Pandaren as a race but they were put in as a joke, no way they could spin them off into an actual, interesting part of the Warcraft setting.
This is the cinematic that brought me back to WoW, where I remained - off and on - until Shadowlands.
While it’s highly unlikely I’m ever going to give Blizzard a single cent ever again, I post this in encouragement for those discouraged. May such a cinematic come for you all, in time. May the magic of Azeroth call you back, and may you discover in your absence things you never thought to witness in the game again.
After all…it happened once before.
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So she had no agency for the last 17 years? Or… half? I guess, simply, Sylvanas wasn’t *really Sylvanas, and now she is.
Logically, if she was a puppet of the Jailer and now is not, then the ‘banshee’ has already been vanquished. Not that logic is necessarily going to apply here. BUT! I think everything we all predicted will continue unfolding. I’ll be surprised if they execute her, for example, but they’ve made sure that even if they do, it’s still a stupid outcome!
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Gnomes and night elf players must join up. We will be unstoppable.
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New Darkmoon Faire, the expansion is saved!
Right when Youtube disabled dislikes.
Also if the Jailer was in control or her soul was shattered and aligned with the Jailer’s intentions for so long then why did she want to kill Arthas who was the Jailer’s first bae?
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The whole “soul split in two” concept is dumb.
So the whole lore of Ranger General Sylvanas being turned into a banshee but then breaking free and inhabiting her own corpse was just some superficial nonsense. What about the Forsaken, then??
“That Banshee Queen sure was trash, right guys?!” – Sylvanas
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I sorta like the realization Sylvanas is having, though this is my main concern.
By making ‘good Sylvanas’ an independent entity, it makes merging them back together have its own problems. ‘Good Sylvanas’ was basically pulled out from stasis and told “Yeah, so, your puppeted corpse became fantasy Hitler and murdered a lot of innocents and children. You should feel bad about it.”
To me, this raises the question of “So, is the next logical step to split her soul again, so Good Sylvanas can keep the body and the murderhobos can go beat the snot out of the Evil Sylvanas shard?, right” (We do this a lot in this game when dealing with purifying minds/souls, so it has plenty of precedent.) Because if Good Sylvanas is independent, and was missing up until now, then it seems rude to blame her for what Evil Sylvanas did in her absence, and leaving her welded to Evil Sylvanas sounds like torturing the poor soul.
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That’s entirely plausible, though I really do hope she just martyrs herself to save the universe or whatever, but no one actually knows or she gets no forgiveness, like Uther implies. She should just accept the fate she was given and do what’s right, right now, and ask for nothing in return, and we condemn her to whatever afterlife she’ll be given (new jailer? Gross,)
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I just think it would have better if your soul was in the sword, or it wasn’t. In or out.
Uther killed by Frostmourne? His soul is in there until Frostmourne is shattered in Legion. Let him go up to Bastion and still be wounded because he was stuck in a sword for 8 years or whatever. Maybe inside the sword was the same as being in Torghast. SWORDGHAST.
Sylvanas killed by Frostmourne but turned into a Banshee? Her soul is a banshee. She breaks free and possesses her own corpse. This was one of Warcraft’s more unique concepts, sort of.
Of course, splitting the soul is a plot device used to explain why Sylvanas was actually bad this whole time and also why she can get a redemption… but I also would have preferred if none of that happened.
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So what if Zovaal is paving the way for WoW 2 Electric Boogaloo?
Ok so the art, cinematic, and music team once again did what they were supposed to do. They still put out high quality stuff in spite of everything going on with the story. Which hurts more because you can see the potential in lieu of how bad the narrative is going.
The cinematic and all of Shadowlands story just seems to remind me of a drawn out series that was great when it started out but now has new directors and cast members, all out of touch of why the series was a hit in the first place.
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The most charitable read of this is this is suppose to be similar to that old Icecrown questline that had the little boy ghost that was suppose to represent what was left of Arthas’s goodness or something. A representation of Sylvanas’s inner conflict. Trying to pass the blame on some “bad half” of her instead of accepting she was actually wrong.
As for why living Sylvansas’s face looks kinda off, this actually reminds me of what I… Oh god I was gonna go on about what I thought was a retcon of Sylvanas’s face tattoos, but doing a little research she’s been depicted with the edgy burned tears thing in art dating back to Wrath (when they stopped using the reskinned placeholder Night Elf model). Sometimes she’s shown with face markings instead, but it looks like she was meant to have the edgy tears for a long time.
Dear God…she’s so…edgy.
Also, we’re giving the war criminal a weapon? Oooook…
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Don’t worry, she apologized, we’re square.
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It’s kind of sad how people are convinced this is a good story because there’s a cinematic.
Like people really are that deeply in denial.
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Very off topic but this sounds to me like a hybrid of a Halloween costume contest and fencing tournament; alternatively the name of a heavy metal band; also alternatively a monster in a TTRPG.
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To be fair, it’s subjective, and people can think it’s a good story and they would be right. It’s not, and the cinematic doesn’t make it not, but it’s certainly, in my opinion, a step in the vaguely, generally correct direction. I don’t have any delusions about how terrible Shadowlands is but this whole “people are stupid if they think the story is good” is annoying and not fair and frankly, wrong. Let people enjoy things?
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Yeah it’s interesting… what someone likes is subjective in terms of their personal enjoyment, though by that same token through a critical lens, there’s a lot that’s lacking.
Narrative structure – how it works and what resonates – is fairly established at this point. For example in scriptwriting, your tentpole moments are even on specific pages, and pro readers will sometimes only read those pages.
Going by professional standards (which is what I personally judge media I’m paying for by) and best-practice structure, what we’re getting here doesn’t really qualify as a story. You could lay out everything you’d have in a great story and the amount of missing pieces would outweigh what we have.
BUT! Enjoying it isn’t stupid, enjoyment is totally subjective, I used to enjoy it despite all that (because it never handled the deeper narrative elements well IMO) – at a time when all this stuff we’re seeing now, we all joked about here… so I was enjoying it when I knew it would happen.
Yet now it happened and I’m like… just hoping they retcon this sooner than later.
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