Blizzard’s stubborn REFUSAL to take the L and acknowledge their players’ historical and legitimate requests (people have been asking for playable Quel’dorei and Ogres for almost 20 years now) is frankly baffling.
The addition of the Ren’dorei can only be explained by either complete disconnection from the fanbase OR actual malice/pettiness/at the very least utter disregard for what people actually want.
The tweet from the dev in the OP shows that there’s still a ton of devs at blizz that are deeply deeply disconnected from what the playerbase wants.
It read like a 5 yr saying We’ll do want we want regardless of what the people disliking it think it’s pathetic how childish they come off as a lot of the time
My concern right now, is Midnight. One of two things is probable with this expansion.
The First? Blizzard outright ignores the Void Elves (par the course) or just makes them antagonists (also fairly par the course).
The Second? Blizzard hyper-fixates on the Void Elves and uses the expansion to develop them as much as possible.
Out of the two, it’s the second which is more vexing to me, and for two reasons. Firstly, this is just going to establish that BFA was not the right time to add the Void Elves as an Allied Race. It’s been so long since they’ve been made playable that addressing the issue now is like slapping a bandaid onto someone who lost their arms and legs hours ago; they’ve already bled out, you’re not helping.
The other thing that will irk me if Blizzard does that route, is the effect it will have on Blood Elves. We’re going back to Quel’Thalas. This should be their expansion. Blood Elves should be, at least, 95% of the focus. If this expansion is used to develop the Void Elves instead, it’s stealing the spotlight from the Blood Elves whom have had nothing but cameos and bit roles as the Horde’s bridge to the Alliance for years now.
It’s not just stolen development time that bothers me either, because if Void Elves are the focus of Midnight, they’re going to be so sympathetic that the Blood Elves are going to come off as complete monsters. They’re going to make the Forsaken look tame. It’s already bad enough that we cannot approach the basis for this expansion without the logical conclusion of, “Wow, the Void Elves were right, Lor’themar sure was an absolute moron for exiling a portion of his bordering-on-extinct population. Again.”
Midnight is going to be a sh*t show no matter how it plays out at this point, all because the Void Elves ruin everything they touch.
You’re right, the Tyrande interaction is a pointless red herring, irrelevant to the discussion of why the Nightborne joined the Horde.
The Nightborne are Highborne. Not were; are. They are the descendants of pre-Sundering Highborne, and maintain their culture. The Kaldorei are all descendants of the poor, low-class peasants that ruined everything, in their eyes. The Blood Elves are also Highborne, separated from the Nightborne through fate alone. Many of the Nightborne knew Dath’remar personally, I’m sure, for heaven’s sake!
Given a choice between two factions that both seem fine enough, Kaldorei or Sin’dorei, the choice was obvious, based on shared culture alone. Anyone who disagrees is delusional to the extreme.
Shared culture and shared struggles. The Blood Elves also understand the pain of magic withdrawal, understand what its like to see your homeland crumbling about you, and also understand what it’s like to see the faith and respect you have placed in your leader betrayed by what appears to be their own selfish ambition.
The Blood Elves and Nightborne absolutely made for the most natural allies. There is no doubting that at all.
The problem is, the Blood Elves come with this additional baggage called, ‘The Horde,’ which should’ve been the point the Nightborne got cold feet. Assuming they did their research into the Horde’s history on Azeroth, that should’ve been a gigantic red flag that led to the Blood Elves being friendzoned.
It only got worse from there, when the Horde committed genocide against the Night Elves, and then turned around and started courting the Zandalari. That should’ve been the point Talanji broke out into a cold sweat and began muttering, “I’ve made a terrible mistake, and so has Lor’themar…”
What makes this worse is that I think the Ren’dorei ARE interesting conceptually, as do a lot of people - but they don’t do anything with them that couldn’t be done with High Elves. They don’t really capitalize on the Void aspect of Void Elves at all. The N’Zoth plotline came and went with almost zero involvement from them (though we killed a bunch of them in a Horrific Vision, so I guess that’s “Void Elf fatigue”).
It’s really hard not to see them as anything but a race that exists to not be High Elves. I don’t even really care about High Elves that much, but I can admit that’s what they are.
No, I was active on this forum at the time. There were definitely people here who expected it.
I mean, yeah, it’s fair to be a bit hesitant for that reason. But the situation is quite literally this:
You’re Nightborne, you return to the world after thousands of years of separation. You suddenly find that two groups are at your doorstep:
I’d be tempted to look the other way if the first group was hanging out with some slightly dirty green beasts. After finding out who Tyrande was, it’s actually kind of impressive that Thalyssra didn’t just declare war on the Kaldorei right then and there, considering how much animosity existed between Highborne and regular Night Elves in pre-Sundering society. People keep forgetting the brutal, classist hatred that existing between Night Elven factions ten thousand years ago. Didn’t we all read War of the Ancients?
Given what we know now about what was happening behind the scenes, that’s not surprising.
However…
I truly believe that was just a dev misspeaking. I don’t think they were really going to end the Night Warrior arc at that point.
Considering that the Alliance has more ultra-powerful heroes than the Horde does, maybe it’s just that Alliance players’ power fantasy is already being met by the game.
First, how does this demonstrate that Alliance is “not allowed” to have a power fantasy? And second, what makes you think the Horde-side characters get anything better?
Quite simply, Tyrande’s power fantasy was being empowered to a point she could solo Old Gods, but when the chips were down, a single one of Jaina’s elementals was capable of doing a better job at fighting Nathanos than she was. Now, you can ARGUE that is a point in favor of power fantasy through Jaina, however, that is ignoring the circumstances in which Nathanos is fighting said elemental, which is the Alliance retreating from Dazar’alor. A proper power fantasy would have been Jaina leveling the city. Instead, we see her fleeing for her life.
I could swear I remember an interview where a dev said that they hadn’t originally intended for Nightborne to be playable at all, which is why the playable models look different from the in-game NPCs. This lends weight to the theory that it was decided around the time Void Elves came into the picture.
That interview was discussing Allied Races in general, however. If they had no plans to make Nightborne playable at the time they created them, the same holds true for Highmountain Tauren, and Lightforged Draenei, as well as Void Elves, whom didn’t even exist until the last five minutes of their own recruitment scenario.
I submit that this just means the power levels on the Alliance side have raised players’ expectations to unrealistic levels. I can’t imagine what it even feels like to feel cheated at not seeing one of “my” NPCs flatten a whole city. It also doesn’t seem like it would be a lot of fun to just stand aside and watch that—there isn’t really anything for my character to do in that case.
No. We see Jaina pretending to flee in order to lure her pursuers out into open waters, where she intends to finish them off. They manage to survive thorugh sheer force of numbers, at which point Jaina just rolls her eyes and teleports out with nary a scratch on her.
See, speaking for myself, I have no expectations.
I never said I felt cheated. I was giving an example of a power fantasy (my opinion of course) using the topic we had been discussing.
Well, power fantasy in a story is rarely about the player character to begin with. It’s about the flex. It’s Garrosh destroying Theramore, it’s Sylvanas torching Teldrassil, or solo’ing the Lich King and then shattering his helmet.
There aren’t too many cases where Alliance characters outright flex their power like that. The example that comes to mind would have to be the Battle for Undercity (Wrath) when Jaina just freezes the entire room full of Horde and Alliance, including Varian, Thrall, and Sylvanas, none of whom can do a thing, before she just teleports the Alliance out to avoid a conflict. I’d have to say that is one of the few times I’ve see power fantasy with an Alliance character.
The Alliance was in retreat. They failed their mission, and needed to get out. Jaina was in the act of retreating, regardless of her strategy of luring the Horde after her in particular. The fact remains, she couldn’t finish the Horde off. So, she just left, on her terms. Again, not indicative of a power fantasy.
To be fair, most of Suramar were against Azshara bringing the Legion coming down. Its why they locked themselves in a bubble. It wasnt until Elisandre was tempted by them that she relented.
Same with the highborne exiled tnat webt with Sunstrider and later became high elves. And the Highborne of Shen’delar.
Those that sided with Azshara became Naga and Satyr.
False dichotomy. They didn’t have to choose and could remain neutral, and still worked on neutral terms with the blood elves. They also “chose” at the end of Legion, when there was no need to. Either way, I’m not even arguing that they didn’t fit with the blood elves, but that their betrayal of the night elves and the Alliance player who built them up was jarring.
Personally, I think the constant pursuit of “power fantasy” is a big reason why the narrative is suffering, and we’ll likely never have a solid plot so long as this pursuit of “one faction doing big cool thing, followed by other faction doing equivalent big cool thing” is there.
It’s not a story. It’s just a spectacle.
I mean, Thalyssra shows us a little home movie of what Tyrande said to her. It really stuck to Thalyssra’s craw.
Tyrande’s awesome diplomacy at work.
Thalyssra even says that rejoining her kin from Kalimdor was the natural idea, but she was spurned.
The Blood Elves and the Horde were gracious in that they didn’t take offense to being the second choice out of two.
No, the Silver Convenant is not meaningless, because they would be the literal HIGH ELVES that people been asking for.
It’s a win win for high elf fans
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You are just talking how it would be fit into the plot. You can always have plot reasons. That doesn’t change the fact that you want Blizzard to lot Alliance players play a Horde races, while objecting to the same thing with the Nightborne.
I have to say, to me it seems to be just taking some minor difference and making a big deal of it. Like if I were to point out that the Blood Elves never fully rejected the the rest of the Highborne while the Nightborne were, in fact, that same group that the Night Elves forced out into the wilderness. That makes the call for Highborne stealing but the Nightborne fair.
What?.. Tyrande was the leader of the very faction that tried to destroy the hierarchy of Night Elven civilization that the Highborne benefited so greatly from, ten thousand years ago. The Nightborne, being Highborne, are the 1%'ers of the pre-Sundering world, and Tyrande was warring to end that. The Highborne were the status quo, and Tyrande was a revolutionary, a traitor to Azshara’s society!
I’m not actually any kind of defender of the old Highborne, but Tyrande is by definition the traitor. She’s the one who was trying to take down the Highborne. Why on earth would Thallysra side with one of those dirty 99%'ers (in her eyes)?
The dance of the Blood Elves, Kaldorei, and Nightborne is one of classism. The Nighborne and Blood Elves are the rich, the elite, the snobby. They’ll band together, always.
The last ten thousand years of Night Elven society didn’t happen for the Nightborne, you can’t forget that. Tyrande and Malfurion are the same as they were from 10k years ago, as far as the Nightborne knew. The rich versus poor war is still fresh for the Nightborne, even if the Kaldorei long forgot it.