Oh ho ho, that’s rich.
Wether it happened at the beginning or the end, it doesn’t matter. Blood Elves got all the blood washed from their hands. I guess the Horde needed a squeaky clean race to attract players or something.
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…and the irony that a facet of the Pro High Elf case is to re-balance the factions again, in Alliance favor, by…attracting them with a pretty race is somehow lost on you?
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The vast majority of Alliance race/gender options are “pretty faces.” I honestly don’t think it would matter too much to add another.
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Runs counter to Blizzard’s philosophy on adding races and balancing the factions, unfortunately.
Explain Lightforged Draenei. They’re basically prettier “holier” Draenei.
Explain Void elves. They’re basically Blood elves with a blue tint and emo hair cuts.
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Explain the “pretty races” and ignore the Dark Iron and Kul’tiran counterbalances? Not that I’d call either of the latter strictly “ugly”, but “rougher” would be more accurate. Not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Have a slice from John Height:
Obviously, Allied Races is one of the features players are very excited about for the upcoming expansion. How much thought goes into which Allied Race is next, and what side they go on?
So first we looked at the geography of the space and who the inhabitants were. In some cases we drew from the lore that’s out there – it’s obvious who’s in Zandalar, for example – but in other cases, we had to think about what an interesting race would be to inhabit that area, and in some cases we had to think about inventing a new race to suit it. Then we consider what’s their natural tendency – are they likely to be more sympathetic to the Horde or the Alliance? – and then if we noticed a preponderance of really big, tough-looking races on one side or really charming, cool, cute-looking races on the other, then we try to do a little bit of a rebalance. Those profiles and those aesthetics are really important. We didn’t want everyone on the Horde to look ugly, right?
-PCGamesN Interview
“Just add another pretty race” is easy to type, but not really indicative of developmental process.
There’s already 3 zandalari player characters for each kul tiran.
I think Blizzard is failing hard at balancing factions that way.
It’s pretty clear who Blizzard is favoring.
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Nah, the two situations are completely different, the Horde back in the day didn’t had any pretty race and that made it outnumbered, Blood Elves fixed that, at that time a way smaller portion of the player base was involved in high late game activities. Nowadays the Alliance is outnumbered because of gameplay reasons such as outnumbered in PvP, no recruitment pool for guilds, bad PvE racials etc. This topic has little to do with that, it’s just the fact that the race we talk about on the topic is part of the Alliance for a god dam long time in real life and we still cannot play it.
By the way if you want to talk about prettiness, i find Void Elves prettier than High Elves and Blood Elves, if all i wanted was to play the prettiest race in my opinion, i wouldn’t even be here.
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And there’s something like 5 Void Elves for every 1 of any other Allied Race aside from maybe Zandalari, and they just finally came out. It’s almost like people gravitate to pretty races that have work put in, or something.
Because people wanted high elves, so Blizzard made a worse version on purpose.
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They did it to give the Alliance some much needed edginess and darkness. Potential for some borderline crazy/evil stuff among the goody two shoes the rest of the Alliance is mostly comprised of.
I don’t think it was an intended snub to High Elf fans, and in fact was probably originally born from the High Elf desire. We can only take Blizzard at what they’ve said in multiple interviews on the matter, and speculate on the rest.
You cannot be serious. People don’t play Alliance to be edgelords.
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So yeah, lets look at that quote. Notice anything interesting about it? Out of all the Allied races established so far take a wild guess on which two have had the least amount of time invested in them and the least amount of story development.
I’ll give you an idea.
*Dark Iron Dwarves have been around since Vanilla and have played pretty major roles in Vanilla and Cataclysm- and were frequently featured in several other expansions.
*Mag’har Orcs were featured pretty heavily in Outland and had a whole expansion dedicated towards them in Warlords
*Highmountain Tauren and Nightborne were the focus of their own respective zones in Legion, and the Nightborne had their own gigantic questline and dedicated raid.
*The Zandalari Trolls and Kul Tirans were the primary focus and the hosts of the main questing areas of BFA and you spend the majority of the expansion helping them with their probems.
*Lightforged Draenei are a handful of special Draenei you only saw on the last major patch of Legion and mostly stood around and did nothing of important (Turalyon, Illidan, and Velen did most of the work.)
*Void Elves are a “crack elite” squad of blood elves that were exiled from Silvermoon that were exposed to void stuffs and were trained to harness their power by Alleria. Thats it.
A lot of time and effort were clearly put into some of these races, and a certain few on a certain side… really got the short end of the stick.
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If Blizzard cared, it would have made actual effort into the storytelling, like they did with the Horde races.
And it’s not just void elf, lightforged is almost as bad.
It’s pretty clear where Blizzard put all the effort.
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I think more accurately, anyone playing wanting to play Alliance didn’t have the ability to play an edgelord. Now they do. That’s…kind of what re-balancing is?
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I hope you realized something in your words: Void Elves fill the role of the edgy dark Elf, sometimes evil, different from the rest of the Alliance. So it doesn’t make any sense for you to say that it was intended to appeal to High Elf fans, because High Elf fans want to be the goody two shoes like the rest of the Alliance races, they don’t fit this fantasy, no way.
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Dark irons are just as edgy. And broken was a very requested race that could also fill up that niche. And both of those use shadow magic.
Void elves were completely unnecessary.
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It doesn’t help the fact that on the Alliance content you are still going to be a goody boy all the time no matter the race you play. No, hardcore Horde players are not going to play Void Elves because they are going to do the same Alliance questing they hate to begin with.
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You say that, and yet I’m surrounded by High Elf fans, playing Void Elves insisting it was a pure snub.
You’re not sending a strong message by decrying their design choices in Void Elves on paper, and then enjoying them in game and in action.
I really don’t know what to tell you.
My Wife and I played Void Elves to get their Heritage Armor. I don’t exclusively play Horde because I like getting my money’s worth out of the game by not arbitrarily cutting out half the content and story I pay for.
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What even are Worgen?
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