Spoilers I guess? Although this is just part of the new war campaign. And people just may have missed this option entirely. But this bothered me a lot. And I felt like talking about it.
So when you’re doing the Darkshore campaign which is the prelude for the battle for darkshore hub Sylvanas’s boy Nathanos orders us to find the body of Delaryn Summermoon. Sira Moonwarden comes out and you have to kill her because she wants revenge. You get her down to one health and Nathanos comes along and yells out “what u doin bruh hurry up and finish the job.”
What you can do instead is tell Nathanos “Nah you do it.” He tells you. “You’re too weak to do it.” and he shoots her instead.
What I don’t get is this. From an honorable standpoint. Is this supposed to be some gotcha moment? Wow! Nathanos is such a jerk! He shot down a defenseless night elf! But… only she wasn’t defenseless. She attacked your character first. It’s actually completely within the lines of Orcish honor to kill her yourself. Are you supposed to consider what’s going to happen to her and Delaryn next? Or are you supposed to just forget that fact? Many people may have just overlooked this because I actually had to think for a moment before trying to talk to Nathanos because I didn’t think such a shallow option existed. This just seems like a problem with Blizzard trying to push the lines of what is and isn’t part of Sylvanas’s Horde.
What could they have done differently though? Should they have done something differently?
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I think the choice probably represents a sense of doubt your character is given the option of having. Sure she attacked first. Sure it may be within a code of honor to defeat an attacker who instigated a fight. But perhaps this is a little nod to a deeper sense of doubt player characters may be harboring for the war effort. Sure the Horde has made a choice and initiated an attack on the night elves. But does every last soldier feel 100% good about it? Maybe not. Is it possible that many soldiers are obeying orders out of duty and/or fear moreso than because they agree with the course of action being taken? I think so. So to me, this little choice is a nod to that.
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I think the idea is that Sira leapt into overwhelming odds that she couldn’t possibly prevail in to prevent you from committing the evil act of necromancy. Hence, instead of facing in honorable combat, you kind of just attack her and support the use of necromancy, neither of which is honorable.
But you’re not incorrect. Orcish Honor is a term that has no meaning beyond whatever the user intends it to mean. Orcs justified Theramore, slavery, genocide, joining the Legion three times and are eagerly going along with the Scourge and calling it honorable.
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I’m past the point of looking for meaning or even consistency in any of this. That is a short path to madness, my friend.
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I feel like, somewhere along the way, a lot of people just sort of forgot that killing people you have at your mercy isn’t a great thing to do without some really huge mitigating circumstances.
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Nope, you’re absolutely right. It’s perfectly honorable to finish her off (self-defense + honoring thy foe with a clean, warrior’s death and all that), and the only reason it’s being framed as a “gotcha” moment is because the writers genuinely don’t know or can’t remember what honor is (hence why so many people now are saying honor means nothing, because the writers sure seem to think so). There are only two actual moral quandaries here, the first being whether or not you should even be in Darkshore perpetrating the atrocities your faction is involved with, and two, whether or not necromancy is tolerable. You as a player get functionally no say in either of these, aside from being a mute, discount Baine.
I think they were on the right track with the whole “not my table” choice later down the road.
Given the sad state of the writing the Horde is getting, I just plow through most quests without reading much of the flavor text, so if I missed something, my apologies, but I don’t necessarily think we know for sure that someone is getting raised into undeath…or do we? I dunno for sure.
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Nathanos was ordering the player character to recover Delaryn’s body to be revived. One could assume that we would be killing Sira and she would be suffering the same fate.
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Yeah I can’t say I feel too bad about it. She attacked. She’s in a warzone. She is the enemy. A real gotcha moment would have been forcing you to either chase and kill her or otherwise save something else. What do you do? Save some soldiers that were transporting an Azerite mech thus preventing the Alliance from getting a hold of a powerful weapon/destroying one of yours ? Or do you chase down Sira who would inevitably warn Tyrande of what the Horde was doing risking the plan to raise the fallen failing and possibly many Horde lives? I know this isn’t a perfectly balanced scenario. I’m sort of just spitballing. But I hope you get the intention I’m getting at with it.
eh i feel like it was an alright choice to be put in because some people might feel pity for someone who lashes out against unbeatable odds because after seeing their home completely destroyed and their god unwilling to answer them the person might not be in the right mind
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Definitely felt the heart twinge. Sylvanas burned down her home, slaughtered her people, is now raising them into servitude and Elune is apparently ‘silent’ during all of this.
Still did the deed myself, if only because, in character, Gen knew he’d offer a cleaner death than anything the Blightcaller would offer.
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I just came out here to stripmine what resources your people have left after massacring most of your race, and honestly, I feel so attacked right now.
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I don’t think it was so much a choice added so you could feel “honorable” as much as an option added due to the outcry of players who didn’t want blood on their hands regarding the faction war. People were incredibly vocal regarding teldrassil and blizzard has added in a couple “moral choices” to make people feel more okay with playing the Horde side of the story. “Go kill 12 of these warriors, these 3 officers, some wildlife and oh yeah you can opt out of the killing blow on this one named npc so you’re still righteous”
Clearly we need to balance this by giving Alliance players comparable choices which allow us to be a dishonorable as the Horde.
E.g. during the Tyrande quest, Maiev asking us if we want to go watch Tyrande become the night warrior, or if we would prefer to go curbstomp camp Taurajo again
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Of they could’ve given the Alliance the option to not kill unarmed, captured and wounded forsaken sailors in Azuna?
Inb4 they make a Horde quest where you execute Alliance survivors with no arms or legs, or weapons. Effectively forcing you to kill unarmed, unlegged, unarmed Alliance.
Or let Nathanos do it. So you don’t have to FEEL GUILTY.
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I guess “not writing the Horde as the new Scourge” wasn’t on the table.
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Having Nathanos kill innocent people because you don’t want to feel bad better not be considered a “good guy” option by Blizzard.
That choice just makes you a coward, on top of being an awful person. There’s a group of people who saw their government changing for the worse and didn’t agree with it, but did nothing, in real life. Historically they’re not exactly considered heroes.
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In Telltale’s The Walking Dead games, one of the DLC stories from the first season (I think) had you playing as a young black kid out on his own. Eventually he gets picked up by some dude in a big truck and it seems like they’ll be safe buddies. Eventually it becomes clear, after escalating incidents, that the trucker dude is a sadistic monster and the ‘episode’ ends with the dude aiming a gun at an old married couple (one of whom he already shot non-fatally, thinking they were attacking him) and trying to convince the player’s character to “have some fun.”
The “good” option is to say no and walk away, thus leaving those two poor old people to their fate. You don’t stop it, you don’t even attempt to–you just say something like “I won’t be a part of this” and head out the back door.
That’s what some of this WoW stuff reminds me of. You don’t pull the trigger yourself, so you’re somehow absolved of all guilt even though you’re literally letting this stuff happen, and Blizzard thinks this is acceptable writing.
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My biggest gripe with Dark Shore was when Nathanos sent me out to get an elf priority target. And… she was literally on the same beach all he had to do was can his head to the right and she would have been in line of sight
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