None of that was ever true until Before the Storm–in fact, it directly contradicts the way the city was set up and the questing experience that was in place before that. I don’t know if you were on the board when BtS came out, but Forsaken fans were already upset about their culture being retconned out from under them at the time.
Also: you can link posts by putting a ` symbol on either side of the link.
I’m use to retconning at this point.
They had Suramar destroyed in both WC3 and War of the Ancients. But here it is… and I still made a Nightborne though, because I love me some Highbornes.
You mean like the primary races of the Horde–orcs, tauren, and trolls–did for the blood elves and the Forsaken? Or like the Forsaken did for the blood elves?
Note the complete lack of Alliance intervention here.
Or need for it.
Like the Forsaken did against the Lich King and the Scarlet Crusade. Like they’ve been doing from the moment they gained free will.
But please, don’t let that stop you from comparing them to genocidal murderers who now need to be “redeemed” because they were so easily “manipulated.”
Oof. I remember all the hate I got for making a thread about that.
I regret nothing.
Sure, which is a good philosophy to take (it’ll save you a lot of headaches). But when we’re discussing how the Forsaken have been destroyed narratively in the eyes of their fans, it’s important to note that this has been a multi-step process. The stuff you were quoting was, for the majority of posters on this board, part of that destruction, not the established situation they were working from.
Exactly; if you go back and compare a lot of the Horde-side narratives from Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm to what we’re now seeing in Before the Storm and Battle for Azeroth, for example, you’ll notice a huge difference. Right around Mists of Pandaria was where the story really started to turn anti-Horde, with Garrosh becoming the primary villain.
Sylvanas wasn’t far behind.
Lmao. So can all the people rabidly extrapolating on one and a half sentences please calm down now?
The Forsaken were going to be destroyed from the start because even before the game came out the developers weren’t sure what to do about the race.
John Staats said in his book that Metzen wanted a misunderstood plagued human and the rest of the team wanted an “evil badass monster”.
They wanted to make the scourge playable but couldn’t until Metzen came up with the forsaken and they all loved it.
Well that would explain why we ended up with slightly more “evil badass monster” than misunderstood human.
Like the Forsaken in Before the Storm are misunderstood human. The folks throwing blight everywhere come off as “evil badass monster” to me.
Not sure what you mean but the story of how I heard the Forsaken were developed and planted into wow is what I mentioned above.
The whole badass thing doesn’t sound familiar to me but I know Metzen had to fight a lot with other creators at blizzard.
Badass thing comes from John Staats who said that is what the team wanted for the Forsaken prior to release.
The Forsaken and Blood Elves are being framed as way too altruistic. I hope they dial it back because we don’t have to be boy scouts to be better than we were.
All of that’s readily available on WoWPedia, under the Trivia section of the “Forsaken” page.
But yes, Blizzard has kind of had it out for the Forsaken since their inception.
I said this in another thread about the Forsaken.
I wish they could just compromise with the race. Have folks like Belmont still wage war and then have other forsaken who would be similar to Vellcinda on the other end of the spectrum. Then your player character can end someone in between that.
I’m not even a tiny bit surprised to hear that. Frankly, the entire Horde suffers from that problem, to one degree or another. (Is John Staat’s book out, by the way? I’d be interested in reading it.)
But this thread is about the Forsaken fans’ disappointment with what is happening to their favorite race. They didn’t have any reason to be so fatalistic about inevitable destruction when they started playing.
I’m also trying to explain why quoting BtS isn’t really effective for this discussion. I’m trying to think of a good analogy…
So, your neighbors have a garden full of flowers that you really love to look at every time you pass their house. Seeing it makes you smile on a daily basis. But then your neighbors move away, and the new owner of the house is super-allergic to flowers of every kind. So he starts demolishing the flowerbeds, one by one, leaving ugly gouged-up holes in the lawn. And then, instead of at least planting grass, he paves the whole property over with concrete.
When you say, “Ugh, I really hate how that property looks with all the concrete,” it’s not very helpful if someone responds with, “The concrete makes sense, since nothing was growing there anyway.”
Here’s a response from Samariyu regarding the quote.
The same interview you’re referencing also said “but in the end the Forsaken ended up around the center of the spectrum.” Which is ultimately exactly what most Forsaken fans are asking for.
Me, I’m asking for diversity of representation across the spectrum, but for the central goal or message of the race to be pretty middle-ground.
Here’s the full quote in question.
The Forsaken almost didn’t make the cut as a playable race in World of Warcraft due to the designers’ animation workload and limited resources. There was talk of axing the undead during development, but the suggestion was so unpopular that the debate was postponed until the producers had a better idea of how much work could be handled. At the time, Warcraft III’s storyline hadn’t yet solidified, and Chris Metzen wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the undead. According to Johnathan Staats, a lot of the designers simply wanted to be able to play as an evil, “badass monster”, rather than simply a misunderstood plagued human, but in the end the Forsaken ended up around the center of the spectrum . At the time, the team also referred to the undead as Scourge; since they hadn’t yet played through Warcraft III , they didn’t quite understand that the Scourge and Forsaken were separate factions.
Me, I’m asking for diversity of representation across the spectrum, but for the central goal or message of the race to be pretty middle-ground.
The problem with this part of the quote is, Blizzard lost all frame of reference for “middle ground” following Cataclysm. They now call Sylvanas “morally grey” (she used to be), and then have her do things that are clearly more “blackhearted evil.”
Now they want the Forsaken to be “redeemed” by Calia, and have the rest of the Horde follow suit with Anduin.
It’s all become binary at this point.
Not exactly. When they considered making the Scourge playable, that was before WC3 came out and established that the Scourge were controlled by the Lich King. After WC3, they realized that playable Scourge wouldn’t work. They also shifted their concept of the Horde around that time from “the evil faction” to “the faction with the monsters that aren’t necessarily evil.”
Full story here:
But Before the Storm is now established lore, ignoring it won’t do any good.
I loved the Before the Storm book especially because I got to meet characters like Vellcinda who were different than what I had seen from most Forsaken. I mean the Forsaken don’t forget who they were in life, Vellcinda certainly didn’t. She seems like a woman who was given a crap hand at life and made the best of that.
She really like Sylvanas, but she also didn’t forget what life was like for her before Sylvanas. I still remember a quest in Vanilla for Forsaken where you return a wedding ring to a guy who flat out rejects it because it’s from his human life. Which is cool and tells his individual story. But I also liked hearing Vellcinda’s tale.
I mean is the race not allowed to have agency? Do they all need to fit into a formula?
Has that been datamined? I haven’t seen anything in Alpha about Calia or Anduin. I could have missed something though, was that in the broadcast text? I don’t always read those.