I’m not sure that moment was “blinded by vengeance”. It seemed more like “defending against a Horde assassination attempt her own brother was forced to be part of”.
What is a big issue? People have different priorities. Small issue to one are big to another.
Even small issues can apply to the plot at times.
And how do you ensure they are fully in accord? Do you insist on a morality test when hiring everyone to be sure they agree on everything? What happens if they are all in accord on one expac and then years later as more are hired in that have a difference in opinion?
I really don’t think you could ever really have a true accord.
That just doesn’t work. Take an in game example. I would say forcefully killing and raising someone in undeath is morally wrong. And most character in wow agree, most. Even most players tend to agree. But the argument when Sylvanas did it was that it was less bad then letting the Forsaken be wiped out. Was she wrong? That leads us to an ends justifying the means debate. I personally am against that. I don’t believe ends can justify the means. But there are many who disagree. So, how would we prove if Sylvanas was right or wrong? Either you would have to establish the Forsaken would not have died without it or you would have to have a ‘word of god’ note saying she was wrong. Both of those are going to take you out of the story and experience to do it.
Many, many, people in RL have gone to their graves fully believing the evil things they did were right. Every single person making and evil choice in wow having a turn of conscience would be unrealistic.
And even good people, who had a wrong belief may never change that belief.
I really believe the best thing Blizzard can do is tell a story with grey characters being grey with different morality and leave it to us to decide who are overall the good people.
That is the nature of a soft magic system. But I would still argue the issue with Naaru is less about them being of inconsistent power and more of we just don’t have very much to go off in order to gauge power.
But we have no real idea of how powerful Naaru actually are.
And keep in mind, she was shown to be in rough shape. Literally he whole body remains cracked through the whole cinematic. That was a choice they made to show her that way. The cracks were actively put there by the designers. It would have been less work to have her texture just be smooth, but they choose to show the cracked state. So, they clearly intended to show she was in a weak state. In game terms, she was just rezed and was on low HP.
You have to remember the media is financially motivated to present the most sensational things. In the very partisan state of the country when someone says something about one party’s nominee it gets people worked up. When it is good all the other party’s people get upset, when it is bad all of that party’s people get upset. That makes the news companies want to report on it because it drives engagement. That means that is going to be constantly reported on. Where as, saying China is bad is basically just going to get a ‘duh’ response from most people. It wont really drive any engagement or the anger some networks peddle in. So, there is not much incentive to report it.
Additionally, discussing different politicians endorsements or attacks on candidates has an actual impact on the likelihood people vote, donate, etc. So, there is an incentive for the politicians to make those public statements. Saying China is bad is like saying Antarctica is cold. For most people the response is: ‘Sure, and?’ It doesn’t really drive any action. So, less motivation to talk about it.
In short, you see the ‘lots of comments about Trump and little about China’ because that has both more motivation to speak about it and more incentive to be reported on. It isn’t really a measure of whether or not people think China is also bad or not.
Volume of discussion seen doesn’t give you a good reflection of what they actually believe is worse.
Yeah, we Horde players wanted a morally grey Sylvanas/Horde in BfA. Begged for it, even. If the Alliance had been morally grey as well, that might have actually made BfA a good expansion—one we could all have enjoyed debating the different angles of.
Not during BfA. I remember, because it was super-frustrating that we simply didn’t know what she was actually up to at the time. We knew what she told Saurfang, but that came with a heavy implication that she was manipulating him and that her real agenda was something else completely unknown.
What would have been actually morally grey would have been if she’d had reasons we could point to for starting the war that made sense, reasons that could be supported by a reasonable person even if we didn’t personally see it that way. Nobody except hyper-partisan knuckleheads could really get behind “We need to wipe out the Alliance now before they get strong enough to do it to us in a hundred years.”
One of the funniest lines of dialogue in the game ever. I salute Laura Bailey for pulling it off with a straight face.
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Sylvanas was NOT treated morally grey, like, at all? I’m pretty sure context of the “loyalist” path is you being a complete tool, following a psycho without even having the smallest hint of what her plan is, and then being “gently” dropped when she was done with you.
Like sure, the story does not directly call you an idiot, because that would be rude. I think you would feel like one.
People fail to realize the outcry of Sylvanas loyalism was born out of meta-rebellion against an objectively stupid story, not some kind of unconditional love or loyalty to the character.
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Why would the Alliance be “morally grey”? The entire purpose of the faction is to be the “Good Guy” option.
Maybe, maybe not. But in my opinion, BfA would have been more interesting and enjoyable with some greyness on the Alliance side.
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I feel like I played a different version of BFA than you guys
Cuz my version of BFA had the Alliance doing all sorts of bad crap in the leadup, and they really never missed a chance to do rando civilians wrong until after Daz’ralor.
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Yeah, you must have definitely played another version of BFA. Possibly an unreleased/exclusive one that no one else got access too.
In the official version that got launched, the Alliance was not doing “all sorts of bad crap in the leadup”, nor did they ever “do rando civilians wrong”.
Maybe it’s hard to tell whether it’s grey or not due to the inconsistent writing, resulting from that tug-of-war. The fact that Blizzard made Christie Golden write a big “please love Sylvanas again” novel and some writers’ pathological fixation on morally grey makes me lean toward the former.
Fair points. Then at least it can be ensured that the story is written from a single moral perspective. Or have the writing done by one person.
Disagreement doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it just means in those situations some people are right and others are wrong.
Most of those in WoW who did evil are dead. But when they try to imply Kil’jaeden, a literal demon, was capable of remorse, who is off the table?
We have enough to see that its poorly written.
Her model in Legion - when we find her on the Xenedar on Argus without Light’s Heart, had a pretty hefty health bar, similar to Illidan’s. With Light’s Heart, logically it’d be greater.
But this is another example of “things fans put more thought into than the writers”. We shouldn’t do their job for them.
Not entirely true. What you’re saying is correct, but the media can have agendas and biases (eg; the majority of media donations to political parties are given to the left-wing, not the right-wing). And they do. They’re also financially motivated to push agendas.
tbf the devs did claim at the very start of BFA that it was not a “garrosh” situation, so I think the badly done “morally grey” was planned from the start.
I think saying it wasn’t Garrosh 2.0 was wrong regardless of the motivations set in that book (sad lava eel cannibals as a motivation didn’t move me near what something Like edge of night did), but even before we knew which city was going to be destroyed first in BFA, they were cagey about the details being not what we think.
But I’ve been on team “A guy known for domination who had known control of Sylvanas very soul in EoN and a team of valkyr agents surrounding her probably should have just been dominating her, and others” from the start.
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My best guess at how things went behind the scenes, based on what I can piece together from extremely spotty publicly available information, looks something like this …
- Initial plans for the faction war expansion involve genuine moral greyness on both sides and at one point, even some ambiguity about who actually started the war. Devs are briefed about this and give interviews using this as a talking point.
- Afrasiabi decides to make Sylvanas start the war unilaterally and for no obvious or defensible reason, culminating in a giant atrocity. He either doesn’t tell the quest writers and fiction writers what her reasons actually are or he flat-out tells them that she’s just doing it because she’s evil. Writers do their best to make the war start in a believable fashion but leave her motivations vague or simply don’t address them at all. (This covers the WoT pre-patch and A Good War/Elegy.)
- Afrasiabi departs without leaving behind a long-term outline for the story. Remaining writing staff scramble to retroactively re-inject some greyness by inventing the Jailer.
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They usually do the big cutscenes first (because they take so long), so I don’t think anyone was blindsided by it.
I think it was meant to be more “both sides” but the rage and crying was so strong that I assume they just changed plans after the first content patch.
I think thats why the ended as abruptly as it did. The war was hated, just drop it and hope people stop caring a year later (lmao no)
A little of both in my case. I wanted to support my 3rd favorite character and I resented being told through 24 minutes of high-quality CGI that a hypocritical orc was right and that I was dumb for not agreeing with him.
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Which cutscenes are you talking about?
Also, I should add that I think part of the mixed messaging was due to poor internal communication. We know from Christie Golden that the Warbringers shorts were well underway when she joined the staff in May 2017, but the devs were claiming in April 2018 that they wanted “to end up in a place where the Horde can make an argument that the Alliance started it and vice versa” (Travis Day, Invenglobal*).
I don’t think it was ever going to be “both sides” after Afrasiabi decided to trash Sylvanas just to spite Danuser or whoever.
I agree with you on that one. It’s clear from pre-expansion publicity that the war was originally supposed to go much further and probably was meant to take up the entire expansion. I would not be at all surprised if they cannibalized the entire next expansion for the Old God plot.
*See this thread:
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I’d argue that they did. They just wussed out on calling the Alliance out on their sins, like they always do.
The Horde did a whole lot of turning the other cheek before Saurfang was willing to do the WoT (which he didn’t intend to end the way it did at all).
I think Shadowlands was always due up next but Nzoth was just so random that it didn’t fit as the end cap raid given his non involvement in the prior plot that I think he was put there instead of a 2nd SoO or whatever.
At least the Naga breaking the fleets and Mechagon being a trove of military tech makes sense if they were planning on tying it closer to the war plot, I think they re-worked them after work had already been done, and Nzoth was a last minute inclusion, hence why there wasn’t actually a new zone and they just reused storm/org/ulduar/pandaria for the patch quests.
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I think that if they were committed to giving Horde players an argument for the Alliance starting the war, the WoT intro quests and fiction would have been written very differently. But that’s just my take.
Oooh, that’s a very good point! I hadn’t considered that those zones might have been originally intended to tie more directly to the faction war.
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That is viable in a book, or even book series. You might even be able to make that work in a short run TV series or a movie. But a MMO that involves lots of devs writing quests and story across multiple zones, for decades, is a different situation.
I was saying it doesn’t work because there is no good way to ‘declare who is right.’
It falls to us to decide who was in the right.
Well, first off, demons in WoW are often fel corrupted beings who were grey. Second, it should be noted that he wasn’t redeemed. He died a villain. He just died recognizing he may have been wrong. Which, on some level is a worse fate/punishment that just being killed.
I don’t think it is safe to use health bars as a measure. Those are game mechanics and notably not actually set by the story writers, instead by the programmers. Sometimes they are set because of something they have to design. Sometimes they are just going to be cut and paste code. The later is my guess. They probably just cut and pasted a ‘boss’ stat group because she wasn’t needed for any specific encounter. There was no real reason to try and set her health to any number.
Heath numbers should always be looked at as purely game mechanics.
Completely true. That is another reason that it is more likely that something directly involved in US politics (discussion about a candidate for example) would be more reported on than something mostly outside the US.
Another way to think about it is: Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack.
Just because you don’t see politicians condemning China reported to you doesn’t mean it is not there.
I can’t really find any good data to back up that claim. Best I could find was a survey that found a bunch of journalists that contributed more often to democrats. But it wasn’t exhaustive and it didn’t track actual dollar amounts. It was just a poorly done survey.
More significantly, based on several studies (including one from Harvard) it looks like very few media execs donate directly, only a bit under 15%. Then you have to mix in what the companies themselves, and their parent companies, donated and it muddies things.
The bulk of political donations go through PACs and 527s, and are notoriously difficult to track. So, the VAST, VAST majority of donations coming from media groups, execs, and companies are completely unknown.
In short, when you dig into the claim, there just isn’t enough evidence to say if that claim is accurate or not. But it is a sensational claim that politicians and organizations with an agenda can spout. Which means it will get repeated a lot. But, that doesn’t mean it is fact. It may be, it may not be.
It would probably be better if you could see which billionaires and companies (who drive the media company agendas) are donating to who and they couldn’t hide it in PACs. But that is just not the world we live in.
I take it you didn’t play the story on the Alliance side for any of Cata, MoP or BfA. Because they were VERY regularly lecturing the Alliance about how it was bad that they were fighting the Horde. Even in WoD Khadgar lectures the Alliance player about how they are terrible if they don’t trust the Horde. He actually makes a bigger issue of it to the Alliance player than to the Horde.
“Stop fighting each other you idiots” is not the same as having to actually confront the wrongdoers in your faction. Or working with npcs talking about how they should murder you wholesale instead of accepting your help.
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There are things like Jaina being chewed out for kicking the Sunreavers out?
Or ‘confronting own wrongdoers’ would be like killing Benedictus.
And Garrosh and Sylvanas weren’t so much confronted by the Horde for wrongs they did to the Alliance. More for hurting the Horde.
Bottom line, while the Horde were the aggressors in both wars, Blizzard has not ‘wussed out’ or ignored calling out or confronting Alliance wrongdoers. I also think they handled the faction wars VERY poorly. And I hope to god they NEVER try it again. But, it is also wrong to pretend they in anyway played easy on the Alliance.
Yeah, but that’s not really “How could you do that to civilians you didn’t know if they were involved or not?” but “Good job screwing up my negotiations”
This statement refutes this statement
In both cases Blizzard went out of the way to shoehorn in ways for the horde to be at fault after the Alliance did something that rightfully should have started both wars.
I mean, Varian literally declared war on the horde at the end of Wrath, which got cancelled by a peace treaty that was introduced and broken in the pre-cata book. And Genn Greymane tried to assassinate the Warchief and destroyed a horde fleet for no good reason while there was a world ending threat we were all fighting, but we pretend that didn’t happen.
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