The Burning of Teldrassil was narrative poison to the franchise, and especially the Horde.
The Horde in WoW was established as not being like its predecessor. It was a band of misfits, honorable savages, and the desperate seeking to survive in a world that hated it. Redemption and Honor were the New Horde’s cornerstones, its dark past a lesson against the path easier tred.
Then the Horde forgot all about that when Garrosh came along. One toppled Warchief later, and it seemed like the Horde had relearned this valuable lesson. Evil is bad. A very fresh lesson. No reason they should ever kowtow to a megalomaniac warchief ever again.
And then Teldrassil happened.
The issue isn’t that the writers don’t know how to write the Horde. It’s that the Horde has been ruined.
This franchise needs a reboot, and writers with far more respect and care for the intellectual property to control the narrative. Narrative needs to come BEFORE game mechanics as well, and anyone attempting to justify any new lore with, “New and Cool,” needs to be fired on the spot.
These two things are relative to each other. The only thing they have had for us is leader goes insane, Horde has a schism and goes against that leader.
They just need to prop up characters they have introduced and create story for them.
It probably is one of many components that Blizzard has to consider, to be sure, but the reality is that they can’t really do a whole lot of story centered on the Horde because people are overwhelmingly disinterested in the Horde outside of a few specific races (which coincidentally happen to be the least Horse-like).
Any story involving Blood Elves will be popular.
Any story involving Nightborne will be popular.
Any story involving Forsaken will be popular.
Yeah I don’t think Blizz really understands how much damage BFA/SL did to their franchise. At the very least their attempts to just sweep it all under the rug have just made things worse.
They really should have used DF to hit the reset button but they didn’t so here we are.
Especially because they published that online short story right before, the war planning session between Sylvanas and Saurfang, where she explained in detail why destroying Teldrassil would have been a terrible idea.
Yeah the horde hasnt felt like “The Horde!” For a long time, really since Sylvanas became warchief.
Id say the biggest mistake wasnt teldrassil, it was killing voljin. Voljin was set up to pretty much be the perfect warchief after deposing garrosh, but the writers came up with this stupid sylanas plot and killed him.
If teldrassil was a betrayal to the horde by one of their leaders i think itd be easier to recover. Clearly the alliance would believe that Voljin approved, and the 4th war would continue as is. Heck voljin could still be wounded in legion and assign sylvanas as the hordes interim commander.
Rather than all this undercover betraying the horde style storytelling with Saurfang, it would have been pro horde proving our innocence and punishing a traitor story. Letting the horde reclaim their honor. Maybe voljin does the duel with sylvanas instead and dies by her hand, leaving Saurfang to pick up the pieces.
Maybe im still coping, but that feels like it would have had a better outcome for the horde.
Nobody even remembers who the nightborne are, not even blizzard. More story would be great, but there would be more people upset by the fact that they were chosen over tauren/trolls/orcs etc…
And blizzard cant decide what they want undead to be, and its a double edged sword. Try to redeem forsaken? All the edgy forsaken players will hate it. Make them edgy and morally grey (aka evil)? The rest of the horde will be upset at being the villain again.
First they said the delve companion would change every season - which was just a lie on Blizzard’s part - and people actually thought that they’d alternate between Horde & Alliance themed compansions.
Now it turns out that it’s just all Alliance, all the time. Like everything else in the game.
They really do just want all the Horde players to unsub and walk away.
I think he’s raising a fundamentally good point — what, precisely, was unique about the Horde that leads you to believe that WoW owes its success to them?
Do recall that the original game was so skewed in favor of Alliance, that Blizzard had to give one of the most popular and highly requested Alliance races to the Horde just to even remotely tackle faction balance.
At the time, Orcs, Trolls, Minotaurs, Undead, etc… were stereotyped as evil, villains, hero fodder, etc…
What Warcraft 3 did was turn the trope on its head. It’s so common these days to see races presented with more nuance that I think a lot of people forget that Warcraft’s popularity is where that began.
Not many games let you play as Orcs, Zombies, and Minotaur all on the same side, and sentient as well. And the WoW version of Trolls is its own unique thing.
Alliance is fine, but it’s staple fantasy and not exactly original. Maybe Gnomes and Draenei are, but Humans, Elves, Dwarves, are pretty ‘by the book’.
Alliance, for the most part, just reacted to whatever the Horde did- they were rarely ever the aggressors, only on a few occasions they were.
The formation of the Alliance was originally to corral the Horde (the demonic Orcish Horde) under their control.
I like both factions dearly for what they are, but Horde always stuck out to me as being more unique of the two.
I never saw this as a horde vs alliance situation. Sure Brann is a dwarf, but i always viewed him as neutral. Ive worked with him on both factions.
Like in 11.1 i expected Orwa…o…i cant spell her name but the Haronir we have been working with.
And for 11.2 i could see it having been Venari or even Xalatath herself weirdly enough.
The fact that Valeera happens to be alliance, most of the time she was neutral in legion…kinda, doesn’t bother me as much as it seem to other horde players.
