War of the Thorns killed the Warcraft franchise

Lore Story Forum
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I guess I’m really late to this discussion probably, but I hadn’t played WoW seriously in 5 years or so, and decided recently for whatever reason that maybe it was still worth playing.

Well in my opinion, it was, I thought most of BFA was steady rockin and rollin era Blizzard, with plenty of interesting characters and narrative threads and stuff that made it feel like the whole thing was working.

Then I started to get to points where I just couldn’t really see what happened without watching a video or something, (I was just about to do the BFA faction quests and the Tyrande night warrior quest line after finishing the Unite the island main questline), and I came across the war of the thorns, which I vaguely remember being referenced when it came out with a lot of emotion on the topic, and people saying that it was Warcraft going in the wrong direction.

Well anyway, having carefully watched the whole thing, I just have to say, boy were they right. It really boils down to two words “Burn it.” In that moment, Warcraft went from rule of cool to incomprehensibility, it was just, like I couldn’t react. It went so far and extreme it was like that game Hatred that came out that was just so crazy there was just no way to deal with it in my opinion except to just not play it at all.

Now instead of focusing on the perfectly normal aspects of BFA like re-visiting Jaina and having her have a major role as Grand Admiral and stuff that all seem perfectly well developed, this whole franchise just feels like something weighed down by the crazy and there’s just not a good feeling because there’s no way to address it in any way that would feel satisfactory. I know what happens to Sylvannas in SL and it just doesn’t matter, what about Saurfang and him stopping Malfurion? Where was the rest of the Alliance? The Draenei? What about the Forsaken or whoever fired the demolishers? It’s just a complete collapse of the continuity of just generally keeping big major characters around to be cool and aid the sense of immersion and roleplay for the players, and nstead, in BFA, the characters became living and dying and breathing up in your face glass like incendiaries that could wrench the series in different directions.

Dragonflight generally seems like they’re trying to go back, but in my opinion, there’s no going back, it’s just jumped the shark and it can’t be fixed. This nice, well running car is stuck in quicksand and it’s a total loss and can’t be salvaged.

The only solace I have is that, to be fair, Blizzard pulled some of these stunts before, though the only time I can really think of is in WC2 if you played the original orc campaign (which I did when it came out, I was in elementary school), I just remember finishing a quest and there’s these helpless human soldiers that just get burned to death by the Horde for no reason and I stopped cold turkey and said there’s no way I can play this.

The thing is, back then, I could, I just played Alliance, that was the solution.

But then Blizzard ignited it’s golden age of rule of cool starting with WC3, making all the factions major players and it was somehow possible to play the Undead or the Orcs and it went fine, and that trend continued into WoW and in my opinion all throughout the expansions (improving each time), until you hit Legion when they really went back and harmonized all the problems that went all the way back to even WC2 and, you know, sorta played it safe the way they always do but it made a big impression.

So I was like, well, this works, but maybe that crassness in WC2 was always still there somehow, because BFA and the War of the Thorns ran a train wreck through all of that.

Everyone had a relationship with Sylvannas, at one point or another, during the war against the Lich King, or in Legion, or wherever it was, they evolved Warcraft so that all the factions and races were interdependent. I couldn’t just ignore this often third party major neutral player going completely rogue, like I could the savage orcs of WC2. If nothing else, there’s playing as her in WC3 and the sense that this wasn’t the end for her.

I guess one could say that playing Arthas in the undead campaign and having him become Lich King was pretty bad, but Arthas was kind of ambiguous in WC3 and Frozen Throne as wanting to counter the power of Legion with the Lich King’s power. Then he functioned more or less like a military commander in Wrath, there was no wanton destruction. The worst was in WC3, but even then, he also was kind of just a servant of the Legion also so he often had no choice it appears.

There’s also Garrosh, but once again, Theramore was harsh and crazy but theoretically some kind of “military” target on some level. He was a dangerous wild card who went the wrong way.

But Sylvannas? I just can’t reason with it, it’s too far out there, and it taints the whole franchise in my opinion all the way from at least WC2 to now which is a lot of games.

It’s problematic too because I feel like the quests and gameplay and everything else functions as well as it ever has, this is strictly a top of the line top shelf lore matter problem which also unfortunately means it just too hard to ignore.

So anyway, that’s how I feel, but then again, maybe Blizzard will take note of all the people who said things like this and find some miracle fix, but I sure don’t know what that would be, it’d have to be something better than what they did in Shadowlands, because that just doesn’t just address all the kind of core systemic things that went wrong in the War of the Thorns.

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One problem that I think is coming to light more and more often is the conflict between telling a more removed tale from an RTS perspective (where at best we we’re playing through the game as specific characters), and telling the story through an MMORPG (where we are often times directly involved).

Personally, to be specific, I think the War of Thorns largely was fine. It made sense enough, especially with A Good War. But having the Players be directly involved in the Burning of Teldrassil was a bad move.

If Azshara burned Teldrassil as we fought over Darkshore, that could have been more palatable. Or if some third party took advantage of the situation and destroyed Teldrassil.

So, I’d say it was not so much the War of Thorns, but the Burning of Teldrassil, and involving the Players involved in it. It sapped a lot of enthusiasm in some Horde fans, and it made some Alliance fans lose enthusiasm, feel weak, and feel as if the Horde is irredeemable - and then they are made to work together.

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I don’t know how “fixable” it is alliance-side.

But at least for me, the War of Thorns ruined the entire premise of what made playing horde appealing to me. I can’t really explain away, justify, or rationalize how you can play a hero protagonist horde character at this point, because you run into the wall of “canonically you’re complicit in an on-screen genocide because you, through your faction, didn’t learn your lesson the last time you were aggressors and proved the alliance right that you’re as bad as they think you are”.

I liked the advertised premise WoW offered that as horde, you weren’t necessarily bad just for being a monster race, even if the traditional “good guy races” believed you were. It’s a concept that by definition, the alliance can’t offer. You can’t reroll away from the damage BFA did to it. And it’s not something that appears in any other MMO so it’s not like you have another option either.

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The War of Thorns was a massive story undertaking. It, and BfA in general, felt more like a RTS plot because it raised the stakes in several ways never before done in WoW itself:

  1. It destroyed two player capitals, while the player character was there defending it.
  2. It displaced player races to a new location by rendering their old one inaccessible (without time travel convenience).
  3. It made other playable faction into the main enemy of the story.

And I think that, while those plots are fine for a RTS, it did not translate well into a MMORPG. An RTS follows preset characters, and thus has more emotional distance to the player - they’re watching Jaina make Jaina’s decision to abandon doomed Lordaeron to found a new city across the sea, or watching Arthas make Arthas’ decision to take up the cursed sword and then slaughter his own people, rather than the player making those choices themselves.

And while there’s never been much player agency in WoW, usually what ‘decisions’ the PC makes are relatively minor, and bad effects are settled almost immediately (like obeying Abercrombie in Duskwood and then slaying him when he attacks, helping Drakuru in Grizzly Hills and then slaying him in Zul’Drak, etc). But BfA forced the player into several extreme decisions that were decided for them, and which they couldn’t even react to after-the-fact.

In this RPG, we’re playing characters that we made ourselves with our own opinions on what they would or wouldn’t do. And so having to watch your own character make Sylvanas’ decisions (and then suddenly Saurfan’s decisions) is jarring if those aren’t the decisions that the player would have made themselves - and a lot of players did not want to make those decisions.

And on the same vein of player identification and agency:
In an RTS, the emotional distance between the player and the story is more conducive to major events happening during gameplay - Lordaeron falls, it’s tragic, but we’re just sitting back and watching the story unfold and wondering how the prewritten characters will react.

In WoW, we’re playing our characters in the moment. We’ve always been portrayed as the unstoppable and always-successful heroes who have taken down literal gods for breakfast - and now the story tells us to sit back, you’ve lost, now watch all those people you were supposed to protect as they die horribly. That has a much stronger impact on making the player, not the character, feel impotent in a story beat, and I think that’s why the negative reaction to the Burning was so much higher than Blizz seemed to anticipate.

And boy, did Blizz spend a lot of time, energy, and writer focus on emphasizing the amount of civilian deaths and the horror of those deaths. They even specifically used/approved the word “genocide” in their official short story Elegy. That’s a very heavy word to use a scenario where the player either a) allowed it to happen by failing to stop it or b) actively participated in it.

(And as a minor note, it’s my own pet theory that Alliance players on average tend to be more sensitive to the loss of their civilian NPCs, however nameless most of them may be, because the core theme of the Alliance is that the faction exists only to protect these people. And then this story rubs the player’s face in the fact that they were too weak to do the one thing they exist to do. (Plus all the memes over the years of Alliance players being wimps building up resentment.))

One other RTS/MMORPG difference is that in the RTS, you can keep playing the story until it reaches the conclusion tailored to pay off the awful beginning scenario. In WoW, we were left on a depressing cliffhanger for weeks/months until the next story content dribbled out (and most of it was leaving to do something only vaguely linked back to Teldrassil, until the Battle of Darkshore patch).

I don’t know if Blizz thought that BfA’s ending was at all sufficient to pay off the heightened emotional response they intentionally caused with the Burning, but it wasn’t. I don’t think Blizz knows how to undo what they did with the Burning. The utter ineffectiveness of the Night Warrior arc makes me thing that it was hastily thrown together after the real story was written, as an attempt to show that they were still paying attention to those angry over the Burning (and also say “heeeey, Sylvanas is gone (temporarily) and that’s totally all you need for revenge, now quit thinking about the Burning and go for some renewal instead”.) I don’t think that worked, either. Now we’ve got the new seed storyline, which I also think won’t work.

I believe there are three major points of resentment left over from the War of Thorns, which the attempted story resolutions failed to address:

  1. Sylvanas did not burn the tree by herself. The stories around the WoT spent a lot of detail showing how much of a unified and diverse Horde army was (happily) involved - both in the lead-up to her order to burn it, and during the burning itself. And all of them kept following Sylvanas afterwards. Even Saurfang went along with her, and ‘objected’ by trying to get the Alliance to kill him as he slew them to defend Sylvanas. (Saurfang’s messed-up story and characterization is its own can of worms.) Revenge narrowly against Sylvanas can not address this point.
  2. What’s to stop the Horde from genociding our civilians again if we rebuild? From point 1, the story showed us that plenty of Horde members were fine with carrying out such a mass murder of civilians, and has done very little to change that depiction Alliance-side since. Until this point is addressed, “renewal” will ring hollow.
  3. The feeling of weakness. The WoT went out of its way to say “but the night elf city guard totally got a 8:1 KDR fighting the entire Horde army” (and I think that was silly), but, y’know, we still lost and had the story rub our faces in all the horror that happened because we were too weak to stop it. (By my pet theory, Alliance players tend to care way more about our civilians’ deaths than about killing Horde, so the 8:1 quote really only annoys the Horde player without helping the Alliance player at all.) The night elves have been the victim of choice when it comes to the writers setting up faction conflict stories, so unless we get a clear-cut, no strings attached, in-game victory against the Horde (or Sylvanas loyalist holdouts) in night elf territory, this resentment is going to continue to fester.

So, in conclusion, I think that the War of Thorns was a highly ambitious story attempt, that missed the mark and ended up severely damaging the entire franchise. And I think Blizz still has no idea how to address it, and is instead trying to ignore it and move on - which I think will only make the bad emotions left from the Burning fester.

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The real horror of BfA’s writing is that horde campaign.
:dracthyr_nervous_animated:

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This is why I picked up this game and stuck with it for so many years - even though I tend to play Alliance.

I like the setup where my characters on each side can both be good people, making reasonable decisions with their limited knowledge of the world, and still conflict with each other.

Both factions had good characters in charge, mostly good characters as the population, and enough bad characters spread across the faction for the other one to keep distrusting them. The player could go through the main quests of their faction working only with good/neutral characters (or for good causes even if a specific character is sketchy), and work with bad characters only if they wanted to.

That’s the balance I liked.

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If you didn’t play it, and you can’t because it was a one off thing, you have no call to judge it. It wasn’t just the bloody cinematics. If you din’t play it you don’t have the meat of it to understand it. You’re looking at quarter of the skeleton and judging the whole animal. Especially if you did not play both sides like I did.

And yes there were backroom issues with Sylvannas, but does not invalidate the play experience which you can’t judge since you didn’t play.

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I did play through it, and I vehemently disagree that the gameplay is necessary at all to understand and judge the War of Thorns. The in-game quests and dailies didn’t add a whole lot - unless you think that flying a goblin gyrocopter to shoot some wisps, or fighting furbolgs who went rampaging mad again, are the true core of the War of Thorns story.

Edit: the impossible-by-design rescue quest in Teldrassil was a pretty neat gameplay element to illustrate the scope and tragedy of the burning itself, but it still only underscores the event’s impact rather than bein the only major source of feeling for it.

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The truth of the matter is, the vast majority of people, on BOTH sides, hate the War of Thorns for good reason. It was done for pure shock value and nothing else.

Why a small minority continue to defend that pile of flaming garbage is, well it’s confusing

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The vast majority of vocal pundits.

-Corrected that for you

The vast majority of players couldn’t give a copper’s care for the storyline as long as they got rewards they liked.

This subforum is hardly representative of the player base.

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I would suggest not dictating to others about what parts of the story they can or can’t talk about if they didn’t play through the daily pre patch grind or whatever excuse people like to use when other peoples opinions don’t match their own. It comes off as arrogant and condescending

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This. So much this.

Before WoT I mained Horde for MANY years and was staunchly Horde aside from the odd lowbie alt dabbling here and there to experience all facets of the game. While parts of the MoP story really left a bad taste in my mouth, I didn’t think it could get any worse and thoroughly enjoyed being Horde through WoD and Legion. BfA ruined that for me purely from it’s launch with WoT.

My excitement to see and experience Zandalar (Trolls being my favourite race) was overshadowed by this constant feeling of shame for my faction and I actively avoided doing any of the War campaign content until it came down to HAVING to do it for Mag’har and Zandalari unlocks. I rushed through the entirety of it which is unlike me, I usually soak in all the story elements because I like to feel like part of the narrative. Even now, WoT really alienates me from the Horde, and I’m so sad for it as a lot of my early WoW nostalgia lies with the Horde and I’d love to enjoy those characters again.

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This is a brilliant summation of the problems with this.

I will say right now that I do not have a problem with Horde players. I have Horde alts. But they are being written into an impossible situation.

How exactly are the orcs who were traumatized from what they did while under the effects of the blood curse supposed to reconcile with openly killing civilians? And not even killing them in a fair fight? Just watching them burn.

How do the Tauren feel about destroying a World Tree? How are the Highmountain supposed to feel about this?

How are goblins supposed to feel about all the exploitable economic resources of Darnassus just going up in smoke? No profit at all.

I know a lot of Horde RPers kind of just stopped after this whole thing. It was one thing when the Wrathgate happened, and Sylvanas wasn’t really behind that. But then after Garrosh in Mists, they were 100% sure “Okay, let’s not do this again”. And then…just…they did it again.

And you are forced to help this genocide, and support the war it started.

As Aviala so eloquently put it, this is supposed to be a game where you take on the role of a specific character, not different sides of massive military forces. You’re not the Horde, or the Alliance. You’re the ‘Champion’, and people refer to you as such.

“Champion…your help in securing our world tree in Highmountain from a demon attack is the stuff of legends. Thank you. Now, go help burn down a world tree. You know, because someone thinks there might be a war in a century.”

And as bad as ‘Hey, let’s make baby stew again’ that it makes Horde players feel like? How the hell do you think it makes the Alliance feel? Especially the night elfs?

“Hey, remember how you couldn’t stop that school for druids from being blown up in Stonetalon? Don’t worry, it was okay because Garrosh did something cool to the guy who ordered it. Anyway, now watch as your people die. I’m sure some orc is going to do something cool to who ordered it. Eventually.”

It makes the Alliance seems impossibly stupid, and the night elves impossibly impotent. And it directly contradicts events that they have explicitly laid out in game. If you think this is an exaggeration? Go back and kill Garrosh in Siege of Orgrimmar. Listen to what is directly told to the Horde.

If the writers are making the Horde into Snydely Whiplash? They are making the Alliance into Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football Lucy totally promised she’s not going to move this time.

Like an idiot? I got kind of excited when I saw that trailer for the Darkshore warfront, where Malfurion reminded everyone exactly who he was. Especially with Tyrande as the Night Warrior.

Fighting the strongest druid on the planet? With a woman who could dang near hold off an army before being infused with vengeance powers? And a bunch of night elves - night elves - looking for retribution? In the forest?

That should have been awesome.

You know, before some guy with a bow held them off by himself.

…

I don’t…I don’t get why Blizzard hates night elves. It’s weird.

Agree.

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I think the issue isn’t that blizz hates night elves, it’s that they love the night elves a little too much. They’ve had several major story plots since at least legion.

We keep getting these terrible stories, because blizzard doesn’t know how to write anything that doesn’t involve elves, orcs and humans.

There’s a bunch of playable races beyond orcs, humans and elves that never get any major narrative love. Be nice to see the other races carry an expansion for once. Zandalar was nice, but in typical blizzard fashion, they had to reduce the Zandalaris power before they were allowed to officially join the horde. Because you know, heaven forbid the horde has a race that can rival the god tier characters of the alliance

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I think…I think the writing team wanted to do something big and bold, but didn’t think things through past “How does this help get us to the next expansion?”

It’s one of those things that’s not uncommon when you’re RPing with someone in game. They have this really cool goal that they have, but they don’t really share it with you. They want you to come along for the ride. Which is all well and good, but they don’t do a good enough job of making things make sense along the journey there.

But you’re in the dark, so instead of feeling anticipation about what you know is coming? You’re just feeling irritation about how they’re getting there. All you know is you’re being taken on an uncomfortable ride by someone going “Trust me, bro”, and you don’t have any reason to believe they aren’t just going to take you to their favorite restaurant, and ask you to foot the bill.

This kind of thing pains me to see. I hate seeing people who used to enjoy things end up essentially having to give that up because other people are making it difficult.

I’m sorry, Nithae. That sucks, especially if you have to see something you’re excited for also involved in, like…well, genocide. Ugh.

Have any of those ended up on a positive note for the night elves? I mean, even if we don’t include the genocide, has there been anything positive for the kaldorei?

And yes, seeing as how the entirety of Battle for Azeroth was based around that genocide thing? There are going to be a lot of plot points about them.

If my only reaction when I seek someone out is to slap them in the face and throw a Coke at them? And I keep doing that, over and over? I think you can make an argument that I hate that person.

[Quick edit]

The fact that the Alliance has several god-tier characters and still keeps losing so much is…look, I’m just saying this is a ‘grass is greener’ thing. You keep pushing for this kind of thing, and you might find yourself struggling to figure out why the writers are for some reason ignoring the fact that your faction has literal spaceships which they don’t use in the war.

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Truthfully? None that I can recall. But that’s also one of the major the problems with blizz and their writing. They get obessesed with the same three races and or leaders, fail to write them in a consistent manner and than everybody else has to suffer due to their incompetent writing skills

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BFA could have been a great faction war story had it actually been about Azerite : Both factions discover this incredibly potent new resource with game-changing potential and groundbreaking implications. That immense potency, fueled by a series of incidents and diplomatic missteps, re-opened old wounds and made the factions rush headlong into a spiral of paranoia and military escalation to secure their control over Azerite, convinced that letting the other faction get their hands on it first would bring about their downfall.
It was literally that simple.

Alas, that is not the story the writers wanted to tell. Retrospectively, after Shadowlands, it is now pretty obvious that they never actually wanted to tell a war story at all in the first place.

Oh well.

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Before I say anything else, I should say I understand where you’re coming from. I don’t want that to be lost.

It might be nice to see how Dark Irons are adjusting to the presence of Sargeras’ sword in Azeroth. Does that have any kind of effect on people who have lived so long in the earth?

How are the Tauren feeling spiritually, as a people? I refuse to believe the people who respect the land so much are indifferent to the Burning, and the fact that so many of the people they had sworn allegiances to seemed to have no problem with what happened with Baine being treated that way by Sylvanas.

What does the lifting of the veil for the Shadowlands mean for the Forsaken? How might they be feeling about knowing they might be…reanimated, whatever, as things approximating living beings?

A lot to be said and explored. I hear you.

Still, I stand by my earlier point. You might not want to find yourself on the other end of that kind of attention.

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at this point it feels half-hearted to say ‘Never assume malice where incompetence is more likely’ when we’re taking about BLIZZARD, but the story writers and money men actually in charge or corporate are two separate groups.

Lenny from Of Mice And Men doesn’t hate mice, and rabbits, and women with easily snappable necks; in fact he loves them, but, well…

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I’m honestly sad that some of my favourite themes were wasted on one of the worst expansions.

Azshara/Naga, Trolls, Night Elf and Void/Old God content are some of my favourite parts of this game and it’s lore. BfA had ALL of those things but somehow was still awful. It’s like having the recipe for the most perfect chocolate cake, only for it to come out tasting like dirt.

I feel like they were trying to tell too many stories in too little time. They really should’ve stuck with the faction war narrative and left the rest for later expansions.

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