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:
- It destroyed two player capitals, while the player character was there defending it.
- It displaced player races to a new location by rendering their old one inaccessible (without time travel convenience).
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.