I’m not saying they’re wrong about some Night Elf fans being crazy. I’m saying Cursewords is acting crazy as well, and it’s a distraction.
The fact they took my entire post and boiled it down to, “ARE YOU SAYING NIGHT ELVES ARE A PROTECTED CLASS?!?” is beyond absurd and I’m not going to engage with someone like that anymore.
You, on the other hand, seem like a person who actually wants to have a discussion about the War of Thorns and its affect on the setting.
Sure. I don’t think that is far off from my point. I keep using the Reclamation of Lordaeron as an example - Genn and the Alliance help, and everyone works together. It was roundly well received, and no one was dunked on for power fantasy.
In the same vein, I have suggested before that Thura Saurfang - with the Axe of Cenarius - could help the Night Elves resettle areas they were chased out of. She could be the Horde’s window into helping the Night Elves, like Genn was the Alliance’s window into helping the Forsaken.
That is more in the spirit of factions working together, and trying to heal wounds.
As opposed to the one sided Horde massacre some Night Elf partisans demand.
I do not endorse elf mains continuing to insist the Calia Appreciation Hour did right by Forsaken players.
The “Calia Appreciation Hour” is absolutely dumb and made zero sense, she would have been far better off remaining as a living human rather than being killed off to villainbat Sylvanas and then replacing her.
broke: The Pallid Lady and Champion of the Pallid Lady
woke: The Dark Lady and the Champion of the Dark Lady
This is Cursewords on my Forsaken - I played the Quest on this Forsaken. As a Forsaken Player, I thought it was great.
My main is my Zandalari Druid, for what ever that means.
I mean, you are a level 50 Forsaken, if I judged you only by your avatar, it would seem my Forsaken has leveled more, and actually played through the Quest.
I think it’s fair to say that it killed the franchise, lorewise, for me. I could see as soon as it happened that there was no satisfactory way out of it.
Where I was wrong was that I didn’t think it could get worse, but the rest of BfA made it worse.
On this we agree entirely. This was my experience as well.
As for what can be done? This is where it gets tricky. I could tell you what would satisfy myself personally, but it’s not a popular idea generally:
I think WoW needs to soft-reboot. Return the timeline back to Vanilla, with the old lore intact, and tell better stories within the world of Azeroth, having learned the mistakes of things like villain-batting, careless retcons, and hopefully with a less toxic workplace so development will be less messy.
Alternatively, dont revert the timeline for players, but simply re-write it with the above in mind. Make the next expansion the start of a new era for WoW, and let Blizzard tweak and re-write the history of Azeroth from beforehand. The final™ retcon. The retcon to end all Warcraft retcons.
I know both of these seem like extreme, messy choices, but I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to fix this anymore. Too much damage has been done. We jumped the shark years ago.
The story can’t just keep going forward like this. It has no credibility in my eyes. This isn’t a coherent fantasy world. People don’t act like people. Characters just spout their childish character arcs at each other while the player watches. Everything is mired in inconsistencies and plotholes. Both factions have been ruined beyond repair.
Seriously, I’m open to other ideas here because clearly mine will never happen.
Well I finally read like a lot of responses, wow there was a lot of responses, not all of them though. Based on all that I would say a few things to my original post.
It really is the Burning of Teldrassil specifically that’s the issue, not the war of the Thorns generally, I’d make that more specific.
It’s true we deal with a lot of suspension of disbelief in WoW all the time, the death knights raiding the Paladin class hall in Legion and killing their fellow Legion fighter noble paladins comes to mind, but there’s just a flimsy sort of “well we really need Tirion, he’s so much more important than a few paladins” like there’s just some level of “well we’re basically on the right track” that gives some latitude to actions that are pretty iffy on a number of levels, but Teldrassil burning went beyond that. Even for crazy fantasy fiction it seemed to go beyond the pale.
In going beyond that, I’m interested to see that many Horde players were disappointed along with the Alliance players, so it’s clear that if both sides are having problems there probably was really an issue there.
All that said, I think Blizzard with Shadowlands created a Sylvannas arc (BFA and SL) that actually sort of works. Basically I see Warcraft as 2 arcs, Legion/Sargeras Arc (WC1 if you count the movie as canon) to Legion, and the Sylvannas arc.
I mean they literally devoted an entire expansion to Sylvannas and the nature of death in Shadowlands as seemingly a mad attempt to bring the franchise back to stability.
It’s weird, I actually think the war of the thorns up until the burning of the tree was fairly incredible, in a sense that they knew that players liked faction conflict and Pandaria was so limp and WoD dodged the issue and they finally were like we’re going to give them what they want and they totally did. I finally finished all of BFA and it feels like the end of classic era Warcraft lore where it’s rule of cool and they’re gonna blaze ahead, compared to SL anyway. SL is like refined ok no more crazy stunts everything is going to make sense, but we’re spending all that effort basically just to reverse where things went off the rails the previous expansion.
Faction conflict is fertile ground for storytelling, so BFA delivered, and with SL context, it’s an 8.5 for me. Maybe an 8 because the war campaigns on both sides kind of withered in the beginning and end a bit for me. Also Horde side kind overdosed on Troll everything. It was also clearly designed as an Alliance Kul Tiras expansion, with Horde as just, well we need a Horde something, so those things undercut a lot of interesting things. Anyway, without SL, it’s like not showing up to the test, it’s a zero, a franchise killer.
Like, Alexander the Great massacred civilians at Tyre and somewhere else and it’s like this incredibly significant RL thing that people sometimes point out as marking him as totally different from the general theme of heroism. In my mind, whatever good things he achieved are totally irrelevant in light of his actions. In contrast, Sargon II (from the record) never did kill civilians, even though he was also a commander in an ancient time of warfare. The distinction between soldiers, combatants and non-combatants is just a deeply ingrained in a way that even wild fantasy fiction has to deal with delicately, and old reckless Blizzard overplayed their hand.
So they made SL to try and fix everything and I’m not done with the expansion, but it feels like they basically did but it’s just an 8.5 for me because it’s internally consistent and doesn’t trip the player but it’s so singularly focused and it crashes so hard against all of the previous warcraft lore, like just whisking away Thrall and Jaina and Anduin just like that in the first 10 minutes, and instead spending all your time with um, lantern robots, vampires, Greco-Roman stonemen, and the cast of Fern Gully?
That’s cool, and I remember Houndmaster Lokey, so with all that they can just use their new coke storytelling approach for Dragonflight and deal with Azeroth again and that can work well again.
I just think with BFA they broke an unspoken lore approach which was just to let the major big characters be major big characters in the background, like TV show characters, they’re not killed off or some such. They don’t move around and risk alienating their fan bases. Moving them around like they did in BFA showed they were going with a more Hollywood approach, which is good I think, but they weren’t ready to do it right.
In the future, I think they can have faction conflict in a meaningful way that actually satisfies everyone. I think the weakly scuffle (by comparison to BFA) faction conflict basically propped up all of the Pandaria expansion, as you never hear anyone talking about those great Townlong Steppes quests, or hey, fishing in the Soggy Bottom quest cluster in Dread Wastes or whatever was just my greatest time with WoW. It was a nothingburger of a grand arc but back then just a taste of genuine faction conflict was enough.
BFA was a bit late, but delivered a heavy dose in many of the right ways, just one glaring wrong way.
In order, I think the best WoW story beats are,
No, no more inter faction war, they keep screwing it up not thanks
That was broken back in Cata/MoP with Garrosh.
In all honesty, this part just feels like what you said earlier about feelings being too entrenched:
It just feels like people who are opposed to seeing Sylvanas loyalists NPCs being killed are too far gone entrenched in their own feelings and have just decided that it is their personal stand to protest it despite at this point that Sylvanas loyalists for all practical purposes aren’t relevant to the Horde story any more.
A regular dinky blackpowder pistol memed on Sylvanas.
I wasn’t talking about how I personally feel about the idea. I was saying Cursewords is not wrong that there is a pretty large/vocal faction of Night Elf fans who have clearly stated (on this very thread) that only one solution will make them happy. If that’s “entrenched in feelings,” then I think it applies to both sides.
Sylvanas loyalists will always be relevant to the Horde, simply due to BfA’s story as a whole. The Alliance being able to kill loyalists is still finger-wagging at the Horde.
I feel like I am the most fair guy in the room, because I would like participation for all involved.
If we are working together, and helping each other since Shadowlands - let us work together and help each other. Genn and his Alliance Champions helped the Forsaken, maybe the Horde can help the Night Elves.
We can have story progression for races that does not trample other factions.
But these Night Elf partisans do not want fairness. They want to feed their power fantasy on the backs of the Horde - and they do not want the Horde to answer. They want the Horde to sit back and take it. That seems unfair.
If the Night Elves want to attack Loyalists - Loyalists being members of the Horde who have canonically been unified and brought back into the fold - then Horde Players should have mirrored quests where we slaughter Night Elves who dare attempt provoking the Horde, again.
Maybe in the mirrored Horde Quests, Horde Players have to defend 4 Mages and 4 Shaman, but we only manage to save 1 of each. While all but one Night Elf sent to kill them is slain, and the Alliance Champions get to report that.
The Night Elves get to play at revenge, and the Horde gets to defend itself against the partisans in the lore.
I am all for peace, but if there is a fight, I am not for one sided fights in the background.
At least both sides were involved in the attack at Stormheim, and the Burning of Teldrassil. I think if there is faction conflict, and the story impacts both factions, it should be played through by both factions.
Which is why it be best to have it be part of the Night Elf heritage armor questline where Horde players don’t have to see it.
As Pellex pointed out, many Horde players would not want to have to play through killing more evil characters formerly part of the Horde, so Horde players having to quest through killing Sylvanas loyalists in Ashenvale is not a reasonable stance. There have also been many previous proposals over the years, some even from Horde fans, about the Horde helping the Night Elves in Ashenvale in a combat related manner - proposals made far before the questline to help the Forsaken clear up Tirisfal, but for all practical purposes the same idea. However, even more vocal Horde posters hated this idea, especially at the time of how much they had already been stuck behind questing with Jaina and hearing speeches from Anduin, these Horde posters already felt like they had been forced to boot lick for the Alliance already and vehemently opposed the idea of having to quest in Ashenvale and rebuild settlements for the Night Elves or the such, specificialy as that to them also felt like finger-wagging a the Horde, sentenced to community service for the Horde’s crimes.
Additionally, Anuella and I have pointed out in the thread how Sylvanas loyalists are not part of the Horde any more, since if they have not forsworn Sylvanas’ ideals they were still being hunted down by Liadrin and Geya’rah.
Yes, my point was that it is both sides, not just from Night Elf fans.
I mean, it doesn’t work that way really. Alliance players didn’t see Silverpine either. The questline would still exist and have ramifications regardless
The new ramifications would be beneficial to the Horde, as if the hold outs in Spintertree Post and the Warsong Lumber Camp were Sylvanas loyalists rather than Horde citizens with the support of the Horde council then that clears the playable Horde of anything having to do with conflict with the Night Elves in Ashenvale.
Sylvanas loyalists being enemies to both the Horde and Alliance still is not a new lore ramification. That has been the case and has remained the case since the end of BfA.
Sylvanas loyalists were all folded back into the horde, other wise the PC wouldn’t be horde anymore