If there is one absolute within these virtual halls, it is this: To speak of the Purge is to herald the birth of a new Purge Thread.
Either way, the fire burns so let’s feed it.
The core moral conflict of the Purge was isn’t “Was the Horde guilty?”
It was.
It was an action sanctioned by the Warchief.
The conflict has been “Did it justify the actions undertaken by Jaina and the Silver Covenant during the Purge?”
The Purge that was described above as:
a bloody purge of a population largely innocent and ignorant of said crime
Innocent people died and suffered during the Purge.
Innocent people dying and suffering is a bad thing.
You can call the Purge pragmatic and necessary, if you want.
But I struggle to agree that it was “right”.
There were a hundred different ways the issue could have been resolved, and Jaina chose one of the worse ones.
Maybe, for a start, she could have used Dalaran’s own legally sanctioned law enforcement.
Just a thought.
The Sunreavers were very much the wronged party. Garrosh set them up for a slaughter at the Alliance’s hands, and the obliging witch purged them over unsubstantiated claims of treason against their leader. Granted, it did turn out said witch was entirely correct in her blind assessment; then they were only the innocent victims of a bloody purge. I can’t imagine the one elf who’d actually supported Garrosh stuck around for it.
His faction produced a traitor, as all factions do, and Aethas handled it in the right way for once. It speaks rather poorly to your character that you’d try and spin this rare moment of grace as a petty “gotcha”.
Jaina was probably within her rights to lock down Darnassus to safeguard the bell. But she also admits to personally battling every Horde agent sent to retrieve it. Is that conduct becoming the neutral head of the Kirin Tor?
Fanlyr was the liaison the Horde PC works with to hijack the bell, but was never confirmed to be the source of the Sunreavers’ portal charms. That individual is just vaguely identified as “a Sunreaver agent acting on Garrosh’s orders” in War Crimes.
I was always partial to the theory that Fanlyr deliberately botched the job of covering his conspirator’s tracks, as the B side to Garrosh’s plot was to provoke Jaina’s wrath upon the Sunreavers.
If your happiness is derived from the Horde being shown as nothing but unwavering, unquestioning, evil villains that kill defenseless alliance then good.
You should be unhappy. Its that mindset that gave us BFA.
as one of the things that shamed Horde players. Again, in this very thread.
And somehow, somehow you read all this and conclude that not only does it make me happy when the Horde is shown as killing defenseless Alliance, but that’s the only thing that makes me happy?
Either you’re trolling, or you are only listening to the voices in your own head and not, y’know, reading what I’m actually saying. Either way, I’m out of this particular subthread, because it’s clearly pointless.
EDIT: And I see your response, and I don’t see any reason to revise the previous paragraph. I’m done and I’m out. Have a nice day.
When the end result of all your “solutions” is a Horde that is apathetic to their crimes and you don’t want the Horde NPCs to display any sense of humanity, humility or care. You find that humiliating. So its clear what you really want in practice.
Its not even something thats directed at the player! How it is a Lorthemar or Baine or whomever else explaining why they fought for Sylvanas or better yet forced Horde soldiers and champions down that bloody path is not a punishment, it actually pulls the Horde out of the mud.
Thats how you create anti-villains out of villains. But you aren’t interested in that. You find that this punishes you in some way. You just seem to want the Horde that bathes in blood and then laughs about it afterwards.
To be fair, I don’t think either of them actually explain WHY they were fighting for Sylvanas? Part of the issue of the Horde Plot device boutes is that Blizz has this tendency of just … vanishing people who should have issues with whats going on. Until its convenient for the story that they be allowed to voice those issues. Baine was not there, then when its time make a stink … he’s there. Same with Lor’themar. Same thing happened to a ton of characters who might be “inconvenient” for the story during the Garrosh period. Why does the Horde do anything since Cata? Because the story wont happen if they dont, doesn’t matter if it makes any sense.
The other issue is … amends. Kind of hard for these plot-convenienced doofuses to do such gestures if … the Horde doesn’t get any real focus when its not being plot-deviced. The pendulum of relevance swings hard. Going from way too much of the wrong type of focus when villain batted, and getting shelved to sit moping in a hallway, or bussed away in a seed when its not. Baine alone has so much cut content over the years its staggering. Cata he did, Legion he did, SLs I would assume he did. Or he was really just included to be told he’s so worthless we had to buy him back in the Beta, and fawn over Golden’s Golden child Anduin.
The why could have worked if Nzoth made a deal with Sylvanas earlier and he manipulated the Horde’s mind to go along with the villain.
But too late to do that unfortunately. So Blizzard has to come up with the whys.
And yeah what I am thinking would involve the Horde more often rather than put in a corner and not allowed to speak.
They actually do this at one point to the PC character in BfA actually lol! Every opportunity I had to spit in Sylvie and Nathanos’s eye, no matter how minor and worthless, I took it … but the moment the story needed Sylvie to get that stupid evil dagger … suddenly “The black blade forces you to give it to Nathanos”. Then you don’t get to do anything with that afterwards. The fact that a Old God relic of that power WANTED Sylvie to have it, to the point where even if you’ve gone against her several times you have to give it to her for that deranged plot to work … its nuts. Then you just move on like nothing happened? Its weird.
Neither faction historically exists as more than a convenient plot device really. Sort of like how when it isn’t convenient Blizzard forgets we have an orbital weapons platform which withstood constant bombardment from the legion’s heaviest weaponry with a laser cannon that could descimate armies. Really, the entire fourth war was pretty much pointless and no one came out better for it.
As I said above, I’m convinced the writers at Blizzard don’t know why they were doing it. Afrasiabi just waved his arms and said, “And they all follow her!”—and then he disappeared and left them with that situation. I’m not surprised they don’t want to waste their time trying to come up with explanations for something that frankly makes no sense, especially when that “something” was now two expansions and four years of real time ago.
Its a bit surreal to think about that BfA in nearly its entirety was to settup SLs? That both Azshara and N’zoth, two villains who could have carried an expansion on their own, and all those amazing Old God Whispers, amounted to … the Jailor? That nearly the Horde’s entire story since Legion ultimately amounted to setting the stage to help Sylvanas settup SLs in one form or another; that Jin died to trash mob to aid in that. Because the Horde sure as hell didn’t help against the Legion after Broken Shore. All we really did outside Surumar was help Sylvie on a shifty chore, and immediately get betrayed by her.
They really put so many eggs into a single basket called Shadowlands? And created a Faction Conflict Expansion where neither Faction could find any Faction Pride in service of that?
I think their team was in general in a terrible place at that point, they already knew by BFA that the core gameplay loop was going to be despised and there was nothing they could do but stare at the truck as it barreled at them. Plus the story team was split and unhappy with the entire framing of the fourth war. On top of that all the assault stuff and general poor workplace quality that has come to light cannot of helped whatsoever.
In general you had unhappy team of writers with unstable leadership that was missing a creative director because he got fired for being a generally terrible human being. That the story ended up all over the place seems like a natural result of how the company itself was doing.
Warcraft has progressively moved away from its darker origins. Genocide, racism, colonization and let’s not forget slavery were all themes of the RTS games. I would say the shift away from those topics and towards a lighter tone was caused by external factors, primarily the fact that Blizzard became a publicly traded company; secondly the political climate (for lack of a better term) is much different now than it was in the 90s/early 2000s.
Sure Game of Thrones was successful for its grittiness, but that was HBO. Many of the darker tones present in Warcraft history would require a rating similar to Diablo to be included in the current game, and that would affect sales/subscriptions. Essentially I think Blizzard doesn’t want to upset the apple cart or disturb the cash cow, so they keep things safe and light-hearted.
I don’t remember a Sunreaver traitor in the Mage Order Hall? There’s Aethas, while he was exiled from Dalaran after the Purge, but by the end of the Mage Order Hall, after helping imprision Kathra’natir. The Sunreavers are quietly welcomed back into Dalaran by the Council of Six, Khadgar apologizes to Aethas and the Sunreavers are tasked with secretly keeping Kathra’natir contained inside the Nightborne Soulstone and for it to keep powering Dalaran’s defence mechanisms.
That being said, there’s opportunity there for the Sunreavers to again fall under fire if they fail to keep the dreadlords from freeing Kathra’natir and making Dalaran defenseless in the future, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it.
