I know Tirisfal was a hack job. Because a good amount of it is still perfectly habitable.
The game seems to agree with my assessment as well considering you meet Calia in Tirisfal. Outside the still perfectly intact Calston Estate. Which still had some NPCs kicking around last time I was there they just forgot to remove. Vestigial class trainers, who I at least remember because I starred at them like a confused dog when I first came back, baffled that they had nothing for me.
Deathknell is fine. The Scarlet outposts are all extra vacant now so just waltz in, hang some spooky chandeliers and there you go. Agamand Mills is also fine. Pretty much anything not directly in the path of the Alliance is okay.
So it’s kind of baffling why the Forsaken would opt to slum it in Orgrimmar when most of it seems perfectly habitable, at least for them. On the gates no less. I’d put up little umbrellas when I’d fly by to give them some sort of shade. Can’t imagine how miserable that place would be at high noon.
I felt like I’d return home to find my pet sitter had just thrown my dogs the odd piece of meat and otherwise neglected them.
“GASP!What are you doing?! Don’t you know they like it dark and damp! They ought to be in the Drag! My poor babies don’t worry I’ll try to fix this”
Yeah, the alliance was nice enough too to invade through the north instead of going through and destroying Silverpine, so that area was fine as well. Other than Sylvanas blowing up undercity, I didn’t see why the forsaken couldn’t just move back in especially after the alliance just abandoned it immediately after the siege.
I dunno, pre 3e Forgotten Realms was just TSR bolting on every new setting they didn’t think would sell on its own. I agree with Greenwood’s personal vision for FR being leagues beyond what TSR or WotC put out, but Cloak & Dagger into launch 3e were about as good as it got.
Amusingly, FR suffered from terrible novelization having far reaching consequences in the game world itself. Virtually all of the Time of Troubles stuff reeked of: “let’s make our PCs Gods, formalize it in novel lines, then fundamentally change the setting!”
If the most believable leak is to be… believed, Tyrande had an important role in a Thros themed zone (speculated to be what we got as Korthia) and a raid, where we fight a dominated Tyrande. We learn that the Night Warrior and the Worgen Curse were actually deceptions of Thros, who had been tinkering with nelf culture for centuries.
I’d rather just blame this on Onyxia or Varimathras(possibly him because dreadlords are still going to be important in the future) and be done with it. There, neither side could be blame for that mess.
That would involve having to address Gilneas and Blizzard won’t do that. It is funny though. I’d host events in the parts of SFK open to the overworld. So I’m more familiar with it than most players. Always was a bit tragic. Watching Forsaken and Worgen soldiers unstuck in time, marching and battling over two inexplicably abandoned regions.
Also that Darkshore and Astranaar stuff is uh. Yeah. Who tf would that be fun for? I’ve mentioned how weird that warfront is because the Forsaken’s typical tongue and cheek horror comedy vibes are completely absent. Also the Forsaken have no real beef with the Kaldorei. So Natty Blights telling us to melt everything and there’s just this air of
ok why tho?
They never even explain why the Forsaken are there. The cutscene is Malfurion and Tyrande wiping out West Horde forces and a Belf.
So did their scare tactics work and they had to send in the spook resistant bone boys to rattle the opposition? There could’ve been a lot of funny banter and “The dark is my home too, Elf” stuff. You’re just obviously joyless bad guys. It’s not really fun.
Like I literally had a fun little RP friendship with a Priestess of Elune based largely on how little the Forsaken and Kaldorei actually knew of eachother. It remains baffling the Forsaken were there and not in Arathi.
They did because UC was indefensible without Teldrassil as collateral. The only reason to be there for the Battle of Lordaeron was to commence the evacuation and spring the trap.
I know to you the horrors of Hitler’s Germany and a comedy cartoon zombie farm with a character named Johnny Awesome in it are apparently interchangeable.
But I’ll note you actually shut that down in the storyline. With extreme force. Stillwater is a villain whom you thwart. The Sludge Fields are considered a bad thing to be undone.
I wouldn’t even necessarily be opposed to what you’re talking about so long as the Alliance perspective was adequately given here. We actually have very little information from the Alliance’s perspective from TFT all the way to WoW. All we have is Garithos which is why he has to keep on coming up when it’d be better for everyone if we had something else to offer from the Alliance’s perspective so we can finally move past him.
I want to see how the Scourge affected the Alliance psychologically, both on an individual and collective level. Like you said, it completely upended reality as it was known and the threat that emerged destroyed Lordaeron, Dalaran, and Quel’thalas in a matter of days to weeks. This was in an environment where the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity was still the Horde in the First and Second Wars, and this new undead threat did in days what Doomhammer couldn’t with an army of Orcs over an entire war.
There’s a lot of interesting development that could be done from exploring this and TFT and WoW did a massive disservice, in my opinion, by neglecting that angle from the Alliance’s perspective.
You know “but we replaced the commandant with a different commandant” is not a good defense.
And I’m mostly cynical because of all the pearl clutching about the Forsaken building death camps for Night Elves when back in Cata nobody cared about them building death camps for humans.
I assume you played through the alliance DK starting questline, arrived in stormwind to hear screams, have things thrown at you and hear curses like “The scourge killed my husband!”
Look maybe if breather Lordaeronians were playable their fanbase could have made a stink. But they’ve yet to even make them an AR yet so, like Murlocs they’re just one of the species you’re not supposed to respect in the game world.
Lordaeron is one of many kingdoms that your character could be from when they start their adventure. Northshire is just where your murderhobo career begins.
Heck, Stormwind is actually one of the less likely places for them to have been from since it had been destroyed only a few years previous.
The terrible novelization was kinda part of the whole “giving the finger to Greenwood”, one of the things Wizards famously hated was how prevalent the cult of Eilistraee actually was among the drow and the fact that she was unironically a good goddess (the northern Underdark was solidly anti-Lolthian among other places)