I think the problem some people are having is, we already know what happened to Alex during WC 2. It was disgusting and distasteful then, and it still remains that way today.
Adding that particular quest in game just have us relive Alexs’ trauma serves zero narrative purpose. It adds literally zero to the game. And that’s one of the reasons people are calling blizz out for it, as they have every right to do
I think there are (at least) three major problems with the quest.
As much as I’m loathe to bring up Shadowlands, Sylvanas’s scene with Arthas’s dissipating anima does this way better (even if it has its own unrelated issues). The cutscene’s not trying to be jokey, the player character obviously isn’t part of it, and ultimately the scene is about Sylvanas trying to find closure with what happened to her and where she ended up since then.
Or the Dragonmaw quests in DF most people praised, despite it coming from a former torturer’s PoV, for a more recent example.
I would kindly ask what you are on about? Other media?
Sure, if you are a fan of a TV series, you can skip parts you dislike.
I got my mother into the old GoT show. She loves it - but she would always fast forward through the “Wildling” parts. After John Snow gets captured. The Wildlings disgusted her and she found that red head lady highly irksome. I thought it was funny that she really disliked the Wildlings so much.
If you are watching a movie, you can skip parts you find distasteful.
But an MMORPG video game, where you Play a Role? A repeatable quest that gets cycled in and out, that can gate personal progression unless they are completed?
Suggesting people just skip stuff that might gate personal progression that they would normally be happy to do, does not seem a wise ethos to maintain in a subscription based video game. Other media are quite simply other media.
Unlucky. Plot-mandated atrocities just don’t hit the same for me after the entire Horde faction was made party to Warchief Killhope’s canonical genocide. Pity the Twitter outrage didn’t compel them to walk that garbage back too.
The difference is that they wanted Warchief Sylvanas killing hope and genociding to be a surprise!
/facepalms
So we weren’t exactly sure who was burning the tree until the release of her warbringer cartoon.
I think they could have made it much better and maybe more acceptable if they had gone straight to Alex and explained the situation instead of trying to maintain this “hush hush” sneaking around.
Chromie should have known better.
The PC should too, honestly. There should have been an option to convince Chromie that going to Alex was the best thing to do.
Or, maybe even an option to tell Chromie to do her own frickin’ dirty work.
/shrug
There’s also the fact Blizzard can’t even do safe themes right.
As has been said before, this particular quest with Alexstraza was so flippant in it’s tone that disrespectful is too meek to describe how it was being handled.
Compare this to, say, FFXIV for a moment.
Yotsuyu was introduced as an antagonist character, deranged in her hatred of her homeland, who played terrible games to torment and hurt the people of Doma. In time, we learn of her life. As a child, her parents died and she was forced to live with her abusive aunt and uncle. She was married off to an abusive noble, and after he died, she was sold to a pleasure house to settle his debts. Here, we see a victim of SA, and her story isn’t written off as, “Whoops! Someone had back luck. Well, just kill her and hope her next life is better,” or something. It’s given actual gravity and puts her actions in a whole new light.
Even if she does die and is remembered as a villain, her story results in change in the nation of Doma after its liberation. The abuse young women face was something that nation was forced to address.
That, is handling the subject respectfully. Even if she was made into a villain, her suffering gave it new context, and ultimately resulted in change and growth in the world at large. It was a dark, dark story, and it didn’t try to treat it any other way.
Which is nice and all but that’s not what Blizzard has done here. In fact they haven’t done anything to change the context or events of Alex’s imprisonment.
Quest was badly written to the point of being straight up corny, like every Dragonflight quest. Very funny to see Dragonflight fans pretending they mind badly-written quests to further their moral panic about RTS lore and the general tone of Warcraft.
No, they haven’t, and with how many characters and future events are tied to that event happening as it happened, I’d be surprised if they did.
You have to wonder. Someone actually made the conscious decision to make these quests.
EA are money greedy. Blizzard is flat out bad people. F*** em.
my face when killing civilians in Statholme, caverns of time
drakeok.jpg
my face when killing random npc from shady alliance secret service
brainless wojak rage.jpg
I don’t believe there was an intent to be malicious.
The Alexstrasza quest does focus on part of the lore, which was greatly expanded on by Richard A. Knaak (prior to him writing Day of the Dragon, which was first published in 2001, we didn’t know specific details about her capture, there were bits and pieces here and there, specifically in old game manuals, but nothing that implied SA) and if you look at Chromie’s overall behaviour and personality she does take serious events with a more… humorous, upbeat outlook.
I don’t think anyone at Blizzard was sitting there rubbing their hands together like an evil villain and saying things like: “Let’s have our subscribers do a quest where they are complicit in SA because that’ll show them! Mwahahaha!” they probably wanted to show this portion of the lore in the game, which unless you’ve read the books you likely wouldn’t know about (and most players I’d wager haven’t read the books) and they decided to use the Chromie quest chain as a way to have players see that part of the lore.
But in using Chromie and keeping to her upbeat, humorous attitude, they didn’t give the quest the seriousness it needed, and by making players actually take part in putting the Demon Soul back where it needs to be, they effectively made us an accessory to what happened to her, we became complicit. And that was going to fly about as well as a lead balloon.
Ideally if Blizzard had to show that part of the lore, they could have done so in a way that made the events far more serious, where Chromie didn’t joke about not telling Alexstrasza, and didn’t make the player character complicit in the events taking place, instead making sure that we assist Rhonin in freeing Alexstrasza when she’s meant to be freed, which the Infinites might want to disrupt, since if they eliminate Rhonin it upsets the timeline considerably.
This article reminded me of something that i completely forgot: Chromie wish to change the timeline to prevent Nozdormu to become Murozond.
This is far much bigger twist of their rules than saving Amber Kearnen.
What was the saying? “Do as I say, don’t do as I do.”
There’s a key difference between what Chromie wants to do, and what we are being asked to do.
Chromie wants to find a way ‘now’ to change the fate of Nozdormu. She is trying to desperately find a way to ensure that Nozdormu does not become Murozond in the future. Whereas what we’re doing, or rather, what Chromie is making sure we do, is preserve past events that have already occurred, which if changed could result in major alterations to the future as we know it.
If Amber Kearnen is spared from her fate in Dalaran during the events of Legion, it could lead to Detheroc being able to cause more damage as Matthias Shaw than he would have otherwise been able to, because it was Amber Kearnen’s death specifically that prompted Jorach Ravenholdt to investigate SI:7.
I’m wondering if this was something that was written before 2021 and was part of someone’s idea of how Amber Kearnen really died as part of an edgy plot twist to make the conflict between the Bronze and Infinite Dragonflights more grey.
It’s similar to the writing in early Shadowlands where the “good” Kyrians were the ones who vehemently defend the erasure of Kyrians’ memories of past lives and the “evil” Kyrians were the ones trying to stop this.
It doesn’t really make any sense as to why Amber Kearnen would suddenly be alive at this point, though maybe the original intention was that Amber Kearnen’s death is supposed to be a time paradox where it was assumed that she was assassinated by the Legion but in reality was assassinated by a future version of ourselves. I don’t think that explanation would make it any better, though.
I’m thinking this quest is one of the ones that’s going to receive changes in a future PTR build considering the implications of a time paradox where the player character is the real killer of Amber Kearnen and not the Burning Legion.
Initially she was assassinated by SI:7 agents under the orders of Detheroc, who was posing as Matthias Shaw.
However the Infinite flight, who have repeatedly attempted to change the past to suite their own ends, spared Amber (likely by assassinating the assassins who were supposed to kill her) so Chromie sends us back to ensure that Amber Kearnen dies like she’s supposed to.
If Chromie manage to prevent Nozdormu to become Murozond:
No Murozond → No Infinite Flight → No Caverns of Time events meaning no war through Time and Space.
This is a very serious alteration of the past, present and future that could lead to numerous temporal paradoxes.
It’s several times bigger than Kearnen alive or Alexstrasza freed sooner.
Somewhere, i expect that Chromie fail and understand that Nozdormu becoming Murozond is a necessary evil to avoid the same negatives consequences as if we don’t do her daily tasks.
Ah, yes. One of ::checks notes:: … three? Alliance characters die in fifteen irl years and we must absolutely revert it.
Good lord, we have the constant criticism of Blizzard in that they take way too soft an approach to their writing, lowest common denominator, non-offensive writing
And the moment we have anything that makes the player feel any sort of conflict we yell at them too. No wonder the writers are a neurotic, panicked, shell-shocked mass.