What does Wyrmrest Accord think of BFA?

Although Island Expeditions were a bit of a letdown I do agree that they get too much hate. Not because they’re great, but because randomly generated content has a TON of potential.

The rush-rush pacing of Island Expeditions sort of ruins the potential exploration aspect of random content. But if they take what they have developed on Islands and work on, say… randomly generated, run at your own pace dungeon crawls… that could be extremely cool. Exploration-focused procedural content is something I love, and though Island Expeditions don’t quite deliver that they do lay the groundwork.

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I’m a bit divided on this because, seeing as I don’t care for the faction war in the first place, it’s sort of a good thing that I don’t have to interact with it in the old world. But I think even I would find it less bad, seeing as it apparently has to be relevant anyway, if they would at least make it seem like it matters.

When it’s confined entirely to Kul Tiras, Zandalar, and Arathi, it doesn’t feel like it matters. Blizzard says it does – and other people here have more eloquently described the issue with Blizzard telling us what the story is supposed to be – but it’s so far removed from “home base” that it might as well be on another planet.

When I first heard about the incursions of next patch, I kind of assumed that they would be Legion Prepatch-style old world content. But no.

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Nah I getcha, I could also see it getting stale REAL FAST. Especially if it was a literal repeat of the Legion event mechanics and went on threw the whole expansion but at least leveling alts would be easy peasy :sunglasses::sparkles:

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Grinding isn’t the problem. The time gating is. I don’t mind grinding out kills, repeatable quests, or other things. What I do mind is doing a set number, and then being told to come back tomorrow. Waiting is not a game mechanic Blizzard.

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I personally hate it. I think this is going to be a sleeper expansion for me. They simultaneously have nothing to do while obsessing over making sure the things you can do, you don’t do too fast, which just results in milling around waiting for nothing.

Worst starter PvP season in a while and the fact they let some specs - let alone entire classes - just go mostly unplayable until a month before it ends is a huge joke on the “We care about PvP this expansion” comments.

War Mode is boring. The only time there’s any action is when someone from WrA or MG manages to drag a 40 man Tichondrius raid or something to our shard after dying, and dying, and dying and being so bad they need Off Worlders to save them.

Uldir has no narrative hook for me and the color palette puts me to sleep.

Dungeons were clearly designed with spectator events like the MDI in mind and got old fast.

Island Expeditions are surprisingly the most fun for me, but that’s because they remind me of old Challenge Rifts in D3.

Allied Races means nothing to me because I main two Death Knights.

Tanking on any class other than Blood DK feels like an exercise in self-directed penance and so they’re nerfing Blood DK without actually improving the others. While we already have one of the most crippling tank droughts for casual / semi casual content in a long time.

Warfronts were good but replayability isn’t there at 340 items. Hopefully Heroic actually is worth running.

Not having any control over the forward progression of my character other than the occasional +2 item level on my neckpiece is utterly ignorant game design. No combination of Exalted reputations or professions allows you to give yourself a leg up above 340/few 350s which has already become the epitome of the welfare item level. They’re barely rectifying this in the next patch (professions) and just collecting your weekly “Ohh, better luck next time!” currency like they did for Legendaries towards the end to buy items off the upcoming vendor wasn’t fun then and isn’t fun now.

Azerite equipment is the same traits, single spot perks, artifact abilities, and talent points they’ve torn out of the game, re-wrapped and handed back to us going “This is new!”

Recruiting “Doers” on the Alliance side is a nightmare and more and more guilds are slowly, quietly going off life support when it comes to larger group content.

I’m interested to see how they walk back from this one. I’ll believe them when they say they aren’t deliberately driving the game into the ground because I think that would require a degree of ruthless intelligence and end goal I don’t think they’re capable of, but I do genuinely believe the World of Warcraft team is being horribly mismanaged either from a middle management or upper management level that only cares about MAUs to show investors to get just one more year of salary than “We make games we want you to want to play.”

Bonus, I’m also just sick of Sylvanas. I never found her to be this amazingly complex character from playing the games and she was right up there with Illidan on “Parts of WarCraft 3 I Hated” and to basically have her skirt ‘we killed better characters for less’ over and over was confusing until the last interview where Afrasiabi practically rolled his head back and moaned thinking about how great she is to write. Now I just know she’s not going anywhere for awhile and probably never will just slowly grinds down any hope that the story is going to get better. So it’s just a gameplay game. Except the gameplay is getting pretty stale to me so…

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Why though? I thought the three plot lines on the alliance island and Jaina and her mom were pretty great. Better than the disjointed loa tales on zandalar.

Probably because it’s the same thing it always is. Horde controls the story, Horde gets to make decisions, Horde gets choices, Horde gets the first and final word.

No matter how good the Alliance story is, it’s an afterthought by design. Hard to feel good about that.

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The Alliance isn’t allowed to win or be right, has their favorite characters do complete 180-turns into villainhood, and has their resources ignored when its convenient, and it’s only in BfA have all of these things been so explicit.

The Alliance gets totally crushed at Teldrassil and then would have been totally crushed again had we not had Jaina Ex Machina come to our rescue, and even then, Undercity was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Brennedam got totally crushed, and our war campaign ends with us doing the Horde a favor by killing the elf vampire that was killing their troops.

Where are the draenei in this, with their giant spaceship? Shut up, it’s not important.

8.1 is supposed to be the Alliance rallying and coming back with a vengeance - except its not. They want us to believe that Tyrande and the night elves are going to take back their lands, except they made it a warfront, which means it’s going to be locked in a stalemate for the rest of the expansion. Any gains the night elves could theoretically make will be immediately erased as soon as the Horde fill up their Magic War Bar.

Dazar’alor is supposed to be a victory - and we at least kill an enemy leader! - but we’re not allowed to pursue it. “We would be just as bad as Sylvanas to attack the Horde while they’re grieving,” say Anduin and Jaina, the Big Ones In Charge.

It’s difficult to overstate how nonsensical that is. No one who cares about ending their war and protecting their realm and has any concept of warfare would say that. No one who had innocent citizens of her homeland burned to death would say that. There’s only one reason they wrote that - because we’re less than six months into the expansion and there’s no expansion without the war, and no amount of squinting and stretching Anduin and Jaina’s personalities to fit that can hide how blatant it is.

As a man much smarter than me said, “when verisimilitude fails, authenticity is no excuse.”

We are also slowly having all the characters we like either go evil or get put on the chopping block. Yrel is evil now. Thalyssra is evil to us now. Delaryn Summermoon, our prepatch questgiver, is evil now. Alleria is on the chopping block because of the grape juice she drank, and if the line in Tyrande’s scenario is any indication, the Night Warrior will either kill her or make her evil too.

It’s like they introduced all these female characters just to turn around and make us hate them. Hmm.

Both factions have plenty of reasons to dislike their story, but the way they address the Horde’s complaints is markedly different. The Horde get to have a central tension with branching quests that they’ve indicated won’t just be a one-off thing. The Alliance gets minor tweaks to make it slightly more palatable I guess.

And then they get on the stage at Blizzcon and try to dunk on us for being bad and having terrible characters. Gimme a break.

None of these problems are new - and trust me, I’d love to be told that they’ve all been addressed in datamined stuff I just didn’t see - but BfA is the first time they’ve been so explicit.

We’ve seen the man behind the curtain, and it’s Ion wearing a rubber Grom mask.

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Ah yes. Horde corrupted the tidesages, horde created the coven, and horde controls the ashvane company.

Gotcha. :ok_hand:

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They actually do corrupt a tidesage, so you’ve got that going for you.

But however you may feel, the Horde began this expansion and the Horde will get to end it. This is objective fact and there is nothing that can be done about that.

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Honestly I’m Horde and I don’t know who or what I’m supposed to be grieving

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You’re supposedly meant to mourn Rastakhan, except we know he was always only there to leave a power gap for Talanji to fill… in addition to the fact that he sold his daughter’s soul to Bwonsamdi or whatever-the-hell he did.

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Because I think I ran out of room: the zone plots were kind of fun if unremarkable, and the Proudmoore storyline was nice. But having one nice and three inoffensive stories doesn’t excuse the problems of the A-plot of the expansion - you know, the thing they were getting us to pay $50 for - and it’s uncertain how much time the senior devs on the WoW team spent worrying about those plots.

When Alliance writing is left to zone and quest designers, it’s pretty good. But the more important it is - the more the senior devs have a hand in things - the worse it gets.

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They rose one (per his own request), not corrupted them. There’s a significant difference between the two and you’re being disingenuous by conflating them.

I could just as easily say the horde storyline was an afterthought as well. We have several big name characters irreversible killed or deleted for no other reason than to shock us. We’re never allowed to act until the villain has already won. The three zones have three different villains, one of whom disappears after the quest line and the other two become raid bosses with no story resolution.

Speaking of story, were fed the tale that the great seals are holding back an old god and if the seals fail it’s unleashed. We are given no option to keep the seals from failing. The villains easily win and the old gods take over.

No wait, I mean the seals fail, nothing happens, and the story is resolved in a plot-less raid with no cutscenes or relevant dialog.

The story is weak as eggshells on both sides. Alliance ain’t special.

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Half of the Horde probably barely knows who Rastakhan is lmao.

You’d think they meant grieving Undercity, although I guess that only affects the Forsaken and they can’t be sad anyway so Who Care. Actually… the destruction of Lordaeron would’ve been tragic for a lot of the Alliance, too. Hm.

Not really. The Horde is the preeminent force of evil and destruction in Azeroth. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that he was corrupted, similar to how we say those influenced by the Legion are corrupted.

You’ve unintentionally confirmed where the Horde’s privilege shines. It’s true that the protagonists aren’t allowed to act until the villain has already won. It’s also true that the Horde is the villain, guaranteeing future victories that the Alliance will not be permitted to participate in.

Teldrassil.

The Alliance get even less story than that, so.

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Yeah, that’s why it’s kind of just whatever. Who cares about Rastakhan? And grieving Undercity would be weird since it’s Sylvanas that destroyed it.

It’s just goofy all around.

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i’m liking it so far, i’m actually subscribe through this one unlike WoD.

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Quest and zone lore is good, overall story quality is bad. This is a concrete truth for every faction.

The difference is you’re holding the story up as a black and white win ratio, where the alliance story sucks because they lose, and the horde story is good because they win, as some sort of quality quantifier.

Bad story is bad story.

The Horde as a “lore character” of sorts began this expansion, makes active decisions, and yes, will most likely end it. I don’t argue that this doesn’t have pretty uninspiring consequences for the Alliance’s part in everything.

But again, I don’t see that Horde players have anything to be happy about if we don’t like the what the Horde began, don’t like the way it began that thing, and don’t enjoy the prospect of ending that thing (again, because it’s retreading a basic plot that we already did, except that last time was slightly less offensively packaged).

So I’m not sure if you’re trying to say that the writing favors the Horde as its own Blizzard-owned “character,” which it kind of does in that the Horde gets to do things – or if the writing favors Horde players, which it doesn’t. When players objected to their faction and warchief being written as an expansion villain for the second time, Blizzard lied, said that wasn’t what they were doing, and then did it anyway.

Are you saying that Teldrassil was a Horde victory? From my perspective, Teldrassil was another example of the villains winning while players couldn’t do anything, except that this time, we also get to be “responsible” for it happening. We didn’t even get so much as a dialogue option to object. Doesn’t seem like much of a win to me.

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