I’m very baffled why they’d think making the Forsaken playable Scourge is a good idea.
We already have that. It’s called the Knights of the Ebon Blade. They hang out in a Necropolis and everything. There’s your playable Scourge.
Meanwhile the Forsaken use Abominations as shock troops and guards sure but otherwise tend to have a more unique military. It’s actually not that far off from what you’d expect humans to use. Melee infantry, sharpshooters, combat medics, heavy calvary. But augmented with spookster stuff like vampire bats, death fog, banshees, etc.
Like I’ve seen people sympathetic to the Forsaken say they should get a Necropolis. But I don’t want that. If the Forsaken were going to get a flying fortress I’d take one of those WW1 armored bomber zeppelins and stylize the hell out if it with skulls, eerie floodlights / lanterns, and bat like tattered wing sails because aerodynamics just aren’t something you worry about in this setting.
I could just picture the bottom being filled with bats already hanging upside down so airmen would just hop on them and drop as the bay doors open. Man that’d be cool. Damnit I want that now.
They’re way more interesting than the Scourge imho. Some of these new writers just strike me as just incurious and uncreative. Just rehashing old ideas or using ones from other projects they worked on with no time spent on imagining new things with the pieces we already have.
Teldrassil is like the poster child for creative bankruptcy. All flash, no passion, no substance. Just marketing stunts.
I thought for the forsaken when they started giving them the kind of dark gothic style building, in like wotlk, instead of the ruins they were using before that was a good fit for them. It also served as a way to distance them from the scourge we were fighting in that expansion, while giving them new buildings instead of just squatting in ruined buildings. I thought going forward from that they were going to lean into the cultural identities of the races more and give them all more unique and cool feelings, but it reality it has been the opposite.
I think at the time too when GoT was popular (I’ve never seen a fanbase evaporate as quickly as it did after season 8, which Danuser though was brilliant) they wanted a similar shocking moment to maybe the Red Wedding, but they didn’t want to do any of the things that lead to it and they didn’t want to follow up on it like saying “Tyrande got her revenge for the night elves in 8.1” it’s the idea of “We did that story! Why would we worry about it after a patch or so? We need to move on to the next thing”.
I guess going back to the expansion of the forsaken identity in wotlk, you could say the devs are doing the exact opposite in terms of races in general. Where instead of building and expanding on a new identity and moving the forsaken away from squatting in run down castles, the writers are regressing all the races into soulless blobs without much of a unique identity that people have loved about the warcraft universe, the variety, not just everyone being stormwind humans because it’s less of a hassle to write, and the writers are now just squatting in the lore ruins they created, instead of expanding on it. Now the world just seems so much smaller with only a few main characters mattering while ignoring the races and their cultures in general.
Agree with the sentiment, BUT… objectively, this is very much like a No True Scotsman Fallacy. Warcraft is large, it contains multitudes, for multitudes of players. Or at least it should. I wonder what the exact cause of the fall is- did the people who took over make content that only they cared about, or did they try to hard to please everyone only to water it down to the point they pleased no one?
It doesn’t need to be hatred. Apathy can do even more damage. Those that hate at least care.
Yeah, tbh I never felt the devs hate the night elves. They just flatly don’t care about them either way. Why else would they be shocked at the outrage over Teldrassil? If they hated the night elves, Teldrassil and most importantly the outrage would be the point. They wouldn’t be shocked; they’d’ve been elated, because the outrage is the goal.
They were simply ambivalent to the night elves.
They def hated Thrall’s Horde though, and nobody can tell me different.
This is probably entirely benefited by hindsight take on my part - but I’ve never understood the Alliance vs Horde. That isn’t to say I don’t understand the idea of factions. I get it, somewhat, but it feels like the “Alliance vs Horde” dynamic meant everything had to be shoehorned into two sides.
Again this is probably entirely due to the benefit of hindsight, but my opinion is that it eliminated some dynamic options. I’m a Data Engineer - so I do programming, play with data, and basically nothing that relates to a front-end experience (so I am super unqualified to speak about WoW programming-wise but I’ll do it anyway). Over the years I’ve made my programming more “dynamic” to allow for flexibility as situations changed (and that means, by definition, it was rather static initially). I get how that happens (I also have to update other folks’ old code sometimes and thankfully it wasn’t just me).
I could absolutely envision scenarios where there were factions such as the Cenarion Circle, Earthen Ring, the Alliance, the Horde, Night Elves, Knights of the Ebon Blade, the Forsaken, the Illidari, etc. I can’t say I know entirely how it would all function, but I think the two faction dynamic was/is a mistake. I don’t think the Forsaken as a playable race are a bad thing, I just think they suffer from being a star-shaped peg being stuffed into a square hole.
Tbh the book Red Wedding was better. Robb Stark breaks his promise to the Frays not for young love, but out of a sense of honor because he sleeps with a woman from a lesser house in a moment of weakness. The honorable thing to do is marry her so that’s what he does. So his death mirrors his father’s and helps nail down the Lawful Stupid idea.
But even in the show there’s still a clear cause and effect. The Frays aren’t just bastards for the hell of it. Robb Stark still broke an agreement and in a much more selfish and stupid way in the show.
WTF was the cause and effect for Teldrassil? That wasn’t some downfall caused by hubris or arrogance or any wrongdoing of their own. They just got sucker punched and stomped in a 6 on 1 fight. What’s the moral of that story? Try not to get jumped?
They went for the Red Wedding and gave us Season 8 instead. Only I think that’s unfair to GoT season 8 as it least had a few ideas I could see working if they had more time to cook.
Teldrassil and UC were just casualties in an advertising campaign that never really felt like part of the story. Seriously 95% of the Battle For Azeroth is fought in regions we’re just now seeing and aren’t at all relevant to the battles that started the war.
It really did feel like we were supposed to have been drawn into a conflict by an existing Zandalari and Kul Tiran one that our existing human and troll factions would naturally pull us into. That would lead us into Old God madness.
Instead we got this ridiculous war story that ends with Sylvanas blasting off like Team Rocket while screaming “SEQUEL HOOK”. And all that for what is widely regarded as the worst expansion in the game’s nearly 2 decade long history.
Its downright embarrassing and the idea any of them are pretending otherwise is just laughable.
Oh yeah, I’m not going to deny the book is far better than the show and gives a lot more nuance to the situations, but I’ll give that a pass because it is a show and they can’t really do the book. They had to like cut plotline, and even merge characters, kind of started falling apart the further they got from the books in the later seasons, culminating with season 8 when there was really no book to follow anymore (just maybe general ideas of what was going to happen from GRRM).
But going back to the red wedding, there were reasons for that with a reason for it happening, the political intrigue, the backstabbing, the slights and the value of image (like Tywin’s image basically holding back the debt collectors who immediately came knocking once he was gone, the power of how you’re perceived in this world matters a lot), reasons that seemed to be entirely lost on the wow writers.
These events had meaning and weren’t just shocking for the sake of it. Teldrassil was to try to shock people in an attempt to spark interest in the franchise via similarities to other popular media “look we have GoT style “”“shock””" value/we have marvel’s thanos and he’s getting the infinity sigils", it’s inherently creatively bankrupt and just trying to follow a trend instead of creating their own and they don’t really understand what was good about that shock.
Then we get “Tyrande got her revenge for the night elves” in 8.1 because they just want to move on to the next thing. They do these things thoughtlessly because it’s something they liked at the time before they move onto the next thing.
Why Cata Thrall hate, he is no worse the current Jaina. That being said I agree with you about Metzen and his passion for wow. I do not know if he favored horde but at least he kept faction parity.
That parity is long gone, horde is only ever used for faction conflict. It only gets any sort of development for faction conflict. Other then allied races and zappy boy the horde doesn’t have any positive development from end of mop to shadowlands.
The lore is a mess and Tyrande and night elfs are just the tip of the ice berg. This world end threats are ruining the world, they need to stop and focus on the world of warcraft. It is okay to have stories that focus on just 1 zones. I think blizzard does it’s best work in those situations.
I don’t like current Jaina either, I thought she had some good moments in some of the cinematics with her mom in bfa, but that was about it. I don’t think Jaina has any kind of point in SL, she’s just there because she is a recognizable character.
Going back to Thrall, I didn’t like the wedding, I didn’t like him being the one to uncover Benedictus as a cultist, I didn’t like him being the key and the only one who could shoot the dragon soul, I didn’t like the ending where all the dragons were huddled around cheering on his wife being pregnant. It was awful. I know Metzen said he wanted that added because he was going through a lot of stuff at the time, but it still felt out of place and bad and it’s not going to make me like Cata thrall.
On the same note alliance only gets any kind of development when it’s reacting to the horde (incompetently of course, such as forgetting the forsaken use the plague). The horde moves the story, the alliance is just kind of there reacting. I wouldn’t say there has been anything positive in the alliance story for a long time either.
Yeah, I would love if they just went back to world building instead of these big world ending threats, I’ll say I thought MoP had great side stories, the main story was terrible, but I liked learning about the pandarien, mantid, mogu, I thought the thunder king was great and probably should have been the end boss etc.
I think revendreth is a great zone and a good story, it could be because I like those kind of characters, but on the same note I though Ardenwald was rather soulless in terms of story and that was my most anticipated zone and I love the fairies and even their theater (I even suffered as an ardenweld ret paladin instead of bastion). I even thought drustvar was good, so I think the potential is there for good world building, but the “main stories” have been absolutely terrible and yeah if they could move away from those world ending threats and move over towards smaller racial/zone stories the lore would probably improve greatly.
Tbh I think the Forsaken’s biggest problem is the Alliance doesn’t have an answer to them.
I’m 99% sure the Worgen were supposed to. Because in Silverpine they are presented as a match for the Forsaken. Even giving Sylvanas pause with their sheer ruthless brutality. No easy feat, that.
But Blizz just wouldn’t pull the trigger on that. Because heaven forfend the boys in Blue have even one faction that doesn’t appeal to the boyscout demographic. And as a result the Worgen have been just kinda there ever since.
Maybe the Mechagnomes could give it a whirl. Those things creep me right the hell out. Bite sized body horror borg.
It does feel like they don’t want anyone on the alliance kind of being ferocious, the worgen definitely seemed to serve that purpose but they were essentially just shipped off to darnassus and forgot about after their starting zone.
This goes back to wanting everyone in the alliance to just be humans because it’s easier to write. Initially I thought the night elves after teldrassil would have served the purpose of being a more ferocious opponent, especially after the terror of darkshore cutscene, which is my favorite Malfurion appearance. Because in my head when Teldrassil was announced, I thought there was no way night elves wouldn’t play an important part in BfA…then they were forgotten immediately afterwards with just the pointless warfront.
My idea was also kind of eco terrorists who essentially turn the bodies of their fallen invadors into trees. I guess the botani did that kind of thing in WoD, but I thought that was a good way for them to recycle. I thought that was what the night warrior was going to be and the continued follow up to teldrassil, instead of a dropped plotline that essentially accomplishes nothing.
Interesting to note is that Maiev I guess originally considered for the night warrior, as the avatar of vengeance would have made sense, since that would be a call back to wardens anyway.
“We certainly considered” making Maiev, the notoriously vengeful Warden, the Night Warrior instead, he says. Maiev had a full story arc in Legion with Illidan and the Vault of the Wardens, however, so the writing team decided that Tyrande and Malfurion needed a time to shine
But it’s again something they change, and it essentially weakens Tyrande who was strong in her own right before this power (a power which I will say nerfed her as it’s used to accomplish nothing).
Instead we just get renewal Tyrande after she accomplished nothing, without any of the story where she reflects on what happens and weight of the pain and choices, something Syvlanas got multiple times in game as well as in a nice long book about her. Because we can’t have alliance characters being anything other than borderline irrationally forgiving.
Some of those things should of been horde only. I do not get why thrall’s wife was shown, she hasn’t shown up in the story or his kid. Guess horde characters just get ignored. I personally never seen a character out shine like Jaina does. In shadowlands while baine and thrall are hurt and useless. She is the one fighting, teleporting and showing images to us. Centimetric in the battle for undercity as an example, Andiun should of bubbles and Aleeria should of teleported them out. She hogs and out does other characters and classes around her, the girl has no equal. Characters continuously tell us how strong she is, I am wondering why? how is she more special then mages of races that eat sleep and breathe arcane. There are examples of this in shadowlands as well. Like showing images of what was going on should of been a shaman or spirit walker thing.
This is not true, alliance gets all sorts of development out side of factions wars as most netural content is alliance centric. Alliance got Turalyon, Alleria, Draenei lore in legion. Best part most alliance characters do not die. They become more important over time like Magnie and Bolvar. I can go on and on here with alot more examples. As a I mentioned outside of faction wars horde pc plays alliance story. Since most of the story is under alliance characters it is alliance development. Look at the legion class halls were mostly alliance centric with alliance characters. Look at shadowlands most places are alliance centric and alliance characters out number the 2 horde characters. Alliance is always involved in the store in a faction war or not.
This last war I can argue the alliance started it when Gen attack out warcheif. But horde has to be pure evil thus are the ones being aggressive and the good alliance is just reacting.
If you mean, we’re all mostly forced to play a Human Centric story, than sure. Because blizzard has no idea the alliance is made up of more than just humans.
We don’t have it nearly as good as some horde posters like to claim we do.
sure humans are part of the alliance. I be happy if we just had something close to parity in natural story. I do not want to feel like i am playing the alliance outside of faction wars.
One thing I have noticed, when blizzard writes humans they have no down side or bad side to them. They are also better then anyone at what they do.
I would love to see more drawf centric stories or night elfs where we are not rescuing them in neutral settings. More than anything I would love some horde settings and content in neutral content.
And I don’t want human potential shoved down my throat in every single variation of content alliance side. Just, it’s this nonsense that alliance players have it soo good, needs to really stop.
Two of the races, Worgen and Night Elves, the dev team is completly apathetic towards and the gnomes and dwarves as a whole might as well not even be in the alliance with the little they actually do in the story.
So, can we stop? Please? And realize we’re angry too?
It probably should have been horde only I agree, it was pointless to have like Tyrande and Malfurion celebrating Thrall’s wedding while Garrosh was in the process of burning down Ashenvale.
But to the point of Jaina, she is just there as a teleport bot, she’s not really like integral to the story. Why is she there? Just to be a taxi service? (Queue her lugging Baine and the PC around in her tornadoes in the ZM intro questing). Her showing up to turn the tide of battle also ruined the alliance in general, why did the alliance not come prepared for the plague? It was for a “rule of cool” flying pirate ship Jaina, it makes the faction in general look worse.
Then also characters saying how strong someone is, is just more of Blizzards tell “don’t show” which is entirely what they did with the night warrior “oh the night warrior is so strong!” meanwhile needs to be saved by Malfurion in 8.1, why did Malfurion need to be there in her fight against Nathanos?
But back to Jaina again, what purpose did she really serve? She’s just kind of there and her worst showing was in ZM:
Jaina: I will NEVER trust her Jaina turns around in anger
Uther: Then trust in me
Jaina: Always Uther. Okay here’s the plan…
Her character really just serves no purpose, much like Baine. At least Thrall I guess had that moment with his mother, but he was mostly there because Draka was going to be important to the story, outside of that he is not relevant.
Well I would say neutral characters are no longer a part of the alliance. Just because a character is human doesn’t mean they are alliance. Khadgar helped out the horde by kicking Jaina out of Dalaran, while he turned a blind eye to Teldrassil. Neutral characters don’t help develop the alliance. If anything these neutral characters almost have to favor the horde, just like the CC not helping out in Ashenvale in Cata or BfA, these aren’t alliance aligned groups or people.
What exactly is Magni doing? Is he reflecting on his time as the former leader of Ironforge? Or is he mostly just trying to save the planet after getting turned into diamonds, they only randomly turned him into diamonds because of the Cairne vs Garrosh duel to mirror the horde losing that leader, it seemed like a pointless story and again written as a reaction to what was happening with the horde. His time in BfA wasn’t any kind of development for the dwarves or alliance.
It seems like your problem is more with neutral characters, if you don’t like the alliance that’s fine, but I’m not going to pretend alliance has got any kind of good developments in the past like 10 years and they mainly just react to what the horde does EXTREMELY badly, especially if you like any of the alliance races that aren’t human.
Like Jebus she forgives. The many, many sins of Sylvanas Windrunner. Not to mention the Horde. Blessed be Elune who sent her favored daughter into the maw and gave her the dark powers only to fail her and her favored children. So that the Banshee Queen maybe forgiven and the Horde by extension. May Tyrande’s story be as thus.
lol, but the sad fact is even though Tyrande is being extremely merciful, a lot of Sylvanas fans are still upset and angry with Tyrande that Sylvanas is going to help to fix just a tiny fraction of the damage she did.
I mean alliance characters have gotten power ups, alliance lore been explored like Draenei’s in legion. Alliance got their character back like Truylon and Alleria (Alleria should of been part of the horde, but whatever). Mean while horde has fewer characters, if we get a characters from the past they end up as raid bosses.
It is not just natural characters even natural settings are very alliance centric, 2 of the 4 zones in the shadowland are Ardenweald & Bastion. Horde has what 1 maybe, and that is a big maybe because I expected all of shadowlands to look like Maldraxxus. There are more friendly alliance shadowland npcs(characters who are deal and live in shadowlands).
About Thrall, so he is a shaman now… he was in the raid but when you quest with him he is a warrior.
Maybe it is faction bias, I just feel as if this team isn’t passionate and or doesn’t want to work on the horde story. Like what has Baine done, why is he there. When was the last time a horde character did anything heroic or cool. At least Tyrande has a story you can say a bad story but you can see their tried and actually put in effort. While Thrall and Baine its just meh. Thrall has 1 quest chain with him mom and it is not much.
They have shown her being op as well. She was the only one who kept escaping from the jailer. She leads our efforts saves Thrall and the other. Leaves frozen bodies in the intro, even latter when the city is attacked she is gunning them down. Visually you can see her being far stronger then the rest.
Same with Tyrande in shadowlands, she left behind trails of crops in the maw.
The draenei overall have been doing nothing since they were introduced in BC. Even in WoD, it was just alt draenei and even Yrel’s story was cut before we leave that place or what happened to our universe maarad being a warlord of draenei among all the orcs. Plus the only people who even get to interact with them again (negatively) are horde players.
But draenei were such a joke because they were afk forever other than their main accomplishment being helping the blood elves cleanse the sunwell, something the alliance has no access to. So it’s reasonable they get a tiny bit of lore in the last patch of the expansion when we go to their home world against the legion when their entire story has just been about fighting the legion. It wasn’t great, but at least they got talked about a little in the legion expansion (before being forgot about in BfA and shadowlands). Draenei don’t even have their heritage amor while their counterparts the blood elves got that and it looks like the blood elves are getting a second set.
Also about the zones, I don’t think Bastion is a alliance zone, I would say Ardenweld is closer to night elves despite there being no night elf leaders in ardenweld, like there is a horde leader in Maldraxxus, but it definitely leans more night elf despite the trolls stuff being htere as well as huln, while zero night elves living in the zone (shandris is not an ardenweld resident) are actually important. Is there even an important night elf npc living in Ardenweld that is even relevant like Huln? I don’t think so.
If you are considering Uther to make it a horde zone, then Kel’thuzad would make Revendreth a horde zone, but this doesn’t really seem like it.
Going back to “power ups” because I do see that a lot as a complaint, that or “demi-gods”, what do the power ups even do for the alliance? What did the night warrior do? These power ups are just kind of there, they aren’t developing the alliance, it’s just more “and goku got more powerful after this battle, but continues to do nothing”
But at the end I guess it’s just going to be “the grass is always greener” if you don’t really care that much about the opposite faction and just think the characters showing up is enough. You can hate getting hit with the villain bat in BfA, but that doesn’t mean the alliance players like having one of their races lose their home and go through a genocide, only to essentially do nothing about it and not really being allowed to fight back. They even tried to frame Tyrande in a way where she seems almost evil despite it being completely reasonable for her to be angry about genocide
You can see how they frame it, the more peaceful heroic music, everyone clapping and then the shift to the ominous music and tyrande being entirely justified in her anger (a kind of way I expect them to present her insanely merciful judgement to Sylvanas, ominous music etc.)
Everyone kills the maw red shirt, that’s nothing impressive. We don’t even know what Tyrande did in the maw aside from killing a few weaklings, that story is entirely cut, just like cutting out what happened to Tyrande from when Elune took her over and she just changed her mind, we didn’t get that Uther/Sylvanas moment where Sylvanas gets to reflect on what she did and come to a decision, we just get Elune talking to her sister and then tyrande changing her mind without being able to witness that story.
The night warrior did absolutely nothing and served no purpose to the story as a whole. It was actually insulting they even had it in there and it was something that seems to have been added just to ruin elune.
