Oh, I expect the Earthen to be mostly forgotten when this expansion is over. But the expansion isn’t over yet.
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I haven’t read the story. But so far, in game, We have had a minor Alliance character pulled out of obscurity to match with Gazlowe. And, of course, Gazlowe himself doesn’t go report to a Horde character, but an Alliance character.
So clearly, stories will never feature the Horde, unlike what has become par-for-the-course for Alliance.
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I think with Sylvanas and the Forsaken there was a fork in the road and the cdev chose the mustache twirl option.
Sylvanas and the Forsaken were okay because they were helping the Horde keep the Alliance in check while trying to kill the most evil person in Azeroth at the time. All the while fighting their inner demons, the curse of undeath.
Edit:
This is WOW; you would be hard pressed to convince me that using a plague on your enemies is somehow more evil than throwing a meteor sized fireball at your enemy setting them ablaze.
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the bias is real but the shills still deny it exists.
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I don’t wanna derail this too much, but this statement doesn’t actually make sense. I do get the point of what you’re saying. “A nation being ‘democratic’ doesn’t make it necessarily good.” But still, if you’re going to use the broad term “authoritarian,” as an exeception then you’re pretty much indrectly saying “All non-democracies are evil,” since if a nation isn’t “democratic,” how can it also not be “authoritarian?”
That’s right. If Blizzard wants the Horde to become evil again, they’ll just have every single member of the Horde council vote on it instead of a Warchief. I’m sure you’d be excited to kill more Horde leaders.
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I’ve seen you around the forums for a while now, and sometimes I wonder if you are meant to be in the RP forum instead. We are all humans, just playing a game and trying to rationalize lore written by other humans who don’t think deeply about every bit of content they put into the game as we do.
Really though, the problem all stems from how WoW was set up at the start. It came from the Warcraft RTS series, in which the story was told through the eyes of several key figures/characters with numerous faceless, expendable units. When WoW came out, all those Hero units we fell in love with became big name NPCs/World leaders while the faceless unit became our playable character.
Simple stories and questlines compared to today, where most of the adventure and nostalgia we remember about them come from the long and convoluted journey it took us to complete the quests. It worked back then because… well the developers never really intended the game to work, they were just throwing things in. Thats why we had corrupted Ashrbinger, pretty much all of Burning Crusade, and so on.
Then when they saw that the game wasn’t going to fail, they were like “Oh poop, I guess we actually have to start focusing on the story and world.” The problem then became balancing the importance of the player character, Who many are happy just being faceless,non important grunts, with the fact that they had been involved in so many important events in the games history. So they go back to the Warcraft RTS, your character doesn’t really ‘exist’ and it is one of the Hero Units who lead the day, is there in the big room talking to the big bad.
They show up in the cinematic, they are the ones who give us all the exposition about events, etc. It is the writers going, “okay this is going to be our vehicle for moving the plot.”
Buuuuut unfortunately because the writers are human, and sometimes ideas shift or threads don’t come up until later. Or even there are multiple writers who have their own ideas and takes on thigns and want to go in a different direction. The Character changes from being a core part of the story and having direct ties and motivation, to also occasionally just being token representation of a playable race’s interest to what is going on.
Example: Genn and Sylvanas. Both clearly have their own desires and motivations at certain points in the story. At other times, they are shown to more or less be there to show the support/interest of their specific faction/race and don’t do much else besides that. Tyrande is another great example. Is she here on a personal vendetta or quest? Or is she here solely to show Night Elf support.
Because the writers use both so interchangeably, we often see the same characters far too often for certain stretches of time - only to never seen them again for years. They have their favorites, or see a new shiny toy and go ‘lets use this one’.
So yes, I moved beyond it because I see how it is a product made by humans, and I know how humans can be. I know trying to balance WoW’s large roster of characters with the idea that the Player has to be involved but also not too involved or important is absolutely insane and I certainly could NOT do a better job of it.
I don’t speak for others, i only speak for myself. And as speaking for myself, can you drop the RP of being a horde fanatic for a bit, or at least tone it down? We’re all the same here, just fans of a game and trying to make Lore work when the people writing the lore didn’t even think of that.
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I used to be a fan then Blizzard started removing all the stuff I liked and now only meme leaders are left who had never a impact on the story and weren’t present in the RTS titles.
I would have to hard disagree here.
I know people have mentioned somewhere that Blizzard had talked about retconning the stuff with battle for Undercity but im not finding in anywhere.
True, why I say no ones really “good” in this story just different shades of evil.
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Putress and Varimathras are the architects of the wrathgate not Sylvanas.
Then maybe the term isnt authoritarian(because honestly all governments, even democratic ones, have a degree of authoritarian nature baked into it). Maybe the better term is a repressive government.
I am going to take issue with the “so that.” That phrasing implies that the goal was killing them, and then they were made villains to do it.
Blizzard talked before both Cata and BfA about the Horde ‘finding itself’ and wrestling with the sins of the past. At the end of MoP they even indicated they did not feel they had landed the story. So, both expacs it looks like the goal was the wrestle with the evil of the past and reject it.
The problem is, someone came up with a bad idea that if the Horde started the ‘old ways’ and then turned against it would tell that story. And having a Warchief go off the deep end was a quick, lazy, and easy way to do it. Garrosh and Sylvanas were already pushing the line (Garrosh warmongering and Sylvanas lack of remorse). They made easy targets to become villains. It was a bad idea they took the easy way of implementing. The deaths of Garrosh and banishment of Sylvanas were outgrowths of that original bad idea, not the goal.
What someone might do that you don’t know about doesn’t make them a villain to you yet. She was not a villain to the Horde.
Very much no. Gallywix was an antagonist the the Goblin players from the get go. Sylvanas was edgy and potentially dangerous, but she was not doing anything to the Horde.
No, she always had that potential. Not guaranteed. There were other paths they could have taken her.
One of the questline in Vanilla was a human trying to warn the Horde the Forsaken were up to something shady. He was assassinated by the Horde player under the direction of one of the forsaken.
The fact Thrall suddenly had Korkron in Undercity after Wrath gatetells me Thrall wasnt as aware of all of Sylvanas’ dealing as he probably should have been.
What you’re saying does not in any way contradict my own statement. Garrosh being turned villain was for the purpose of the Horde “finding itself” in turning against him, defeating him and presumably killing him (until they got the idea to just have him do a WoD and die then instead). Both situations can be true; they are not mutually exclusive. Turning him villain so he can be killed can be (and was) the means and method of “the Horde finding itself.”
This applies to Sylvanas as well. Her Cata portrayal was 100% setting up a villain arc. Everything we saw from Silverpine through to Hillsbrad and WPL is highlighting that Sylvanas is going way too far, is going against Horde morals, and is in fact part of the “itself” the Horde needs to “find again.” That this arc got no resolution until she actually became an expac villain changes literally nothing; she was still made to become an outright and open villain, with the eventual intent that she be defeated. And that is exactly how things played out.
You like to talk about Blizzard’s stated intent, as if that should be factored in to discussions about how things ended up actually playing out. I do not agree with that premise.
If Blizzard suddenly made Hunters so OP that they could two-shot fully geared out members of every other class, their intent not to so overtune the class doesn’t change how an Arena match plays out.
If Blizzard made a raid boss so vastly undertuned that ultra-casuals like me could easily join a pug and down the boss on Mythic difficulty, thier intent not to make such an easy boss doesn’t take away my achievement or possible gear.
Why should their story intent verses what their story actually played out to be have more relevance?
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I do not remember that quest myself, so I can’t speak to it specifically.
But, up to something shady doesn’t mean something that would hurt the Horde. Just something the rest of the Horde leadership would not approve of. You know, something like developing a new blight.
Also, by your description of the quests, Horde didn’t know about it.
Or he thought she was not in as much control of the Forsaken as she claimed. They were put there after she lost control of Undercity after all.
I agreed with most of your comments. It was just the “so that” part I raised issue with. It confuses cause and effects. Turning them into villains caused them to then be killed/banished. They were not turned into villains in order to kill them.
If everyone was just discussing just what happened and not applying some intent, that would be fair. But that is not what happens. The ‘Blizzard hates my faction’ narrative gets thrown around a lot. You see people spreading those narratives, or derivatives of them. Those false narratives about intent color people’s view about things. That is how you get people thinking Gallywix being a boss is somehow a way of punishing Horde players. Or like claiming Undermine is really just Blizzard throwing them a bone so they can get back to the Alliance. Etc., etc.
That narrative gets tiring. Maybe you personally did not intend to say Blizzard was taking aim at the Horde. If so, I apologize for taking it that way. I maintain the phrasing was not accurate. But I don’t mean to take any aim at you.
I would say developing a blight that can potentially wipe out all living things is something that could potentially hurt the Horde. And ultimately it did hurt it.
Yeah, plus there were Forsaken questgivers who indicated the Plague was ultimately intended to kill everything. One of the persistent undercurrents in Vanilla was that the new Plague was being developed for use against the Scourge and then the living in general, which would ultimately include the other races of the Horde once the Forsaken no longer needed them. In particular when an early (ostensibly Forsaken) leveling player is sent to test a sample on some NPC’s, the questgiver indicates that its results will be a preview of what the Dark Lady intends for all of Azeroth.
It’s also why the “holy grail” that her Royal Apothecary Society sought (though they never managed it) was their own Scourge-type of Plague of Undeath that would kill the living and then raise them all as more Forsaken. People like to ignore that a big motivator behind Sylvanas and the Forsaken (as well as the source of their name) was a hatred of the Scourge and the living, with the Horde being just an ally of convenience that would be discarded and then targeted as another living threat once the Plague was perfected, the Scourge, Scarlets and Alliance destroyed/raised and the need for that convenience ended.
The betrayal of Varimathras and Putress arguably upended Sylvanas’ longer-term intentions because it left her simultaneously under more scrutiny by and more dependent upon the Horde than she ever wanted to be, a situation that was then compounded by the events preceding Cataclysm saddling her with a new Warchief who outright disliked and didn’t trust her.
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Huh its been a while since I did Vanilla so I have more or less fogotten how much shadier they were.
It didn hurt the Horde until Afrasiabi took over and looked for a way to get rid of Sylvanas. But he is gone and Metzen will bring her back and make her a hero again.
It’s been a while because that never happened. You and I both know Sylvanas had one goal until cdev decided to go mustache twirl with Sylvanas. Huh, was my first reaction too lol.
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