Now we know why Dori’thur is always scowling at her.
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Sylvanas can be salvaged still and I hope to see her in Midnight.
Its gonna be rough, but if she can show up to save everybody at a critical moment in a way that doesn’t steal everyone else’s thunder, something along those lines, or maybe if we call on her? Idk something that’s not cringy or puts her in the spotlight too much and I think she could win people back.
Everyone’s just sick of her. She was in 3 expansion cinematics in a row as a main character like what in the world was Blizzard thinking???
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Because she is the best and Blizzard always loved her before Afrasiabi got his dirty hand on her story.
She was always a favorite, but not like a main character favorite. Her story was preservation of the Forsaken and it was badass. Warchief never should have been considered, at least not out of the blue like it was. “Many will not understand” yeah, cause it made no sense, Vol’jin.
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I think she grew on par with Jaina and Thrall now in terms of being a main character of the franchise.
I was reminded of this just now, as I pulled up the launcher to update the game. The big splash screen advertisement? Xal’atath holding the Dark Heart in front of a burning Dalaran.
It made me want to jump in and deal with the fallout of the destruction of the city I’ve spent so much time in - to check in with the survivors and see how they’re doing, gather items from the rubble, clean up the magical fallout it released.
But Dalaran is a tiny footnote in the overall expac. It’s physically limited to an out-of-the-way corner of Dorne, there’s like 5 named Kirin Tor questgivers scattered elsewhere around the map, and there’s some featureless no-name NPCs walking circles in the city.
(I haven’t done the Kirin Tor quest, just read about it - because I really wanted to do it on my mage, but I did the campaign on my hunter and the Harronir quest on my druid, and apparently you have to do both campaigns on a single character for that single character to unlock the Kirin Tor quest. And the campaigns were alright once, but they’re too boring for me to want to play them over again when I can just look up what happens.)
I wish that Dalaran was the focus of at least an entire zone. Like if the earthen were almost entirely underground, so the surface areas of Dorne could be mostly about the fallout of Dalaran - rubble scattered from one end of the island to the other, the zone towns/FPs being groups of Dalaran survivors pulling themselves out of the rubble and setting up camps, the stories being focused on their survival, trauma, recovery, and cleanup of escaped magic while encountering earthen/Titan facilities on the way - and then jump into earthen society in the Ringing Deeps. (The teleporting crabs in Hallowfall being an effect of Dalaran crashing was great - I’d just love more of that.)
I’d just like a stronger focus on the established characters/setting - when they’re used in a story, and especially if they’re destroyed in a story, I want to really dive into that and experience it, rather than jump immediately to something else.
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Do you realize how crazy that sounds? “The story and the world have moved on from the days when both sides could quest with heroes of their own faction, and now only one side gets to do that”?
Did you mean to say “It isn’t hard to conclude”?
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No, that was two times ago. The last time they were in negotiations to rejoin the Alliance, the Purge of Dalaran happened.
I get that, but at what point does the imbalance become so glaring that they stop doing the easy thing and actually address the problem?
I don’t agree, actually; I still maintain that making the leader of one faction into the expansion’s Big Villain was a bad narrative decision, and that it was the start of the story decline that the Horde has never recovered from. BUT, if they were determined to do that story, I will say that MoP pulled it off about as well as it could be done.
I suspect somebody, somewhere said all or most of those things. It’s just that those people didn’t have the power to make the decisions (especially when it came to the Vol’jin and Sylvanas situations).
It was almost certainly cut short, unless you really believe that expansion was always supposed to have only two major patches (I don’t).
I’ll take it. I’ve had it with Horde leaders dying, and you never know, they might be able to do something with the Ranger-General that won’t entirely suck. (And I have a lot of faith in Patty Mattson.)
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Yeah, they “fused” so now you’ve got a Banshee Ranger General Sylvanas. Ranger General Sylvanas didn’t have a relationship with the Loyalist/Forsaken PC, and yet when Sylvanas contacts the Loyalist/Forsaken PC at the end of the Forsaken Heritage quest, she refers to them just as the Banshee Queen would, just as she did prior to BfA.
(Between Cataclysm and Legion, she was actually one of the more personable Leaders, taking pride in working with the “champion” while Garrosh became more dismissive towards the Horde PC)
Moving forward, Sylvanas will be regulated to one of those PULL LEVER IN CASE OF LACKING HORDE PLAYER INVESTMENT emergencies…
…or she may show up in Midnight for the big elf reunion, despite her last words in the game stating rather honestly that the Forsaken are the only people on Azeroth who would be willing to take her back—as she’s their crazy mother who went off the deep end when she joined an interdimensional MLM scheme, got dad killed, and now hopes the family will take her back so long as she signs over Parental Rights to the family’s new therapist, Calia.
The Horde is a family—made up of a lot of other broken and abuse-ridden families.
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Well, to be entirely blunt and to hurt my own soul; it probably never does.
Because the imbalance we’re discussing is about which faction has starring roles in the story, and Blizzard has long been a gameplay first company. The game doesn’t exist for the story being told; the story exists to facilitate the gameplay.
And most players don’t invest much thought in the story. They pay attention to the major beats, the major NPCs involved, but they don’t dive much deeper into it than that. They’re here to raid, to delve, to M+ and to pvp. Heck, most people here, where the real story nerds live, are here for those reasons. I’ve checked y’alls armory, I seen your gear, I’m the only true one here who is so bad at those aspects of gameplay that my gear proves I must only be here for the story (this is completely in jest and jealousy).
So while people might be annoyed that Dagran and Moira and Magni and Anduin and Alleria are yet another example of Alliance-based storytelling, and the most Horde players get is another token Thrall… We’re still here for the raids, pvp, delves and… Well, I guess nobody’s really here for M+ right now.
So why bother addressing a problem that isn’t a problem for the bottom line? Blizzard is a company, owned by another company, and companies exist to make money.
Developing new Horde stories that might or might not keep player interest costs money that might not shift that bottom line meaningfully, or might cause it to be severely negatively affects.
Throwing more Anduin on the screen is largely accepted, as long as the new gameplay elements bring people back home.
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But that can be true yes. I am just saying that Sylvanas was salvaged when Alex was fired. For the better.
the blood elves pulled their weight in the Horde and fit in perfectly these days. We are stronger together I imagine.
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Because they don’t care.
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I always forget they were looking to officially get away from Garrosh. So thanks for the reminder. Honestly, the first time should have really been enough considering if the sanctums had been destroyed, what was left of Silvermoon and Quel’thalas in general would have been left looking like the Lorderon and the Plague Lands.
Speaking of which, when the whole Elven Reunification kicks off, I will pay ALL of the money to be a fly on the wall when Lor’themar and Thalyssra have their conversations with Tyrande.
< Starts ordering crates of popcorn >
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If you removed Thrall from the War Within storyline literally nothing would happen at all. It would make no difference whatsoever. If you can’t process that it’s tokenism to weaken the argument from the obvious conclusion you really can’t be helped.
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Yes. It was clear he was a token Horde insert character from the beginning. There’s no real reason he’d be there or be going after Anduin. If anyone, it should be Genn, but they wrote him out of the story, apparently.
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aww, but he was so proud to be the middle school soccer coach for the one earthen lady as she learned to do cool shaman stuff he isn’t allowed to do anymore.
Could you really take that 10 seconds of pseudorelevance out from the expansion without irrevocably altering the story? (turns out you can, huh.)
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It is weird that if you replace thrall with any other shaman and nothing about that questline changes at all. Makes one wonder blizz even bothered with thralls 10 second spotlight
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Well, she retired, so there’s a high chance that the conversation will be with Shandris instead - one of the nice, kind, entirely understanding, friends with the Forsaken new leaders.
So, they’ll likely walk into the debate hall, say “Renewal” a few times, nod sagely as if it were a deep and fulfilling conversation, and then instantly all become best friends forever.
One character present in the scene will disagree, and the PC will get a quest to uncover that the one guy is actually an eeeeevil void being or Xal’atath in disguise, smack him until he yells Enough! and leaves, and then go back to holding hands with all the other friend-elves because that action has proven beyond a doubt that anything except friendship is stupid and evil.
…This may have gotten a bit more vitriolic than I originally intended.
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