I have literally better things to do with my life than be the errand boy forevery 10th level throwaway avatar.
I would think that since Blizzard’s actual stated goal is to give every race access to every class is a prima facie statement of that stance. Along with the games ongoing statement that YOU are THE Champion in just about every quest shoved in your face.
You will BE the Champion whether you are an Orc Paladin or a Night Elf Warlock.
The game is the ultimate expression of canon for the majority of the player base.
Well, fantasy in general used to be based on tropes, and fantasy cultures used to be very distinct.
For whatever reason, people who enjoy fantasy now don’t really care about that. They just want to play whatever they want, and usually their characters are just self-inserts. They don’t play Faltharas, druid of the claw. They play Melissa, a high school student whose avatar is a night elf, and her favorite class is warlock, so therefore night elves should be warlocks.
We see this with DnD. They’ve done away with so much of what made each race unique, because dnd players now just want to self-insert themselves as their favorite race, so they don’t want to be hamstrung by cultural values or tropes.
I think it lessens the world of fantasy, but sadly, that’s the way things are going.
I dont see how i am going agaisnt the story by wanting the player characters to be removed from the spotlight.
Thats exactly the thing yes! And you know what? Its why i hate Legion, because Legion did exactly that, people might say sl or bfa did, but Legion was the big step in the pool when they gave literally ASHBRINGER to everyone!!! And it was a bad idea because, you see it right now, where is Ashbringer now? The sword of legends is irrelevant now…because the players got their hands on it.
You nailed it!
I have nothing agaisnt that myself, its just that to me, classes should not be “so much” a lore thing that it sometimes is, i will give you an example :
When for example, in the novel shadow of the Horde, you have Vol’jin asking that human HUNTER “where is your pet hunter” and the narration telling you that the guy is a LONE WOLF (which is the name of the talent when you have no pets in wow) i think its too much…like a hunter is not ONLY with a pet, its not because in gameplay of the class it have a pet that ALL OF THEM IN LORE have one, because i mean…where is Alleria’s pet? Where is Shanris pet? Where is Sylvanas pet then? lol
Be ready for them to arrive sooner or later, because they are more real than most people think!
Bringing new customizations for playable races is a great addition to Dragonflight. However, this seems to bring a lot of “errors” to the NPCs in the game. For example, I have already seen many Blood Elf guards with blue eyes. Do you manage the implementation of NPC customizations to avoid errors? Can we fear that Man’ari Paladins will one day be visible by mistake, for example?
Katherine Bankson: “Blood Elves can have blue eyes now, it’s not just a customization available to players! Time has passed since the game’s debut, some Blood Elves have golden eyes now while others have returned to their original blue color. The fact that such guards exist is not only related to the customizations available to players, but also and above all to the fact that time has passed since Blood Elves found themselves infused with Fel, giving them this greenish eye tint.”
“In that sense, I think that if we place a Man’ari Paladin in the world of Warcraft then it will be a deliberate choice, and then after all… who says the Man’ari can’t defend the light ? I think this would be a very interesting character! If we were to add such a character into the game, it would not be a narrative error, it would be a deliberate choice on the part of one of our developers aimed at introducing an element that he considers interesting to develop. in the history of the game.”
Anne Stickney: “In Legion, there was for example a Nathrezim, Lothraxion, who chose to join the Army of Light. There are therefore indeed characters fel or infused by Fel who changed sides over the course of their lives. So it would truly be a deliberate choice .”
And what’s wrong with that? They are by far, the majority of the player base.
And I think it’s sad that so many feel that the key defining aspect of a race is what they’re not allowed to be.
For example, people got all kittens about Night Elves being mages when for the vast bulk of their existence, the Night Elf society was all about mastery of the arcane until an upstart peasant led a revolution and decided by fiat that this could no longer be the case.
I believe that players should be given the widest array of choices that can be feasibly made. You are not obligated to use them.
The part I highlighted is what continues to amaze me. It’s the one thing that people keep forgetting. Nobody is putting the proverbial gun to peoples head and making them play the new race/class combos
When i started to read your post, i thought of DnD too and then you brought it up.
However, i dont agree with you, DnD is for me the opposite example as how you use it, because DnD did that loooong ago to add more and more possibilites to players, and DnD also have the “homebrew” when people just want to have their own fantasy.
And i think you are confusing things, DnD gives you A BASE, not some kind of untouchable canon lore that you cant move around, the base is here for you as a DM to not have to think if you dont want to bother too much, but none of the rules and “canon” things are untouchable, you can do whatever you want with them.
Now that the lore team of DnD implement the things that peoples wants into the canon of the game and into the base, its just because thats what their customers wants why would you go agaisnt them?
I got a talk with so many gatekeepers of the sort, mainly related to DnD when i came up with idease of having “'not purely evil demons or devils” that we could have some (rare) occurence of good succubi (as good as a succubus can be) even if you do have the case with Fall-from-Grace in Planescape: Torment since ages!!! People will still say “no no no!!!”
And what could be used here to allow both the breath of accessibility and player choice with what any nation should or should not be is to emphasize the mainstream aspects of society.
Most Night Elves to use as an example, now, are Sentinels (hunters/warriors), druids, and priests, and we see those aspects emphasized throughout questing and world building. To be crude about it, they’re still eco terrorists who live in trees. Mages, and more recently Warlocks, do not have any strong cultural prominence or state power. If coming across this for the first time as not a NE mage or warlock already (you’re a bushy eyed youth with hope for the world who picked up the game yesterday) the story guides to showing ‘this is what night elves are about, maybe you should consider playing something like this.’ Night Elf aesthetic, culture, etc, dissuades you from making a mage, warlock, or DK, but you still can if you really want to.
Best example too is probably tauren. They can be warlocks, but how many tauren warlocks do you really see both among all tauren but then also among all warlocks. Both are minuscule and borderline non-existent in their respective populations, just as they probably are within the setting.
All this goes without saying that if you give story as to why someone can be something, folks love it. See Sunwalkers and Seers.
I’m gonna lightly correct you. The night elves did not exist as we know them until after the Sundering. They swore off arcane magic and adopted druidic magic. Its this kind of cultural distinction and understanding that I’m talking about. New fantasy players just don’t care.
Anyone can be whatever they want. My stance is that it cheapens the lore when there is no lore.
Take druids. Druids were specifically created by Cenarius to protect the Emerald Dream and the land of the night elves. Its the backbone of night elven culture. That’s why every other race seems a bit out of place as druids. They were given skimpy lore to justify why they are druids without being taught by Cenarius. This was done for gameplay purposes. I play non-night elf druids, but still acknowledge that the lore is wonky and cheapens the unique relationship that night elves have with that class.
The peasants who found themselves in charge forswore arcane magic. That wasn’t true of the Highborne population or those Night Elves who survived elsewhere, even those who didn’t change like those in Val’Sharrah.
Lore is not based on negation, if your race fantasy rides that much on what is not allowed, then you really are saying that there is no substantive content at all.
Thats not very polite when someone react to what you said and add its own experiences and would like to have your pov to not answer them!
Yes, i know that, but i dont recall it was stated that she was archidruides since a long time, just like vanilla also said that Taurans learned druidism with Malfurion and Hamuul became archdruid in less than FOUR YEARS!!! (yes it was terrible)
But in Legion having an archidruides since war of the ancients, while the lore always said that druids were only males…its kinda a blow to one of the cultural aspect of the Night Elves.
Its a blow I can take with complete equanimity.
It was the lore of America that women could not have credit or property in their own name, something that changed within my lifetime. It was the lore of America for centuries about what women could not do, or whether the color of your skin marked you as chattel.
What a race can be not is not a description of what a race IS.
Lore is based on structure. If there is no structure, there is no real lore. Of course there can be additions, but in a tropey genre like fantasy, sticking with the tropes helps retain the uniqueness that separates one fantasy world from another.
Night elf culture, being druidic in nature and shunning the arcane/fel, is very unique from other fantasy universes. If you take that away and make them just like any other elves, there’s no real uniqueness to the WoW universe.
I could reword your argument and say that you think principles/values are a negative towards creating a culture.
That’s an aspect of a limited segment of Night Elf culture. The Night Elves did not originate with Malfurion, and they do not end with Tyrande. Prior to Malfurion they had eons of history as a powerful magical empire. And in recent history, they’ve discovered that druidism alone can’t save them from threats without.
Healthy cultures evolve. Night elf culture as led by Malfurion and Tyrande, was frozen in stasis because of the immortality conferred by Nordrassil. Now it’s evolving again.
And not just magic… Night elves can even bring their own touch to engineering as seen in recent conflicts.