There’s a lot not to like in BFA for sure, but I just don’t buy that there are that many people who weren’t playing active content in favor of doing obsolete leveling/zone content and a farm. People tend to just quit the game when they’re not getting what they want out of it (in the massive numbers we’re talking about here).
Put another way: there are definitely more corners of MoP that were not tied to faction conflict, but I’ll reiterate those corners existed outside of the scope of what everyone would consider expansion content (except for Timeless Isle, which was the progenitor of catchup gear zones whose model we are still trapped in over a decade later).
Put yet another way: if you are just saying MoP technically had less faction war stuff, I agree. If you are saying that is the reason MoP was more popular, I vehemently disagree, for a litany of reasons that form the mountain of BFA’s failures.
Guess what I’m saying is people liked MoP for a variety of reasons and the faction war was only ONE tiny slice out of many reasons to like it. It wasn’t THE reason.
It was a genuinely FUN expansion and the pandaren people were a delight.
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I agree with that. Both in terms of systems and content, MoP was the clear winner. I think BFA had some really solid raids and leveling content, but that’s about it.
That also means that faction conflict wasn’t THE reason BFA failed, however. To tie it back into the topic, there were a lot of depressingly bad plots, subplots, and characterizations, to the point that long time favorites are possibly unrecoverable (including Sylvanas).
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What pisses me off is that the quest involving her and the council is very much a lecture about how wrong you are for not wanting Calia.
It’s so resentful and condescending on the part of the devs. “You’re seeing a difference when there is none” and “We’re all forsaken”.
No. We aren’t. Don’t gaslight us. You’re making it so we will never want to accept her. You aren’t going to shame us into accepting her.
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Oh yeah. That was specifically arrogant of them. When players said she has no business being a Forsaken leader based on several reasons including the fact that she wasn’t turned undead like a Forsaken, they hit us with this arrogant piece of dialogue.
But that wasn’t the whole problem. She had no business being in the Forsaken faction even as some nameless, faceless thing that she was before Legion, but also served as some kind of punishment from the Dev team pretty much telling the player how wrong they have been playing a Forsaken. Yeah, the “fixed” the Forsaken the same way they “fixed” the orcs.
God I wish Metzen will fix this stupid situation they left the Forsaken in. Get rid of Calia.
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I could accept her if she steps down as ruler and forms a forsaken chapel for priests and paladins. Pulling a Maester Aemon and renouncing her claim to the throne of Lordaeron.
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Keeping her diminished to a council member role (and not royalty) to serve as a foil to highlight the Forsaken aesthetic would work. They would need to stop expressing factions through individual characters to really sell it, though. Hopefully we will get a lot of world revamp stuff to help flesh out stuff like this after the Worldsoul Saga wraps up (assuming it isn’t intended as part of the third act).
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Yeah. If they highlight her differences instead of dismiss them, she’s a better character.
I want to experience her through her shocked and disgusted attempts at assimilation. Pearl clutching and all. I want to grow to love her because she tries so hard to learn to be forsaken in spite of herself. Not because we are told in a meta-narrative that we have to accept her.
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I think Calia is a response to long-standing requests from red players for a Horde closer connection to the Warcraft cosmology. The first undead we meet, resurrected by the Light. Seeing the undead Arathi she will definitely show up in this storyline.
But I’m not surprised why so many people don’t like her. The problem is Blizzard, who apparently cannot break the habit of writing cosmology from the Alliance side. Calia has a lot of potential, but she needs to prove herself as a Horde character. Let her appear in a situation where she choose Horde over Alliance… several times. It would be nice if she got a story similar to Tess, where she would feel what it feels like being taken over by the Lich King control, just like Tess experienced what it’s like to be under the Worgen’s curse
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The biggest disconnect for forsaken fans, at least the ones I’ve talked to anyway, is that calia doesn’t LOOK like a forsaken. Which is fair.
Mainly because the two most famous forsaken, in sylvanas and nathanos, didn’t either. I guess blizz thought another pretty undead would win people over.
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I don’t remember any red players wanting some human sparkle princess to lead the Forsaken.
The Forsaken were fine before they Garrosh-ed them. They legit created a clone of the MoP events to get rid of Sylvanas cause the Alliance didn’t like her. And of course the Alliance lovers in the Horde. Lucky for them there was a team of crappy writers who fulfilled their wishes. There was nothing wrong with the Forsaken.
There is nothing wrong with the Horde. It was one of the two factions in this game that felt different from it’s counterpart. And now thanks to the above mentioned people that is almost gone. The Horde has been reduced to the Red Alliance. Sharing their exact code of morals essentially bein the Alliance but uglier. Freakier. What a damned waste.
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I don’t think how she looks is much of an issue. It along the lines of what Elmira said. They want to develop a new Horde leader. They don’t bother actually developing the Horde story. Instead they take a character from Alliance lore, have her support the Alliance over the Horde, turn her undead, and assume she takes over the Horde race? All the time never doing a single thing to show she doesn’t still have the Alliance POV?
What could go wrong?
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And they want her to be forsaken but they don’t want the alliance to get it’s hands dirty. They can’t have it both ways. The undead aren’t forsaken if no one treats them like monsters. Who forsook Calia?
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Calia had a great life and all her friends are alliance leaders. I hope she gets killed soon.
Or we need some awesome horror. She needs to come out of a trance and realize she’s been eating a family.
Unless they show her dealing with cannibalistic hunger then they can’t say that there’s no difference between lightbound and regular undead.
You know very well she’s never going to do anything monstrous.
- There’s no curse if she touches you…
- She doesn’t crave flesh or blood…
- Her body is preserved so she doesn’t have to worry about maintaining herself…
- She’s not a spirit, so she doesn’t have the downside of lacking corporeality, or had to possess her own body to get it back…
- No one ever controlled her in this state, so she’s never lost her autonomy…
- She’s friends with the entire Alliance cast, so she certainly was not banished or rejected for being what she is…
So yeah, you could replace her with the living version of herself and nothing would change. It’s not like Blizzard has to make it a point that she doesn’t need to eat anymore, because when’s the last time you saw Jaina sit down for dinner before being interrupted while she was hungry, or needing to go run off and find a spot to use as a latrine while she was stuck in the Maw?
I’m serious, you could just give her back her living body and absolutely no part of the Forsaken story she’s participated in would need to change. None whatsoever. At no point did her undeath matter to what she said, what she did, or what she was capable of. She doubts and pouts just fine as a living human woman.
That’s how pointless and worthless she is.
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Welcome to the Post-Golden Era. I know it’s not all on Golden, yes. But this crap started in BFA when Golden joined in so I’m gonna use her, plus I don’t like her.
Sylvanas was the last vestige of the Horde that stood in the way of the new Horde. The Alliance-Loving Horde. So they got rid of her. And I think they would have killed her off if the last semblance of logic had left Blizzard then. I mean they have no problem killing characters that carried this game, like Arthas, the perversion that was done to that character in Shadowlands another monument to crap writing, is unforgivable.
I honestly keep hoping they retcon that idiotic Arthas sendoff.
But I suspect someone came in and said, WAIT, let’s not copy MoP down to the last detail, let’s instead banish Sylvanas. But not before messing up her character to be buddies with Golden’s golden kid, Anduin. He’s like the seal of approval for chracters these days, if a character isn’t his buddy, you can expect it to be capped off, unless that character represents stuff Golden didn’t like, like masculinity, which is why poor Saurfang had to be humiliated as a character and destroyed before finally killing him.
Oh boy could I go on, but I don’t want to fill the forum with my gripes concerning the WoW story, I’ll leave some room for others.
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I didn’t hate this when it was an interesting juxtaposition. When she would talk almost sweetly (all be it condescendingly) to the little lion it gave me chills as much as warm fuzzies and I wanted to know more about what was going on there.
They just don’t know how to not over-salt the soup.
What do Darkshore transmogs have to do with the discussion? They are just as optional as the griffon mount and I don’t care about going after either one. Just because some things are optional doesn’t prove that the entire storyline was easy or difficult to avoid.
It also locked off non-war-related dailies in those zones, though, which MoP didn’t do. You could experience the whole map without participating in the faction war (beyond the initial sequence in Jade Forest). In BfA, the price of trying to avoid the faction war was to only see half the zones.
I don’t quite get why you’re so eager to make a case that the faction war was avoidable in BfA. Is it because of your earlier comment about how you felt bait-and-switched by not getting as much faction war as you wanted? Because both things can be true at the same time. The faction war can have been not absolutely central to BfA and the individual parts that we got can still have been obtrusively positioned to force people to do them. It would just be one more example of how BfA made nobody happy.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.
I’m actually arguing against you that MoP was similarly if not more focused on the faction war and people remember it fondly. Your argument is “faction war bad and Blizzard shouldn’t have made that mistake again” and mine is “actually, faction war was not the problem with BfA. There were plenty of other problems”.
You can opt out of the faction war content in BfA. Honestly, it was easier to opt out of content you didn’t want to do in BfA and find other content and other ways to gear in BfA than it was in MoP. You didn’t have to unlock Kul Tiras as a horde member. If you did, the faction war part of those quests was miniscule. You were fighting drust witches and wicker beasts, not slaughtering alliance. To argue that those quests were more necessary because they gave you access to more of those quests that you didn’t want to do in the first place is not resonating with me. I’m sorry.
You didn’t have to do faction war stuff to raid, or dungeon. You didn’t have to complete the faction war to move on to N’zoth stuff. You only had to do faction war content to get access to more faction war content in the same way that MoP had the long daily quest chain which led to the grand Griffon mount.