And yet they aren’t, so you’re wrong.
I’m glad we agree that Grom Hellscream, the orcish bamf, killed the ever loving hell out of Cenarius so hard that Cenarius was afraid to come to defend the Night Elves during the War of Thorns.
I mentioned the demon blood.
One single clan who was massively outnumbered by the entire night elf empire was on the ropes, yes.
Nah. Just Blizzard was afraid to use him because then the Horde would have lost. Cenarius’ children still came to defend the Night Elves.
Hell, if Sylvanas didn’t play cat and mouse with dear old Malfy then he would have likely wiped the floor with the Horde army.
…sure.
Sure.
Malfurion’s most impressive feat in BFA was killing some Horde trash mobs in a cutscene.
As most PCs can obliterate enemy guards at max level with decent gear - this is not exactly formidable. If you’re just tunning in here Malfurion does not come off as all that notably powerful.
And honestly that cutscene ought to have been Tyrande doing slasher movie stuff instead. I guarantee you a lot of people on these forums would have a more negotiable attitude if that had been the case.
What part of that are you confused by? Thrall sent the Warsong clan on their lonesome to harvest lumber as a punishment because Grom was acting crazy.
Not like the Horde PC accomplished anything against the Alliance in BfA, either.
Killed some town guards and helped raise their captain, sunk a few kul’tiran ships, bumped off a few tide sages is about the extent of it.
EDIT: Said town guards might have been Ashvane flunkies and said tide sages might have been old god worshipers. Not certain about that last one though.
Mine used chronomancy to timewalk to pre-invasion Darkshore, just so he could catch a boat to beat up Velen with two friends.
And that was just for a bear he wanted but will never use. Speak for yourself.
Despite the interviewers constantly bending over backwards to praise Blizzard in their interviews, Danauser (or maybe Ion?) have stated there was issues with BfA’s set-up for Horde players and they should’ve been more blatant.
So when they feel like they didn’t do MOP “justice” like they did when they cooked up BfA, they’ll revisit the same story but hamfist it even harder.
This time, focusing on the Alliance because the points they mostly acknowledge is how the Horde didn’t have proper motivation.
I’m sad my old thread about how the Horde is bizarrely caricatured in Alliance questing when the Alliance is portrayed neutrally in Horde questing died with the site change.
But yeah…the Alliance player is never presented a Horde that’s sympathetic in any real way during their average questing experience. Which just makes them suddenly being asked to see “the good in the Horde” when it reaches the part of the story where the plotlines merged so hard to swallow.
The Horde could still have been the more villainous party in the BFA war without this divide, even if I don’t like that either. Blizzard seemed to be under the impression I the Horde player needed to be drowned in Pathos to question what I’m doing, but didn’t seem to get they need to not show every single random Horde NPC the Alliance player meets is a brutal monster if they want anyone NOT to agree with Genocide Sea Man while they were exploring his homeland.
I haven’t seen this–do you have a link? The only admission of less-than-perfect story I’ve seen from anyone at Blizzard was the idea that patches were too open-ended and didn’t come to a good stopping point.
Pretty much.
It’s not a question of whether or not the Horde can change. Of course they can. They’re a creation of Blizzard, same as the Alliance, or anything else in the game.
It’s really all a matter of how Blizzard will choose to characterize and contextualize them in the game.
So yeah, they can change. What they change into will be anybody’s guess.
Like any writer of anything… So why every talk about any fictional narrative ever?
It’s a non-point. If you’re not interested in talking about the narrative, then why are you on the Story Forums? If we want to have to discuss about the narrative, then we have to set the parameters of the conversation within the context that has been provided.
There is though… Don’t get me wrong, it’s a mess but it is cohesive. Blizzard had accomplished that mostly by the omittance of certain details, which causes a lot of confusion from the community. When you sit down and actually work out the logistics of it, it tends to yield something most people don’t want, which is the point I was making.
It makes sense that the Horde is constantly villainized. Since classic, we could see that Thrall really had no control over what was happening within his Horde, and had little understanding of the cultural normal of his own people, or the orcish traditions of multiple tribes being slightly different from one another blurring the lines of “Orcish honor”, rather than it being this universal, mutually agreed upon thing.
It really almost does feel intentional… And I am not saying Blizzard is some narrative genius here, but I do feel like the foundation laid in Classic was based upon the Factions not really being that good. Being purposefully problematic in their own way, and we representing the common and ordinary deeds of small folk that keeps the darkness at bay…
Overtime, that got muddied with overzealous faction pride of the player base, despite the factions not offering anything to be proud of. And Blizzard feeding into that, making the game more and more about the faction war, and “big story moments” as opposed to humble origins that made the world attractive to begin with.
There are plenty problems with the narrative, but it’s not “The Horde is evil and Alliance is good” mentality. I don’t believe that is a mentality the writers ever had. It’s not even their blatant disregard for their own lore, or lying to their player base (though that certainly doesn’t do them any favors). It’s that everything they have done since TBC has been in the service of homogenizing the factions, dismantling race and class identity, and implementing mechanics that make the world seem smaller and the player seem bigger.
Even the names of the factions reflect this, a bit.
An “Alliance” is when you get a group of people with like-minded ideas and goals working together.
A “Horde” is when you have a group of people that happen to be doing the same thing.
Back during launch, one thing you’ll notice is that all of the Alliance factions were friendly to each other. This wasn’t the case with the Horde (Undercity is neutral).
What I think - and this is purely conjecture - is that the idea and aesthetic of the Horde tended to attract a certain type of player. The underdog feeling, blood and thunder kind. This was cultivated early on by Blizzard, because that makes sense when you have a successful product.
But over time, it went from just being “we want to feel like an underdog with dignity, ready to protect and fight for things” to “death for the death god”. This was reflected both in the story and - I hesitate to say - some of the actions of the playerbase.
I really wish I could find the interview or article, because I am positive I heard Blizzard mentioning one reason Garrosh was so…Garroshy is because he was supposed to represent what the developers were seeing with the player base. People were moving away from the relatively peaceful unless provoked Thrall to blood and thunder Garrosh.
But at that point, tribalism was in full effect. What, you want to be like those Alliance cowards? No, lean in to it. People a little surprised that so many people were siding with “Death to all things” Sylvanas wouldn’t have been that surprised if they had seen how quickly people lined up with Garrosh back in the day.
More conjecture? The rumor mill is that a lot of the developers and writers tend to play Horde characters. Which is fine, it’s just…without people in there who mainly play Alliance characters, or people who alternate between the two? You’re not gonna get met with too many people who might slow your proverbial roll. You’re going to keep looking at things through that same lens, and then we end up with surprise that people don’t view your night elf genocide thing as “That’s pretty epic, but we can just move on” or “they’ll surely be okay with this”.
I mean…this got so bad that people are actually doubting Saurfang. From launch until…well, this current expansion? That man was venerated, in part because he actually was telling people not to be a part of the old ways of the Horde.
I don’t know. They wrote themselves into a corner, and I really want to think their solution isn’t going to be to try to break through the wall and see if they can go farther in the direction of the corner.
I know I’m nitpicking this part out of your post, because I don’t feel like I can argue against its intent, but it’s hard for me to really see this.
I’m sure the developers don’t THINK they’re writing a good/evil story, but if they’re trying to write one where both factions have crap stuff about them, I really feel like I’m not seeing it. I think I have to go way back to vanilla starting zones to find examples of something where the alliance would be doing something wrong that isn’t a retaliation based on something the horde did.
There isn’t just a single reason why Saurfang’s become disliked, though. I don’t know if this is what you’re saying, but to me, it reads like you think he’s getting blowback just for not gung-ho horde. Is that what you meant?
Personally, what made me instantly hate him was having him go along with the war in the first place. He comes off as going with it because Sylvanas recited The 14 Words and now I’m meant to sympathize with him? It was frustrating.
The Horde will go evil the moment Blizzard wants them to. That’s the entire thread of BFA. The Horde wasn’t evil until Blizzard decided they would be.
And when Horde players complained, Blizzard backpedaled to their usual holding pattern: Scapegoat the Warchief and have the other characters be super honorable (once Sylvanas’ actions start affecting their friends, because who cares about Teldrassil?)
The Horde is nothing. They will be exactly what Blizzard wants them to be in the next expansion, and the expansion after that. “Honor” changes in meaning all the time and stops mattering when the plot demands it.
I’m in agreement that Sylvanas’ character was ruined in BFA, but she wasn’t the only one. Nathanos, Thrall, Saurfang, Baine, Lor’themar, Anduin, Tyrande, Greymane, and Jaina all got a crap deal in BFA because of the incredibly forced story. If Blizzard’s writers didn’t have so much tunnel vision and weren’t so stuck in their ways all the time, BFA would have likely been VERY different.
But Blizzard LIKES the Alliance being quintessential good guys
They LIKE the Horde being this constantly shifting nonense
They LIKE writing trauma survivors as axe crazy psychopaths
They LIKE making one-dimensional man-pain stories.
And one of them in particular REALLY likes “Anduin the super special perfectest boy”
They WILL do this again. Your favorite character will be put on the chopping block the next time Blizzard needs a scapegoat to backpedal on Horde atrocities they create to justify starting a war.
I’m sorry, but this was never the reason. The reason Sylvanas started the war was to prevent the Alliance from gaining control of Azerite.
Blizzard had no idea why they made Sylvanas warchief and is just using this Jailer arc to try and make it make sense.
Sylvanas had a tactical but dumb reason to start the fourth war. Dumb because her opponent was Anduin, Prince of Peace and Never Gonna Bother You.
And you might be right. Part of my argument is that Blizzard has moved away from what they intended, but that’s not necessarily “The Horde isn’t evil.”
Right now I am not sure the problem is the Horde is evil, rather the problem is the Alliance is good. In Vanilla, both factions were pretty bad, but the Champions of Azeroth were basically no-names.
Blizzard can keep everything that has happen, but start unveiling Alliance politics to reveal Government corruption in Stormwind and sentiments of human superiority within the Alliance military and leadership. Then we would be back to where it all started in Classic, with the Horde being uncontrollable and aggressive by nature, vs the Alliance being systematically oppressive.
Uuuuuh, what?
They have been evil since Orcs and Humans…
They could try, but it feels way too little, too late for me. I know it’s a gross sentiment to share, but Blizzard’s left me with the impression that the horde deserves to be subjugated and oppressed after this, because apparently they just can’t help themselves from being as monstrous as they appear to be. 