I blame this on the fact that at the time that Worgen were introduced they were trying really hard to make Varian this badass human warrior who was Goldrinn the wolf gods chosen.
They didn’t want to steal that thunder from their precious Varian Wrynn, cause Blizzard has a hard on for the Wyrnn family. So worgen get left in the dust and get no follow up or anything to show they have teeth.
Honestly the whole Wolf Varian story was poorly thought out, he would have been better off as just a straight up powerful warrior in his own right. I mean again they introduce this element to him but never really used it other than him having a bit more stamina than a normal human.
Honestly that component would have been better tying the worgen with the night elves if Genn got that focus.
I feel like the worgen heritage quest and Tess’ arc was a story that makes sense in-universe - a person learning that strength is not guaranteed success and to be careful what one wishes for - but it has the exact wrong tone for its out-of-universe function of making the player feel cool about the race they’re playing.
As you said, the curse aspect exists in-universe, but the game hasn’t done much to show that. Post-starter zone, Tobias Mistmantle is the best example I can think of, and even then his emotional uncontrolled transformation wasn’t dangerous to anyone but the NPC the player was out to kill anyway - Tobias is back under control when the player finds him in town, and no innocent townspeople are harmed or even aware of the possibility of being harmed. So the ‘bewaaaaaare this curse’ theme falls flat for the player - it’s unearned in the player’s experience.
Similarly, the heritage quests are designed to celebrate a race, and Blizzard has named the race the worgen. Not ‘Gilneans’, ‘Gilnean Worgen’, or anything to water down the concept of ‘click this button to play a werewolf’. So it’s a bold choice to have their heritage quest be about why being a werewolf just isn’t worth it, really. I don’t think it worked out for them.
With just a bit of tweaking, the quest could have been about Tess getting bitten (perhaps by another Gilnean character who lost control) and learning the same lesson - she gets the thrill of power of the new form and wonders why she didn’t get this curse earlier to change things, Goldrinn gives her the same dream lesson of ‘power isn’t everything’, and she learns that the real strength is using her Gilnean stubbornness to integrate the worgen side rather than letting it control her. It could even include a scene of Genn being fatherly to someone other than Anduin, if Tess was hiding her bite from him because she knows he didn’t want that for her, but Genn learns and turns up to freak out at first but then use his own experience and their familial bond to advise her through the final stages of regaining her mind and control. It would keep much of the same themes, but with a bit more ‘worgen are cool, so you shouldn’t regret clicking the werewolf button on the character creator’.
Everything about this post is perfect! This is exactly how the heritage quest should have been handled.
And you’re right Tobias Mistmantle in the quest with his brother is really the only time we get to see a hint of how the worgen curse is bad. He loses his control and attacks his brother. More stuff like that would be appreciated.
But Dar, why would you want Gothic Werewolf Horror content?
Human content already eats up 87.3% of Alliance screen time. They desperately need that extra .2% that the Worgen get.
Stop being so greedy.
Seriously though what amuses me most is the Worgen Heritage quest came after Kul Tiras was introduced and already did most of the stuff you can do with Anglo fantasy.
Which you think would make Gilneas pivot to covering Victorian Gothic Horror stuff as well as more specifically Celtic, Samhain styled witchery.
But instead they double down on the humans of Gilneas. Who far as I can tell only have tophats and bulldogs going for them.
So they could’ve gone with Macbeth meets From Hell meets Werewolves of London.
But instead we’re going with,
That’s a bold but confusing angle to take. They really are the masters of subverting expectations.
Bold? More a hate letter if you ask me:
In Shadowland, out of the blue the Gilneans have still not retaken the country while every single other material suggested otherwise.
Should i mention the Dracthyr joke about a tail?
And it continues even in the current patch: They added 5 new fur colors…except not a single one is the only color requested since the 9.0: A solid black fur.
It’s obvious that not a single dev from the artistic and story department has any love for the worgens.
In fact i believe that the current team hate the race for whatever reason and that they love to make fun of us.
It’s a shame that we can’t discuss any of this with someone from their team, at least to understand why we got such treatments.
Nothing sums up to me how little the Worgen come up then when I reintroduced WoW to an old friend who’d played with me from Vanilla to Wrath.
He rolled a Troll Druid and I an Orc Shaman so we didn’t stop by Silverpine. This was during BFA when the max was still level 120 and I think we were like level 70 when he randomly asked me when Druids get their werewolf form.
I was confused thinking he meant that variant bear form I think you get from the Legion class hall. But no he was insistent there was a werewolf form he’d seen.
Eventually I figured out he’d encountered a Worgen Druid in a BG and had assumed that was a class feature rather than a playable race.
To reiterate we got from level 1 to 70, which is a pretty big chunk of the game, without him ever noticing an entire playable faction. And he only noticed them not because of story or world content but because of a chance encounter with another player.
And granted we were Horde but I think you could be forgiven for making the same mistake on the Alliance. Seriously I swear the Horde had more Goblin content before they were even a playable race than the Alliance has Worgen content a decade after their inclusion.
On my first Worgen toon I saught out all the Worgen content I knew of and that well ran dry before Id even unlocked flying. So annoyed I decided to do the Booty Bay questline as I was an outlaw rogue so, also had a pirate thing going for me and I’d never gotten around to seeing the post Cata Neutral STV content anyway.
And wouldn’t you know it there’s an excellent questline about Worgen Pirates in that storyline. That I love because in Vanilla a bunch of pirates happened to be Gilnean. I figured that was just throwaway flavor text to make Blue players feel less weird for beheading humans for Goblins. But they actually remembered that story point and ran with it into Cata.
I had to trip and stumble into Worgen content.
Yep! Theres very little Worgen content and its sad. You’ve got:
Cata content:
Then theres nothing until Legion:
Then in BfA we get the Worgen helping the Night Elves in Darkshore and that’s it.
It just kind of sucks because worgen just show up sporadically, and most of it has nothing to do with the worgen curse or how it affects them. They are just there.
Worgen Lore is so scattershot and paper thin I actually made my toon mostly unrelated to it. Had him be essentially a D&D Lore Bard who was cursed with lycanthropy by a witch after a sort of monkey’s paw / crossed the wrong person arrangement. I hint that he’s the author of the excellent “Torment of the Worgen” short story from BC’s Karazhan;
“I did this. I don’t remember doing it, but it cannot be otherwise.
I have committed sins in my life before. I even killed a man once who didn’t deserve it. But this is different.
I am changed.
These murders were not my choice. A beast lives inside of me.
I will be hunted and shunned. I need to hide. Run. Bury the bodies.
I start to walk outside when I realize what truly bothers me.
I feel no guilt.”
Seriously how the Hell were Worgen more interesting when they werent a playable race?
And the thing is I am known to play with the lore a bit with my RP. This toon’s Alteraci, who I insist are Alpine Germanics (because they somehow have knowledge of Switzerland) and write his magic as more connected to Dreams and Nightmares than they traditional Light / Void dichotomy because;
A. I really liked Netflix’s Sandmann and
B. Gives me an excuse to give him two corvid familars based off the ravens of Thought and Memory from Norse mythology but with the personalities of;
But he’s still a rank and file Forsaken that fell to the plague of undeath during the events of WC3. I didn’t have to muck around with the standard PC origins to make a character I found interesting to write and seldom ever have unless I’m going for something more specific like with my older generation Death Knight characters.
With the Worgen I wound up doing that because I did try to do a standard character. My first was a Rogue I just wrote as one of the many pirates who fell to the Worgen curse.
But the fact that he was a werewolf just seemed so mundane. They very sporadically allege that the worgen curse gives you some anger management issues but so? Everything in this setting is profoundly magically disturbed and I can’t imagine their problems could be worse than the Orc’s literally demonic bloodlust and they seem to be managing just fine. Hell the Forsaken crave the flesh of the living and manage to live around allies made of steaks without incident.
And what gets me is post BFA we’ve an opportunity to really sell the worgen’s ferocity after the destruction of Darnassus. The Kaldorei, or at least their womenfolk are supposed to be, damn near feral themselves. They hang out with apex predators with fangs the length of Polish calvary sabres. Of course they’re unphased by the worgen.
But the humans of Stormwind? And in particular their more diminutive allies? Well maybe after a few Deeprun Tram commuters go missing every full moon tensions start to rise. Leading to a call to resettle Gilneas to if anything get these beastmen the duck out’ve their streets.
There’s just so much you could do with the Worgen but honest to God it feels like Blizzard regrets even adding them into the game. Even certain ARs like the Velves and LForged have had more screentime than the Worgen. And even when they get it, it’s usually just Genn being terrible at his job. Again.
Again this is one of the problems with worgen. We never get to experience or see why it’s a curse, why it is so bad. We are told worgen always have this innate desire to hunt and kill, to the point it can be overwhelming, even in the Wolfheart novel they explicitly tell Night Elves to stay away from the worgen area in Teldrassil because when they are hunting some of the worgen become too feral and will attack on sight. But we never see this in-game. Blizzard really needs to go all in on showing why it is a curse if they want to keep saying it’s bad and needs to go away.
Which is why I love this. I’d love to get some conflict in the Alliance. Give us some murder mystery where people are mysteriously disappearing, bodies found torn apart, and it’s turns out it’s some Gilneans who are just giving into their primal urges and hunting and killing people. Give a reason for why the humans of Stormwind should fear worgen and want them out of their city.
I do agree though, Blizzard 100% regrets adding worgen. It’s why they have changed their racial flag to just stormwind’s but darker, turned Genn into an Anduin boot licker who cares more about him than his own people, and it’s why they had the heritage quest say the curse sucks balls and needs to die out with this generation of worgen. Blizzard has made it clear they don’t care for worgen.
That’s also the sad part. They are suppose to be untamed people and a race of werewolves. Not Blue Dog Pets to Stormwind. Plus also I think the Darker Lion Flag isn’t really Gilnean like what the Old Flag was in Warcraft 2 Second War.
Just wished Blizzard cared more about creating the Alliance have more interest.
Sadly Blizzard views them as nothing more than blue dog pets for Stormwind Humans. I mean they are left homeless in Stormwind, Genn bends over for Anduin to kiss his boots, and they changed their flag to be Stormwind but darker.
Seriously, look at all the other racial flags at the embassy, then look at the Gilneas one, they changed it to be just Stormwind darker, which is asinine. The Gilnean flag you see in the starting zone was amazing.
Even worse they made the heritage armor the same colors as Stormwind.
Too bad that we can’t discuss any of this with the writers… because the way they are treating the worgens is disrespectful even toward the players (the Dracthyr joke).
I guess that Gilneas became a vassal state, and that’s unacceptable.
It’s dark green so it’s more an outfit from Kul tiras but it’s still a bad joke.
I don’t care about the Dracthyr joke, I think it was funny. It was Blizzard’s way of saying stop asking for tails because worgen don’t have tails. And I agree. They have NEVER had tails and I wish people would stop asking for the race to be changed to fit their ideal werewolf when Blizzard has decided their werewolves, the worgen, do not have tails.
If people want werewolves with tails then they can go play stuff liks ESO or Skyrim. Those werewolves have tails.
It’s based off Genn’s original model update in Legion, you can see it in the Worgen starting zone. They based the worgen heritage on that color, but even then it doesn’t look the same, and I would have much rather them just use the colors on the OG Gilnean flag we see in Gilneas which is grey.
Also why they didn’t give worgen long coats is beyond me people have wanted thst since they saw Genn in his long coat, but nah let’s give it to the Kul Tirans cause screw worgen I guess.
Agree to everything in your post but especially this. It’s not that I begrudge Kul Tirans their long coats but man. They really got everything and Worgen have nothing 
What pisses me off about it is that EVERYTHING they gave to the Kul Tirans, their heritage armor, their wicker forms, the spooky aesthetic of fighting monster in the dark forests, that was entirely the Gilnean aesthetic. That was part of what made them unique and different from Stormwind Humans, but Blizzard decided to say screw worgen we are gonna give all those things to the Kul Tirans.
BfA was and still is a really bad time as a worgen player. It felt like the expansion where Blizzard really decided they wanted to tell the players they regret adding worgen and that you should play either humans because Gilneans are just homeless in stormwind now, or fat humans if you want all the cool aesthetics that Gilneas boasted before getting crapped on.
I still can’t believe the heritage armor we got. Like it’s not bad, I like the way it has the part that wraps around our shoulders, but they couldn’t do anything better? They could have easily given worgen a long coat like Genn while in human form, and then in worgen form it goes away cause that’s how Genn’s model works. But nah, let’s give the long coats to the Kul Tirans who had never been shown having long coats before like the Gilneans had…
I like the heritage armor, too ( minus the shoulders ) but yeah the long coat should have been a given and Genn had it first.
And I loved Drustvar, especially on my Worgen. It really had all the Worgen themes and felt like, well, home. Which makes it all the more frustrating that we still don’t have one.
I can only agree.
I also made a rediscovery:
Since the Burning of Tel drassil, i often complained that we were forgotten in this story because many worgens burned too.
In the french forum, someone pointed a lore mistake i made about the Kaldorei mages so i have read again Elegy (last time was right after the burning when i got the CE of BFA) and i read that the gilneans from Darnassus were all evacuated BEFORE the Kaldoreis, with only Mia Greyman staying behind until the very last moment (Genn rushed through the portal to save her, puting down Anduin who tried to stop him in the process)
But IN GAME, i remember the worgens running for their live while the city was burning!
There were still Gilneans in Darnassus!
HOW THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT IF IT ISN’T IN THE GAME ?!?
Were we supposed to guess it?
So in the writers mind, only the Kaldoreis burned because it’s in a damn book writen by Golden, and an horrible one to read on top of that!
I don’t know if i should be happy or not to see our favorite race being spared of another genocide, because once again the worgens weren’t part of a story that directly involved them.
You said this:
You have forgotten our narrative from our intro: The feud between the worgens and the forsakens.
It was shifted to the Night elves for their great misfortune and at the end of Shadowland, we weren’t involved in what should have been the conclusion of OUR narrative with the trial of Sylvanas.
We’ve been robbed of our storyline, so what’s left now?
Kissing the foot of the Forsakens to give us back Gilneas despite the country already under the Alliance banner if we take into account every single others material?
I wish that someone from the Council expose this problem but…who cares about the worgens?
The way blizzard is writing wow it seems like all races are supposed to forgive warcrimes that happen against them because to hold any responsible for any of their crimes is the true evil.
This idea that to fight for your homes against an invader is being painted as being wrong is such twisted way of thinking in the current day.
Pretty sure the circle was exclusively/nearly exclusively night elf until they decided to open it up AFTER Warcraft 3.
In fact, Hamuul is the first Tauren druid in 20 generations.