Things will only get better when Blizzard finally realize that the huge majority of the players despise the lore and is still here due to the memories, guilds and gameplay.
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I think that the writers were only interested in Sylvanas in trying to save her as a character (and they fail spectacularly since the beginning of the expansion) so any other character is an accessory for this goal.
I can’t help but being convinced that was a meta message from Danuser telling us to forget Arthas and Warcraft III.
A pretty insulting one on top of that, who he is to tell us what story we should remember or not?
His own work on Shadowland will be mostly remembered with bitterness and hatred just like Rian Johnson and The last Jedi: A work only aimed to destroy the past and the stories we loved to replace it with its own inferior crap.
I’m in the same boat as you: I loved the lore but Shadowland nuked it with a H bomb.
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Gameplay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> lore
In every game, not just MMORPGs or WoW. Lore and storytelling is a complete waste of time by comparison to FUN and satisfying gameplay.
So accurate…
Nope. Not going to happen.
They had a golden opportunity here, and Blizzard blew it, big time.
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arthas literally murdered countless of innocent children and families. he wasn’t done dirty enough.
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Please read this book, then come back and play with the rest of us.
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that book actually looks sick, how do i come play after i finish?
0 things were retconned tho (in terms of this cinematic or arthas).
I played through WC3 and the Frozen Throne, and I read Rise of the Lich King. I liked the cinematic. It was a fitting end to the character. Arthas is a tragic character. What he had to do in Stratholme, how it hurt those he loved, his use of Frostmourne, his change into the Lich King and what he did to Sylvanas are all tragic. The use of Arthas’s remaining soul to create Kingsmourne is tragic. Him fading into obscurity is tragic.
Some big return and dialog, etc would not have done justice to his character or to the characters that we’ve watched come to terms with what he did to them.
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Engage in discourse on how Arthas is actually portrayed (his childhood, the acts of kindness he engaged in, etc. I am not saying he is the golden boy Anduin, but he DID do some pretty durn nice/awesome things), versus engaging in silliness that some folks keep parroting about “Arthas is teh most evil Evil that was EVAR evil.”
That would be fun 
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Arthas not having a speaking role is not the same as completely throwing him away and doing nothing with him whatsoever. They had the perfect set up for a villain redemption that actually would have made sense for once, too. Arthas was under the Jailer’s domination magic and after his death, his soul was intercepted by Uther and Devos and sent into the Maw without ever even seeing the Arbiter. A character who isn’t in control of their actions and doesn’t stand any kind of trial gets to fizzle out of existence into nothingness, but Sylvanas comes back to the good guys despite deliberately doing way, way more and doing things that are arguably way, way worse than Arthas, and for far longer.
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I personally think a redemption arc for arthas would have ruined his story since a lot of his fall from grace was about his own choices and agency rather than domination magic or trickery.
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I’m not saying he SHOULD have been redeemed, I’m just pointing out what I see as either a double standard by the writers, or them just straight up forgetting their own lore for all but reversing the means by which Arthas and Sylvanas committed their respective war crimes but still letting Sylvanas go seemingly scot-free while Arthas gets condemned to non-existence, despite not really being in control of his own actions (which IMO is less of a retcon than people make it sound, there’s a pretty big gap between being a pragmatist who is willing to hurt people for the greater good like Paladin Arthas, and genocidal monster like Death Knight and Lich King Arthas, and it’s been plainly apparent from the beginning that Frostmourne was influencing him to some unseen degree) while Sylvanas did all of her stuff completely free of outside compulsion.
I really wish people would stop using this analogy. The only reason seasons 1-7 were good is because George R.R. Martin had written everything up to that point. He had nothing to do with the finale of the TV series because it ended before his book could.
They wrote that steaming pile of garbage, not the genius behind all the content you loved.
That’s what makes Arthas’s story so tragic. He was a good kid trying to be a good king and he went down a terrible path.
Dude’s been out of the Warcraft universe for like a decade. Let it go.
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They didn’t tho. Arthas had a choice for his descent. Sylvanas had 0 choice until she was a banshee who broke free from the will of domination. OG banshee lore differentiates banshees from ghosts in that their spirits were fractured. The only thing that was “changed” is uther getting the same treatment.
Sylvanas doe not need to be forgiven for her actions but she did not go through the same experiences as arthas. It just wasn’t the same thing.
I also fully believe that if we had seen a living soul of arthas he would not have wanted redemption.
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Will never happen.
You cut out the second part of that sentence. Knowing how mourneblades work and the fact that domination magic is now for some reason it’s own thing, the only crimes Arthas committed under his own power were the culling of Stratholme and burning his men’s ships and killing the mercenaries they hired in Northrend. Everything he did after taking up Frostmourne and wearing the Helm of Domination is straight up not his own will. And if Mal’Ganis is to be believed (and he doesn’t have any real reason to lie), Arthas was already chosen by Lich King Ner’zhul (and by proxy, the Jailer), to become the Lich King and do all of the terrible things he did from birth or even sooner, so an argument could even be made as Arthas just being screwed from conception.
Shadowlands took a dump all over Arthas already by making all of those things I mentioned not-really-his-fault, coupled with the aforementioned thing with Uther giving the finger to the Arbiter and putting him into the Maw with Devos, and now they’re not going to follow through on everything they’ve introduced from 9.0 to now and just have him disappear. A bunch of setup with no payoff. No point in mentioning Arthas so many times, AND saying that mourneblades possess you (and that Frostmourne was the most evilest of them all), AND having the Jailer be the big man behind the Lich King, AND have the name of his signature technique straight up be the same as the ****ing helmet that Arthas wore around his head. Pointless retcons are bad enough, but at least follow through and fire your Chekhov’s Guns.
And compare this to Sylvanas. Her new plague, her burning Teldrassil, her working with the Jailer and trying to genocide the universe, all of that was done well after she regained her ability to think independently, and she was never dominated like Arthas was.
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And even then, he had already been started on being driven in to madness.
Like… this is all documented. We know all of this. Yet people going hurrduurrr Arthas is teh Evil.
Nice comment btw <3 I already liked it, but you deserve another like lol 