The thing is though they want to talk about genocide and PTSD and ish. But it’s like a 12 year old who just learned about these topics trying to jam them into a fan fiction.
I know because I was that 12 year old. If there’s an Arbiter IRL I will answer for the torture I put my long suffering guild mates through with those never edited diatribes about concepts I was completely ignorant of.
But these are allegedly professionals and adults.
This might be another example of the art team carrying WoW but seeing him in his full armor makes me like Zovaal more now that he looks like an imposing evil overlord rather than a Dad at the beach
Danuser just learned about the Tulsa Massacre a month ago, side note. Golden too. They did a back and forth about it.
Man I just.
You go to more interesting beaches than I.
And eh he just feels very insert badguy here. I mentioned elsewhere I think it would’ve been cooler if he suddenly became very handsome and angelic looking. Something like Canabel’s Lucifer, ya know?
As it stands it’s just like - how many skulls do you need? It’s called work life balance Zooval. I get you’re the God of death or chains or something but you are allowed to have other interests.
I was expecting this but with wings
Warcraft is at its best when it’s OT Star Wars.
There is some depth and symbolism to be expanded on, but it’s otherwise a easily understood story that just executed basic concepts well. Because challenging a WW2 Germany coded Big Bad Space Empire is fun just like it was fun and impactful to see Grom furiously reject the pit lord’s claim they are one and the same by running up and shoving his axe into his chest cavity.
To be fair a lot of Americans were oblivious to that and remain oblivious to a lot more. I think the most exhausting part of the internet is watching people lose their minds because they’ve just now clicked on the history tab on a Wikipedia article about their town.
But honestly I sort of expect better from writers. History is a free idea bucket. A lot of fascinating stuff happened there.
Like are they unaware the most successful genre writers were themselves well versed in history and folklore?
He’s just bad because bad, there is nothing to really care about. He doesn’t even have a personality like someone like Denathrius does. He just kind of exists to advance the plot and so we have an enemy.
Embrace your inner MHP and learn to love fighting giant skull people with glowsticks
Those villains are fun when they are well presented, which the Jailer is not. Sauron was pretty absent in LOTR, but the plot didn’t hinge on supposedly complex goals and generic mean words from him. It would be like the fellowship making a mockery of Mordor day 1 until they had Sauron wreck something the reader/watcher doesn’t care that much about.
My thing is WoW is built upon DOZENS of real life ethnicities and cultures, explicitly invoking both historical beats (e.g. the Vulpera vs Sethrak parallel to Imazighen-Arab struggles in North Africa).
They have to have a few Real Life History experts employed, right?
Right?
A theologian maybe?
Maybe Shadowlands should have opened up with the player character being kidnapped and worked over by Zovaal while he tries to break you into joining, or something like that. At least then you’d double up on the reasons for wanting to get back at him: “Yeah you’re bad news and got to go, but also screw you.”
They do but Activision is lending them out to the CoD franchise to give them more stuff to lie about.
Pain. So much pain.
I think that the main problem is still that we don’t know exactly what he wants. Zovaal is obviously a Lich King/Ner’zhul kind of character for this particular narrative but in Warcraft 3 the Lich King’s motivations were made clear and comprehensible early. They wanted to make everyone into zombie slaves. Got it.
We know that Zovaal wants to do something that will make everything serve him but it’s still too abstract for most people to care because we still don’t have a clear idea of what his victory would even look like.
If anyone wanted to know why the Scourge was bad news you could just point at the Plaguelands and they’d get it pretty quick. There is no equivalent for the Jailer yet.
In fact, the Jailer forcing the souls of the dead into the Maw is really the only link that we so far have to Azeroth. Without that element we are literally just participating in a proxy war between a bunch of people we didn’t even know existed an expansion ago, so I hope that the war goes to Azeroth next.
This in particular really sums it up.
Like the Scourge were killing people. I still remember a quest where you find some captured Argents. And one Dwarf is like barely alive, and you’ve to put down his surgically mutilated comrades and then him because he’s in the plague goo and about to turn.
And it’s over the top but it’s fun melodrama. Sort of thing you can shake your fist at a passing necropolis about. We’ll get those murderous bastards back for this.
But with Zooval? Like he’s torturing souls but they’re mostly humanoid ghosts. So he’s vaguely hurting more the loose suggestion of a person than a person. And I can’t really get worked up about that.
IMO they should have played up the “true lord of the Scourge” angle more. For the second half of BfA I would have dispensed with the Naga/Nzoth business entirely and had the growing PvE crisis being a sudden and massive resurgence of Scourge activity as Bolvar struggled to retain control and Zovaal’s influence grew.
I think it would have gone a long way towards making people care more, because it ties Zovaal to an already established force that the players already have a “love to hate them” relationship with.
Have the final boss be Nathanos on Maw Steroids or something while Sylvanas escapes into the Shadowlands
And he looks basic as hell
All of those centuries being imprisoned just to be freed and end up dying immediately. He should have at least gotten his own expansion.