No because I played that warfront enough on the Horde and the Nelf armor was not so interesting to me that I was going to drag myself through another gazillion matches for a purple variant.
But sounds about right. Personally I love how Void Elves come off, to a man, as dangerous and clearly insane lunatics on the Horde. Which actually had me hyped up to play one.
A cackling Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu Velf Warrior spilling blood to appease the madness burning like a thousand stars in his mind sounded fun.
Only to get Blueside and oh they’re quite sensible. And the undead tyrannosaurus they raise with void magic is actually considered a harm reduction, psychological warfare tactic. And not you know, desecrating a people’s sacred culture just to spite them.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. I had to put on subtitles. I actually couldn’t tell if that cinematic was supposed to be comedic. Because yeah Zooval sounding muffled and unintelligible because he just put a mask over his face is the sort of realistic awkward thing that would happen.
I kinda wish Sylvanas just blinked at him and said “No, seriously, what is your plan now I cannot hear you”
Yeah. Okay, well I get what Blizz was going for. They wanted to make him sound like the Helm Of Domination so they put a filter on him but then dialed it to 11.
Problem is, the Lich King is already hard enough to understand as it is.
I’d much prefer it if they made his voice akin to Krexus from the Drake Afterlives Short.
FFXIV already did that story (villain wants reality to be different and screw everyone else, heroes admit it’s flawed but want to keep living because it’s their world) with Shadowbringers so WoW trying to do it would just bring in comparisons of the two.
I’m thinking more of the whole human experimentation thing and the towns they wipe out. They didn’t really commit fully to humans being hyper aggressive, as its not really explained what is going on with Hillsbrad by the time we get there, just that its a “human infestation” to be wiped out for their plague development. The whole angle of needing a plague because of the likes of Scarlets but more importantly the Lich King (which is why it works on undead too) goes out the window as the Forsaken come across as simply jerks as its not properly shown that even non Scarlets do not want the Forsaken to exist.
Then the Cataclysm follow up had the Frostwolf Clan straight up leave the Horde because of the Forsaken and other Horde members acting in similar fashion.
It may not be properly illustrated but the lore explicitly states the Forsaken turned to humanity first, and we’re hunted like animals for their trouble. Hence turning to the Horde. Which wasn’t anyone’s first idea because the 2nd War is still a pretty fresh memory for Northern EK ex humans.
And yeah they certainly pull twisted experiments on the Scarlets. But turnabout is fair play. I don’t know how you torture someone with a touch and go relationship with their nervous system to death but the Scarlets sure managed. Suffice to say I felt no pity whatsoever for the ones in the Apothecarium. They’re not exactly the brightest bulbs in the box anyway. Who eats a pumpkin handed to them by a mad scientist with a notepad at the ready?
Edit:
Though upon reflection I do think in a Forsaken playthrough this is illustrated well. Humans are some of the very first hostile NPCs you encounter in game, and you don’t run into humans who don’t want to kill you on sight until the Argent Dawn. I still remember first wandering into Light’s Hope because the sight of humans and undead not just coexisting but working and fighting alongside eachother was extremely remarkable.
I mean, I haven’t given the writing team the benefit of the doubt for years, so my interpretation is almost always going to be on the “uncharitable” side of things.
Fair and just to his mind might be: I’m not given Free Will by the First Ones so no one should have Free Will!
Furthermore he might be programmed to sort Souls according to the Purpose by the First Ones and sees Free Will as a flaw in the First Ones’ design since Free Will results in Souls with no Purpose. Get rid of Free Will and all Souls have a Purpose!
Perhaps Zovaal is merely a Machine of Death doing what the First Ones programmed him to do.
I’m just wondering how they all still have jobs at this point. And that’s an awful thought, this is still a period of profound economic hardship and on any occasion a pink slip isn’t good news.
But they are bad at their jobs, objectively speaking. I’m aware they’re working around a mountain of variables that make things incredibly difficult but that comes with the territory. But fundamentally their gig is to produce an interesting narrative for this product, and they’ve failed spectacularly in this regard multiple times.
Like in what other line of work could you get away with such a consistently subpar and widely frowned upon performance? Honestly I hope Roux gets to write off her Blizz income as a charity reward. Because she’s actually written some best sellers. She gets canned she’ll do alright. I’d love to see the rest of these guys try to hack it without stapling their ish on to an already widely viewed IP.
He’s knock-off fantasy Thanos because that’s what the tools in the marketing department think sells. Only he isn’t even as remotely interesting as MCU Thanos.
Add in a pinch of generic Fantasy Dark Lord Sauron look-alike no. 26487. Removing Sargeras as a threat was one of the worst moves in Warcraft lore. Sargeras was integral to the backstory of Warcraft and most of its playable races.
Imagine if Warhammer killed the Chaos Gods and tried to replace them with a DC Comics Darksied wannabe. That’s what WoW did with Sargeras and the jailer.
See I wouldn’t even call him a Thanos knock off. Because the clever part of that story was he was the protagonist of the first film. Not the hero, but the protagonist, the one with the goals everyone else was reacting too.
And initially I did think that’s what they were going for with Zooval. And I think it could’ve worked.
Skyrim’s dialogue isn’t winning any Pulitzers but one piece I did love was up on the mountain with the friendly dragon when he suggests perhaps this apocalypse you’re thwarting is necessary for a new and better world to be birthed.
To which my response was, curtly, that world will have to look out for itself.
And I think that would’ve been a fascinating scenario for this story. What if Zooval is telling the truth, and we know this for a fact because heroes from the new universe he births come back in time to try to thwart us?
That’d be something. If we could be if not the bad guys at least something approaching selfish.
“He creates a universe without want. No one hungers, no one fears, nothing hurts. Why would you want to prevent that?”
“Because my people and stuff are in this universe jackass so eat lead and give me your pants for the 5% Stat improvement”
No-one is asking for him to be that. What we mainly want is some sort of personality. Instead we have Satan Jiren. You can be an evil bastard while having a personality. Daddy Sheev from Star Wars for example. Make him an actual character instead of just a plot device.
It won’t matter who of the “workhorse” writers they bring in if they get rid of the current ones as long as the narrative team is being run the same way and as long as the WoW team as a whole doesn’t take narrative cohesion and audience expectation more seriously and with an actually reasonable attitude.
Morgoth’s Ring. The last chaper, Myths Transformed, has two sections that are very relevant: Melkor Morgoth, and “Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion.” They explain a lot about what Morgoth and Sauron actually wanted, how these two interacted, and what led to their individual downfalls. The most relevant sentences are :
“Sauron had never reached this stage of nihilistic madness. He did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it. He still had the relics of positive purposes, that descended from the good of the nature in which he began: it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and co-ordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. (It was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him.)"
Honestly no. Not even that would be enough if we look at the entire universe, It still would be nothing, not even a drop in an ocean. But it would be “better” for sure.
What I’m getting at is in order to solve the issue of him having no personality, we need to just go even further with that.
Think of the Doom Slayer from Doom. He’s got zero personality besides being angry. Let’s just do that with Zovaal. But we need to actually make him do something cool, like kicking some but and taking names or whatever.
I don’t think they’ll go that far. It’ll just be “darkness is necessary because Light alone is worse than light with a little darkness for balance.” Which, honestly, is about the most cliched idea out there, but the new cosmic diagram is pretty much based on that premise.
I’ve actually been enjoying Zovaal so far because there’s still so much we don’t know about him and just what he intends to do.
I also like that this is one of the first times the main villain not only been several steps ahead of us but has actually won big time. He basically just used our assault on the Sanctum to bypass the now weak defenses of Oribos to seize the Arbiter’s sigil right under our noses.
I’m still kind of mad at us for that, why weren’t the Covenants defending Oribos en mass and the Eternal Ones themselves guarding the Arbiter’s chamber? Seems like we just left the one place we know he wanted to go wide open.
I’ve been very interested in the idea that Death used to more wild and antagonistic until the First Ones ‘chained’ and ordered it like we see it now. Empowered Zovaal is exactly what I expected to see: Death as a conquering power and his armor is very much a statement of that intent.
And now I’m very interested to see where we go from here. I understand others might not find it as interesting, but everyone has different tastes.