Back in my day!

Lore Story
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I’d say that the whole thing was framed under the usual characterisation that you’d expect from Sylvanas: carrying out some shady stuff in order to secure her own people’s agenda.
Only this time, she at least tried to signal some degree of restraint.
If only because she prefaced this scheme she had with a “No, you take my army and carry on fighting the Legion, Champion. This one I’ll take care of without making the entire Horde army be a puppet for my own goals”.

Yeah, it was all shady as hell. But it was still your another day with the Sylvanas we knew.
The one that still showed signs of improvement.

Come BFA, that was all thrown out the window and replaced with the screeching “Horde is nothing” and “Souls to the Death God” impersonation.

Same.
Voljin a death would’ve still been a bitter pill to swallow, but at least we would’ve had a meaningful payoff.

With what came after, not only did he die an underwhelming death that removed the only iconic OG troll we had, but also made a fool out of him.

It was all authorial fiat.
We had stuff like Saurfang warning Sylvanas he’d challenge her as soon as she stepped a foot beyond the line.

But it was all discarded for the sake of plot and to stretch the second attempt at a civil war.

It’s not that characters were stupid to not learn from the stuff that happened under Garrosh.
Writers KNEW they should’ve reacted differently.
But they wanted to tell this story, so they temporarily gave them the attention span of a Goldfish.

And for the first round or why did the troops/leaders comply, I’d say that writers did in fact bother with plausible reasons.

At first we had factions revolting against Garrosh or downright disobeying him (Frostwolf collaboration in Silverpine, how the Forsaken were to conquer Gilneas, etc.). But these same people would end up submitting if only because his arch portrayed him increasingly deranged and dangerous towards dissidence.
Fear basically reigned any act of rebellion.

1 Like
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That’s still accepting the need to depose her to have a right to disobey her, though. You are right, there is a mechanism to change leadership. But the system of leadership is needlessly absolute.

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Wouldn’t be the fist time when this happens. For example, here is a bit from the lead quest designer from Cata-WoD days:

One of the things that came across was that we’re doing this really cool story with Pandaria where there’s the sha but there’s also this war between the Alliance and Horde, which is bringing out all of this energy onto the continent. Then there’s the pandaren, who are kind of caught in the middle. Very, very cool story. And originally we were too subtle with that, it really wasn’t coming across in the intro. It was a slow build, and you’d eventually discover all this stuff.

A lot of people weren’t quite catching on. It didn’t feel like this cool epic beginning to the expansion. And we went back to the drawing board, and I’m really glad we did. Because once we decided “Hey, let’s just have this story be huge, right from the get go,” that was such the right decision to make. When you play through the beginning of those zones now, there’s no question about a war. There’s no question that there’s a culture clash happening here. There’s no question what the sha is, and that we’re going to cause all kinds of trouble.

Which IMO is very characteristic of what happens in WoW story. Just with an added admission that the original scripts could’ve been altered by implementers.

Extra food for thought:

https://twitter.com/Wonton_/status/1408829316549386243

gl hf

2 Likes
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Those tweets… Oof.

And really, just stressing that the writers aren’t the biggest part of the problem. The game just isn’t made by the writers at all. Nor are the writers chosen by people who care about what came before.

So…yeah, I’ll stick to my position that “no big story” is the best big story WoW could do.

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Potential idea for the next expansion story:

Bonus (real reason he left blizzard):

gl hf

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