As much as I dislike lore being told in the books, I do genuinely think that the Desolate Council (before the current one) was a pretty neat idea. A group of Forsaken who took it on themselves to govern Undercity while Sylvanas was off doing her Warchief stuff is a pretty cool idea!
Just a shame that most of them were killed off in said book and replaced by the current council consisting of “I don’t like Calia”, “I’m indifferent about Calia (times two)” and “Yes Calia, my queen!”
It feels more like them leaving the faction divide behind and I think for them they already are at the point where they are no longer thinking in terms of oh this is alliance content and this is horde content
The battle of gilneas kind of proves that too me, I think the issue is that it was a sacrifice they were willing to make in order to have more patches in shorter timespans ready
Quicker patches, faster content cadence, faster and easier storytelling and most importantly a much bigger budget if they don’t have to divide 50/50 between the factions. It was definitely an inevitability once Blizzard realised all those factors. Whether it’s good however. . .
Rule of thumb: If you don’t explicitly see the character die, the character did not die. It’s one of the tropes I’m really not a fan of but it’s popular enough for a reason I suppose.
That being said I did like her as a follower in the Dalaran Underbelly and I think she had one of the better plots in BFA, even if she did have a good wrap-up in Scholomance.
If Gilneas was a foretaste then I hereby state:
No its not.
The breaking of the two factions and their barriers just doesn’t feel -earned-. I do believe it was about time for it to happen but not like this. I would have certainly preferred smaller factions forming even among the two big factions if it’s this absolute pillar they refuse to part with.
Goblins and Vulpera dominating the transport, logistic and economic sphere of the Horde.
Orcs, Darkspear and Tauren being the spiritually and tradition oriented and being obviously part of the old Horde having this unbreakable bound.
Horde and Alliance Elves being their own sovereign nations and working on whatever is going to be an Elven Empire looks like.
Pandaren being their own neutral side happy to assist newcomers such as the Dracthyr acclimate to this new era in a smoother transition in a way they themselves never got the opportunity.
Alliance is already homogenous for the most part and share a great deal of history with their present members. It’s rather hard to balkanise the whole faction when things have been smooth for the most part and share many ideals. I mean you could have all Dwarves pondering the question of being back under a single emperor, the Gnomes already have their elected monarch, Draenei are cool with Velen in charge, Human kingdoms are ressurging in strength and unity, etc… There is no possible antagonistic force among the Alliance in a way the Horde once had and it would require masterful writing to pull one off that unravels or even erode the bounds in the Alliance. Genn was the last warhawk and his last apparition in the game kinda was mellow. Turalyon would need the stupid bat or light zealous bat to hit him and turn him into an antagonistic element.
Point being, this is what would have been a better path to follow up with but because of external reasons, the faction peace is uncomfortably hamfisted making every content taking place in one faction to be cross-content anyway.
I think this is just symptomatic of a franchise having gone on for too long. WoW, Star Trek. Star Wars, Warhammer, LOTR and many more… The titans of scifi and fantasy for the last several decades have all succumbed to this exact behaviour. Do new writing teams have to do this with the franchises they take over? It seems to be mandatory now and I have no idea why but it’s extremely disappointing.
I too would like for franchises to have an end. A definitive end with a celebratory thing about its greatest moments and fans being present and then go in some sort of hall of cultural landscape where its like a time capsule but frozen for all time and no one touches ever again for revival.
There’s just something off about the idea of WoW, Warhammer, SW and so on still getting content well into our 50s, 60s, 70s, etc… Expected, granted it still generates cash in our current economical model, but off.
I don’t agree entirely. There should be an end for a story, but a setting is far more than a single tale. In Warcraft there’s far too much lore to not be explored in games, books and whatnot, which is why Chronicles of the Second War were this successful. And there is more to it, like Pandaren revolution, the troll empires pre-Sundering, the rise of the kaldorei, and all the rest we know only by the scraps of the lore.
With settings like Warcraft and Star Wars, they’re universes more than they are concentrated stories. There’ll always be more to do, see, and fight.
It’s equally possible I’ve started to find such sentiments suspect because of the prevalence of weird internet talking heads saying these franchises are dying because they’ve “gone woke”.
Promises to get even better. The team behind Chronicles of the Second War already showed their plans for the First War. As a part of that, they will also have us have prologues on Outland for instance, showing us the rise of the Horde and the bringing-in-line of Highmaul among other things, before they finally leave for Azeroth. Stuff’s going to be, dare I say… lit. 
That’s the problem with many of these old settings. That instead of expanding and exploring the lore the new storyliners prefer to stick to old and proven tones, or worse, try to include actual real-life topics in the fantasy. And I may sound provocative, but some of the best parts of Warcraft storyline were those with not too much Alliance or Horde as we know them included, if any at all. Like in Pandaria.
So this is one of those ones where I feel like how well it’s recieved is entirely in it’s implementation. I can’t remember the exact name of the group of players that partook in a lot of the edgier void elf stuff but I do know that it was worringly close in name and mentality to an IRL Nahtzee group. Obviously this is ADRP, it’s not canon, but it was my immediate thought of bad implementation. That, and druids saying “Not My Warchief” after Sylvanas burned down Teldrassil in a basic one-to-one mirroring of the IRL “Not My President” campaigns that were still happening at the time.
I’m definitely fully off on a tangent here (sorry Shogganosh) but I do think that as of Dragonflight, the dracthyr are a really good vehicle for explorations of identity and gender. While they have different sexes, the sexual dimorphism is non-existent outside of the visage form, but the visage form is a presentation chosen entirely by each individual dracthyr and I think there’s room for interesting storytelling there, as well as the more obvious themes of identity in each dracthyr having to find out where in the world they belong after being missing from it for millenia.
Obviously gender identity and gender expression aren’t the only IRL issue you could explore through the realm of fantasy characters, but it felt like the easiest one to explain. Anyway, all of this is to say that you very much can incorporate it and a part of me wishes to see Blizzard to take the risk, but it also very much is a risk because if you do a bad job with it then you basically annoy everyone in the process.
Chronicles 2 was a damn good book and I stand by that, no matter how much people doompost about Chronicles being written by an “unreliable narrator”. They’re canon unless otherwise contradicted, which has always been the Blizzard MO. The only lore compendium specifically written by a narrator who is objectively wrong - and actively made out to be wrong - is the Grimoire of the Shadowlands, where the Broker author interjects his own biases into the conclusions he makes from interviewing mortal races. The information he receives from the mortals is factual (funeral rites, etc), his conclusions are not.
I agree with you, but I think we’re talking about a different Chronicles here. Linma and I were referring to:
oh
It sounded like you were literally describing Chronicles 2 word for word which went into detail about the Rise of the Horde and origins of orcs on Outland, before moving to First War, and then the Second.
Nah, I was talking about the creators of this campaign having plans to expand their Warcraft: Orcs and Humans remake with that stuff as a prologue campaign before the orcs arrive on Azeroth!
In my opinion, it’s when new writing teams are given creative control over a setting and choose to do what you suggest and expand the scope of the original tale and try to boldly go where no man has gone before etc etc, that the issue arises. They’re absolutely not good enough to carry the torch and end up having to rely on call-backs to the old stuff to try and keep long-time fans on board with ample, poorly executed and often hamfisted “oh, I remember that part!”. Shadowlands is an excellent example of this. It’s WoW’s first bit of really new lore since MoP, the first time they came up with something largely original that doesn’t tie up a loose end from the RTS games, and what do they do? They write an absolute abomination of a storyline full of holes that trounces all over the lore whilst also sporting frequent “oh, I remember that part!” moments that are entirely disrespectful of the story that came before it. Look what they did to Arthas, mang.
I firmly believe this is what WoW is currently suffering from. Every expac for bare time now has been a distasteful mix of nostalgia bait and poorly written original ideas, and the Horde’s identity is being eroded as a result of it. Goblins are no longer arch-capitalists that are happy to destroy whole regions for the sake of profit so that the Horde can go and peacefully explore new places. Orcs no longer hate humans so that there’s no friction when we go and quest in the underground human kingdom. The Forsaken have been defanged, lost all the ground and territory they have conquered from Cata onwards and the two least iconic, least like the Forsaken we all grew up with, undead characters are pushed to the forefront so that Blizz can say “hey, remember Gilneas?”
There’s not a single race of the Horde that feels and behaves like they used to simply because in order to facilitate the kind of stories Blizz wants to tell now, bad stories I’d argue, the Horde races have needed incredible adjustments in attitude, temperment, and worldview. It’s because nu-Blizz is trying to do new stories that expand on the setting, seeking out new life and new civilizations, that the Horde is suffering.
I think you mix the reason and the consequence. The desire to search for new lands is fine, but it’s the people that write the story it that make it work bad. I won’t be surpised if (over)zealous Arathi humans’ first step after learning what they missed would be burning every orc, undead or void elf in holy fire. Or it should be in their logic. But for the sake of convenience we likely won’t have that.
The forsaken are a weird group writing-wise because while almost all races in WoW have their moments as villains (humans with the defias, gnomes with Thermoplugg, even tauren with the Grimtotem) the forsaken are one of the few where it feels like villainy is kind of the norm, and that’s a significant driving factor to many people who play them.
In some hypothetical world where the forsaken were never playable characters I fully believe they would just be classed as villains in the same way the Scarlet Crusade currently are, showing up now and again to cause havoc and act on their own interests regardless of who else they hurt or kill, but obviously we’re not in that world.
Unfortunately the status quo is to be upheld above all else - WoW has never had races leave their factions, so I think in order to justify the forsaken not being straight-up villains they had to tone them back a bit, when the more interesting option (to me at least) is to show the forsaken as something independent from the Horde as a whole.