It’s one thing to help the villagers kill gnolls because they’re attacking the village, it’s another thing to help an obviously unhinged Kirin Tor mage kill gnolls because they’re gnolls, with no option to report him to the Kirin Tor or to warn the gnolls about him, especially in the light of the relatively nuanced handling of this subject by a certain competing MMO.
It really does make our character feel like a amoral murderhobo who will do anything for anyone with an exclamation mark over their head.
As someone who subscribes to the idea that some fantasy races should inherently be evil (yes, looking at you, D&D orcs), gnoll slaying is fine in my book. The NPC is unquestionably a bit touched in the head, but even then, I don’t think it’s necessary to have an option to call him out.
Why? Because some times bad people get away with bad things, and not everything is resolved and wrapped up with a nice little bow on top at the end. It’s like when people want Odyn to be held accountable for the terrible things he has done, because that is the ‘right thing’ to happen from a moral standpoint, whilst completely forgetting that it waters down the narrative if every shady decision gets a moralistic resolution.
We would not have 90% of the Forsaken quests from Vanilla, were that the case.
Accurate. We’ll topple nations for a new pair of shoes.
Forsaken quests are just comically evil but they get a pass for being edgy undead and the wider Horde going “Look over there! Honour!” while PoW slaves are dragged off to be ghoul food.
Okay, but WoW doesn’t, and it’s baffling that we’d take that approach with gnolls when we already know they’re not all “evil”.
Like, that’s the lore and has been for years.
It is bizarre that Blizz would spend so much effort pointing to the retcon centaurs and say “see they’re not all bad” but then have us freely genocide some gnolls because…they’re there, I guess, and the Kirin Tor are racist?
He’s not getting away with bad things. We’re doing bad things for him, despite having an established character as champion of good things (supposedly, when they remember).
Sure it has been that way for years, but not always - and that change has been a mistake in style, in my opinion.
As for doing bad things for the npc? Sure, the player character does that. They also got duped several times in TBC, performed torture for the Kirin Tor during WotlK, helped the Forsaken with questionable things in Cata (Hillsbrad), participate in what practically constitutes war crimes in MoP, and the list goes on. It’s nothing new.
Okay cool, but gnolls still aren’t inherently evil in universe so regardless of your opinion on whether they should or shouldn’t be, they aren’t.
“I like to think fantasy races can be inherently evil, so Archimonde destroying Dalaran was good, actually.” because, I mean, humans have done a bunch of bad stuff throughout WoW’s history, and we’ve killed a lot of them, so…
And in recent years Blizzard have been pushing to make the player character more of a character - they’re a champion of their faction, they’re the leader of a class hall, they’re trusted allies of the faction leaders.
You’re right: It’s not new. It is in fact quite old, and in a way which is incongruous with the direction they’ve otherwise been taking.
I mean unless you’re a Death Knight but we’re not even getting an undead gnoll army out of this so I don’t really see what’s in it for me.
You are right, the current iteration of gnolls portrays them as non-evil. However, that has nothing to do with my point - which was to disagree with the direction they are taking that portrayal, whilst it used to be entirely different.
You are perfectly welcome to agree with the current narrative they are telling, that is your own business. You will note, however, that I also only ever gave my thoughts on what direction I think the narrative should take, to become better.
Sayge has been in the game since Vanilla. They allied with the Defias (the good guys) in Vanilla. Meatball has been friendly since WoD. Cackle and her tribe has been canon since the first traveler novel in 2016.
Current iteration meaning “anything after WC3”, I suppose?
There are, and should, always be exceptions to the rule. But that’s a powerful narrative tool you use in moderation, like the unreliably narrator. They are, after all, the exception.
As for the Defias, they were decidedly the bad guys in my book. And I say that as a staunch trade unionist
If there are exceptions to the rule then they’re not inherently evil, and therefore we can’t slaughter them without feeling bad, because there could be exceptions.
I mean, not really - the rule is an observance of the natural occurrence, while the exception is a notable divergence from the established pattern. The rare capability to rise above, if one wants to put it melodramatically.
If we’re meant to be morally okay with slaughtering a specific species en masse simply for being that species (which is what we’re doing in the Kirin Tor quest) despite knowing that some of them can be or are good people, then we’re the bad people.
And that’s explicitly not the character that Blizzard wants us to be in recent years, and certainly not in Dragonflight where we’re doing cool stuff with the nice new centaur and Alexstrasza and rejuvenating the land and whatnot.
“What if the Highlord of the Silver Hand did a racially based genocide for the Kirin Tor” doesn’t really seem like the sort of thing that fits in with the rest of the expansion.
At least not since Jaina quit the faction lmao gottem.
In recent years? What’s that whole business with the Death Knight who tries to raise Tirion Fordring as a Horseman during Legion? Or is that not recent enough? Or are death knights not the heroic champion you mentioned? In that case, should they be included/excluded from certain quests? It’s a hodgepodge argument.
But like I said, you are perfectly welcome to agree with the direction they are taking the game, its story, and the portrayal thereof. Just as I am perfectly allowed to critique said product. We don’t exactly have to come to a unified world view on this
The Death Knights are explicitly bad people doing bad things (for good reasons, or so they tell everyone else) in their class specific quests, same as Demon Hunters.
But the general quests that everyone plays? Not so much. Then we’re back to being a faction champion of honour and whatnot, saving the day for truth, justice and the azerothian way.
And even when the Death Knights are wiping out a racial group they’re not doing it just because they don’t like them, they’re doing it because they want a magic book to point them at a corpse so I can get a cool new dragon mount. They’re mass murderers and grave defilers, but they’re not racist.
A quest is a quest, it’s not made less valid (or more, for that matter) on the basis that it happens to be a class or general quest. The whole narrative of the world - at least the narrative that isn’t exclusive to the books - is built upon the quests, and you can’t just pick, choose and disregard nilly-willy based on what you think makes sense
Am I a cool champion of good+justice? The Kirin Tor quest is dumb because it makes me a bad person.
Am I an edgy Death Knight of the Ebon Blade? The Kirin Tor quest is dumb because it’s a complete waste of my time and I don’t even get a cool mount or ghoul army out of it. I’m out here to save Azeroth from the bad undead (not good undead, like me), not do errands for lazy mages.
Always hearing about how super powerful mages are with their arcane explosions and blizzards and whatnot why don’t you just do it yourself!!!
Whats the problem with this gnoll questline, I get a weekly quest to murder the Horde races across Azeroth and the afterlife and this is requested by a third party who is amused by our genocidal tendencies.
I say we need more murderhobo questlines and stories and fewer idiots claiming they are problematic.
