Just Ashenvale. Also, it would be accurate to say the night elves still battle the Horde instead of the other way around, as there’s no description of any Horde offensives in recent lore, but there are descriptions of sentinels attacking Splintertree and Huntress Jalin decorating Stardust Spire with the corpses of Horde engineers, as well as their broken machines. Gnarly.
Depending on your perspective, the night elves might absolutely be in the right for still trying to push the Horde out of Ashenvale despite the armistice, but that wasn’t really the point that I was getting at.
My points were that the night elves are getting love from Blizzard, with nowhere near as many monkey’s paw caveats as people feared, and that I’d like to see the Forsaken get something that is even half as impressive as Amirdrassil, instead of a stinky corner of the Ruins of Lordaeron.
And splitting up story beats of enormous significance, setting them up with chapters years apart, but that’s just standard long term player retention tactics.
“This war would be over tomorrow if the people of this land we’re trying to conquer would just give up. Why can’t they be reasonable and embrace peace?”
Voidies no longer exist; excised from AD Common Lore in favour of their pale cousins. Their random sneezing mid combat turning them inky black is just an illusion.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t, given how bafflingly poorly tirifal is set up. Could they be ignored for being stinkies complicit in Sylvanas’ crimes? Could they be actively undermined at the highest level by blizzard simply hating them in a grand conspiracy to humiliate them? Could forsakenposting replace nelfposting as the new indignant essays of greatest memeworthiness?
You better be. I don’t know anything about the lore of that setting, but I know a crime against conlanging when I see one!
Tolkien didn’t start building his language-centric world by going, “Oh, this language seems poor and primitive because all the intricacies of meaning are in shades of intonation that only elves can pick up.” It’s a lazy worldbuilder’s excuse not to flesh out the language, and to my knowledge, no natural language works that way.
They should have simply added high elves to be quite honest with a unique silhuette - god knows there was the work done for them with that 10 year long yank thread demanding them.
High elf customisation feels like some absurd joke after Ion’s 500 page manifesto on why they shouldn’t be added or whatever lead Blizzard to make void elves.
Still waiting for them to add high elves as a new separate allied race to cash in on all those fat race change macrotransactions (no that’s not a typo).
Nah, the last complaint-worthy thing concerning the Forsaken that happened was when Calia spoke to that lich in Maldraxxus, only to be reassured that she was just like all of the other undead because she was reanimated using necromancy, even if it was Light-based necromancy instead of Death-based necromancy, without commenting on all of the differences that separate her from literally every other Forsaken. That was dumb.
The reclamation of Lordaeron was alright, the reformation of the Desolate Council was alright and the entirety of the Forsaken heritage quest was alright. None of the fears about Light-based Forsaken or Calia taking over as queen have come to pass. Undead haven’t gotten anything to be justifiably indignant about in quite a while.
There have been a few things, namely, how we didn’t know the state of Lordaeron from the start of BFA all the way to 9.2 and 10.1.7, which is 4 - 6 years.
Half a decade of one of the core races’ since Vanilla’s lore being left up to interpretation and not much else, only to be mended over with a questline about one of their enemies’ return, and a half-baked phase that is genuinely less furbished than Stromgarde, both in matters of NPCs and buildings.
I wouldn’t say it’s something particularly indignant, but it’s a strange state of affairs. They haven’t even mentioned the Undercity once in those two lore updates this last couple of years, which is only made even more ridiculous considering how the doors to the Undercity are still there, they’re just ignoring them, apparently.
It’s definitely a start, but it’s genuinely a bit ridiculous how the Scarlet Crusade is getting more lore fleshed out about them than the state of Lordaeron and Gilneas as a whole.
This is frankly mainly the issue of the timeskip and expansions taking 2 years now, and it leads to some very interesting situations, such as group of mages being all depressed about destruction of Theramore in DF, even though the questline takes place 10 years after it was destroyed and the city itself was only built in 21 at earliest, meaning Theramore has now been a ruin for longer than it has been a city.
If we were in the old “1 expansion = 1 year” times, 9.2.5 to 10.1.7 would have been less than a year, with 8.0 to 9.2.5 being less than two years. And I feel like taking about 2 years to fix deadly mist covering the core of your territory while also fighting in a world war, and then not having the actual city rebuilt after 10 months or so is pretty reasonable. Less so when 2 years turn into 4 and 10 months turn into 3 years and 10 months.
I’d argue that a lot of that is the Blizzard norm. It’s not common for them to flesh out or look back at anything that isn’t relevant to current content - or at least it wasn’t until the past couple of years, with the advent of heritage quests and quests for unlocking customisation and the Exploring Azeroth books, for what little they are worth.
Despite this, much of the setting is still left up to interpretation, with little idea of what has happened since Cataclysm.
As for the half-baked phase that comes with the reclamation of Lordaeron, I actually considered that acceptable at the time, especially since the night elves hadn’t been give anything at all by that point.
However, it’s less acceptable now that the night elves have gotten an entire zone built around their racial fantasy with a load of cutting edge assets, so I do hope that the Forsaken get something better than their stinky corner of Lordaeron to squat in.
Dark Iron didn’t even get a mention about the whole Smolderon thing, tauren and trolls are nowhere to be seen in an Emerald Dream patch, draenei have been doing the Peter Griffin death pose in some corner since Legion, Forsaken have been an afterthought for nearly 7 years now, and many, many more while humans and elves have entire expansions themed after them and zones that should be afterthoughts are more developed than entire capitals (as I’ve mentioned earlier, Stromgarde being exhibit A).
It’s pure hopium because, deep down, i know the Microsoft acquisition isn’t going to change much. But - while it wouldn’t (sadly) be represented in the game, it would be nice to see Blizzard returning to churning out short stories and novellas on their website to fill the gaps until actual assets are generated.
Blizzard have always been bad at balancing stories across the races, lor’themar being called Bob for a long length of time and gnomes have always had it stinking are two examples. I wager the Dracthyr are gunna get the pandaren treatment too.
Feeds into me being against more races really. They’ll get a great expansion and then radio silence until someone turns the servers off.
Night elves: “You got a whole expansion to yourselves, then you took our land, got all those cinematics about how sad it made you, you got the best heritage armor questline…”
Forsaken: “At least you got a story and a new capital! Ours is a glitchy phase and leaders nobody likes!”
