They filled our favorite RP spots in Aegwynn’s Gallery with NPCs 
The “May Blizzard remember you exist” curse strikes again.
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I am just going to say it; I am glad the Worgen and Forsaken Guards are gone. Never made sense to have those 2 factions in there anyways. Especially not with the Forsaken having their Blight carts with them. And the Worgen having a rabid hatred for the Forsaken on the otherside of the city never made much sense either.
Now, would’ve been better if they just opened up both sides to… Well… Both sides, to increase the RP-able area for as long as it still lasts, but eh. Just glad the Elves are back to guarding it, eitherway.
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Regarding Alliance and Horde storylines. We’re currently so far ahead with inclusion in modern entertainment and everyone wants to feel represented in one way or another.
So it’s not strange Horde players want to feel represented too without there be needing an Alliance vs Horde war to motivate that storyline.
But I think it’s hindered by expansions going to new places where there’s no reason for the story to exist without being forced. Really, we should have had a second Cataclysm (in the sense of an updated old world) expansion where we return to the OG zones for new/updated stories. Dragonflight had such a good initiative with going back to adventure roots but it didn’t take long for some out of our plane void doom looming over everything.
Classic was best when there were just individual bad groups doing bad things without an overarching main baddy.
My guess is that this will come after World Soul saga ends. Right now Blizzard is updating the oldest part of Azeroth, TBC areas in Midnight (I firmly believe Azuremyst Isles will be patch zone for Midnight) and WotLK areas in The Last Titan.
With that done, there can be place for the (at the end of TLT) the oldest parts of Azeroth to be updated next.
Once again, Blizzard invented the “new places”. The Isle of Dorn and Harrowfall did not spring fully formed from the aether, they are not merely conveying a divine vision they received from on high.
Blizzard could and should have invented the new place with reasons for a Horde story to exist.
Imagine how much worse WoD would have been if it had opened with the orcs having already completely wiped out the draenei, so Alliance players would’ve been forced to solely tag along with Thrall and Durotan, following only the orc stories. Imagine how much that would’ve sucked.
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Isn’t that how most Horde feel going into TWW?
…yes, that’s why I’m saying they should change it, so it doesn’t suck. It was a hypothetical to help illustrate my point.
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How did we go from this
to this
What’s the problem, other than “violence good talking bad?”
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The BFA one goes hard. The War within does not.
If you compare the BFA cinematic to that of war within in terms of audience reactions alone at Blizzcon (which is arguably the most saturated congregation of WoW fans, and thus an extremely good cross-section of the playerbase), it’s very evident.
Fair enough, maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea- But it is undeniably a far more epic and involving cinematic than that of War Within.
Which is actually quite funny because I am 100% sure War Within, gameplay wise at least, will be far better than BFA. As was DF.
But that was before they turned Sylvanas into a puppet for Zovaal. I doubt the audience would still be that enthusiastic with that hindsight.
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Yeah, BFA one turned out to be a Big Ol’ Lie, at least with how they rolled with it. I still can’t believe it was intended that way when it was first made/released, but that doesn’t stop it being any less sour, frankly.
Also, MoP remains top tier among trailers 
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I’d say that they go hard in very different ways.
The BFA one is designed to get players pumped up and hyped for faction warfare, it’s designed to that whooping and cheering.
The TWW one is clearly not intended for that. It’s meant to be more introspective and an exploration of the character of Anduin, it’s also meant to present the audience with the mystery that will likely drive the Worldsoul Saga from the beginning to the end, the voice of Azeroth.
In short, it was designed to intrigue, not galvanise, and the audience reaction reflects that. It would be pretty weird if there was resounding applause and cheering while Anduin wrestled with his trauma.
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BfA trailer was a pinnacle of what we used to know and love Warcraft for. The normal, sensible war where both factions have something to be proud of. And indeed, it’s a pinnacle of military propaganda before the addon about said war. The TWW one is hard to understand without the context, and it does feel more blank with Anduin being as he is and Thrall… doing whatever he does out there? Even Dragonflight one, with a stone dude climbing up to fix the wires on a lighthouse, has some suspense to it, especially with the dragons’ arrival (which too wasn’t handled as good as it could).
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I mean, saying that, would either TBC or Wrath make much sense, to people who didn’t know WC3, other than a vague sense of “Clearly evil guy Bad”?
Not much, but it had style to it. We had this demonic elf, charismatic and edgy, we had a death knight raising an army of undead, and despite being obvious bad guys they had their cool. Deathwing was known only to those who played WC2, but it didn’t make him feel less of a Cataclysm. While now it’s… well, this. A guy laments the loss of the Light while there’s something sinister happens to the rest of the world. It’s just not as cool.
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To me Anduin is just a really boring character so that cinematic bored me to bits. But that started all the way back in Pandaria when we first start questing alongside him.
Shame we didn’t kill him in Shadowlands when he was possessed. That would have been a nice character ending.
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Add to it Turalyon claiming the throne by the right of a regent, and we get an interesting story ahead.
That would have been massively unsatisfying. It was absolute horse manure the character 180 and assassination they pulled on Sylvanas, frankly, and just axing another character because people don’t like them is equally on that tier.
Bad writing does not counter bad writing.
Edit: Tell me what’s satisfying about a cut-short character arc, with no motivation, no justification, as much ‘shock’ value as them arbitrarily deciding to kill Tirion and Voljin at Broken Shore?
Edit edit: Yes, I think looking at the Trailer more objectively they could have done something cooler. But boiling it down to ‘Anduin Bad’ could be just as equally turned to ‘Thrall Bad’, given the amount of ‘Green Jesus’ frustration and annoyance spawned over the years. I ain’t forgotten.
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I would say that a cinematic, a commercial, any piece of news media is and should be judged by it’s ability to invoke a need or interest in you.
Vanilla WoW cinematic, hell, all of them up until BFA basically invoked that kind of hype. Even SL did in some ways, but the breaking of the crown was, I think, symbolically a really bad move from the business.
Why? Because as said earlier, all hype should strive to stroke the most amount of emotion im the target audience.
Adding a pre-requisite to that (e.g. you can’t appreciate the WW cinematic without knowing the context) is like willingly handicapping yourself.
Take Wotlk cinematic. You can be a completely noob to the setting yet you recognize the dude walking over the ice and summoning a giant frozen dragon goes hard as hell.
However, if you do make a cinematic where you do use a piece of the media (e.g the helm of domination) to boost the said audience’s emotional investment, you better make god damn sure that your sacrifice of that holy cow pays you dividends.
Which, as you know, it did not. But already when that cinematic got revealed, I could see a bit of dissonance. The audience blinked, and that was that.
I think that WW cinematic failed because it failed to stroke any kind of investment from the audience. Unironically if they just skipped all of Thrall’s and Anduin’s monologue and just showed the giant Sword, it would have gone harder.
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