This is hands-down possibly the most ridiculous questline I’ve ever seen honestly. It tries, I guess. It. . .tries to do. . .something of some sort in some way. It sure does.
But when you’re trying to convince people that Lightforged should have Warlocks and even the premiere Lightforged Warlock NPC says “screw this, FOR THE XENEDAR!” at the very end of the questline and doesn’t appear to do anything remotely warlock-y besides get handed a soul-stone by the player character it just. . .completely falls apart. You can’t justify giving a race Warlocks by having the NPC meant to represent it not involve himself in any of the warlockery during the Questline and start yelling praises to the Holy Light at the end its utterly ridiculous.
It’s weird to look back in retrospect and at old interviews/dev notes that TBC broke so much various canon or messed up storylines for characters.
It is the one expansion where Blizzard truly had absolutely no idea(not even a bad/rushed one) what their storyline was going to be and just threw anything they thought was cool at it.
They were pretty much gunning for going the TTRPG route of keeping the game more relatively grounded and making a South Seas expansion for most of Vanilla. The reason why TBC’s storyline feels rushed is because it was.
But more so than any other rushed expansion. WoD was also really half-done, rushed and cut, but there was atleast some thought process behind it. Same with Shadowlands even if it was a bad plot.
Yes, but when it came to WoD and Shadowlands, at least they had planned the plot, as better or worse as it was.
For TBC, it wasn’t even that. The very concept itself was a late planning thing in development, to the point where you can see the seeds of a future South Seas expansion by how many pirates and pirate-like factions there are in Vanilla, the Zandalari Tribe in Zul’Gurub, Theramore & Kul Tiras, how even some of the attunement quests had you doing things around the South Seas’ shores…
And then they did a full 180º and said ‘yeah and then the dark portal opens again and a spaceship crashes in azeroth’.
Considering that a development map from ages ago shows that the Dragon Isles were going to be a level 70 zone/raid? Better! We could’ve skipped aaaaaaaaaaaall of Cataclysm-Shadowlands and still get our dragons, followed by going to Northrend.
Starting with a more grounded expansion like South Seas might also have helped the whole villain/threat inflation that WoW has had an issue with, where every bad guy needed to be topped by something else.
Having the first expansion immediately kick off with a war against Illidan and the Legion, with the full Scourge on the second expansion, it might had better been saved for down the line.
I mean, that’s a problem that’s been going on since Vanilla. We went from Ragnaros, to Nefarian, to Hakkar, to an Old God and his empire, to Kel’Thuzad and a worldwide Scourge attack.
I just think that the whole going to another planet, spaceships, and killing named lore characters from Warcraft 3 in an attempt of going “hey guys remember warcraft 3???” to an audience that had played Warcraft 3 like 4 years prior is pretty meh compared to what we could’ve got.
Nostalgia baiting when most players probably still had the games installed alongside WoW was a bit weird yeah.
It is one thing WoW has struggled with alot though in general, it’s heavily reliance on the “core” team of characters from its Warcraft days. It’s only quite recently that we’ve started to see new characters step in and gain more spotlights. It would have been nicer to see development earlier though.
“The light wills me to become ketamine addicted felhead”
This but unironically.
Like it or not, the Light is just a cosmic force that rewards large amounts of willpower and self-confidence with superpowers. Any zealot who thinks that they’re doing the right thing, without a shadow of a doubt in their mind, can wield the Light.
While other Lightforged Draenei might disagree, there’s nothing wrong with some of them believing that the enemy’s weapons can be repurposed and wielded against them, by binding demons to their will and wielding destructive fel magic in the name of the Light and all things good.
It also makes more sense now that the Burning Legion has been neutered and engaging in warlock shenanigans is unlikely to seduce the Lightforged Draenei into serving the enemy. The new quests even seem to support that.
