Or the main questline where the Alliance player character single handedly participates in more war crimes than the Horde collectively through out the expansion, but this is never mentioned again, because they’re mostly played down or made into a tone deaf gag while the Horde’s crimes have actual gravity in the narrative and treated seriously.
7 Likes
-Forcibly takes BFA from Blizzard, pushing SL off the edge of a cliff, and dragging DF and TWW away-
You don’t deserve these, I know how to fix this. Be thankful I’m not going as far back as Cata to untwist you jank-
writing problems…
plants bombs in the holds of a then neutral nations near entire navy
commits one of the biggest naval massacres since the second war
Shaw quips about it
Alliance audience roars and cheers
blizzard nods
1 Like
The Alliance was a great bad guy in vanilla with their unwillingness to look past old traditions and grievances whilst most of the Horde races looked towards the future and adapting to a changing world (Alterac Valley belongs the Stormpike industrial complex vs Alterac Valley belongs to the Frostwolves because they’ve lived there for 20 years and just want to be left alone).
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You mean the guys who were at war with the Alliance since Cata and allowed Horde to use their harbor as a base?
The difference between Vanilla and say, BFA, is the factions are simply a backdrop. The peoples that made up one had their own ambitions and aims that sometimes went against their own faction or against how their faction was coded.
Sure the dwarves were delving into the likes of Uldaman to learn more of their origins, but they also disposessed and eradicated a tauren tribe for the same aim.
Sure the Forsaken were fighting an existantial war with a sect of Crusaders, but they were also willing to help the Grimtotem to commit a coup on Cairne.
This is always going to be infinitely more interesting than the third retelling of Warcraft 2; this time the orc is sad because the war he agreed was inevitable involved war. And the Warchief was answering to some higher power that wants chaos-- wait a minute.
14 Likes
They had such an opportunity with the addition of both the Dark Iron Dwarves aswell as the Void Elves for BfA, or by switching Lordaeron and Teldrassil around. Where a young and impressionable Anduin, possibly influenced by some whispering from Genn Greymane and Admiral Rogers, decides to launch an attack on Lordaeron to retake it, only for the Horde to strike back by going after Teldrassil.
Meanwhile there seems to be a group of people who are still adamant Turalyon is going to pull a zealot-arc… any day now…
Always remember the Bilgewater Bowl-O-Rama, Voidosaurus Rex, and the Great Horde Ambassador Dissappearing Act!
2 Likes
Light Space Marine guy is totally evil guys!
Hasn’t done that even once yet
He totally cannot abide any corruption!
Cherishes his voidbound elf wife
He’s an unforgiving hammer of the light against his foes, totally dogmatic!
Mentor is an undead, his racial hatred of Orcs almost inexistant
He’s totally one of us, a human examplar!
Decades living with an alien race and becoming their de facto leader for a time
7 Likes
the whole “torturing and kidnapping refugees in front of their families” didn’t twig anything on your moral compass huh
I didn’t read that book
Still happened though, yeah.
I think it’d be nice if Turalyon was a bit more zealous both because him being Chill Guy doesn’t really make much sense to me for what he’s gone through, and also because then it’d actually give him a difference in leadership to Anduin.
If they’re both just Nice Guy Lightsalot then it’s a bit boring when one’s swapped out for another. Doesn’t really mean anything. Anduin taking over for Varian shoulda/woulda/coulda meant a whole new direction for Stormwind. Turalyon taking over from Anduin has meant nothing at all.
Then again, Turalyon’s been woefully underdeveloped for a human who spent a thousand years at war, so no surprise there.
(A Thousand Years of War is interesting conceptually but seems to have existed mostly to give him a fancy title and position of leadership in the Army of the Light rather than actually mean anything for his character - he acts basically the same as if it had been the ~25 years it actually was for us)
2 Likes
A common pattern for the long-living races. Elves and draenei we encounter suffer from the same issue about every time, they just don’t act like if they lived all these millenia, Velen aside-ish).
7 Likes
Turalyon’s just a human though with no scope or reason to act like a kaldorei or draenei in terms of his age.
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I’d level that same accusation at every ‘Main’ faction NPC right now. You could swap out Anduin for Liadrin, Thrall for Nobundo, Jaina for Thalyssra and the plot and dialogue would fail to change.
It’s hard to give much of a hezmana about the story when it’s revolving around such a blandly homogeneous cast. Like watching a three hour debate, with no snack or toilet breaks, where the debaters just agree with each other the entire time.
And the only npcs who break from the homogeny are cast as immediate and terrible villains, that stromgarde woman from that recent short story springs to mind.
Oh, 100%. Flashing back to Baine’s “For the Shadowlands!” and not a whole lot’s changed.
This is why we need Nathanos back. No one’s mistaking his dialogue for anyone else.
To be fair, he spent 25 years among humans and then 1000+ years - ten whole lifetimes! - among the army of the light. That combined with his being Lightforged means he should be a lot less human than he acts.
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A Thousand Years of War was a mistake.
The writers didn’t do anything with Turalyon and Alleria over that thousand years that couldn’t have happened over 25 years.
All it achieved was giving us weird time shenanigans (“oh, time flowed differently for them”) for no discernible reason.
8 Likes
Solid VA work though. To the point that I still lament the ingame VA for Locus-Walker not being the same as in the audio drama.
5 Likes
Only bit that I found memorable about it is having a PoV of a nascent world soul, that was quite nice.
The Tomb of Sargeras audio at least had the decency of giving more depth to Gul’dan and having Maiev and Khadgar acknowledge their respective past.
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Steven Pacey reads the First Law books on audiobook and is honestly a highlight of the experience.
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I’m forever sad we didn’t get something akin to Doomguy Turalyon, just this crazy violent paladin who spent 30 years surviving in hell killing demons on his own.
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