Races, Lore characters and the vibe of the game

Community General Discussion
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I’ve noticed a trend over the past few expansions. It seems like Blizzard has been gradually stripping away the unique moral complexities of the various races and heroes, making them all adhere to a similar moral compass. This has made the game feel bland and predictable imo.

Heroes: Characters like Anduin, Thrall, Jaina, Baine, Alexstrasza, Dagran, Magni, Moira, and Faelin (JUST TO NAME A FEW) all seem to share the same moral compass. They’re all incredibly good-hearted and compassionate, almost to a fault. It feels like they all rolled off the assembly line from the same “Superman Personality Batch 84.” The only way we can really tell them apart is by their unique appearances and voices.
We had an interesting Jaina in the beginning of BFA, but she soon became like the rest of them.

Character types like Garrosh, Daelin Proudmoore, Greymane, Illidan, Garithos and maybe even Varian are kind of gone from the game, and are either dead or stay in the background. I’m not saying we should use them or resurrect those specifically, but we kind of need characters with an edge, a good old a**holes so to speak.

Races: Race stories in recent expansions, it often feels like the message is, “Our old ways and traditions were flawed and wrong, let’s embrace a more inclusive world. It seems to be stripping away the unique traits that made each race so interesting and fun, by pushing for a uniform “world harmony” perspective. One of the core elements that made WoW so captivating was the distinctiveness of its races. Are blizzard not aware that this diversity was a key part of the game’s charm? Actually it feels like every story in the game is told like that now.

I do think WoW should have room for a**holes. I kind of miss them, and they did a lot for the world building. :blush:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9GCNL7c-M8&ab_channel=DanielMaynard

Besides this, i really enjoy tww.

Anyway rant over. :grin:

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Click here :point_down:

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I miss faction conflict mostly. I hate the fact that we are supposed to be “friends” now.

But you know, it is what it is. There isn’t much you can do. Most games are like this nowadays because they are designed in California/USA and people there are weird.

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Yeah me too. More bigots, racists and misogynists are coming out of the woodwork to complain about their historically ‘white male dominated’ game not being so ‘white male dominated’ anymore.

Can’t say I love this trend, but I suppose it’s a way to get the rot out of the wood.
You may continue, Blizzard. :blush:

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I’m not going to discuss about the hue of the skin on in-game characters, but the game is rapidly approaching the uncanny valley with its focus on photorealism during real-time rendered cutscenes and with lifelike non-exaggerated animations where possible.

The lore needs more mexican standoffs too.

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That’s not what OP is talking about. OP means, that the Forsaken for example are not evil anymore, if I understood the text correctly after briefly overlooking it. In the text it says:

I’m not sure, why you’re talking now about something unrelated?

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He was talking about ‘noticing a trend’.
Well, I also noticed a trend. So it’s not unrelated.

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I’ve also noticed this in recent expansions. Every race is same-ish, Ally and Horde are best buddies; forsaken helping worgen with reclaiming Gilneas for example, is the weirdest thing they’ve made.
From what I’ve seen in their latest short story, the Goblins will also be redesigned as “the good guys”.
Imo this approach makes all races equally boring, and from what we can see they are unlikely to change their approach soon.

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I’m guessing we’ll be without much of a faction conflict for a long time, to be honest.

Focusing on the factions is popular conceptually, but after what happened with BfA’s justified backlash to very clumsy writing, it seems like they are putting it on the backburner. It also seems less plausible to have faction war all the time too since the new zones lorewise are being set up as places much harder for the regular old factions to compete in other than sending a few guards. Ironically, with the new hope of making everything “evergreen” it seems they made factions one of the least evergreen thing in the game.

So for ambiguous characters I’d probably look to people outside the faction scope entirely. Wrathion kinda fits the bill of what OP was asking about (even if his dialogue was annoying) and probably the Arathi will be going in this direction. I do get the desire for morally complex racial leaders though.

The source of Goblins and Forsaken being so lackluster again really does come down to having controversial leaders who were made into full villains and defeated, but the nature of the game means you can’t go ‘Undercity/Bilgewater Cartel have decided to leave the Horde’.

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Thanks… Just note I hate living here so. I guess you’re not too wrong.

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The Horde and Alliance being at war just doesn’t make sense anymore. So many times in recent history they have joined forces against a common foe - proving over and over again that they need to work together to protect their world. It’s literally in the best interests of the planet for them to cooperate.

The way world-ending threats are vanquished would have to drastically change to make the conflict between the Horde and Alliance make sense again. Or they would have to be removed for a long time for those two factions to not have a bigger foe to focus on.

Also players in general have become tired of factions interfering with gameplay, which is why we have had changes such as cross-faction guilds. And I suppose Blizzard want these new features to be reflected in the lore so that how the game works mechanically and systematically isn’t too far apart from how the story is.

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I respectfully disagree. Just look at our world, how many times different countries, ethnic/religious groups fought easch other then to be allies aganst a 3rd common enemy, just to back to a tense realtion, even if there were no open, large scale conflict yet.

This is what people want, and the anti-war in warcraft side don’t understand. Just because there are no current reason to be at open wat at each other, it doesnt make us bff automatically.

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Speaking as a role-player, the faction war brought a lot of activity to the table. Right around the same time that it began to fall away the quality and amount of role-play began to decline quite significantly - particularly Horde side.

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Yeah, I’m also trying to work out what this nonsense about bigots and what have you came from. Seems like somebody got offended.

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Uh…I don’t think you can compare that to literally entering war against intergalactic and interdimensional beings who had already destroyed other worlds. There is a huge difference between a race warring among themselves, and a war against something like a gigantic space demon that could play football with your moon if it chose to.

Earth’s humanity has not yet faced a world-ending threat on the scale of WoW. Never mind multitudes of them across only a few decades.

I don’t think we should be bffs automatically even if the goal is to be allies. There should be tensions. After all both groups have issues with one another that still remain and they won’t be magically fixed just because they fought against a common foe. Skirmishes and localised conflicts would make sense, but right now an all out war almost completely across both factions…no. That doesn’t make sense right now, it hasn’t made sense in a long time, and it won’t make sense again unless the story goes in a new direction when dealing with large-scale conflicts in general.

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