And Tyrande’s rebellion has been foiled. The remaining night elves will be hunted down and defeated. The attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed. But, I assure you, my resolve has never been stronger! In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, Azeroth will be reorganised into the First Horde Empire!
For a safe and secure society.
What did Thrall mean by this?
They got to much screen time in BFA, so blizzard is cutting back.
I mean it would be bad if, lord forbids it, the night elves actually had any lore outside of serving as the hordes punching bag whenever they need more logs for their cooking fires.
this but unironically
This direction in the characterization is pretty worrying, not to mention boring. The game feels like its leaning really hard into the identities of the races and factions being replaced by a shared identity, that all of the peoples of the planet are “Children of Azeroth” and therefore they must all work together.
It feels like the 4th war is ALREADY being forgotten and nobody has any hangups about it. The fact that Tyrande and Genn seem like the ONLY ONES that still have a healthy amount of aggression left is insane.
Seeing these sorts of things describing the races is awful. It makes all the races blend together. “Protect Azeroth~” indeed. All of the interesting edges and points in the lore are steadily being filed away, leaving us with a featureless orb.
Whats next? “The goblins used to be a scheming, inventive and explosive people, to whom profits always came first, but NOW they’ve put their past ways to the side in order to DEFEND AZEROTH ALONGSIDE ITS HEROES!”
It’s gross to even think about this stuff.
The 
dude! 
But yea. What you said. They’re trying to “modernize” Azeroth with everyone being equal and acceptive of each other, with the actual threats like the Legion and Scourge gone.
IMO they want to get rid of the Factions first and foremost, yet if that is their long term goal with this, boy have they gone down the wrong path. Also, I loved your tent vid and wholeheartedly agree on that too.
They don’t want to.
The scourge, dismantled…
The legion, defeated…
Agents of the Void, destroyed…
Yet one enemy remains…
The barriers between us that we erect for ourselves!
New raid encounter: a 30 man group therapy session where you have to in turn defeat the internalised false conceptions of the opposite faction each of you has. Upon completion the therapist lets you rifle through their closet for loot
Literally this.
The one reason why they don’t want to is because Faction Transfers give them a nice chunk of money. And in addition, it would be work. But the reason why they could want to get rid of them, is rather simple as well. Literally no other game is enforcing the faction barrier they are.
In every other game you can group, level and play just fine with the opposite factions, maybe sometimes there’s an exception to be found in terms of PVP.
Glad you liked it! Hmm. Maybe a video talking about the removal of these deep rooted hostilities is warranted. It’s going to leave the whole setting feeling really lacking if the writing keeps going this path. Warcraft ain’t the same without the WAR. They’re gonna have to restart hostilities at some point. It feels like a really odd choice to even go with that strange “Break the cycle” theme when the “Cycle” is what keeps the world moving. If I was writing, I’d show the ones repeating that as hypocrites and just plain wrong, but the WoW writing team feels a bit too toothless to do something like that. Needless to say, I don’t have high hopes. And the stuff OP shared with us doesn’t ease my worries.
And because Alliance and Horde are very established in the public eye, at least in comparison to almost anything else the game has. Marketability. Brand recognition, above all.
The only thing that probably came close is Lich King Arthas and they have now extremely thoroughly gotten rid of every trace of him, equipment and all.
Blizzard Storydevs carrying all the “evil lore” away, Colorized 2020
Nah, the modern storywriters did.
There is a plague of an idea in the gaming business where storywriters are afraid to pursue morally gray, multi-dimensional and provoking narratives- Be it due to outrage culture, wanting to “please” everybody (Marketing myopia) or the inexperience and arrogance of fresh people in teams who think they understand what the setting is about.
Weird, you misspelled Draenei there.
Forward Commander Onslaught seemed pretty chill- He seemed like a man of duty and principle, refusing to leave his post and deciding to fight to the last man (literally) just to buy the rest of the forces time for the retreat, despite knowing it’d spell certain doom for him.
There’s also that forsaken in the Horde centaur story who seems quite caring.
*There is a gathering of horde and alliance races in Stormwind
Anduin Wrynn approaches a podium and clears his throat*
“I am sure many of you remember the Lich King…and everything he did…”
Nodding in audience
“…and the Scourge too…”
More nodding
“…well I just wanted to say…HIS NAME WAS BOLVAR FORDRAGON, AND HE DIED SO WE MIGHT LIVE!”
Crowd erupts into cheers
“And even then, he rose, and he took those good fallen, that Scourge, and with them, though the world had turned its back on them…we…turned out backs on them…a tear rolls down his cheek …he took them into the maw of death itself so we can see another day!”
The crowd is fanatic, a draenei female faints
“So I say this: ALL HAIL THE ONE TRUE KING, WE WILL NOT FORGET YOU.”
He turns and walks away as a gentle Forsaken attends to the fainted Draenei in a concerned manner in the frenzied crowd
Can’t wait to see how they are gonna treat the night elves
You are a night elf, you like to hug trees and protect nature, you absolutely do not hate the horde for something they didn’t do, don’t listen to that one crazy elf in the shadowlands, she cray cray and possibly evil, wink wink.
Oh and the worgen will have to be changed as well.
something like: you are a proud human who can turn into a wolf, you have no struggles with this wolf form, you are the zen of zen and you are just a human with a wolf form, your king is kind of mean though, don’t listen to him.
I mean, this was to be expected, surely?
Given that BFA basically proved, quote on quote from Ion himself, that they were “doing it on the run”, and they panicked on how badly people received Sylvanas’ actions, now we’re going down this direction…Except that Ion also added to the same sentence that “we want factions to mean something, warmode is staying”.
It is deeply worrying. Hell, he also said, and I quote: “Continuity exists to enhance the story, not to tie the hands of the developers.”
I truly can not understand this logic. I just can’t. The setting and the continuity IS YOUR STORY ENHANCER. Working outside the box isn’t banned, but if you can make do with the tools that you already have, that is infinitely more creative than whatever cheap easy pulls you can get from outside the box.
There were SO many missed, good opportunities to write a nuanced, multilayered story for BFA. For both factions, but especially Horde. And it was all wasted, because Blizzard wants to push forward simple narratives that don’t necessarily make sense but are easily understood and only have one right answer (See, Starwars sequels). The lack of continuation didn’t make the story better, it made it worse! None of the actions by the characters make any sense, nor do they stay true to them.
But the worst part is we are stuck in this middle. On one hand, factions need to matter, but on the second hand there can be NO NUANCE, no darkness, nothing negative tied to a faction, nada, none. Because that’d mean somebody would be playing the “bad guys” from time to time, and we can’t have that, can we?
So I propose this to Blizzard: Either go nuts and just abolish the factions, merge us all into one and make us into bland, unimaginative milkshake of “same ideals but different races” for Azeroth 24/7…
OR actually go nuts with faction identity and war. Make the war really bloody and shady on both sides, and nasty. Promote the faction and racial tensions/rivalries and different cultures, rather than dillute them.
Why is it whenever I read the argument “we cant play the bad guys” I instantly think about american ideals?
not to be that guy but could this horried change be the brain tumor of some investors going “we don’t think anyone wants to play the bad guys, kids love to be the hero, they need to be heroes”
You’re not the only one thinking that.
Could be the CCP watching over Blizzard so they can contiue to distribute their game in China, too
I think that is more likely than some western investors asking for story changes
Both seem likely