https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/641336504613994536/702806250588602448/forsaken.png
4 Likes
In the Grim darkness of the future, there is only love and happiness.
5 Likes
It does feel like Blizzard really aren’t sure what they want to do with the Horde anymore. Almost as if they went “Here are these bunch of weird monsters usually on the ‘other side’ in fantasy fiction, but to make them accessible to the player base we want to make them ‘more human’”.
I mean part of the whole appeal is that they’re -not- ‘more human’. Thats what I always loved about Blood Elves, they were more like the fickle, mercurial things from our legends, not bargain basement Tolkein goodie Elves. Orcs actually have a culture, and are not simple meatheads who fight because “Waaaaargh!” Trolls were great, making them an ‘elder race’ that was smart enough to spread its Empire across a world, and now is in a slow period of decline, was a genius and new move by Blizzard. No fantasy setting had done that with Trolls before, it was, and pretty much is still, Unique.
Then the big one. You can play Zombies. NOT the tragic misunderstood loner who is the only ‘good’ vampire (Looking at you Blade) not the Demon Prince who is somehow a good person, (looking at you, Devil may Cry franchise) but actually dyed in the wool villainous undead.
I mean thats fresh (I realise the irony of using the word ‘fresh’ about the walking dead), thats a new take. This is like the ultimate staple of horror movies, so prevalent in our minds that there are now a whole genre mocking the original genre as homages. You don’t really get that with any other genre, because it is kind of a given, in any setting, that no matter how nice a person in life, Death really can change your personality and make you a bit grim. With the Forsaken you could play that. Thats their whole point, they generally are not nice people, which is understandable, the world hasn’t exactly been ‘nice’ to them either. I mean sometimes they overdid it, and ended up with more ‘camp’ than ‘evil’l (Sludge Fields) and sometimes they absolutely nailed the grim legions of hell itself idea (Northrend in general) but you always had that thing of “These are very bad people, I can understand why they’re bad, they probably even have fooled themselves into thinking they are allowed to be bad because of the hand fate has dealt them, but these are nightmares made (rotting) flesh…”
That was what made the Forsaken interesting. You could understand them to a degree, they experienced a horrific set of events and had everything ‘nice’ taken away from them, and didn’t even get the solace of blessed death and oblivion afterwards. They were the ‘thinking man’s zombie’
Trying to rebrand them is just a kind of nonsense that doesn’t float. It works as an individual concept, Forsaken like Calia who is still trying to be who she was, and even with players on our own realm like Corvenus and his interesting take on Undeath, but as a whole, the Forsaken are not the World’s Heroes, their behaviour is not some weird ‘Tough Love’ for the poor misguided living souls, they are not generally happy with their own lot in ‘life’ so to have them somehow turned into good guys is just bizarre. It doesn’t even make much sense lorewise, were the people of Lordaeron and Gilneas (mainly) somehow so morally pious that death universally made them good people? How is that a thing? Geography makes you a good person, post mortem?
You will get Good Forsaken, every stereotype exists to be overturned after all, you will probably get pacifist Orcs, Generous Goblins, Urbane Trolls and Draenei who are actually douchebags, but to suddenly turn the entire racial and cultural norm on its head and just say “They were always like that this last 15 years” is just mental…
I really hope this is just one datamined thing taken without context, as otherwise, all the ‘fun’ about playing Forsaken is kind of chucked out of the window…
7 Likes
TIL the real friends were the Forsaken we met along the way.
4 Likes
They green, they bad.
Fixed it for you, friend.
the tauren ruined the horde, i’m just going to come out and say it
3 Likes
Bang on.
I disagree with people who claim the Forsaken have always been an evil race. I think evil is inappropriate here. Examples of an evil race for me would be Man’ari Eredar- literally none of them have redeeming qualities or seek exploits beyond the whole “char mortals, for the legion!” narrative save that one guy in Dalaran sewers who is in hiding. They’re an evil race through and through.
Forsaken however have a bit of a mixture going on. You have some of them milling around with the Argent Crusade, some like Faol and Calia whom seek to embrace their previous virtues, a whole host of generic farmers/vendors who are “just getting on with it” as it were. Yes you have guys like the RAS and Putress’ lot, the Sludge Fields, but I don’t think it’s enough to say they are an evil race. I’d say they’re a race that tends towards moral ambiguity because of their predicament (morals are often seen as the recourse of living as most morals seek to preserve life and/or quality of life, something which has little meaning for Forsaken) so they tend to take a pragmatic view of things and do “what they must” which can lead them down some pretty dark pathways because they lack the conventional “sanctity of life” moral framework, an many of them have been dealt a nasty hand and still cling to negative feelings.
It’s really cool that the game allowed/allows us to play as that. Something that is aesthetically bad, but even more brilliant than that, it’s to a degree made understandable; like when a villain in a superhero move bares their motivations and the audience nods and goes “Okay, I kinda get it”. Prior to this depictions of undead in video games casts them as almost motiveless villains whom kill things because either “hunger” or just because they do. It has no nuance or depth. WoW was good because it gave us the opportunity to play that thing, but mixed it up and asked us the question “imagine the undead involved consciously knew what they were and what they were doing, how would that look?” and you end up with Forsaken; a race that has great potential towards villainy but are so much more than just villains. They’re characters painted by tragedy and being dealt a grim circumstance beyond their own control and their journey shows how many different ways there are to respond to that; anger, acceptance, rage, grief and so on.
To rob that and have all Forsaken tend towards the “acceptance” or “prevent the same for others” really does a disservice to the uniqueness of their situation as a playable race and the remarkable thing they represented when they first landed- allowing us to “peer behind the veil” regarding a oft used fantasy trope and allow us to consider what we might do if it happened to us.
5 Likes
Shadowlands bringing more crappy lore and retcons? What a shocker.
2 Likes
At this point, can we even say there is lore anymore? I mean, they’re stomping on everything they’ve ever written in the past. Remember the times when a single whisper of the void used to turn you insane? A few xpacs later we get void elves. Remember the time when Druidism was simply nature “life” magic? Without the weird death crap of the Kul Tiran’s?
They just brand it new lore, how can new lore ruin old lore they say. It can. It did. And it will continue to do so. Because whenever they incorporate “new” lore, they do not look back at the old lore, they don’t consider the possible implications of implementing such “new” lore. They just do it, after all, it fits the plot, doesn’t it? Like Jaina, when she just froze the plague in Battle for Lordaeron, something not even the Lich King thought of or even better, wasn’t capable of.
I loved WoW’s lore once. -Once-. Now it’s but a bundle of well, crap.
7 Likes
Blizzard “The Blight is a terrible weapon of Mass destruction!”
Also Blizzard “Yeah, a level 3 Mage could pretty much sort that, nay worries”
6 Likes
WoW lore suffers from the issue where the individual pieces of lore are pretty decent, but the meta-direction has only been downhill since Wrath of the Lich King.
Here’s hoping these awful sentence descriptors aren’t indicative of the actual direction each race takes, though we won’t see that until after Shadowlands, most likely.
Though I have the sinking feeling we’re barrelling towards yet more cosmology expansions after this.
Another problem is, that WoW’s beginning to take too much after the modern world. They’re trying to foster a civilization of peace and acceptance in a world of warcraft. At this point they may as well rename it to Peacecraft. Everything that made WoW iconic, is pretty much gone.
The Burning Legion, The Scourge. Those were the key points of WoW’s lore. The most interesting ones. They were a tangible, dreadful enemy that were very real, unlike some other forces (looking at you, void).
But this is what happens when a good story is dragged out. A good story knows when it’s time has come to an end, of course, just putting an end to a story in an MMO is impossible due to it’s player base.
1 Like
While i agree with you almost completely, the same argument could be made in support of the faction war in bfa, and look how much people like the announcement of that.
And this whole Horde & Forsaken whitewashing is another insult to the Night Elves, no? Or did Sylvannas murder Ashenvale and torch the tree all by herself?
Seriously, give the Kaldorei a break…if the Forsaken have a sudden love for life then maybe retcon the destruction of Teldrassil aswell.
2 Likes
Well yes. Sacking the cities might not have been the best way to approach the faction war. World wide, small tactical skirmishes, like taurajo and things like that, would’ve been a vastly better alternative and far greater grounds to evolving characters through interesting plotlines. But then again, that would involve actual work, god forbid and good writing.
2 Likes
Full agree. Blizzard have tended to write individual stuff like mini stories in zones etc very well.
The problem is they bend this stuff to fit into their master plan, which often totally twists it and ruins it because their smaller stories are rich and diverse and then becausehe meta narrative has a clear direction- they just end up being “ah well it didn’t matter” or not tied up at all.
Case in point: the radio silence of the various horde leaders and new allied race recruits followig sylvanas’ teldrassil incident. Trying to square a circle and it doesn’t work.
And horde feel it more because their races have tended to lack that harmony in their goals and ideals that alliance races have, so when you need to unify them to further the Horde’s story, some races always get their angle trashed or rewritten. This doesn’t happen as much in alliance and tends only to affect night elves.
1 Like
The Night Elves had the best story in BfA though, however the Horde side of the narrative was treated.
1 Like
the fact is that most of the “good” undeads went away from the forsakens. leonid, voss, faol, finkelstein werent in the faction exactly because the forsaken’s methods
i cant even remember a good willed forsaken npc, most of them probably are anonymous vendors that havent even any line of dialogue.
all the named one are always sociopaths. damn even the last forsaken party we saw in nazmir was discussing how using a random artifact to completely annihilate in a killing spree the enemies was perfectly fine. damn the awesome darkshore loading screen speak for itself about what the forsaken are.
I agree but this change just has really weird implications for it’s continuation
If I see Tyrande working together with the Horde to go after Sylvanas it won’t surprise me now
1 Like