I’m willing to bet there are 100x more weirdo elf/human/draenei RPers than all the weirdos playing furry races combined. I am unironically hyped for vulpera, if only so I can RP as Ratchet from Ratchet and Clank and none of you can stop me.
The purge squads were obv a tool to push them into Horde though.
You say that but it’s not like it was needed. Alliance didn’t interact with them at all, while Horde saved the entire zone from the Faithless Empire. “Save a zone, get a new ally” worked for a bunch of other ones, so…
True, but this is Blizzard we’re talking about.
Why use common sense when a sledgehammer will do?
![:poop:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/poop.png?v=6" ":poop:")
posting aside.
My massive issue this expansion, and I suppose it’s the same with other 'Horde fans (I use the term loosely). Is that both the Horde and Alliance are held up to different moral standards. What is made to be a villainous plot point for Horde antics tends to be brushed over entirely within the Alliance plot.
Look at the stonespire (is it stonespire?) tribe of tauren which were entirely wiped out because dwarves thought there was some dusty old relics in the Barrens, it’s a pogrom in all but scale. However, after vanilla it’s never touched. And it’s understandable, in Vanilla the Horde didn’t really have the clout to really strike back for it. The player character goes down, kills dwarves and kills their foreman for vengeance. Fair enough, is it settled? Blizzard deems it so, because it’s never raised again. It’s dropped entirely. Forgotten. The Horde and Alliance weren’t really looking to fight each other (there are numerous other examples, Vanilla Alliance was really damn cool with numerous imperialistic and supremacist themes poking through - the guns of Northwatch are another example where in vanilla high elves are killed because they might be blood elves. Despite, you know, blood elves at the time trying to reclaim QT and keeping to themselves largely).
Fast forwards to Theramore or Teldrassil (pick your shade of poison), and the Horde does bad. This is then blown up and made a major plot point. Look at what the Horde has done? Aren’t Jaina/Tyrande in the right for pursuing revenge? Fair enough, I suppose - we did kill a ton of dwarves/humans for being morally broken bell-whiffs.
Ah, but now we fast forwards to 8.2 and we have Sunreaver’s who are angry at mass incarceration, dispossession and murder due to a guilty few and Reliquary agents (who were all killed in Teldrassil anyway). While it certainly isn’t on the scale of wiping a city out or you know, a concentrated pogrom because there might be a titan towel rail under that there rock. It is still, by our own standards morally reprehensible; China and North Korea do this. However, this Magister Hathorel is painted as a villain/antagonist for something Blizzard actively encourages/makes a hero out of other characters.
While the scale of events are skewiff (the purge wasn’t a cleansing), it is still a morally bankrupt thing to do. There are likely dozens of other examples I could make but i’m a wee bit tipsy.
Blizzard are arbitrary and use cheap shocks to drive a story forwards without actually thinking it through, and it’s genuinely degrading the setting. It has become massively detrimental.
To make things worse Blizzard repeatedly drive home that this “cycle of hatred” needs to be broken. Isle of Thunder, Warcrimes, Nazjatar. Whatever. It’s a crux of Warcraft, but the plot is about as old and tired as Telaryn’s sense of humour. It needs taking out back just like Loras did when he got old and senile.
okay wow what the
Aerilen’s throwing shade!
“bUt iT’s WaRcRaFt nOt pEaCeCrAfT hurr durr”
To be utterly blunt the AvH war is pants on head stupid. It’s always driven by either one individual going off the deep end or a third party playing each side against the other, neither are compelling. Then during said war stuff gets constantly swept under the rug (Especially for Alliance, the few times they do something dickish nobody brings it up at all, not even Horde) or otherwise forgotten or warped in a desperate attempt to make an increasingly illogical war happen but neither side is actually allowed to be “morally grey” with blatant good v evil tones going on no matter who you play as. It’s like they desperately want to be Warhammer Online.
Of late I’ve noticed their habit of killing off characters that are in a leadership position long enough to realise “Hey maybe this is dumb and we should stop”. Reality is: War is bad, and war fatigue is a thing. Especially after BfA, grudges or not, I’m sure a lot of people are just exhausted of losing relatives to the war. Nevermind the strain on resources and morale for everyone involved. It’s just not beleievable for the war to keep going like the energiser bunny AKA eternally.
Throw in the constant “Maybe we should work together” spiel that we’ve seen in: Warcraft 3, Warcraft 3: TFT, Vanilla (Argent Dawn, V Onyxia and co, etc), most of TBC, most of Wrath (bar the ICC gunship which was still the most moronic thing I have ever seen), the latter half of MoP, most of WoD, all of Legion and now seemingly the latter half of BfA, an expansion supposedly orbiting the AvH conflict but failing HARD at doing it, and I’m just left confused. It feels like there’s a tug of war in their writing staff.
Half of them want the war to end so the setting can just move on and mature, the other half regularly snort ground up CD copies of Warcraft 2 and chant ORCSANDHUMANSORCSANDHUMANSORCANDHUMANS and want the war to continue because raisins. And every time the former gets any momentum all their work just gets bulldozed.
I was willing to believe that maybe an entire expansion dedicated to the war could change my opinion on it, but nah, it’s still daft. And now it engulfs the entire narrative instead of a few side quests we can just ignore. Frankly even if ‘villain of the week’ stories are just as ‘bad’ at least I can laugh at them instead of cringe horribly. Legion was over the top as hell and full of camp and tropes and I largely enjoyed it because it wasn’t taken seriously. But BfA tries so hard to be this super srs bsnss war story but faceplants at executing even a by the numbers war narrative, it coudldn’t even manage until X.2 before automatically reverting back to us v evil…
I genuinely think the faction war could very much be interesting, there’s naturally going to be tension. Bitter histories and some races being polar opposites (blood elves and night elves are a good example here) will naturally lead to conflict.
But to once again go to Vanilla, a cold war in which factions within the factions are throwing subtle punches at the other mini-factions within the opposing faction. Blizzard’s strength isn’t in these giant super-hero conflict narratives, it’s in the vague side-quests that weirdly build the world up 10000x better than the main questlines. And I genuinely think the faction wars would be healthier and much more entertaining if it was handled as the “weird side-quest people skip because they out-levelled the zone.”
Funny thing is I found the war most enjoyable in vanilla. It was more or less a Cold War, as you say. The key is nobody wanted open war. Because war means a lot of dead people on both sides, a lot of towns and cities getting torched, a lot of gold falling into an abyss, and more besides.
War sucks. Thrall actively worked with the Alliance to try and maintain peace, even going as far as hiring human spies to do so (Hey why isn’t he being called a traitor? He was even subverting Horde war efforts!) and plenty of Alliance leaders recognised the Horde wanted to simply be allowed to live, but felt the need to keep tabs on them, and carefully trim any branches that grew too far out.
I hope that post BfA we start seeing the effects of war. More than just NPCs /cry’ing over coffin objects in Stormwind. Random NPCs with visible life-long injuries, mutterings about horrendus experiences, people struggling to find work after the war economy bubble bursts, the tension between people and state. I could see at least a few .5 quests being dedicated to trying to pave the way for peace by putting the exhausted, bloodied people at ease before anything else.
What kind of suggestions?
They recommend a monk replaces their legs with robotic limbs with retractable blades. Hunters are told to get a neural implant to help link with their thoughts with their pet’s.
What the heck. That is actually pretty cool.
I assume Mechagon has a version of OOOOOOOOOOOOH ISHNU’ALAH WEARY TRAVELLER…
Maybe…
Would be nice to see the radicalisation of the common folk to the Void and the Light respectively, as I suspect that is the focus of the next expansion. The whole Horde and Alliance might as well dissolve at the end of the Blood War, since neither side can justify the existence of the other at this stage.
It would be a good way to tie in the whole true cross-faction integration, by having two new factions based on the Void and Light come up.
They have different racials, class combos and starting levels… they -do- justify another slot.
An actual, sensible concern IC as there’s been a wartime economy for decades now. Qui bono? Boglins sell guns and make bombs! Consider this the next time someone important dies at a shockingly convenient moment, continuing The Cycle.
MMMMH, DAYLIGHT’S BURNING OUTSIDER!!
Like that?
Maybe so…
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/284360431684812801/569132307311493130/image0.png
He’s hunched in this ![:eyes:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/eyes.png?v=6" ":eyes:")