Belok’s face always gets me.
https://youtu.be/I6UZjsjx3ak yes it was
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haha, i didnt even see it until i read your comment…
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Wait, what, when, how did this happen!?!!??!?!?!
I was very on-board for the faction war narrative, but at this point, I genuinely see where the people who’re tired of it are coming from.
It’s unsurprising but extremely tiring to see every character get bent out of shape for the sake of entertaining this unearned conclusion. Not a single character has mentioned that sure, Saurfang had honour, but his symbolic death was utterly pointless in solving the underlying issues that the races went to war to begin with - competition for resources, insecurity in their own lands, and generations of racial animosity.
It’s sad to see that Moira, one of my favourite racial leaders and among the few with a genuine arc, gets reduced to a “both sides” talking point that the developers wanted to hammer in, despite barely being involved with the conflict.
It’s sad to see Shandris, easily the best candidate to point out that Saurfang’s death was a strong narrative moment, but also completely pointless in resolving the colossal problems of the plot point, sadly just seems to accept it.
It’s sad to see Tyrande written out of the story almost entirely, because “Woman Angry At Genocide Is Too Unreasonable” seems to be a legitimate talking point. I expect much the same of Talanji, or she’ll also get hit with the hammer that turns her into a vague bleater for “both sides…”. Assuming they even bother to remember she exists.
I’m tired of watching Blizzard run through the motions of a story they’re genuinely not interested in entertaining the potential nuances of. It’s sad that almost every character, at this point, is just an extra in Saurfang’s story, or Blizzard’s fetish for endlessly rewriting how the Horde reclaims its honour.
Well, back to the endless chasm of homebrew plots, villains, and organisations. At least Blizzard can’t nuke those, I guess.
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My take: Villain of the week stories can suck, but we can at least laugh at how corny, OTT or absurd it gets. Legion having space ships and draenei having gundams was worth a groan but in the grand scheme it’s not THAT awful (Comparatively) to other stuff.
The big issue with faction war stories is they have, seemingly, ALWAYS been banking on characters doing a dumb dumb, or being manipulated by a third party. It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out Sylvanas was serving someone else who then pulled the strings on her this whole time, so even if she was right about starting a war, still caused by a third party. And there’s been some hints that it’s the case so… not holding my breath.
And even throughout the conflict past the convenient misunderstanding or brief moment of sheer stupidity (As seen in basically every moment pre-BfA where the war pops up because raisins), when the war plot gets dragged out more and more characters collectively lose brain cells or have their personalities warped so far they’re borderline unrecognisable.
NOBODY gets out of a faction war story looking good. When a faction war plot happens Blizzard doesn’t just make us groan with mild dissapointment, it’s outright cringing at how stupid both factions end up looking, with Alliance and Horde flipflopping all over the place in a large number of ways people have covered in this thread, and others, MANY times to the point where I’m not going to bother listing them. Not just in BfA either.
It’s why I had no real confidence in the faction war focus to start with in BfA, I had an immediate gut feeling it wouldn’t go down well since last efforts to make a ‘legitimate and meaningful war’ happen just faceplanted with “Obvious bad guy shows up” or “Horde leader goes 110% evil” or whatever else. But I gave it the benefit of the doubt, maybe dedicating their full focus to it rather than having a big baddie in mind would help make the narrative more… well, good?
Nope. Big fat pile of nope. Horde are humiliated again and suffer from honor/warmonger schizophrenia start to finish. Alliance basically picked their nose in the background for 2 and a half patches. Congrats Blizzard, really feeling it.
I had a lot of issues with the plot of WoD and Legion, but at least those stories left our beloved factions and characters alone. BfA spared nobody. Everybody got a slap in the face with a wet fish no matter what side you’re on.
WoD/Legion I could just have a laugh at when it got absurd, even the Illidan anti-hero stuff. Just chalk it up to Saturday Moring Cartoon logic, dumb but harmless.
BfA just made me start headbutting my desk, and unsub for the first time since sometime in Mid-Cata. It was as dumb as WoD/Legion except our own factions got egg on their face, and meanwhile Blizzard were jerking off about how great and nuanced their story is. That’s what made it extra unbearable, the way they talked on the QnAs made it sound like they wrote the next Game of Thrones or something.
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I don’t want a third faction war story excuse they’ll have lobotomise the characters even further to go for it again. It’s been done twice now and the last round left a poor taste in mouth.
I’d rather they do something else than beat the dead horse.
That’s not to say I’m against conflict. I’d prefer we go to the pre-Cata Cold War.
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They wrote the next season 8 of Game of Thrones.
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For a Frostwolf RPer you’ve sure got a weird definition of Cold War.
I find this a bit disingenuous - you criticise BfA (rightfully) for ruining characterisation by having everyone act in service to Saurfang’s honour shtick but then turn around and excuse everyone acting in service to Illidan’s “antihero” shtick as ‘saturday morning cartoons’? Meh. I didn’t. Illidan’s story sucked, I hated it, and it wrecked Legion for me since it was a central narrative for the expansion.
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Yes, he should’ve just stayed dead. Or atleast not be made into what he was now D:<
The new Nighthold cinematic is Maiev dabbing on Illidans corpse for a full minute.
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That’s because, to tell a REAL faction war story, with any meaningful consequence, it would mean the end of one faction, my guess, it would be the Horde.
But Blizzard can’t do that as the back bone of the game is the Alliance and the Horde.
It is stupid and I wish they’d stayed away from it, after MoP as every ending would have a similar result to that expansion.
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Having one faction be ‘defeated’ and forced into what’s essentially hiding could be done, if they wanted to. They don’t need to stop being playable, they just change that faction’s narrative from “world superpower” to “plucky guerilla fighters”.
Could be.
But being written as nothing more than a refugee, straight after you get called “Champion of Azeroth” would be quite…odd.
I’d rather they not even bother with anymore red vs blue faction war. It doesn’t end well.
MoP’s ending was a book and if one didn’t read that, then WoD only presented more questions, on top of the already existing questions, about the time-travel-stuff, which not even I understand to this day.
That’s sort of only a consequence of the bad way the Faction War has been handled from the beginning.
In Cataclysm, while the war starts with legitimate issues on the side of the Horde (resources, mainly) plus a great deal of outside interference to escalate the conflict (Twilights assassinating Night Elf and Tauren Druids to make both sides blame the other), the questing experiences are crammed to the brim with the Horde being over-the-top evil and destructive everywhere they go, which means the Alliance has no good way to make peace, while the Horde characters themselves seem to be operating under the impression that victory only means total destruction of the other faction.
The BFA war is worse - Sylvanas’ justifications for going to war are so paper-thin that I couldn’t believe someone actually wrote it, let alone had it published as official lore - from the start, with greater crimes, more reasons for hate, and even less notions that it is a war that can end any way other that the total annihilation of one side.
Thing is… real wars aren’t like that. Humans do a lot of war on each other, but the idea of a true “total war” is not only fairly recent, but in a historical sense extremely unusual. The First World War was a total war, but it did not end in the “total destruction” of the German state - merely its reduction, disarmament and reformation, and that was at the time the War to End All Wars.
If Blizzard had written the faction war sensibly from the start, with character motivations driving the plot rather than “FIGHT WAR”, proper battle plans that actually aim to achieve specific objectives and goals, and indeed an actual end-goal for the war other than “KILL-KILL MAN-THINGS” for both sides… Well, we could actually have a conflict that ends in some other way than “And then they teamed up to fight the Big Bad and declared peace because consequences for actions are lame”.
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Why are your takes always so bad please stop
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The Cold War and everything it brought is bad writing
t. fel futa breeding bull
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I swear that A Good War was a fever dream I imagined rather than a published short story because good God nobody remembers it.
Sylvanas’s personal motivation for war (creating a high body count for as yet unknown but likely Death Magic related reasons) is bad. Obviously. Nobody argues this point.
The motivation that she gives Saurfang and the Horde follows (tensions will always arise while there are unresolved grievances, those tensions will escalate into war eventually, and Azerite weapons will develop to the point where a war 100 years down the line will be a war of annihilation - so it’s important to strike now) is sound reasoning. Saurfang agrees with it because although he initially reacts with violent disgust he understands that 100 years of peace that then results in the complete annihilation of his people is a coward’s bargain.
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exactimundo. It’s really based lore that makes me sad there’s people who just don’t even make the effort to get into it. Hell, in general that entire story is just prime tier, and makes me really surprised with how useless they made Saurfang afterwards.
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I criticise BFA’s story not because of it going over story threads but because they set up an idea of the cost of being honourable being shown by Warchief Sylvanas and just how quickly a war can end if you are willing to do something brutal but effective - that when Saurfang first and later Baine sabotage those plans for moral reasons, it escalates/continues the war and causes more suffering. That’s an interesting and unique story to be told.
But then the story goes to ‘actually the Warchief was corrupted/Saturday morning cartoon villain evil the whole time and being honourable all the time in all circumstances is based and only makes good things happen’ and botched the landing.
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