I don’t have the book yet, but people on X (former Twitter) have been posting all kind of shocking screenshots.
And they’re not talking about retcons - retcons, of course, exist, they’re huge and some of them - surprising. Retcons are the smallest problem in this book.
The problem is that it’s full of mistakes - some of them so significant that readers have said that the Warcraft Wiki is much better than Chronicle 4 in terms of quality. Except that the Warcraft Wiki doesn’t charge you $50 dollars to read it.
For example, the book claims that the father of Garrosh Hellscream has been a fearsome warchief. But Grom Hellscream has never been a warchief!
But the most idiotic mistake is the one where Uther meets the PLAYERS in Haven, Zereth Mortis. Yeh - you read that correctly. The adventurers are referred as players. Well, the only good thing is that at least we aren’t called maw walkers, or champions, or commanders…
One may have hoped that the Warcraft Chronicles would attempt to fix the train wreck that’s the current lore of the game, but no…
To be honest, at this point I kinda feel that someone with that hope can only blame himself. After the last decade and a half or so it should really be understood by now that not caring about details, consistency and verisimilitude is the default, not the exception. In my world, modern WoW lore products are crap until proven otherwise. And no, I haven’t seen a Metzen-based improvement yet.
I was skeptical ever he returned back. Of course, he’s a cool guy and very charismatic, but he also doesn’t pay much attention to the lore.
After all, wasn’t he who screwed the draenei/demon corruption lore in Burning Crusade? Wasn’t he who admitted that Gilneas stood behind the wall for so long because he simply forgot about it?
Yes - he might be slightly better than Danuser, like - if Danuser was a crap writer, Metzen is average. But still… average writing.
The players are known to be an existing entity in the warcraft story so thats not really a crime in my eyes
But the mistakes yes and also unneccesary retcons
Personally I think its weird that the purge of dalaran now is no longer a purge, blood elves weren’t killed but detained and exiled
why are we trying to make the lore more boring
They don’t want to hold women accountable for the even the most reprehensible actions in the same way they happily hold men accountable for their shadier acts.
It’s the same reason why Sylvanas, when finally confronted for all the atrocities she committed over the years since being risen into undeath ended up being written to be a poor, innocent victim who totally repents but needs to go away for a while to ‘atone’.
What Jaina and Vereesa - especially the latter - did during the Purge of Dalaran was utterly abhorrent. I’m not surprised that they’re trying to desperately downplay it.
sort of… they wanted to hold horde accountable regardless of gender but I think that’s just taking the mick, knowing blizzard knows alliance is the superior faction above the horde.
Didn’t we have similar situation with the other book? It was the dragonflight codex I suppose. It was so badly written that Blizzard had to release a corrected version. As we can see, we have a repeat of this whole comedy.
It’s a common problem that goes beyond the faction divide.
Just look at the likes of Vanessa VanCleef. Not only was she killed off, they brought her back and tried to make her an anti-hero and ‘oppressed’ despite going out of her way to kill two elderly farmers and their horse to help cover up her identity.
Remarkable. Did Blizzard really retcon that one out? Even though Sylvanas book which came out not that long ago clearly stated it was a purge, and many Blood Elves died in Dalaran because of this.
On top of it all we have still ongoing Pandaria remix where players can experience this purge first handed. This isn’t even a retcon amymore. It is an outright insult to players intelligence at this point.
It really feels like the gutting of the Lore department after the acquisition went through meant that there was no one available to proofread Chronicles 4.
I mean the whole BFA timeline makes little sense, what with the Horde storyline ocxcurring after the Alliance one despite the rescue of Talanji being what prompted the Alliance to head to Kul Tiras in the first place! It’s like there was a note to the writer telling them to explain the Alliance story first and Horde second, and they misunderstood and wrote it up as if that was what happened in canon.
Also, I’m not too impressed with how the more “morally dubious” actions of the Alliance (The Purge of Dalaran for instance) have been toned down, while Horde actions have been modified to be a bit worse (Apparently the Sunreavers were a tad more complicit in the theft of the Divine Bell). Also, Jaina got the Thunder King’s power fused into her staff canonised, but there is no mention of the Blood Elves getting their hands on the power of the Dark Animus and a working Animus Golem.
Oh, and Xal’atath’s release? According to Chronicles 4 that’s the fault of the Horde. The Horde version of that BFA questline is now the canon one. I guess it’s just easier to pin that on the Horde since we’re to blame for everything else…
I kid, but it just boffles the mind to hear what’s in this book after Blizzard said they would stop beating the Horde with the Villain Bat & introduce more shades of gray to the Alliance morality…
we love ignoring book lore when its contradictory to whats inside of the game
I’m a roleplayer tho so I actually have to engage with whats in the game so I might be biased, if the book says there’s a fort in the barrens but I go there and its a campfire and a single tent, yeah I’m going to treat it as a campfire and a single tent.