1 Re: OP’s post -
Yes the story of BfA was terrible. It was forced and shoehorned into the game with no thought for common sense or character consistency, and on some occasions they outright retconned previous lore.
The boring ‘red vs blue’ faction war storyline they had forced into the game kept stealing the thunder of much better fresh storylines. Zandalar, Kul Tiras, Nazjatar would have been far more fresh and interesting to focus on, but instead we had to watch the same boring story of Garrosh 2.0 / Lich King 2.0 being celebrated and hyped by the writers as some epic faction storyline when it’s just rehashed nonsense.
The whole faction storyline was completely invalidated by 8.2.5, basically invalidating the entire existence of the expansion. It’s hard to get into the theme of an xpac when you know it’s going nowhere except the same old ‘Well, we were wrong to fight each other, let’s unite against a greater threat!’. It’s even harder to feel faction pride when you know Blizzard is writing another ‘genocidal warchief must be removed’ storyline. And we of course got back right where we started, holding hands, in less than 3 patches so it’s even more obvious that there was never any point to this.
2 Re: Varian and the ‘war was inevitable anyway’ comments -
No, the Alliance wouldn’t have started a war, and certainly not over Varian’t death. If you played the Rogue Order Hall campaign you’d know that the whole Broken Shore was a set-up by the Legion who intercepted the scouts we sent, and instead gave us false info to lead us into a trap. Shaw, who was impersonated by a Dread Lord would have told Anduin later that whatever happened there wasn’t Sylvanas’s fault. This is also brought to closure in Before the Storm when he directly asks Sylvanas and is satisfied with her answer.
3 Re: Azshara -
Yes her character in BfA was a huge letdown. Azshara is one of the most iconic and oldest WoW villains, certainly one of the most distinct female villains, her influence felt all over the world ever since Vanilla, and she didn’t have any content or character develoment previously.
But what does she get? An expansion? No. All she gets is a disposable side appearance in one single patch in an sub-par faction war expansion that gives the spotlight to Sylvanas re-enacting what other male villains already did before her (and better).
Azshara wasn’t even given a whole Patch, she was given half a patch, with some quirky gnome farm zone getting half the glory. Sure, let’s interrupt our campaign against Azshara and farm some quirky bosses for mounts on Mechagon. Sure, ignore Nazjatar, we’ll just fish ourselves off of the ocean floor and fly around collecting scrap metal, isn’t that fun and immersive? Such lore, such characters!
4: In conclusion -
They didn’t even take the effort to give Azshara a patch of her own, they didn’t even put in half the effort into Nazjatar than what they did into Mechagon, and it’s such a letdown. Blizzard writers have proven that they can’t even handle a single storyline well (faction war… yaaawn), and they certainly can’t handle the jumbled mess that the saving Azeroth, battling Old Gods, facing Azshara, helping the Zandalari, doing mecha stuff, uniting Kul Tiras storylines of BfA ended up being. A totally lackluster expansion with an identity crisis that can’t do justice to any one of its storylines, and is built upon a totally forced and pointless faction war premise.
