I found this thread in Us forums.
It’s about WoW worst story decisions.
I became interested, because a lot of OP opinions are things I relate to, like Teldrassil.
"Let’s be real here. A lot of us on this forum love to complain. So here’s another complaining thread!
What’s been the worst story decision you’ve seen so far, in the history of Warcraft, and why? What long-reaching ramifications has it had on the story in your opinion?
For me, I don’t think anything can top the sheer miscalculation of Teldrassil. I don’t think Blizzard ever anticipated the fanbase to have such a strong reaction to it. It’s made the story far more bitter, vicious, and grim than it should have ever been. I don’t think shoving a war of extinction and live child immolation into Warcraft made the story somehow more “mature”, nuanced or high-brow. Teldrassil was the moral event horizon of the Horde. What enrages me is that this absolute mistake of writing must nonetheless be accepted as canon, and so therefore I’m forced to decide between abandoning one of my favorite characters as evil and worthy of death, or just plowing through the story with nothing but disdain for it due to the needless assassination of Sylvanas and the Horde at the writers’ hands, because I know DAMN WELL I’M NOT GONNA BE MANIPULATED BY THEM SO I CAN LICK ANDUIN’S KINGLY LITTLE SLIPPERS BECAUSE HE’S SO GREAT HE’S SO GREAT HE’S SO GREAT ISN’T HE SO GREAT?
/wipes froth off my lips
I understand where the Honor Horde people are coming from. Sylvanas is evil, I know that. She’s done evil things in the past. The reason I’m still clinging to her and damning the writers instead is because they didn’t have to make it this way. Any other story path could have been salvageable. Characters can and have changed, become more heroic, grown into their roles. We could have had the BfA cinematic trailer Sylvanas. But Teldrassil destroyed that. Regardless of the lore universe and lore characters’ opinions, there are huge swaths of the player base who will never forgive her for Teldrassil.
I never wanted a Blizzard-flavored Game of Thrones, I wanted a story that made both factions feel good and excited and maintain that rivalry without the moral bitterness. Teldrassil eliminates that, because the only way to ever right the moral compass is for Alliance to tip the scales so massively that the story’s happy themes and bright mood will forever be tarnished. It won’t be heroes fighting heroes. God I hate Teldrassil."
Worst story decision? I’d say starting another faction war when the entire writing team, apparently, despises the concept of a faction war. Just look at what they are doing in 8.2.
Well Ion did say that th Horde vs Alliance is a fundamental of the game, so just when things were peaceful in Legion what shall we do? Oh right have one side commit unforgivable actions so there will be no peace in the near future.
Writing sounds just about right to me when you consider it that way.
If you ask me the whole of bfa makes a great point about “Hate” and thats the only bad side effect. By creating new hate , Sylvannas instigated all the past hatred so now you have people pointing fingers at each other about everything, purge of Dalaran, Battle of Dazaralor, Teldrasil, third war u did that , second war we did that etc etc
One Legion amongst all timelines. Messy, inconsistent.
Killing off Vol’jin and thinking it was somehow good idea to give Sylvanas spotlight. Waste of good character for the sake of one expsansion. Not good enough Blizz!
Plot Armors and nerfs - does not feed to rich story. The continuity bull is just nonsense!
Forcing certain neutral characters to lean towards factions without given any backstory (Lillian, Garona, Gazlowe etc.)
Killing off Vol’Jin. Because not only it made the entire MoP story resolution obscure the moment they switched to Sylvanas but also denied Horde any possible highgroud when it comes to narration.
He was the best person to call out Jaina’s BS. His people were attacked by Her father. He was the one who was reacting when Theramore was making offensive assaulting Barrens reaching Durotar and even Sen’Jin village. He was the one who rebelled against Garrosh right in front of her very eyes and then she was “dismantle the Horde!” he wrote a letter that he was willing to let the purge of Dalaran slip but she needed to promise nothing like that would happen again. And who made a temper tantrum in WoD over Horde again? Jaina. Wow.
And now same BS appears but everything is swept under the rug because Sylvanas did so much worse so everything bad that Alliance did is invalidated and forgotten.
So I second what Northgrave said - if devs don’t have balls to write proper balanced story that is engaging for both sides then they shouldn’t bother with one to begin with. Just make it a cold war like it was in vanilla if the likes of Golden are too against actual conflict, war and nastiness it brings.
Faction war is a good subject because it makes all sides engaged but Blizzard writers are so terrible at it that it makes everyone hate it. Amateurs and fans proved they’re capable of coming up with much better and consistent intruiges than the hired employees. What does that say about them?
Looks like I’ll have to take another long break from wow to get some actual good story and stop with this insanity.
Not launching the secret space-ship in Thunder Bluff once the Blood War started.
Teldrassil, the whole War of the Thorns… no, actually, the entire Blood War.
WoD, but more notorious, the Mag’har recruitment scenario.
Some minor things, such as bringing back Illidan (wtf) and making Bolvar Lich King. Stuff like that, placing or using emergency buttons because you’re running out of cool characters to murder.
Most of what you people listed are not bad decisions on paper. Sylvanas becoming a parallel of Arthas and starting the War of Thorns? Yrel going crazy due to her faith? Anduin being entrusted at a young age with leading the Alliance forces? These are GOOD ideas on paper, that could have led to wonderful character development, but since Blizzard writers are bad, they wasted those ideas.
1-Valkyr raising Kaldorei out of the bleu
2-Night Elves in WOW
3-Azshara makes her debut while her main rivals are not used
4-War of Thorns
5-Taking Axes/shot/arrows unexpectedly from the back because we can’t write powerful characters. (Malfurion WOT, Tyrande Wolfheart, Jaina Warcrimes)
6-Useless and boring human characters taking center stage
But the one thing that has driven me to consider quitting this game is what they’re about to do to the Horde in 8.2. The War Campaign is a shambles and pretty much ensures that the Horde leaders will always be remembered as hateable bastards. At least in my eyes and likely the eyes of many others.
Striking down Sunreavers who rightfully want vengeance to protect the Alliance leader responsible for both the deaths of innocents and the recent regicide of Rastakhan and free Baine who also has Horde blood on his hands.
Worse yet, Sylvanas’ plan involves letting them be killed with the aid of one of her spies and having the Alliance free Baine because… she’s an idiot?
Blood Elves and Zandalari should both be abandoning the Horde for that crap.
This guy wasn’t the only one. And honestly one of the few times I do feel sympathetic to those who like Sylvanas as a whole too. They just saw the char the like and love get ruined narratively by bad writing and decision-making which honestly resonates well with mine concerning Baine and the Horde leaders in general.
I was convinced in the trailer that it was the Alliance that did something, for some reason, that caused the Horde to be driven at a corner once again fighting for their survival, and it made me feel hyped for it.
Until we got the following events, everything feels like her own quotes are just her talking to herself in the mirror, not trying to be interactive with anyone. Honestly, it feels like the cinematic creators, story developers and producers are also out-of-touch with each other in that we’re seeing two or more decisions being contrasted against one another.
I think saying BfA is a no brainer so I’ll say something else.
TBC, easily on the same level as BfA lore mess up if not higher.
Villain bats everywhere, retcons everywhere, characters inconsistencies, the entire map being changed around and so much more.
Illidan’s faction easily had the chance to become a third faction and by the end of Warcraft 3 it looked that way (even tho’ it was always going to be a 2 faction game but still) yet we just killed them all off and the redemption story doesn’t land for many people.
Zul’jin and the Amani, urghhhh I understand why they weren’t part of the Horde because it would be unfair for Alliance to get Draenei and the Horde to get a re-skinned Troll (assuming they went withe the default model and not make a Zandalari-type model for them) but damn did they will have to be killed off, twice? If they ever make custom expansions for Vanilla (or patches) then I hope they do it differently.
Kael, just turns evil and joins the mastermind who destroyed his kingdom to begin with, wonderful.
Draenei retcon, I dm broken and I don’t know why they had to change their models.
etc etc… But TBC had really hard raiding and you had to spend every other day grinding like 8 different type of consumables to raid with so it is considered one of the best expansions.
Bringing space ships into the mix was a big one for me. It kind of made technology irrelevant. If space ships and laser cannons don’t change the balance of powers, and don’t make that pirate guy with his two swords a joke, why would I believe that anything could?
WoD’s premise was another big one… we can freely travel to other dimensions and times and recruit people from there? It is one thing to make the world bigger, it is another to make any specific thing feel insignificant.
The Cata-direction for the Forsaken was another big mistake in my eyes. I actually think that BfA-Sylvanas is a perfectly reasonable followup to the one we got presented post-LK.
Offing Vol’jin… oh boy… what were they smoking? I know they’re trying to tell us that there is still some fun mystery in that box, but it just smells of poo.
And not really on the same level, but possibly my biggest cringe was when Varian jogged through deeprun and snuck into the dwarven throne room to kill Magni’s daughter for shutting off her city for a few days… and then deciding how the dwarves were going to be ruled afterwards… with zero negative consequences. This one really was the first time I feel humans dominated the Alliance. Yeah, they were always more prevalent, but they didn’t always lord over the rest. And while a story of human imperialism and authoritarianism could also have been interesting, nothing but “human potential”-memes came of it. Urgs.
On another note about Varian… de-fanging him was also a mistake. He was a mirror to Garrosh and if they like their faction war so much that isn’t a bad thing. Varian could have made us wonder if Garrosh was right. Instead they created Anduin as a character to tell him what to do and just magicked his rage away. No wonder they killed him off, after that arc there was no character left…
Big oof, there’s a lot of decision I don’t like that’s been made during the years.
Killing Vol’Jin and making Sylvanas the new Warchief.
Stripping the dragons of their powers and making them close to irrelevant.
Giving the Old Gods masters.
Teldrassil. The entire War of the Thorns, actually.
Yrel becoming a zealot.
“Draenor is FREE!”
Kael’thas joining the Legion.
These are in no particular order, by the way. I might edit this later and add more should I think of more decisions that has been made that I don’t exactly approve of. It feels good to complain about the story with other people who understands :’)
Everything was said. The problem is that Blizzard wrote the whole War of the Thorns with shock value in mind and nothing else. They seemingly never thought ahead. They never thought about the ramifications. Comparatively insignificant events suddenly serve as the spark for dissent amongst the Horde like Derek. A single human being resurrected.
The problem is that characters like Daelin, Rogers and, to some degree, even Garithos suddenly look justified in their doings. The game tries to paint them as in the wrong, but you look back and simply think, “Why though? We thought that we had killed the worst orcs during Mists of Pandaria. As it turns out they are all simply terrible people.”
Personally the faction war was probably supposed to be some meta distraction from the old gods that was so meta it affected the advertised theme of the expac. If most of the systems of BFA weren’t as badly received as they are (azerite gear, warfronts, IE’s) this probably would have been expanded far more on
I think lorewise we’re at the point where the old gods are watching their stage being made by the current warring factions
![:poop:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/poop.png?v=6" ":poop:")
show, yay)