In 10.2 quests i am realizing something very odd to me, it is that in most of the quests related to the night elves they talk about Teldrasil as if it was “long ago” while it was not.
I must remind you all that Teldrasil was made at the very beginning of wow Vanilla and that it was at the year 25 and we are not in the year 40 which means Teldrasil was at maximum 15-18y ago.
When you take this into account, and you have all these night elves like the one in the night elf heritage armor telling you that they were not born when the battle of mount hyjal happenned, you realize they are at max 18y old you just wonder…what the hell?
Like you have a quest in 10.2 when you have to help night elves druids to sleep, and one tell you something in these lines “Oh my mom used to sing me a song to help me sleep when on Teldrasil.” And when i read this i am like “hum how old are you?” Like if this guy was a little kid on teldrasil that means he is like 15y now or something…
I must remind people that the night elves can live thounsands of years and for a being that can live thounsads of years, Teldrasil which lasted 8-10y is comparable to the blink of an eye…
I really feel like writers and players are treating night elves lore as if they were humans but they are not humans, they had a loooooong history and Teldrasil was a tiny tiny tiny part of it.
Has Blizzard ever treated longlivety that way, though? Most quasi-immortals pretty much act the was they look like in WoW, and ancient elves, draenei and dragons still get character arcs that wouldn’t be any different, if they were the teenagers they appear to be. Even more, thy throw around numbers as if they were of no importance at all. So… 10k years ago we hat the War of the Ancients. Then everything was nice and peaceful and nothing really happened for 8000(!!!) years or so, until we thought up ne next event. Or Illidan, he was locked up after the War and then… he was imprisoned for 10k years. What does that do to a psyche? Nothing much, really, we don’t want that character-defining development off-screen, even if we’re throwing ridiculous numbers around, do we? What are numberas anyways? Of course characters like Turalyon, Tyrande, and fricking Velen would look towards pups like Varian and Anduin for guidance. He is such a good boy, isn’t he? I mean, some 20-year-old newly trained mage has a lot to teach Maiev.
So yeah, I don’t disagree, people tend to just take our normal human perceptions of time as a given. But that’s never been different in Warcraft. I don’t expect that to change any time soon, and it might just be to late for that to improve anything anyways.
Nostalgia leads people to think that writing was better at Classic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Just take Burning Crusade and see what they did to all the Illidaris. Illidan was an interesting morally grey character and he became nothing but a tyran. Kael’thas was destroyed in this extension too. His heel turn was so forced for no reasons, it was just ridiculous.
His final villain speech at Magister Terrace was so bad, it became a joke around the community.
And that’s just one example. There’s also the retcon about the skin colour of the orcs, which makes no sense at all. Or the treatment of Zul’jin (who, by the way, is no longer able to regenerate because reasons…).
But people prefer to forget all the bad things Classic has done and only remember the bad things about Retail.
Whats a GD forum? I mean, in my OP i am literaly telling you that Teldrasil existing is a mistake in the frist place so no i am not saying vanilla was better here…
Yes and the problem with that is that it makes whats called a “leveling down” in term of writing moving forward, since people keep saying that it was better before (even if its untrue) and that devs themselves were part of these players back in the days, they stay in the same mediocrity of writing…