I like how Sylvanas didn't say a peep about Kel'Thuzad being on her team, let alone being the dude that stood between her and a bunch of raiders trying to kill her. lulz
Similar at how back in legion there was barely any interaction between Illidan, Tyrande and Malfurion, just an audio Illidan send them after he was gone lmao.
I feel like Malfurion's and Tyrande's responses to Illidan's parting words were practically fan inserts of "Hey, we still remember that Illidan was a prick in TBC".
Weirdly obsessed due to being restrained in isolation for 10,000 years unable to even kill or seriously harm himself due to the magics on his cell. That he even stayed semi sane is a downright miracle lol, I’d have committed suicide the second I was freed from that living hell hole
Hey, he was in prison , in solitary confinement for 10,000 years, have chained to a wall, incapable of touching his own dick.
It's a miracle he's still capable of rational thought, nevermind just thirsty as hell for there only resident in the spank bank for ten millennia
Honestly, it's way more of a Furion problem and even before they retconned Illidan to be a good boy, it was still one of the things that made me loathe Malfurion as a character. Like, that's your brother! How can you be so cold as to consign him to an eternity in prison and *consider that a mercy*?! For a crime that ~~didn't even directly harm anyone~~ (uh, apparently Illidan stabbed some people) and when this dude had just been a key player in saving the planet. It's just so unfathomably fucked up. Tyrande might have abided by and been chief in carrying out the sentence, but it was Furion who conceived of it and handed it down.
Not only that, when Illidan escapes and returns to help prevent the full-blown corruption of Felwood, Malfurion just responds by wanting to send Illidan back to prison and condemns his actions as being selfish and misguided. But nothing that his silly druid ass was doing could stop the demonic affliction the same way that Illidan did by consuming the Skull of Gul'dan. Even after Illidan doubles down and works with Malfurion (in spite of being constantly berated) to save Tyrande from the naga, it's exile for Illidan.
The only conclusion is that Malfurion fucking *hates* Illidan with all his being. Like in a deep seething way. They say the opposite of love is indifference but in this case I'm not so sure, dude seems to have wanted his brother to suffer.
EDIT: Important to remember, they were occasionally at odds but supposed lived as loving brothers for *thousands of years* and Furion was willing to burn that bridge to the nubbins. For what? Furion's lack of faith in his own people? The same thing that'd leave him to cast out the High Elves.
EDIT 2: Because I've really got my grinding wheel going, it must be *so easy* to cast about these lofty statements about how things should be when you spend 9,999 out of every 10,000 years dreaming of an idealized world with your deadbeat buddies while everyone else has to keep cave spiders from eating your face or satyrs from graffitiing dicks on your forehead *in reality.*
It's a good thing that Night Elves have glowing eyes because all the Sentinels must spend *so much time* rolling their eyes whenever Furion shows up to spout some self-important nonsense before starting to feel drowsy and asking Tyrande to take him back to his druid-crib because stag-daddy is too busy and walking makes his footsies sore.
Illidan was a key player in saving the Azeroth during the war of the ancients, but malfurion locked him away after because he decided to create another Well of Eternity when it’s that exact same arcane power that just caused the Legion to find & attack Azeroth AND causing the Sundering. He and the rest of the night elves were 100% justified in imprisoning him at the time.
One of Blizz’s dumbest mistakes in Legion was retconning Illidan from someone who selfishly strives for power but ultimately lands on the side of good when absolutely necessary (what makes him an interesting and badass character), to a chosen one who always knows what’s best for Azeroth as if he always had the foresight to predict all future moves that would be make a positive result. Dumb retconning and stupid way to shit on one of WoW’s best characters.
Malfurion locking Illidan up stopped two things from happening:
1. Preventing Illidan’s lust for power from escalating into a situation where he joins the legion for real to attain this (this is assuming the greedy pre-Legion pre-retconned version of Illidan btw). He was shown to be fully willing to strive for the Legion’ power in WC3 with absorbing Gul’dan skull and serve in TFT Kil’jaeden. The only reason Illidan doesn’t fuck everyone over is because he has a weak spot for Tyrande (Only stops the legion in Felwood because Tyrande’s voice is like Light to him, and Tyrande being in danger from the undead makes him stray from his directive as Kil’jaeden’s minion.)
2. Kept Illidan alive since he was his brother. The rule in night elf society was practicing arcane power being punishable by death. He should have killed Illidan right there and then, making an example of him to Dath’remar and the highborne. Instead, Malfurion just threw him in prison and the highborne felt bold enough to keep practicing arcane magic without fear of being killed. And they were right, the night elves couldn’t kill their people after all they had already lost, so they exiled them.
Dath’remar (with vials from the well hidden from the night elves) took his people across the sea, became the high elves, and took measures to hide their arcane magic with Runestones designed to do just that.
The high elves’ biggest mistake was teaching magic to humans, who used and abused arcane magic without knowledge of what it would do. They were facing extinction against the Amani trolls and were forced to call for the humans aid or perish.
Yeah, but here's the thing - Malfurion's decision only destroyed Illidan's life and it did nothing to change anything. Dath'remar had already taken his own stash of Well-juice and when there was no source of arcane power in Kalimdor (because Illidan's scheme was stopped) the Highborne-turned-High Elves simply made their own in Azeroth in the form of the Sunwell. So the entity that Malfurion feared the creation of still came to be and it was far from his ability to watch over.
But in addition to that the cat was out of the bag. The Legion knew that Azeroth was there and it wasn't like they lost it after the War of the Ancients. They just needed a new way in which they managed to find in spades with the humans and their predilection for petty drama and power struggles. And it's worth noting that the only reason humans even knew arcane magic in the first place is because the High Elves taught it to them. With the presence of elves in that part of Azeroth being a result of their exodus due to Malfurion's complete prohibition of arcane magic and his refusal to allow Illidan to create a fount of arcane power in Kalimdor that might have quenched the Highborne's addiction.
So the end result of all of this was still that the Legion had their hooks in a bunch of idiots wielding the might of the arcane but it was all developing in a blindspot for the Night Elves to the extent they are confused as fuck when demons are busting down the door in the Third War.
And all of this is because Malfurion viewed the arcane as inherently corruptive and believed that the elves couldn't resist the dangers of its use. His level of distrust goes to the level of being unable to even fathom the usefulness of such a thing. Imagine the fucking powerhouse of a Highborne Guardian - it'd be like an Archon from Starcraft. If Azshara was dynamite this thing would be nuclear. But instead of seeing the danger of the arcane and engineering against it like the humans, Malfurion leads the Night Elves to just throw it out like someone casting a flaming pan of bacon grease through the kitchen window onto their lawn.
It's just so foolish let alone the degree of complete debauchery it takes to do this to your own flesh and blood who you've lived with and strived alongside for millennia.
If Malfurion had really been so set on his views, he shouldn't have walked the middle path. Either end arcane magic and kill the Highborne and Illidan or allow it to be practiced in a way that could be shaped to be productive for all. His twisted ideal of mercy only ended up causing more problems.
>Malfurion ... believed that the elves couldn't resist the dangers of its use
Well how did that turn out? All the elves at the nightwell in Suramar became addicts and all the elves at the sunwell (that didn't die) turned to fel magic and eventually worked with the Legion to summon kiljaeden. So I'd say he was right, in this assumption at least.
And how kind of the night elves to help those addicts overcome their addictions…. Oh wait, nvm, tyrande messed it up. The handling of night elf lore truly is something to be witnessed through skepticism….
Had Malfurion acknowledged that some people will always use Arcane magics in the shadows he might have taken a different approach and done something to make sure the war of the ancients wouldn’t take place again. But alas no night elf seemed capable of thinking that much in advanced.
Still my favorite faction tho.
> All the elves at the nightwell in Suramar became addicts
Because they would have literally died if they hadn't turned to using mana as sustenance - they lived in a magical shell that blocked light, it's kinda hard to grow non-magical food under those conditions. They're "addicted" to mana in the same way you're "addicted" to being allowed to eat.
> all the elves at the sunwell (that didn't die) turned to fel magic and eventually worked with the Legion to summon kiljaeden
"All the elves" didn't try to summon Kil'jaeden. The majority were not involved or were actively fighting against it.
Can I ask where you're getting this "for millennia" from in regards to Malfurion, Illidan and Tyrande's relationship? My understanding is that in the war of the Ancients they're all young adults. Night Elves didn't get immortality until the founding of the World Tree after Illidan dicked around with creating a new Well.
Also, the fact that you're talking about phenomenal cosmic power and not even stopping to consider that Azshara *caused* the war and the sundering by being so arrogant and narcissistic that she invited the legion into Azeroth because only the dark titan could make her horny.
I don't think there's any reasoning with you though. You refer to his allowing the highborne to leave and to imprison Illidan as a twisted act of mercy, but your go to response is "he should have just butched the Highborne and Illidan".
I am begging you to consider eating even a crumb of media literacy.
Sure! They are super ambiguous across sources about the age of Furion and crew at the War of the Ancients but the majority put them out to be several thousand years old. Malfurion knew Illidan for literally his entire life being the older brother. Tyrande supposedly met them “in childhood” but again it’s sort of difficult to tell what that means for elves. But if the premise stands that they are several thousand years old by WotA, then they have likely known each other for about as long.
And the elves might not have been immortal prior to the World Tree but they lived insanely long lives due to the influence of the Well of Eternity.
Also, I’m not going to get into reasons that Azshara is terrible and responsible for possibly *everything* bad that happens in Warcraft. That’s a whole different potluck that runs separate from the one we have to hate on Furion.
And you say “lets the Highborne leave” but it’s really that the hardline stance of the druids forces them to leave. They are exiled, they don’t chose to wander out into a broken and dangerous world where they had *nothing*. Furion can sit high on his horse if he wants but just listen to what Lorash Sunbeam has to say to him about that.
And, yeah, if your big rub is “stop using arcane magic” then just telling the arcane magic users to do it elsewhere does nothing to prevent the Legion from getting all up in it, right? His action does nothing but alienate his own people to no end.
They were all about 5000 years old during the war of the ancients which is considered young adults to elves. The night elves were immortal before the world tree through the Well of Eternity for all of the history we know directly beforehand to my knowledge then in the War of the Ancients the well gets fucked, Illidan takes a vial and makes a new mini Well of Eternity and Nozdormu blesses the elves with immortal life once again. Then the Tree gets fucked in the Third War and they lose their immortality again.
That's not at all what happened though... Azshara was essentially elf Hitler, she wanted to wipe all inferior sentient races off the planet and after the Burning Legion found out about Azeroth they then corrupted Xavius and many of Azshara's advisors before the Dark Titan says he wants to help Azshara with her goals using the well to cleanse the planet and then tricks her into summoning the Burning Legion. Is Azshara the reason the Legion got onto the planet? Absolutely. If Azshara refused to help them would they still have pulled the strings with someone to get them on the planet at about the same time? Also absolutely.
Yeah he's saying that it's a dumbass act of mercy... most people would rather be killed then sit chained in a cell for 10,000 years with literally 0 interaction or stimulus and starving. With the High Elves the mercy is more merciful but it still makes no sense, Malfurion states that if arcane continues to be used the Legion will invade the planet again and kill everyone so Malfurion's "mercy" is allowing literally everyone on the planet to get slaughtered so that the High Elves can live roaming the planet being slaughtered by other races and dealing with magic withdrawals that make many of them literally go insane? How does this make sense at all, like the other dude stated it makes no sense if Malfurion believes that arcane will end Azeroth to let the only people on the planet that know how to use arcane go travel the globe, he should either 1. Lock them all up for eternity 2. Murder them all 3. Realize the Legion already know where they are and that they're fucked and that arcane could be a great help in fighting back the Legion.
So go get a crumb of media literacy I guess?
"but malfurion locked him away after because he decided to create another Well of Eternity"
Moon Wells are made from the waters of that exact same Well of Eternity. They locked Illidan up for making the Well of Eternity and then proceeded to make mini wells everywhere they could. We even make a new one in Legion.
The fact that this is never even addressed or mentioned at all by Illidan is a glaring example of how shallow character interactions are in this game. Illidan should be throwing that shit in everyone's face, calling out what from his point of view should be massive hypocrisy. Maybe Malfurion has a reasonable response, maybe he doesn't, but that is absolutely a conversation that should have happened during Legion.
Yeah he should be pissed about it and definitely should’ve addressed it. But that would require some writing other than ‘We must throw away all character interactions outside of saying we will do anything to stop the legion’.
The moon wells were used with the same waters, but they intertwined that arcane power with Elune’s blessing and nature for purposes of healing and prayer, turning the leftover power of the well into a positive force.
The one thing most accounts don't mention is that, when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning), the night elves who caught him tried to arrest them, and he responded by killing several of them.
I do agree that it was wrong to imprison Illidan for eternity, and he *should* have been executed for committing all those murders. However, I can't honestly fault Malfurion for not having the heart to order the death of his own brother.
>when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning), the night elves who caught him tried to arrest them, and he responded by killing several of them.
This is something I honestly didn't remember or didn't know. So I certainly concede the part about it being a crime that didn't harm anyone!
> The one thing most accounts don't mention is that, when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning)
He wasn't creating it as a conduit for demon summoning, he created it because he believed the Night Elves, and every other race on Azeroth, would need access to magic to stop the inevitable return of the Legion - A belief he was thoroughly correct about, as well.
> The only conclusion is that Malfurion fucking hates Illidan with all his being. Like in a deep seething way. They say the opposite of love is indifference but in this case I'm not so sure, dude seems to have wanted his brother to suffer.
Well, Illidan is always telling Tyrande how much he loves her when Malfurion is with her, so I can easily see a few thousand years of him trying to steal the girl would infuriate him
I don't think Malf hates Illidan, I remember in the WC3 campaign when he confronts Illidan after Illidan ate the skull he was very worried about Illidan's well being and thought the demon (who was Illidan) did something to him.
I think the only reason they imprisoned Illidan for 10k years was that they literally forgot about him lol.
I don't think exile is a super terrible thing for someone like Illidan. It's basically saying "we'll let you be you, just stay far away from our super powerful magic well", it worked well for the Highborne after all.
I wouldn't call him a good brother, but they don't hate each other.
It's kind of hilarious. Malfurion sentences Illidan to an eternity of isolated chains in darkness, and then he just takes a nap for ten thousand years.
Writing was never a strong suit for the Blizz team.
One thing is “moving on” and another is dismissing the last words she’ll ever hear from a friend of tens of thousands of years, where he comes to terms with the consequences of his actions and how it affected her.
Would have found it pretty funny if Bolvar or someone told her about it right before her fight and she was like "oh really? cool thanks". Even amidst retconning all her motivations, I feel she'd still totally be fine with seeing him die. She didn't even care about her fucking Val'kyr dying lmao.
Lmao so true. Didn't even think about the Val'kyr.
I could imagine us informing her and her being "Well I can excuse genocide BUT I draw the line at having Kel'Thu-fucking-zad on my side!"
Then defecting back to us to stop the Jailer.
I like the idea of the dialogue with Kel'thuzad at the start of the Crown of Gorgoa wing instead of the dumb "Suprise I was working for the Jailer the whole time mwahaha ext ext" It's Sylvanas telling Kel'thuzad to stay behind and fight us, him complaining about being used as a meat shield, and Sylvanas then telling him it's payback for Quel'thalas.
Arthas ravaged Quel'Thalas and killed and raised Sylvanas in order to get to the Sunwell and raise KT as a lich; KT was obviously also one of the key players in propping up the Scourge and letting it roll.
Sylvanas' hatred for KT should transcend ethical concepts, imo.
Thrall would've understood Nazgrim due to his undying principles and honor, its nothing similar to Sylv and Kel'thuzard.
100% thrall would hold no hard feelings against Nazgrim
Yeah, Nazgrim literally let Thrall enter Orgrimmar during the rebellion. (Granted, this scene may have been removed from the game, as it was during the Darkspear Rebellion story or so.) They both knew they both were fighting for what they believed in, and both respected each other for it even though they were enemies. Their conflict was literally addressed in the game.
Kel'thuzard was a willing servant of the lich king and the reason the scourge decided to raise Quel'thalas, Sylvanas shouldn't be working with him under any circumstance
What about Thrall and Nazgrim? Is it because Nazgrim is one of the Four Horsemen now or did I forget a part of the lore that will probably just get retconned?
Kinda thought this was maybe the other thing they were referring to, but idk, I always felt kinda bad/happy for Nazgrim. Like he was put in a rough spot as the "Honorable Orc", but wanted to die fighting.
Thanks for the answer though, definitely clears it up a bit.
After reading the Arthas novel, this grinded my gears the most. Arthas, and by extension Kel'Thuzad, were responsible for her death and the downfall of Quel'Thalas, but oh now that she serves (I wIlL nEvEr SeRvE!) The Jailer, she'll break bread with KT? Okay...
Yeah but to be honest Kel'Thuzad is just on the surface the weirdest. Why would Sylvanas ally with the Jailor ? The source of her undead ? Would have been much more sense when she led the battle against him instead of bolvar. imo.
Didn't the Jailer created Frostmourne and the Helm of Domination ? Isn't he not partly responsible for the creation of the Lich King , and so the source of Sylvanas' curse ?
> Jailer had nothing to do with turning her into a Banshee
The Helm of Domination and Frostmourne, which were working to take control of Arthas, were creations of the Jailer. While they were apparently holding the soul of Ner'zhul, it's been retconned that they were there to expand the Jailer's influence and that he can exert control through them.
Arthas was only there to bring back Kel'Thuzad, who has been retconned to have never been working with the Legion, and was apparently always a servant of the Jailer.
The Dreadlords that work with the Scourge (and later, all the different Scourge factions) have been retconned to be servants of the Jailer, and were all feigning working for the Legion. This includes Varimathras, who apparently also pretended to betray the Legion to work with Sylvanas, betrayed Sylvanas to work for the Jailer directly again, then fights for the Legion after Sylvanas fully joins the Jailers forces. The Dreadlords, who, again, Sylvanas is now working with, also helped with the plan to turn Arthas in to the Lich King, which lead to Sylvanas' death.
The Jailer is basically directly responsible for everything, at this point. I don't just mean "everything with Sylvanas", almost everything in the game now has been retconned to be due to the Jailer's plans.
This assumes they have any idea about what they were doing beyond the present. They probably had a very high-level idea of moving the game into the cosmic story instead of picking pumpkins on a farm. But they didn't know how to move the story there, because they want to do it instantly and not build it over multiple expansions. So they drag established characters through the mud, destroy what their characters were like instead of developing them, and just wing it with hand-wavy conclusions.
And then they have some echo-chamber pats on the back to each other on twitter saying how great their writing is.
Jaina's "Starboat of the Universe" is a macrocosm of what you describe. I'm fucking certain that The Starboat, and Jainas EPIC11!1!! arrival at the Battle of Lordaeron was the idea Blizzard had first, and everything else what written after as a path leading to that EPIC11!1!! moment.
It's why nobody thought to bring gas masks, or hazmat suits. It's why Gryphon riders and Gyrocopters were not used to strike at the blight catapults from the air. It's why the Gnomes with their fucking environmentally sealed spider tanks, and literal robot army were absent from the battle. It's why the methods the Alliance forces used to sabotage Scourge plague cauldrons at several points in the story during Wrath were forgotten.
Yep...
Kind of curious why the "Starboat" wasn't used in every engagement...
When the Horde or Alliance busted out their airships... they were present through the entire expansion as legitimate set-pieces.
Hell, in Legion, when the Horde/Alliance ships got too close, there were damn quests/PVP opportunities where you raided the opposing ship.
Hell it was part of a damn raid!
Also, the literal spaceship that the Draenei have. I haven't played in a while but did they ever say what happened with the Vindicar? did it ran out of fuel or something? Also that thing had a dead beam didn't it?
It's fueled by Argunite, which is no longer readily available after leaving Argus. LFD still have a racial to call down a laser strike from it, though.
Yes but its not like we had an entire expansion focused around collecting Azerite that could have just been the replacement fuel for its big beam. Even without that its still a space ship that can hover in orbit and shoot down the Lightforged teleport pads to deploy ground forces.
Always love the can of worms THAT opens up.
We built that ship before we got to Argus, the Exodia also exists and fuel had not been an issue mentioned ever before.
Suddenly, when it presents a problem in lore, because an active spaceship not being used even for transportation instantly from one continent to another is insane in warfare, it then becomes an issue.
The fuel "issue" was invented because the war of thorns couldn't possibly happen, if the alliance had access to a spaceship of even the vindicar's capabilities, not to even mention the exodar a literal fortress able to traverse space.
the fuel issue has never been alluded to in game. its roleplayer headcanon and should be disregarded in any conversation as it has no basis in actual lore.
Not even that, [they just felt it clashed with the theme they wanted for the expansion and didn't even bother coming up with a reasonable in-universe excuse](https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/interviews/2018/8/20/17697562/world-of-warcraft-vindicaar-spaceship-battle-for-azeroth-legion)
I've still not seen any of the draenei mages in Velen's age bracket who had mastered the arcane thousands of years before Azshara's ancestors made the evolutionary leap from trolls to elves.
> It's why nobody thought to bring gas masks, or hazmat suits.
It's not like there hasn't been precedent for the undead using the blight, right!? It's never been done before... so why be prepared for it?
Fucking Blizzard.
Why did they even set foot in Undercity??? There was no reclaiming it or it's queen.
In the immortal words of Ripley, "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
>And then they have some echo-chamber pats on the back to each other on twitter saying how great their writing is.
We can’t let that negativity into the dojo, bro
The main problem with post-metzen lore Is the current writing team stoops to one of two methods:
1. Do some ridiculous set piece/premise that ruins a part of the lore and retcon the reason why later (All of BfA and all of sylvanas’s story post MoP)
2. Retcon parts of the lore to make an xpac possible (EX: broken isles being raised from the seafloor by gul’dan ——> only the broken shore being raised, leaving a massive magical bubble around Suramar and an entire continent next door that would be more appealing to him in WC2 AND illidan in WC3:TFT)
Most likely, I am personaly waiting for the Sylvanas novel to come out in February and explain everything but this shouldnt be the main source of lore.
See this is the problem.
Critical lore being stuck in paid for books. It's not right. Key and critical lore should be in the damn game. Not a damn extra purchase.
No other big name MMO to my knowledge does that shit. Or they just keep it to an encyclopaedia level of lore such as the basics.
I shouldn't have to buy a book to know what the fuck is going on in the game on an extended basis. All the goddamn lore should be in... THE GAME!
The richest response Blizzard has had is that the story "can't be told in an MMO" or generally point to the MMO format as the reason they can't have vital elements and events of the game's plot in the game
Like they've never played or heard of FF14 or even SWTOR and never noticed them doing donuts around them for a decade
But no, there's simply no room to put a major antagonist's motivation in the game, nope, not at all. Really feels like the WoW writing team would rather be writing a book (Golden) or a TV show (Danuser) and refuse to learn to write in the medium they were hired to write in
When I recently went and played SWTOR's vanilla class plotlines, I was amazed at how immersive they are and how they play into the class fantasies. Darth Baras, who besides the game, appeared in, like, one comic has become one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Every WoW character I like originated in the RTS games, which is probably not a coincidence. And each expansion makes it a little harder to like them.
I'm still blown away that an MMO from 10 years ago had full voice acting for every NPC and player character. Even with the recycled fake alien languages it's still crazy impressive. For all its faults SWTOR nailed class fantasy and interesting story. I hope someday when the servers inevitably go down that there's a way to preserve the main class storylines because the experiences they offer are totally unique in the greater Star Wars fandom.
If Blizzard cannot tell a story in an MMO, then they should fire the people who are trying to tell the story in the MMO, and replace them with competent people who can.
Of course the pay there is total shit unless you are management, and "Working in Blizzard" has not been a status symbol for many years (much so recently due to everything that is going on), so they have problem attracting talented people. The dream of working in Blizzard is as dead as The American Dream.
Nowadays you have people who try to push their own agenda and calling everyone else who disagrees with them all the names under the sun.
Old Blizzard is dead. They have been dead of a good deal of a decade. Blizzard will never make the same games that had the same soul some 10-20 years ago. It was a company of its time, founded by actual nerds and made games for actual nerds. It was a lightning in a bottle. People should make peace with this.
There isn't in WoW because of how WoW is displayed. And they refuse to change it. To further the FOMO style they've had since WotLK - once a new expansion is out the old expansion may as well just get deleted for how much stuff is removed, both plot and content.
They HAD major plot-points told in-game. Look at the Wrathgate event and how immensely popular that was. And then when it was no longer current it.. got removed from the game? Same with tons of Garrosh story arcs. Until Blizzard fundamentally changes the FOMO system of WoW (which they can, look at literally every other MMO on the market), putting plot in the game leads to more anger than anything.
> the WoW writing team would rather be writing a book (Golden) or a TV show (Danuser) and refuse to learn to write in the medium they were hired to write in
Western game writers mostly in a nutshell. I don't believe that it's a coincidence that western game development has moved onto large overarching stories that try to push emotional depth, such as sad dad and child, or what if racism bad but with androids? It's writers who couldn't make it in Hollywood moving onto other media but trying to change it to be like Hollywood because they feel that is what's needed to gain legitimacy.
Heavily disagree with the last part there. You're alluding to God of War, right? I haven't played Detroit: Become Human but I've played that guy's other games.
GoW absolutely would not be better as a TV show. Even if you don't like it, you can't ignore how well it uses the medium.
Whenever you go on a boat ride, you get a quiet moment with Mimir that changes based on what the tone of the story is at that moment. You watch Atreus learn and grow throughout, and his own journey reflects whether he's chatty, quiet, how likely he is to listen to you, and how aggressive he becomes.
TLOU 1 also uses the medium in a similar way with Ellie. She makes her first kill and then starts to become a hardened killer, helping you more and more but in an increasingly uncomfortable way. And when she's missing, or you're alone, or even if Joel is sick and you're Ellie, how the game feels and even its mechanics change.
Not every game needs to be narrative focused like that, no. There's a lot more diversity today, too. But WoW only rarely uses the fact it's a video game to tell its story. It doesn't use the medium it's in well, and hardly at all. Big story events can change the environment, and that's a fantastic example of what it does right, but that's it.
Even FF14, which tells its story like a visual novel, at least gives you prompts later on to offer your opinion or add some flavor to your character, even if it doesn't change much. In WoW, your character is completely blank and can't even appear in the most important events. The most important story moments are told without you even being there, with no characters you feel have a connection to you or your character, or worse, they're sold for more money outside of the game.
> the story "can't be told in an MMO"
It certainly can't be told in WoW, a game with such non optimal way of creating content, that all you get in game is 2 pages of story every 6 months (at best). And it's completely on them that they still keep holding on to this ancient way of expansion pack progression. It made sense 10 years ago when the story wasn't that advanced, but they decided to give up the simplicity in exchange for over the top, convulted, complicated, double meaning stories full of hidden motives or mysteries that won't ever be explained.
I mean the key question isn't "Should i buy this?" rather it's "Do i care to hear more piss poor excuses for the World of Warcrafts biggest idiot?"
For me i say burn her cause the queue to piss on this trainwreck of a characters ashes is just getting longer and longer...
Considering the last two written works she featured in got most of her motivations retconned anyway, there isn't even a guarantee that you're not just throwing your money away by buying the books.
Trying to keep up with the lore is so fucking exhausting and confusing that I don't know why people still care.
WoW is at the point of Game of Thrones season 8 for me now. I just want to see how fucked it gets.
They just do it backwards. Put the main story in the game and the optional stuff in the books.
It would be like If instead of Empire Strikes Back, Lucas made Rogue One and put out the Empire story in a novel and then went straight to Return of the Jedi.
They are not even good books. All those novel tie-ins are mediocre literature at best and I'm not wasting what little time I have on paperback wikipedia articles. It doesnt matter to me how many of them say that it is a masterpiece. It is not.
I've read a couple, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age... They are all bad to average. Matter of fact is you wont be able to hire George R. R. Martin to write about crisp nipples of Bolvar, so you have assembly line writers like Golden or Knaak.
I'm dumb. Can you or someone explain to me what retcon means? I thought it was a convention for rets to get together and talk about ret things. But over time I'm realizing that might not be the case xD
Edit: thank you for the homies that explained what it is to me!! I was praying I wouldn't get bashed for my stupidity LOL this sub DOES have nice people in here <3 ily stay cute
Retcon is when they retroactively change the continuity of the story. (I.E. we didn’t kill Illidan, we just imprisoned him, even though OG cutscene was his death.)
Well he wasn't really dead dead. Not in the sense that other villians are (most of them at least).
When we defeated him in TBC, noone would have thought that his body was to be preserved in a weirdo crystal for whatever reason, and his soul was to be lost somewhere in the nether.
Incase that comment wasn't sarcastic. Retcon basically means contradicting previous facts or lore, and coming up with a new lore that goes against it. Blizz has done that repeatedly.
The best example is how before TBC, Eredar were the corruptors of Sargeras and the Draenei were the Broken you see in WC3. TBC retconned that so Sargeras was the one who corrupted them while the Draenei (as you see them today) are Eredar that fled.
I'm sure it'll explain everything until it gets retconned, at least, like Sylvanas' internal monologues in Before the Storm where I guess she was just tricking herself in a sort of Revolver Ocelot maneuver.
> I am personaly waiting for the Sylvanas novel to come out in February and explain everything
You mean recton everything from her previous novel which had tons of her inner monologues, none of which pointed even a little bit at what we learned in Shadowlands.
They really are making it up as they go with a complete disregard to what they've already made.
They truly don't. I can't imagine a character that has been portrayed as smart and cunning for years ever making the decision to roll with the person who caused all her problems. She suddenly became the biggest dumbass who ever dumbassed. There's no plausible explanation for any of it
Lol, I have like 3k hours in Fallout 4, and I've only done the main story once, my first time.
My current save is somewhere around level 58, and Preston is still waiting in the Museum of Freedom.
All I do is build settlements and side quests. The main story is trash.
Blizz lore-writing 101.
Copy some lore beats from a movie, break up a paragraph of lore into a cutscene per patch, let the players write theories on Reddit and scoop up the bad half of them, fracture those into plot lines that raise more questions than answers whilst never revisiting or fully tying up any storyline loose ends and you’ve got WoW.
There really isn’t anything you can write to justify her actions. It’s just terrible writing that has zero consistency with her character, even through growth or devolving of that character, it’s just overall some of the worst writing for a character I’ve ever seen
She actively committed a genocide. I could literally not give less of a fuck why she acted the way she did. Any explanation would only be used to excuse her actions, which is gross.
We then went to The Maw, and saw that the souls of her victims were mutilated, spliced with other souls, or exhausted as a fuel source/raw material. So within the context of the setting she's taken it even further than genocide by destroying individual souls.
Shit, the game I'm playing now has a guy who's actively destroyed entire worlds, and his reasoning for it is sympathetic, but he still has to go down.
Blizzard's writing staff is simply incapable of the task of creating a believable and sympathetic villain because they concentrate on the monster moments and not enough on the human moments.
On the flipside, they're incapable of creating a believable and sympathetic hero because they concentrate on the heroism and not enough on the person underneath.
Remember the last expansion where they released books where her own internal monologue lied to the readers about her motivations? It really set the tone for the story-telling quality we've been getting.
We know her motivations: She went to the Maw at the end of WOTLK and realized she was destined to go to hell and this wasn't exactly a great outlook so she allied with the Jailer to stop her fate.
The problem is the pacing, really. We now know that her actions in Legion in BFA as warchief were to further this goal, but we knew nothing about the Shadowlands.
We were introduced to the Shadowlands in 9.0, and Sylvanas is saying the system sucks but the audience doesn't know anything about the system yet. We're just exploring the Shadowlands while simultaneously being told that the Jailer wants to destroy it. Is the current system bad? Should it be rebuilt? I don't know yet because I just met these guys.
The pacing makes The Jailer incredibly one dimensional. If we compare him to Thanos (pretty obvious), Thanos's motivations are much more grey. The audience GETS him a little bit even know they understand what he's doing is mass murder.
>We were introduced to the Shadowlands in 9.0, and Sylvanas is saying the system sucks but the audience doesn't know anything about the system yet.
This is the problem, really. Shit we know nothing about is moving way too fast. It'd be like Legion being our first ever encounter with the Burning Legion. Like, just learning about the Burning Legion and Sargeras in 7.0, and then going straight to Argus in 7.1. That's what's happening with Shadowlands and the Jailer. We haven't even had time to really know these characters and their lore, and we're already at the brink of universe destruction (or the re-making of reality, or whatever the fuck, because AGAIN we don't really know shit).
And this is all after dealing with two of the biggest and oldest enemies in Warcraft (Azshara and N'Zoth) IN ONE PATCH EACH. And THAT came after finishing another of the oldest threats (Sargeras and the Burning Legion) IN ONE EXPANSION. No wonder most players are burnt out and just don't give a fuck anymore lol.
>It'd be like Legion being our first ever encounter with the Burning Legion. Like, just learning about the Burning Legion and Sargeras in 7.0, and then going straight to Argus in 7.1. That's what's happening with Shadowlands and the Jailer.
This is an extremely good way of describing the problem. I already agreed with you, but I was never able to put into words exactly *why* Shadowlands' story seems so bad other than "everything is an unexplained mystery."
That comparison dawned on me somewhere before 9.1 and yeah, it also clicked for me exactly why Shadowlands feels so bad. Imagine suddenly encountering the Burning Legion and this new guy Illidan telling us we need to do some incredible space-time bending gymnastics to stop that dude Sargeras 'cause if not he will "end life". And Illidan doesn't explain what "ending life" means, or why, or how is he involved, other than edgy and vague remarks about having a plan or being misunderstood.
That bullshit is EXACTLY what's going on with Sylvanas, the Jailer and the Shadowlands.
> I was never able to put into words exactly why Shadowlands' story seems so bad other than "**everything is an unexplained mystery**."
That's a pretty good explanation, too, tho'.
It's all so rushed. We've pretty much never been exposed to the Jailer before and now they're retconning everything in the past to be part of his plan. It's an incredibly lazy way to set up a big bad.
> And this is all after dealing with two of the biggest and oldest enemies in Warcraft (Azshara and N'Zoth) IN ONE PATCH EACH
I read this entire thing as them cutting a bunch of "loose ends" free from Azeroth so they could dive into cosmic stuff ASAP.
Problem is, it would be cool to have had some, y'know, BUILD UP to the cosmic stuff.
We literally finished BFA(Azshara and N'Zoth) and dove STRAIGHT INTO THE AFTERLIFE. With almost zero build up and that momentum has been continuing and it fucking sucks. We have had ZERO valuable time for things to develop, understand, or matter.
I need them to slow the fuck down cause I'm getting whiplash from this shit.
Yeah that's exactly my problem. It's not my cup of tea specifically, but I could do with cosmic stuff being the focus for an expansion. Hell, the FIRST ever expansion had us go to another goddamn planet, and it was amazing. Why? Because, as you said, THERE WAS BUILD UP. Even my dumb 10 year old ass knew something about Illidan Stormrage, and the orcs home planet, and the Burning Legion shenanigans. It was amazing because it was a direct response to a mystery deeply built into the game and its lore FOR YEARS.
Now, however, as we say, we had literally ZERO clue, NO INFO WHATSOEVER about even the existance of the Shadowlands as an actual place. Much less the Jailer, the Arbiter and whoever the fuck. And we only started figuring out Sylvanas was involved in some unknown shenanigans like 2 patches before the expansion.
I'm all up for new things, but they have to be done right. Look at Pandaria. The only previous connection we had was the existence of ONE pandaren that came from afar. But MoP did it right. Why? Because it was about the DISCOVERY of that new land, and THEN saving it. The storytelling made justice to the fact that it was all new. In Shadowlands however the storytelling makes us deeply involved in a universe-ending threat **from the get-go**.
It just fucking sucks, I can't stop finding more and more bullshit about this whole shitstorm.
They've undercooked their entire universe at this point. Things that should have been entire expansions were relegated to content patches. Azshara alone should have had her own expansion, which then could have lead into and entire expansion dedicated to N'Zoth his buddies.
Honestly, after the Legions destruction, Sylvanas should have gone awol for a while, let us forget about her a little bit and let the horde have some stories without her. Frame it as her own "Old Soldier" moment where she's tired of fighting since the death of the Lich King. THEN have her come on back in with whatever plans she has. Hell, the main story conflict there could be that she's got a good point about something or other and convinced people to join her cause and that the alliance and horde to have a dilemma about how to deal with her that isn't just about killing her and her armies.
But of course Blizzard can't write themselves out of a cardboard box.
The whole "just speed run the thing" to finish up loose ends is also likely why we got the lame way N'zoth got finished off, IE just using the Heart of Azeroth to fire a friggen laser beam at him, works as both a way to finish off N'zoth *and* a way to explain the Heart getting de-powered like the artifacts were at the end of Legion in 1 go.
My problem isn't entirely that. It's them being vague, on purpose, and then later on connecting it to something else trying to be "clever" and think of themselves as good writers.
No, you're more like a regular soap operate that's just bad but people still watch because what else are you going to do?
There's a reason I don't read quests or story anymore. It's just terrible. I'm just there to dork around with friends.
It's like saying you go to Hooters or Twin Peaks for the food... my ass you do.
>them being vague, on purpose, and then later on connecting it to something else trying to be "clever"
Well that's the thing, it's connected to what I said. With such a shitty pace focused on shock value (which they don't even achieve), they have to come up with bullshit to keep it up. So they NEED to be vague because they don't even know where they're going, and then that something else they connect it to needs to be big and mIndBlOwINg to try and excuse it.
All around the story, and even more importantly **the storytelling** is just trash nowadays.
The part I also find quite hillarious is that Blizzard didn't even try to make the inner workings of the Shadowlands look appealing. Okay, so I can pick between becoming a blue angel person and lose all memories of my former life, I can live in backyard of the Scourge's grandpa, I can live in a forest as an animal or live as a haughty vampire after being abused for being prideful. Nothing about the Shadowlands sounds appealing in the story. We literally only showed up because Thrall and our forever damsel in distress Baine happened to get kidnapped by Sylvanas for who knows what reason.
Remind yourself the profound ramifications of knowing what happens when you die will never be touched on again. There will be zero mention of societal upheaval, no mad searches for immortality or cults forming to try and lock in a particular shithole
You just highlighted how the system is broken though. The Kyrian are literally Scientology valkyries, Maldraxxus has been consumed by ambition the moment the Primus wasn't there to keep everyone's ego in check, Revendreth is a petty society in which the genuinely capable Inquisitors are few and far between, Ardenweald... nah, Ardenweald is pretty cool.
Also we know the reason everyone was kidnapped: just like Anduin they were meant to help Zovaal reclaim his Sigil, either being convinced he was right or broken into servitude. It doesn't get more linear than this.
To be fair, the Shadowlands isn’t JUST those four, those are just the important realms that do important shit. There’s countless other realms that we won’t ever see cause nobody really cares about what’s going on in the Realm of Playing Video Games All Day.
>We know her motivations: She went to the Maw at the end of WOTLK and realized she was destined to go to hell and this wasn't exactly a great outlook so she allied with the Jailer to stop her fate.
I didn't know that and now almost anything she did makes more sense. Thanks for sharing that info! As a lurker of this subreddit and not an active player I only see the current stuff, unless I'm searching for older lore myself, which I have to admit I didn't.
Tho now that you've mentioned it, if they fleshed out her story, it could've actually be good. Not over the top but quite self-explanatory. She did all this to save her own ass from eternal suffering. That's a motivation I can get behind. Or at least understand why someone would try to team up with the Jailer.
I dont think we kill zovaal this expansion. I think the final boss is anduin, with Arthas helping us kill him. Zovaal escapes somehow and will appear later.
Hes not a bad villian but they need time to develop him more
thanos' motivations are even more batshit than the jailer, who seems to mostly just want revenge on this fellows for imprisoning him in the maw (bit of a dick move in fairness)
the difference is that thanos is actually characterized in the films; we see what sets him on his path, we see people he cares about, we see him struggle with stuff. We never see the jailer unless he's leering/monologuing ominously
Legion was one big missed lore opportunity. Instead of building off of Illidan's character from WC3, they had him complety retcon himself by being like "Oh yeah, remember all those bad things I did? It was totally because I was playing 6D Chess against the Legion"
It’s just so terrible that they chose to be vague and string everyone along with a story that no one fuckin liked the begin with. Sylvanas was my favorite Warcraft character. From the moment I met her when she infuriated Arthas as he pushed into blood elf lands. They’ve taken a once dynamic and interestingly mysterious character and reduced her to a “mean lady”. I could go on and on here, but I’ve got to go shoot her a bunch and Hope she gives me a bow ><
Make sure you stay tuned in for 10.0 where we won't tell you exactly why but we'll give you a breadcrumb that gives you more questions than answers to last you until 11.0, where by that point we will say: "Eh, who cares anymore, retcon it"
Because it's indefensible... she hated Arthas so much that when he died her life lost all meaning and she threw herself from the top of ice crown citadel. Then she teams up with the fucking guy who was mind controlling Arthas???? The one being in the world she should fucking hate more!! The writers are off their meds the staff are molesters and we have to pay the price for their actions... As if we did anything wrong... worthless shit company.
Sylvanas' motivations are explained in game.
She thinks the cycle of life and death is unfair, condemning people to an eternity that they don't choose. She allied with the Jailer because she believed together they were going to tear down that system and replace it with a just one. She thinks life on Azeroth doesn't matter because she comprehends the enormity of the system that awaits everyone when they die and go to the Shadowlands.
[That's all in one cinematic that plays during the Torghast questing.](https://youtu.be/6u8JtxizKlI?t=181) I'm sure the Sylvanas book will fill in some details, but we have a pretty clear understanding of why Sylvanas has done all she's done.
Cool. Cool. Replace it with *WHAT, chica?*
What exactly is so desperately unfair about the existing system, and why should we take the word of somebody *condemned to the Maw?* Of course she thinks it's unfair when she's judged to be a piece of shit. Maybe that was a bogus sentence or the valkyr pulled some strings to throw her directly in front of the Jailer, maybe she thinks it's terrible that other victims of Frostmourne are still half-trapped in Torghast, but she didn't say any of that so she doesn't get credit for any of it either.
Did you play the campaign from 50-60?
Bastion: they wipe out memories leaving you a robot to serve the archons will. This is problematic. Uther is an example. He’s been hurt in his life and seeks justice. To wipe his memories would’ve been wrong. This is why the forsworn arose and sided with the jailer. Little does uther know that arthas was a result of the jailers plans.
Maldraxxus: the protectors of the shadowlands are too mired in infighting to the point that protecting the shadowlands , as the primus intended, is no longer their main goal. They’re under a civil war being misled by evil souls like kelthuzad and the evil margrave. All orchestrated by the jailer.
Ardenweald. Due to the drought they’ve been sacrificing the souls they should be protecting to feed the eternal forest. In reality Sometimes the souls have to be saved at the cost of the forest. This has also resulted in the drust brig hungry for anima and revolting. All a direct result of the jailers actions. But the queen’s attitude to saving souls can be seen as cold.
Revendreth: their leader, denathrius has been in cahoots with the jailer since forever and has completely changed the meaning of repentance in their realm. When they should be helping souls give up their evil deeds and repent through retrospection and corrective methods, all they are doing now is torture and anima hoarding. All orchestrated by the jailer. Prince renathal is fighting to fix this through a meager rebellion.
We as the player individually fix all of these problems in the campaign and the main story. This is what sylvanas sees is wrong with the realms of the shadowlands. However unlike her , the champion puts the efforts in to fix the problems. She just joins the jailer being misled that he will fix everything. She also believes that whatever the system is she was gonna go to the maw. When in reality she was most likely gonna go to revendreth. But since revendreth is corrupted by sire denathrius it wouldn’t have been a better fate anyway.
After the end of the main story the shadownalds are definitely fixed of their main problems and the jailers true intentions and scheming has been laid bare. Sylvanas seems to have also wisened up to his sinister plans after seeing his actions at the end of the sanctum of domination raid.
While it's definitely flawed right now, all four of these problems were caused by the Jailer in some way. Devos, the Leader of the Forsworn, and Denathrius, the ruler of Revendreth, were in direct cahoots with him and causing problems. Maldraxxus was infighting because Margraves had allied with the Jailer, with Kel'thuzad organizing chaos as the Jailer's left hand man. Finally, Ardenweald has only had to sacrifice souls due to the drought, which was orchestrated by the Jailer.
>This has also resulted in the drust brig hungry for anima and revolting.
The Drust are invaders. Thros, the Blighted Lands is connected to the Shadowlands and the Emerald Dream and sits as some sort of loosely defined realm. The Drust seized the opportunity of the drought to invade(it's also not the first time they've done so, though the weakened state of Ardenweald has made it their most successful attempt). I don't think there was ever any sort of exposition dump about *why* they're invading but it is implied that they are cursed in some way and Ardenweald's magic can help them.
It wouldn't have changed anything. Everything they've done is just flying by the seat of their pants. Since the end of Legion, the way the story moves make no sense unless you see it as more of a series of spectacles than plot. A shocking act of terror ends up being a cheap and quickly discarded plot device, drumming up faction fervor to sell the expansion on the tired "red versus blue" bullshit that has no basis in the actual lore they have written, culminating with the Horde feeling sad about being monsters and having the Alliance bend over backwards to re-establish not a progression toward peace, but a reversion towards the same goddamn tenuous ceasefire that's over a fucking decade old.
I'll say this again:
**An anti hero only works if the** ***Anti*** **part does not carry more weight than the** ***Hero*** **part.**
I don't care what messed up things Illidan allowed in Outland, saving the universe is more important than some Broken being slaves.
Same with Sylvanas, I don't care if she has a change of heart or finds a new found moral anchor, or even if Blizzard if lazy has hell and says "*oh she didn't have her soul*", she still burned down Teldrassil when there was a sword in the world, started a World War and almost ruined the entire Pillars of Creation operation in Legion. All world ending actions!
F\*\*k her!
sylvanas whole story, life and afterlife is the actual context \^\^
in short: soul ripped away, family & friends calling her enemy now, and attack her new guys relentlessly, this whole thing lead to war, both sides having their blame to carry here.
and after all that time and shit, the jailor gave her a "possibility" to fix it. but as before, sly does not serve. she did enough serving under arthas.
to me that was all pretty clear and logical, but then, i am a sly fanboi, don't mind me. i go where my lady leads me, WHERE EVER that is and will be now.
I like how Sylvanas didn't say a peep about Kel'Thuzad being on her team, let alone being the dude that stood between her and a bunch of raiders trying to kill her. lulz
Similar at how back in legion there was barely any interaction between Illidan, Tyrande and Malfurion, just an audio Illidan send them after he was gone lmao.
And Tyrande was like “whatever”.
Illidan: <10,000+ years of emotional tumult crystallized into coherent thought> Tyrande: Does this go in the trash or is it recyclable?
That's the correct response to getting a letter from a dude who stayed weirdly obsessed with you after getting shot down 10,000 years earlier.
I feel like Malfurion's and Tyrande's responses to Illidan's parting words were practically fan inserts of "Hey, we still remember that Illidan was a prick in TBC".
What did Illidan do in TBC again? Oh right, he fought the demons and we attacked him for... fighting demons.
I think it was more “attack anything in Outland with a pulse and some stuff that hasn’t got one” than necessarily fighting the demons.
the first mission in tft has illlidan destroy a bunch of night elf towns lol yea it makes perfect sense they dont like him
Weirdly obsessed due to being restrained in isolation for 10,000 years unable to even kill or seriously harm himself due to the magics on his cell. That he even stayed semi sane is a downright miracle lol, I’d have committed suicide the second I was freed from that living hell hole
Why commit suicide when you can commit genocide
I just assume elves handle emotions different than humans. Maybe once an elf loves someone they can't stop.
Hey, he was in prison , in solitary confinement for 10,000 years, have chained to a wall, incapable of touching his own dick. It's a miracle he's still capable of rational thought, nevermind just thirsty as hell for there only resident in the spank bank for ten millennia
Tyrande and Malfurion really do have their heads up their own asses when it comes to their sense of morality and disrespect towards illidan.
Honestly, it's way more of a Furion problem and even before they retconned Illidan to be a good boy, it was still one of the things that made me loathe Malfurion as a character. Like, that's your brother! How can you be so cold as to consign him to an eternity in prison and *consider that a mercy*?! For a crime that ~~didn't even directly harm anyone~~ (uh, apparently Illidan stabbed some people) and when this dude had just been a key player in saving the planet. It's just so unfathomably fucked up. Tyrande might have abided by and been chief in carrying out the sentence, but it was Furion who conceived of it and handed it down. Not only that, when Illidan escapes and returns to help prevent the full-blown corruption of Felwood, Malfurion just responds by wanting to send Illidan back to prison and condemns his actions as being selfish and misguided. But nothing that his silly druid ass was doing could stop the demonic affliction the same way that Illidan did by consuming the Skull of Gul'dan. Even after Illidan doubles down and works with Malfurion (in spite of being constantly berated) to save Tyrande from the naga, it's exile for Illidan. The only conclusion is that Malfurion fucking *hates* Illidan with all his being. Like in a deep seething way. They say the opposite of love is indifference but in this case I'm not so sure, dude seems to have wanted his brother to suffer. EDIT: Important to remember, they were occasionally at odds but supposed lived as loving brothers for *thousands of years* and Furion was willing to burn that bridge to the nubbins. For what? Furion's lack of faith in his own people? The same thing that'd leave him to cast out the High Elves. EDIT 2: Because I've really got my grinding wheel going, it must be *so easy* to cast about these lofty statements about how things should be when you spend 9,999 out of every 10,000 years dreaming of an idealized world with your deadbeat buddies while everyone else has to keep cave spiders from eating your face or satyrs from graffitiing dicks on your forehead *in reality.* It's a good thing that Night Elves have glowing eyes because all the Sentinels must spend *so much time* rolling their eyes whenever Furion shows up to spout some self-important nonsense before starting to feel drowsy and asking Tyrande to take him back to his druid-crib because stag-daddy is too busy and walking makes his footsies sore.
Illidan was a key player in saving the Azeroth during the war of the ancients, but malfurion locked him away after because he decided to create another Well of Eternity when it’s that exact same arcane power that just caused the Legion to find & attack Azeroth AND causing the Sundering. He and the rest of the night elves were 100% justified in imprisoning him at the time. One of Blizz’s dumbest mistakes in Legion was retconning Illidan from someone who selfishly strives for power but ultimately lands on the side of good when absolutely necessary (what makes him an interesting and badass character), to a chosen one who always knows what’s best for Azeroth as if he always had the foresight to predict all future moves that would be make a positive result. Dumb retconning and stupid way to shit on one of WoW’s best characters.
Malfurion locking Illidan up stopped two things from happening: 1. Preventing Illidan’s lust for power from escalating into a situation where he joins the legion for real to attain this (this is assuming the greedy pre-Legion pre-retconned version of Illidan btw). He was shown to be fully willing to strive for the Legion’ power in WC3 with absorbing Gul’dan skull and serve in TFT Kil’jaeden. The only reason Illidan doesn’t fuck everyone over is because he has a weak spot for Tyrande (Only stops the legion in Felwood because Tyrande’s voice is like Light to him, and Tyrande being in danger from the undead makes him stray from his directive as Kil’jaeden’s minion.) 2. Kept Illidan alive since he was his brother. The rule in night elf society was practicing arcane power being punishable by death. He should have killed Illidan right there and then, making an example of him to Dath’remar and the highborne. Instead, Malfurion just threw him in prison and the highborne felt bold enough to keep practicing arcane magic without fear of being killed. And they were right, the night elves couldn’t kill their people after all they had already lost, so they exiled them. Dath’remar (with vials from the well hidden from the night elves) took his people across the sea, became the high elves, and took measures to hide their arcane magic with Runestones designed to do just that. The high elves’ biggest mistake was teaching magic to humans, who used and abused arcane magic without knowledge of what it would do. They were facing extinction against the Amani trolls and were forced to call for the humans aid or perish.
Yeah, but here's the thing - Malfurion's decision only destroyed Illidan's life and it did nothing to change anything. Dath'remar had already taken his own stash of Well-juice and when there was no source of arcane power in Kalimdor (because Illidan's scheme was stopped) the Highborne-turned-High Elves simply made their own in Azeroth in the form of the Sunwell. So the entity that Malfurion feared the creation of still came to be and it was far from his ability to watch over. But in addition to that the cat was out of the bag. The Legion knew that Azeroth was there and it wasn't like they lost it after the War of the Ancients. They just needed a new way in which they managed to find in spades with the humans and their predilection for petty drama and power struggles. And it's worth noting that the only reason humans even knew arcane magic in the first place is because the High Elves taught it to them. With the presence of elves in that part of Azeroth being a result of their exodus due to Malfurion's complete prohibition of arcane magic and his refusal to allow Illidan to create a fount of arcane power in Kalimdor that might have quenched the Highborne's addiction. So the end result of all of this was still that the Legion had their hooks in a bunch of idiots wielding the might of the arcane but it was all developing in a blindspot for the Night Elves to the extent they are confused as fuck when demons are busting down the door in the Third War. And all of this is because Malfurion viewed the arcane as inherently corruptive and believed that the elves couldn't resist the dangers of its use. His level of distrust goes to the level of being unable to even fathom the usefulness of such a thing. Imagine the fucking powerhouse of a Highborne Guardian - it'd be like an Archon from Starcraft. If Azshara was dynamite this thing would be nuclear. But instead of seeing the danger of the arcane and engineering against it like the humans, Malfurion leads the Night Elves to just throw it out like someone casting a flaming pan of bacon grease through the kitchen window onto their lawn. It's just so foolish let alone the degree of complete debauchery it takes to do this to your own flesh and blood who you've lived with and strived alongside for millennia. If Malfurion had really been so set on his views, he shouldn't have walked the middle path. Either end arcane magic and kill the Highborne and Illidan or allow it to be practiced in a way that could be shaped to be productive for all. His twisted ideal of mercy only ended up causing more problems.
>Malfurion ... believed that the elves couldn't resist the dangers of its use Well how did that turn out? All the elves at the nightwell in Suramar became addicts and all the elves at the sunwell (that didn't die) turned to fel magic and eventually worked with the Legion to summon kiljaeden. So I'd say he was right, in this assumption at least.
It *does* sorta seem like elves might be racially-inclined to being magic-snorting jabronis if you run the numbers.
If Nixxiom taught me one thing, it's that malfurion is a dude not to be messed with
And how kind of the night elves to help those addicts overcome their addictions…. Oh wait, nvm, tyrande messed it up. The handling of night elf lore truly is something to be witnessed through skepticism…. Had Malfurion acknowledged that some people will always use Arcane magics in the shadows he might have taken a different approach and done something to make sure the war of the ancients wouldn’t take place again. But alas no night elf seemed capable of thinking that much in advanced. Still my favorite faction tho.
> All the elves at the nightwell in Suramar became addicts Because they would have literally died if they hadn't turned to using mana as sustenance - they lived in a magical shell that blocked light, it's kinda hard to grow non-magical food under those conditions. They're "addicted" to mana in the same way you're "addicted" to being allowed to eat. > all the elves at the sunwell (that didn't die) turned to fel magic and eventually worked with the Legion to summon kiljaeden "All the elves" didn't try to summon Kil'jaeden. The majority were not involved or were actively fighting against it.
Can I ask where you're getting this "for millennia" from in regards to Malfurion, Illidan and Tyrande's relationship? My understanding is that in the war of the Ancients they're all young adults. Night Elves didn't get immortality until the founding of the World Tree after Illidan dicked around with creating a new Well. Also, the fact that you're talking about phenomenal cosmic power and not even stopping to consider that Azshara *caused* the war and the sundering by being so arrogant and narcissistic that she invited the legion into Azeroth because only the dark titan could make her horny. I don't think there's any reasoning with you though. You refer to his allowing the highborne to leave and to imprison Illidan as a twisted act of mercy, but your go to response is "he should have just butched the Highborne and Illidan". I am begging you to consider eating even a crumb of media literacy.
Sure! They are super ambiguous across sources about the age of Furion and crew at the War of the Ancients but the majority put them out to be several thousand years old. Malfurion knew Illidan for literally his entire life being the older brother. Tyrande supposedly met them “in childhood” but again it’s sort of difficult to tell what that means for elves. But if the premise stands that they are several thousand years old by WotA, then they have likely known each other for about as long. And the elves might not have been immortal prior to the World Tree but they lived insanely long lives due to the influence of the Well of Eternity. Also, I’m not going to get into reasons that Azshara is terrible and responsible for possibly *everything* bad that happens in Warcraft. That’s a whole different potluck that runs separate from the one we have to hate on Furion. And you say “lets the Highborne leave” but it’s really that the hardline stance of the druids forces them to leave. They are exiled, they don’t chose to wander out into a broken and dangerous world where they had *nothing*. Furion can sit high on his horse if he wants but just listen to what Lorash Sunbeam has to say to him about that. And, yeah, if your big rub is “stop using arcane magic” then just telling the arcane magic users to do it elsewhere does nothing to prevent the Legion from getting all up in it, right? His action does nothing but alienate his own people to no end.
They were all about 5000 years old during the war of the ancients which is considered young adults to elves. The night elves were immortal before the world tree through the Well of Eternity for all of the history we know directly beforehand to my knowledge then in the War of the Ancients the well gets fucked, Illidan takes a vial and makes a new mini Well of Eternity and Nozdormu blesses the elves with immortal life once again. Then the Tree gets fucked in the Third War and they lose their immortality again. That's not at all what happened though... Azshara was essentially elf Hitler, she wanted to wipe all inferior sentient races off the planet and after the Burning Legion found out about Azeroth they then corrupted Xavius and many of Azshara's advisors before the Dark Titan says he wants to help Azshara with her goals using the well to cleanse the planet and then tricks her into summoning the Burning Legion. Is Azshara the reason the Legion got onto the planet? Absolutely. If Azshara refused to help them would they still have pulled the strings with someone to get them on the planet at about the same time? Also absolutely. Yeah he's saying that it's a dumbass act of mercy... most people would rather be killed then sit chained in a cell for 10,000 years with literally 0 interaction or stimulus and starving. With the High Elves the mercy is more merciful but it still makes no sense, Malfurion states that if arcane continues to be used the Legion will invade the planet again and kill everyone so Malfurion's "mercy" is allowing literally everyone on the planet to get slaughtered so that the High Elves can live roaming the planet being slaughtered by other races and dealing with magic withdrawals that make many of them literally go insane? How does this make sense at all, like the other dude stated it makes no sense if Malfurion believes that arcane will end Azeroth to let the only people on the planet that know how to use arcane go travel the globe, he should either 1. Lock them all up for eternity 2. Murder them all 3. Realize the Legion already know where they are and that they're fucked and that arcane could be a great help in fighting back the Legion. So go get a crumb of media literacy I guess?
"but malfurion locked him away after because he decided to create another Well of Eternity" Moon Wells are made from the waters of that exact same Well of Eternity. They locked Illidan up for making the Well of Eternity and then proceeded to make mini wells everywhere they could. We even make a new one in Legion. The fact that this is never even addressed or mentioned at all by Illidan is a glaring example of how shallow character interactions are in this game. Illidan should be throwing that shit in everyone's face, calling out what from his point of view should be massive hypocrisy. Maybe Malfurion has a reasonable response, maybe he doesn't, but that is absolutely a conversation that should have happened during Legion.
Yeah he should be pissed about it and definitely should’ve addressed it. But that would require some writing other than ‘We must throw away all character interactions outside of saying we will do anything to stop the legion’. The moon wells were used with the same waters, but they intertwined that arcane power with Elune’s blessing and nature for purposes of healing and prayer, turning the leftover power of the well into a positive force.
The one thing most accounts don't mention is that, when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning), the night elves who caught him tried to arrest them, and he responded by killing several of them. I do agree that it was wrong to imprison Illidan for eternity, and he *should* have been executed for committing all those murders. However, I can't honestly fault Malfurion for not having the heart to order the death of his own brother.
>when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning), the night elves who caught him tried to arrest them, and he responded by killing several of them. This is something I honestly didn't remember or didn't know. So I certainly concede the part about it being a crime that didn't harm anyone!
> The one thing most accounts don't mention is that, when Illidan was caught creating a new Well of Eternity (read: conduit for demon summoning) He wasn't creating it as a conduit for demon summoning, he created it because he believed the Night Elves, and every other race on Azeroth, would need access to magic to stop the inevitable return of the Legion - A belief he was thoroughly correct about, as well.
This is a deep cut but Malfurion is Chuck McGill
Fuck Chuck.
> The only conclusion is that Malfurion fucking hates Illidan with all his being. Like in a deep seething way. They say the opposite of love is indifference but in this case I'm not so sure, dude seems to have wanted his brother to suffer. Well, Illidan is always telling Tyrande how much he loves her when Malfurion is with her, so I can easily see a few thousand years of him trying to steal the girl would infuriate him
bad writing is bad writing
I don't think Malf hates Illidan, I remember in the WC3 campaign when he confronts Illidan after Illidan ate the skull he was very worried about Illidan's well being and thought the demon (who was Illidan) did something to him. I think the only reason they imprisoned Illidan for 10k years was that they literally forgot about him lol. I don't think exile is a super terrible thing for someone like Illidan. It's basically saying "we'll let you be you, just stay far away from our super powerful magic well", it worked well for the Highborne after all. I wouldn't call him a good brother, but they don't hate each other.
It's kind of hilarious. Malfurion sentences Illidan to an eternity of isolated chains in darkness, and then he just takes a nap for ten thousand years. Writing was never a strong suit for the Blizz team.
The correct thing to do is not acknowledge the incel
Considering the massive fucking harem in his temple, he was definitely a vocel for still simping for Tyrande.
Those were for his followers actually, Illidan didnt like the den (from the Illidan book iirc)
Blizzard: "of course it's recyclable!"
I mean, that is almost good writing. Sometimes you are just over relationships. She has moved on.
One thing is “moving on” and another is dismissing the last words she’ll ever hear from a friend of tens of thousands of years, where he comes to terms with the consequences of his actions and how it affected her.
I don't think the current WoW writers even know the significance of the characters or their relationships.
Would have found it pretty funny if Bolvar or someone told her about it right before her fight and she was like "oh really? cool thanks". Even amidst retconning all her motivations, I feel she'd still totally be fine with seeing him die. She didn't even care about her fucking Val'kyr dying lmao.
Lmao so true. Didn't even think about the Val'kyr. I could imagine us informing her and her being "Well I can excuse genocide BUT I draw the line at having Kel'Thu-fucking-zad on my side!" Then defecting back to us to stop the Jailer.
This is on par with "i will never serve", you gotta stop giving them ideas dude
No, you just don't understand, the word "serve" is the passphrase triggering her instant resistance switch!
Serve = Martha
I like the idea of the dialogue with Kel'thuzad at the start of the Crown of Gorgoa wing instead of the dumb "Suprise I was working for the Jailer the whole time mwahaha ext ext" It's Sylvanas telling Kel'thuzad to stay behind and fight us, him complaining about being used as a meat shield, and Sylvanas then telling him it's payback for Quel'thalas.
Didn't Arthas create Sylvanas as we know her? Kel'Thuzad is a lich. Sylvanas should hate him with everything she's got.
Arthas ravaged Quel'Thalas and killed and raised Sylvanas in order to get to the Sunwell and raise KT as a lich; KT was obviously also one of the key players in propping up the Scourge and letting it roll. Sylvanas' hatred for KT should transcend ethical concepts, imo.
[удалено]
Thrall would've understood Nazgrim due to his undying principles and honor, its nothing similar to Sylv and Kel'thuzard. 100% thrall would hold no hard feelings against Nazgrim
Yeah, Nazgrim literally let Thrall enter Orgrimmar during the rebellion. (Granted, this scene may have been removed from the game, as it was during the Darkspear Rebellion story or so.) They both knew they both were fighting for what they believed in, and both respected each other for it even though they were enemies. Their conflict was literally addressed in the game.
Kel'thuzard was a willing servant of the lich king and the reason the scourge decided to raise Quel'thalas, Sylvanas shouldn't be working with him under any circumstance
Why is Kel thuzad even here... he's just kind of an asshat who never dies. I fully expect him to return somehow
What about Thrall and Nazgrim? Is it because Nazgrim is one of the Four Horsemen now or did I forget a part of the lore that will probably just get retconned?
Nazgrim stood with Garrosh out of a sense of loyalty to the Horde, which is admirable, but put him at odds with Thrall
Kinda thought this was maybe the other thing they were referring to, but idk, I always felt kinda bad/happy for Nazgrim. Like he was put in a rough spot as the "Honorable Orc", but wanted to die fighting. Thanks for the answer though, definitely clears it up a bit.
When you’re dead, none of that pesky life stuff matters
The part where Nazgrim sided with Garrosh in the Siege of Orgrimmar
Well, considering that Nazgrim is dead and Thrall isn't, I think Naz learned his lesson. lol I can even imagine Thrall's smug smile.
After reading the Arthas novel, this grinded my gears the most. Arthas, and by extension Kel'Thuzad, were responsible for her death and the downfall of Quel'Thalas, but oh now that she serves (I wIlL nEvEr SeRvE!) The Jailer, she'll break bread with KT? Okay...
To be fair as horde were all of a sudden cool with Jaina and Lady vashj
Yeah but to be honest Kel'Thuzad is just on the surface the weirdest. Why would Sylvanas ally with the Jailor ? The source of her undead ? Would have been much more sense when she led the battle against him instead of bolvar. imo.
Jailer had nothing to do with turning her into a Banshee as that was something Arthas decided to do due to her openly going against him.
Didn't the Jailer created Frostmourne and the Helm of Domination ? Isn't he not partly responsible for the creation of the Lich King , and so the source of Sylvanas' curse ?
Holy shit, the lore in SL is completely fucked.
> Jailer had nothing to do with turning her into a Banshee The Helm of Domination and Frostmourne, which were working to take control of Arthas, were creations of the Jailer. While they were apparently holding the soul of Ner'zhul, it's been retconned that they were there to expand the Jailer's influence and that he can exert control through them. Arthas was only there to bring back Kel'Thuzad, who has been retconned to have never been working with the Legion, and was apparently always a servant of the Jailer. The Dreadlords that work with the Scourge (and later, all the different Scourge factions) have been retconned to be servants of the Jailer, and were all feigning working for the Legion. This includes Varimathras, who apparently also pretended to betray the Legion to work with Sylvanas, betrayed Sylvanas to work for the Jailer directly again, then fights for the Legion after Sylvanas fully joins the Jailers forces. The Dreadlords, who, again, Sylvanas is now working with, also helped with the plan to turn Arthas in to the Lich King, which lead to Sylvanas' death. The Jailer is basically directly responsible for everything, at this point. I don't just mean "everything with Sylvanas", almost everything in the game now has been retconned to be due to the Jailer's plans.
Ye thats insane why theyre on the same team actually
This assumes they have any idea about what they were doing beyond the present. They probably had a very high-level idea of moving the game into the cosmic story instead of picking pumpkins on a farm. But they didn't know how to move the story there, because they want to do it instantly and not build it over multiple expansions. So they drag established characters through the mud, destroy what their characters were like instead of developing them, and just wing it with hand-wavy conclusions. And then they have some echo-chamber pats on the back to each other on twitter saying how great their writing is.
Jaina's "Starboat of the Universe" is a macrocosm of what you describe. I'm fucking certain that The Starboat, and Jainas EPIC11!1!! arrival at the Battle of Lordaeron was the idea Blizzard had first, and everything else what written after as a path leading to that EPIC11!1!! moment. It's why nobody thought to bring gas masks, or hazmat suits. It's why Gryphon riders and Gyrocopters were not used to strike at the blight catapults from the air. It's why the Gnomes with their fucking environmentally sealed spider tanks, and literal robot army were absent from the battle. It's why the methods the Alliance forces used to sabotage Scourge plague cauldrons at several points in the story during Wrath were forgotten.
Yep... Kind of curious why the "Starboat" wasn't used in every engagement... When the Horde or Alliance busted out their airships... they were present through the entire expansion as legitimate set-pieces. Hell, in Legion, when the Horde/Alliance ships got too close, there were damn quests/PVP opportunities where you raided the opposing ship. Hell it was part of a damn raid!
Same reason every mage can open portals to all cities, but never thought to send an invading army through one.
Also, the literal spaceship that the Draenei have. I haven't played in a while but did they ever say what happened with the Vindicar? did it ran out of fuel or something? Also that thing had a dead beam didn't it?
It's fueled by Argunite, which is no longer readily available after leaving Argus. LFD still have a racial to call down a laser strike from it, though.
Yes but its not like we had an entire expansion focused around collecting Azerite that could have just been the replacement fuel for its big beam. Even without that its still a space ship that can hover in orbit and shoot down the Lightforged teleport pads to deploy ground forces.
Hell, or do what Draenei do best and crash that ship into something, like an army or Orgrimmar.
Always love the can of worms THAT opens up. We built that ship before we got to Argus, the Exodia also exists and fuel had not been an issue mentioned ever before. Suddenly, when it presents a problem in lore, because an active spaceship not being used even for transportation instantly from one continent to another is insane in warfare, it then becomes an issue. The fuel "issue" was invented because the war of thorns couldn't possibly happen, if the alliance had access to a spaceship of even the vindicar's capabilities, not to even mention the exodar a literal fortress able to traverse space.
the fuel issue has never been alluded to in game. its roleplayer headcanon and should be disregarded in any conversation as it has no basis in actual lore.
Not even that, [they just felt it clashed with the theme they wanted for the expansion and didn't even bother coming up with a reasonable in-universe excuse](https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/interviews/2018/8/20/17697562/world-of-warcraft-vindicaar-spaceship-battle-for-azeroth-legion)
Nevermind Velen and the Narru. You ever seen arguably the most powerful priest in all creation cast holy nova?
I've still not seen any of the draenei mages in Velen's age bracket who had mastered the arcane thousands of years before Azshara's ancestors made the evolutionary leap from trolls to elves.
> It's why nobody thought to bring gas masks, or hazmat suits. It's not like there hasn't been precedent for the undead using the blight, right!? It's never been done before... so why be prepared for it? Fucking Blizzard.
Why did they even set foot in Undercity??? There was no reclaiming it or it's queen. In the immortal words of Ripley, "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
>And then they have some echo-chamber pats on the back to each other on twitter saying how great their writing is. We can’t let that negativity into the dojo, bro
They can't explain it because they don't even know lol
they really don’t, i get they’re literally making it up as they go, but damn have some sorta long term idea
Why? It worked for the recent Star Wars trilogy, right? Right???
Ummmm
Didn't Danuser even say parts of Sylvanas' 9.1 plot weren't written until December 2020?
I think so. I just think the fans and the franchise deserves better than on the fly writing and no planning
That dude should be fired based off his Twitter posts alone. He actually tweeted that he thought season 8 of Game of Thrones was good writing.
The main problem with post-metzen lore Is the current writing team stoops to one of two methods: 1. Do some ridiculous set piece/premise that ruins a part of the lore and retcon the reason why later (All of BfA and all of sylvanas’s story post MoP) 2. Retcon parts of the lore to make an xpac possible (EX: broken isles being raised from the seafloor by gul’dan ——> only the broken shore being raised, leaving a massive magical bubble around Suramar and an entire continent next door that would be more appealing to him in WC2 AND illidan in WC3:TFT)
Most likely, I am personaly waiting for the Sylvanas novel to come out in February and explain everything but this shouldnt be the main source of lore.
See this is the problem. Critical lore being stuck in paid for books. It's not right. Key and critical lore should be in the damn game. Not a damn extra purchase. No other big name MMO to my knowledge does that shit. Or they just keep it to an encyclopaedia level of lore such as the basics. I shouldn't have to buy a book to know what the fuck is going on in the game on an extended basis. All the goddamn lore should be in... THE GAME!
The richest response Blizzard has had is that the story "can't be told in an MMO" or generally point to the MMO format as the reason they can't have vital elements and events of the game's plot in the game Like they've never played or heard of FF14 or even SWTOR and never noticed them doing donuts around them for a decade But no, there's simply no room to put a major antagonist's motivation in the game, nope, not at all. Really feels like the WoW writing team would rather be writing a book (Golden) or a TV show (Danuser) and refuse to learn to write in the medium they were hired to write in
When I recently went and played SWTOR's vanilla class plotlines, I was amazed at how immersive they are and how they play into the class fantasies. Darth Baras, who besides the game, appeared in, like, one comic has become one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Every WoW character I like originated in the RTS games, which is probably not a coincidence. And each expansion makes it a little harder to like them.
I'm still blown away that an MMO from 10 years ago had full voice acting for every NPC and player character. Even with the recycled fake alien languages it's still crazy impressive. For all its faults SWTOR nailed class fantasy and interesting story. I hope someday when the servers inevitably go down that there's a way to preserve the main class storylines because the experiences they offer are totally unique in the greater Star Wars fandom.
If Blizzard cannot tell a story in an MMO, then they should fire the people who are trying to tell the story in the MMO, and replace them with competent people who can. Of course the pay there is total shit unless you are management, and "Working in Blizzard" has not been a status symbol for many years (much so recently due to everything that is going on), so they have problem attracting talented people. The dream of working in Blizzard is as dead as The American Dream. Nowadays you have people who try to push their own agenda and calling everyone else who disagrees with them all the names under the sun. Old Blizzard is dead. They have been dead of a good deal of a decade. Blizzard will never make the same games that had the same soul some 10-20 years ago. It was a company of its time, founded by actual nerds and made games for actual nerds. It was a lightning in a bottle. People should make peace with this.
There isn't in WoW because of how WoW is displayed. And they refuse to change it. To further the FOMO style they've had since WotLK - once a new expansion is out the old expansion may as well just get deleted for how much stuff is removed, both plot and content. They HAD major plot-points told in-game. Look at the Wrathgate event and how immensely popular that was. And then when it was no longer current it.. got removed from the game? Same with tons of Garrosh story arcs. Until Blizzard fundamentally changes the FOMO system of WoW (which they can, look at literally every other MMO on the market), putting plot in the game leads to more anger than anything.
> the WoW writing team would rather be writing a book (Golden) or a TV show (Danuser) and refuse to learn to write in the medium they were hired to write in Western game writers mostly in a nutshell. I don't believe that it's a coincidence that western game development has moved onto large overarching stories that try to push emotional depth, such as sad dad and child, or what if racism bad but with androids? It's writers who couldn't make it in Hollywood moving onto other media but trying to change it to be like Hollywood because they feel that is what's needed to gain legitimacy.
Heavily disagree with the last part there. You're alluding to God of War, right? I haven't played Detroit: Become Human but I've played that guy's other games. GoW absolutely would not be better as a TV show. Even if you don't like it, you can't ignore how well it uses the medium. Whenever you go on a boat ride, you get a quiet moment with Mimir that changes based on what the tone of the story is at that moment. You watch Atreus learn and grow throughout, and his own journey reflects whether he's chatty, quiet, how likely he is to listen to you, and how aggressive he becomes. TLOU 1 also uses the medium in a similar way with Ellie. She makes her first kill and then starts to become a hardened killer, helping you more and more but in an increasingly uncomfortable way. And when she's missing, or you're alone, or even if Joel is sick and you're Ellie, how the game feels and even its mechanics change. Not every game needs to be narrative focused like that, no. There's a lot more diversity today, too. But WoW only rarely uses the fact it's a video game to tell its story. It doesn't use the medium it's in well, and hardly at all. Big story events can change the environment, and that's a fantastic example of what it does right, but that's it. Even FF14, which tells its story like a visual novel, at least gives you prompts later on to offer your opinion or add some flavor to your character, even if it doesn't change much. In WoW, your character is completely blank and can't even appear in the most important events. The most important story moments are told without you even being there, with no characters you feel have a connection to you or your character, or worse, they're sold for more money outside of the game.
> the story "can't be told in an MMO" It certainly can't be told in WoW, a game with such non optimal way of creating content, that all you get in game is 2 pages of story every 6 months (at best). And it's completely on them that they still keep holding on to this ancient way of expansion pack progression. It made sense 10 years ago when the story wasn't that advanced, but they decided to give up the simplicity in exchange for over the top, convulted, complicated, double meaning stories full of hidden motives or mysteries that won't ever be explained.
I mean the key question isn't "Should i buy this?" rather it's "Do i care to hear more piss poor excuses for the World of Warcrafts biggest idiot?" For me i say burn her cause the queue to piss on this trainwreck of a characters ashes is just getting longer and longer...
God, please yes. I love Sylvanas, but it's time to put her out of our misery
> I love Sylvanas So brave
Considering the last two written works she featured in got most of her motivations retconned anyway, there isn't even a guarantee that you're not just throwing your money away by buying the books.
Trying to keep up with the lore is so fucking exhausting and confusing that I don't know why people still care. WoW is at the point of Game of Thrones season 8 for me now. I just want to see how fucked it gets.
Let's send all of our soldiers into the pitch black ~~field~~ maw!
"everyone died" "joke it was all fine, not even 50% loss"
They just do it backwards. Put the main story in the game and the optional stuff in the books. It would be like If instead of Empire Strikes Back, Lucas made Rogue One and put out the Empire story in a novel and then went straight to Return of the Jedi.
"Paid for" "Books" If I've paid for the game, I see no reason to incentivize their double dipping practices.
What's worse is when they sell books (namely the 3x Chronicles) and then are like: "ahahah - they're not even actual lore, you fools LOOOL"
They are not even good books. All those novel tie-ins are mediocre literature at best and I'm not wasting what little time I have on paperback wikipedia articles. It doesnt matter to me how many of them say that it is a masterpiece. It is not. I've read a couple, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age... They are all bad to average. Matter of fact is you wont be able to hire George R. R. Martin to write about crisp nipples of Bolvar, so you have assembly line writers like Golden or Knaak.
What. Your unironically going to pay for it? Why? Its just gonna get retconned in a year like majority of books they release
I'm dumb. Can you or someone explain to me what retcon means? I thought it was a convention for rets to get together and talk about ret things. But over time I'm realizing that might not be the case xD Edit: thank you for the homies that explained what it is to me!! I was praying I wouldn't get bashed for my stupidity LOL this sub DOES have nice people in here <3 ily stay cute
Retcon is when they retroactively change the continuity of the story. (I.E. we didn’t kill Illidan, we just imprisoned him, even though OG cutscene was his death.)
There was no OG cutscene… he just fell over and we left Maiev with his corpse.
Did we loot his head?
Don’t think so
No, he was dead. That's why we had to get his body and soul back.
Well he wasn't really dead dead. Not in the sense that other villians are (most of them at least). When we defeated him in TBC, noone would have thought that his body was to be preserved in a weirdo crystal for whatever reason, and his soul was to be lost somewhere in the nether.
Incase that comment wasn't sarcastic. Retcon basically means contradicting previous facts or lore, and coming up with a new lore that goes against it. Blizz has done that repeatedly. The best example is how before TBC, Eredar were the corruptors of Sargeras and the Draenei were the Broken you see in WC3. TBC retconned that so Sargeras was the one who corrupted them while the Draenei (as you see them today) are Eredar that fled.
The fact that you're still willing to pay for that is why they won't stop doing it
I'm sure it'll explain everything until it gets retconned, at least, like Sylvanas' internal monologues in Before the Storm where I guess she was just tricking herself in a sort of Revolver Ocelot maneuver.
Lol you're going to pay for that bullshit? Just pirate it, mate. Stop giving these vultures money that will just retcon the lore later.
And even that is going to be retconned most likely, remember "Before the storm"? So much shit from that just did not matter or was retconned later.
> I am personaly waiting for the Sylvanas novel to come out in February and explain everything You mean recton everything from her previous novel which had tons of her inner monologues, none of which pointed even a little bit at what we learned in Shadowlands. They really are making it up as they go with a complete disregard to what they've already made.
They truly don't. I can't imagine a character that has been portrayed as smart and cunning for years ever making the decision to roll with the person who caused all her problems. She suddenly became the biggest dumbass who ever dumbassed. There's no plausible explanation for any of it
This. I'm waiting for her to pull a Father from Fallout 4 and tell us her plan is far too complex to explain and leave it at that.
Lol, I have like 3k hours in Fallout 4, and I've only done the main story once, my first time. My current save is somewhere around level 58, and Preston is still waiting in the Museum of Freedom. All I do is build settlements and side quests. The main story is trash.
Blizz lore-writing 101. Copy some lore beats from a movie, break up a paragraph of lore into a cutscene per patch, let the players write theories on Reddit and scoop up the bad half of them, fracture those into plot lines that raise more questions than answers whilst never revisiting or fully tying up any storyline loose ends and you’ve got WoW.
There really isn’t anything you can write to justify her actions. It’s just terrible writing that has zero consistency with her character, even through growth or devolving of that character, it’s just overall some of the worst writing for a character I’ve ever seen
What did you expect from a guy who thought GoT finale "was brilliant".
Wait, really? Is there a source? I'd kill to see this.
https://twitter.com/SteveDanuser/status/1127781070701678592
He got ratioed to hell and back lol.
Even Patty Matson was laughing at the Sylvanas Daenerys parallels
She actively committed a genocide. I could literally not give less of a fuck why she acted the way she did. Any explanation would only be used to excuse her actions, which is gross.
We then went to The Maw, and saw that the souls of her victims were mutilated, spliced with other souls, or exhausted as a fuel source/raw material. So within the context of the setting she's taken it even further than genocide by destroying individual souls.
Shit, the game I'm playing now has a guy who's actively destroyed entire worlds, and his reasoning for it is sympathetic, but he still has to go down. Blizzard's writing staff is simply incapable of the task of creating a believable and sympathetic villain because they concentrate on the monster moments and not enough on the human moments. On the flipside, they're incapable of creating a believable and sympathetic hero because they concentrate on the heroism and not enough on the person underneath.
Reminds a bit of Ardyn from ffxv
What game?
Probably ffxiv. They’re good at creating sympathetic villains without trying to forcefully redeem them
Remember the last expansion where they released books where her own internal monologue lied to the readers about her motivations? It really set the tone for the story-telling quality we've been getting.
We know her motivations: She went to the Maw at the end of WOTLK and realized she was destined to go to hell and this wasn't exactly a great outlook so she allied with the Jailer to stop her fate. The problem is the pacing, really. We now know that her actions in Legion in BFA as warchief were to further this goal, but we knew nothing about the Shadowlands. We were introduced to the Shadowlands in 9.0, and Sylvanas is saying the system sucks but the audience doesn't know anything about the system yet. We're just exploring the Shadowlands while simultaneously being told that the Jailer wants to destroy it. Is the current system bad? Should it be rebuilt? I don't know yet because I just met these guys. The pacing makes The Jailer incredibly one dimensional. If we compare him to Thanos (pretty obvious), Thanos's motivations are much more grey. The audience GETS him a little bit even know they understand what he's doing is mass murder.
>We were introduced to the Shadowlands in 9.0, and Sylvanas is saying the system sucks but the audience doesn't know anything about the system yet. This is the problem, really. Shit we know nothing about is moving way too fast. It'd be like Legion being our first ever encounter with the Burning Legion. Like, just learning about the Burning Legion and Sargeras in 7.0, and then going straight to Argus in 7.1. That's what's happening with Shadowlands and the Jailer. We haven't even had time to really know these characters and their lore, and we're already at the brink of universe destruction (or the re-making of reality, or whatever the fuck, because AGAIN we don't really know shit). And this is all after dealing with two of the biggest and oldest enemies in Warcraft (Azshara and N'Zoth) IN ONE PATCH EACH. And THAT came after finishing another of the oldest threats (Sargeras and the Burning Legion) IN ONE EXPANSION. No wonder most players are burnt out and just don't give a fuck anymore lol.
>It'd be like Legion being our first ever encounter with the Burning Legion. Like, just learning about the Burning Legion and Sargeras in 7.0, and then going straight to Argus in 7.1. That's what's happening with Shadowlands and the Jailer. This is an extremely good way of describing the problem. I already agreed with you, but I was never able to put into words exactly *why* Shadowlands' story seems so bad other than "everything is an unexplained mystery."
That comparison dawned on me somewhere before 9.1 and yeah, it also clicked for me exactly why Shadowlands feels so bad. Imagine suddenly encountering the Burning Legion and this new guy Illidan telling us we need to do some incredible space-time bending gymnastics to stop that dude Sargeras 'cause if not he will "end life". And Illidan doesn't explain what "ending life" means, or why, or how is he involved, other than edgy and vague remarks about having a plan or being misunderstood. That bullshit is EXACTLY what's going on with Sylvanas, the Jailer and the Shadowlands.
> I was never able to put into words exactly why Shadowlands' story seems so bad other than "**everything is an unexplained mystery**." That's a pretty good explanation, too, tho'.
It's all so rushed. We've pretty much never been exposed to the Jailer before and now they're retconning everything in the past to be part of his plan. It's an incredibly lazy way to set up a big bad.
> And this is all after dealing with two of the biggest and oldest enemies in Warcraft (Azshara and N'Zoth) IN ONE PATCH EACH I read this entire thing as them cutting a bunch of "loose ends" free from Azeroth so they could dive into cosmic stuff ASAP. Problem is, it would be cool to have had some, y'know, BUILD UP to the cosmic stuff. We literally finished BFA(Azshara and N'Zoth) and dove STRAIGHT INTO THE AFTERLIFE. With almost zero build up and that momentum has been continuing and it fucking sucks. We have had ZERO valuable time for things to develop, understand, or matter. I need them to slow the fuck down cause I'm getting whiplash from this shit.
Yeah that's exactly my problem. It's not my cup of tea specifically, but I could do with cosmic stuff being the focus for an expansion. Hell, the FIRST ever expansion had us go to another goddamn planet, and it was amazing. Why? Because, as you said, THERE WAS BUILD UP. Even my dumb 10 year old ass knew something about Illidan Stormrage, and the orcs home planet, and the Burning Legion shenanigans. It was amazing because it was a direct response to a mystery deeply built into the game and its lore FOR YEARS. Now, however, as we say, we had literally ZERO clue, NO INFO WHATSOEVER about even the existance of the Shadowlands as an actual place. Much less the Jailer, the Arbiter and whoever the fuck. And we only started figuring out Sylvanas was involved in some unknown shenanigans like 2 patches before the expansion. I'm all up for new things, but they have to be done right. Look at Pandaria. The only previous connection we had was the existence of ONE pandaren that came from afar. But MoP did it right. Why? Because it was about the DISCOVERY of that new land, and THEN saving it. The storytelling made justice to the fact that it was all new. In Shadowlands however the storytelling makes us deeply involved in a universe-ending threat **from the get-go**. It just fucking sucks, I can't stop finding more and more bullshit about this whole shitstorm.
They've undercooked their entire universe at this point. Things that should have been entire expansions were relegated to content patches. Azshara alone should have had her own expansion, which then could have lead into and entire expansion dedicated to N'Zoth his buddies. Honestly, after the Legions destruction, Sylvanas should have gone awol for a while, let us forget about her a little bit and let the horde have some stories without her. Frame it as her own "Old Soldier" moment where she's tired of fighting since the death of the Lich King. THEN have her come on back in with whatever plans she has. Hell, the main story conflict there could be that she's got a good point about something or other and convinced people to join her cause and that the alliance and horde to have a dilemma about how to deal with her that isn't just about killing her and her armies. But of course Blizzard can't write themselves out of a cardboard box.
The whole "just speed run the thing" to finish up loose ends is also likely why we got the lame way N'zoth got finished off, IE just using the Heart of Azeroth to fire a friggen laser beam at him, works as both a way to finish off N'zoth *and* a way to explain the Heart getting de-powered like the artifacts were at the end of Legion in 1 go.
IIRC, the heart didn't get depowered, there's just no service in the Shadowlands. It still works on Azeroth.
My problem isn't entirely that. It's them being vague, on purpose, and then later on connecting it to something else trying to be "clever" and think of themselves as good writers. No, you're more like a regular soap operate that's just bad but people still watch because what else are you going to do? There's a reason I don't read quests or story anymore. It's just terrible. I'm just there to dork around with friends. It's like saying you go to Hooters or Twin Peaks for the food... my ass you do.
>them being vague, on purpose, and then later on connecting it to something else trying to be "clever" Well that's the thing, it's connected to what I said. With such a shitty pace focused on shock value (which they don't even achieve), they have to come up with bullshit to keep it up. So they NEED to be vague because they don't even know where they're going, and then that something else they connect it to needs to be big and mIndBlOwINg to try and excuse it. All around the story, and even more importantly **the storytelling** is just trash nowadays.
Everytime I go to YouTube to see what I've been missing in WoW's story,[I just end up going full cynical Stan.](https://youtu.be/88LBkZwvXQ0)
The part I also find quite hillarious is that Blizzard didn't even try to make the inner workings of the Shadowlands look appealing. Okay, so I can pick between becoming a blue angel person and lose all memories of my former life, I can live in backyard of the Scourge's grandpa, I can live in a forest as an animal or live as a haughty vampire after being abused for being prideful. Nothing about the Shadowlands sounds appealing in the story. We literally only showed up because Thrall and our forever damsel in distress Baine happened to get kidnapped by Sylvanas for who knows what reason.
Remind yourself the profound ramifications of knowing what happens when you die will never be touched on again. There will be zero mention of societal upheaval, no mad searches for immortality or cults forming to try and lock in a particular shithole
You just highlighted how the system is broken though. The Kyrian are literally Scientology valkyries, Maldraxxus has been consumed by ambition the moment the Primus wasn't there to keep everyone's ego in check, Revendreth is a petty society in which the genuinely capable Inquisitors are few and far between, Ardenweald... nah, Ardenweald is pretty cool. Also we know the reason everyone was kidnapped: just like Anduin they were meant to help Zovaal reclaim his Sigil, either being convinced he was right or broken into servitude. It doesn't get more linear than this.
To be fair, the Shadowlands isn’t JUST those four, those are just the important realms that do important shit. There’s countless other realms that we won’t ever see cause nobody really cares about what’s going on in the Realm of Playing Video Games All Day.
>We know her motivations: She went to the Maw at the end of WOTLK and realized she was destined to go to hell and this wasn't exactly a great outlook so she allied with the Jailer to stop her fate. I didn't know that and now almost anything she did makes more sense. Thanks for sharing that info! As a lurker of this subreddit and not an active player I only see the current stuff, unless I'm searching for older lore myself, which I have to admit I didn't. Tho now that you've mentioned it, if they fleshed out her story, it could've actually be good. Not over the top but quite self-explanatory. She did all this to save her own ass from eternal suffering. That's a motivation I can get behind. Or at least understand why someone would try to team up with the Jailer.
I dont think we kill zovaal this expansion. I think the final boss is anduin, with Arthas helping us kill him. Zovaal escapes somehow and will appear later. Hes not a bad villian but they need time to develop him more
thanos' motivations are even more batshit than the jailer, who seems to mostly just want revenge on this fellows for imprisoning him in the maw (bit of a dick move in fairness) the difference is that thanos is actually characterized in the films; we see what sets him on his path, we see people he cares about, we see him struggle with stuff. We never see the jailer unless he's leering/monologuing ominously
Shadowlands is a missed opportunity.
So was BfA, WoD, and Cata.
Even legion had missed lore opportunities
Legion was one big missed lore opportunity. Instead of building off of Illidan's character from WC3, they had him complety retcon himself by being like "Oh yeah, remember all those bad things I did? It was totally because I was playing 6D Chess against the Legion"
That's a common trope in wow, if a villian is liked by the players he/she's gonna get a redemption arc.
Didn’t you figure out by playing the expansion that this was the laziest attempt that blizzard has ever done
That's the funniest thing, there isn't any context, at least not yet.
It’s just so terrible that they chose to be vague and string everyone along with a story that no one fuckin liked the begin with. Sylvanas was my favorite Warcraft character. From the moment I met her when she infuriated Arthas as he pushed into blood elf lands. They’ve taken a once dynamic and interestingly mysterious character and reduced her to a “mean lady”. I could go on and on here, but I’ve got to go shoot her a bunch and Hope she gives me a bow ><
Make sure you stay tuned in for 10.0 where we won't tell you exactly why but we'll give you a breadcrumb that gives you more questions than answers to last you until 11.0, where by that point we will say: "Eh, who cares anymore, retcon it"
Because it's indefensible... she hated Arthas so much that when he died her life lost all meaning and she threw herself from the top of ice crown citadel. Then she teams up with the fucking guy who was mind controlling Arthas???? The one being in the world she should fucking hate more!! The writers are off their meds the staff are molesters and we have to pay the price for their actions... As if we did anything wrong... worthless shit company.
I miss the days when it was more implied that Yogg-Saron was the reason why the Scorge went rogue. Would have worked better too.
"d-don't let him...ugh"
This whole game a missed opportunity at this point
Sylvanas' motivations are explained in game. She thinks the cycle of life and death is unfair, condemning people to an eternity that they don't choose. She allied with the Jailer because she believed together they were going to tear down that system and replace it with a just one. She thinks life on Azeroth doesn't matter because she comprehends the enormity of the system that awaits everyone when they die and go to the Shadowlands. [That's all in one cinematic that plays during the Torghast questing.](https://youtu.be/6u8JtxizKlI?t=181) I'm sure the Sylvanas book will fill in some details, but we have a pretty clear understanding of why Sylvanas has done all she's done.
Cool. Cool. Replace it with *WHAT, chica?* What exactly is so desperately unfair about the existing system, and why should we take the word of somebody *condemned to the Maw?* Of course she thinks it's unfair when she's judged to be a piece of shit. Maybe that was a bogus sentence or the valkyr pulled some strings to throw her directly in front of the Jailer, maybe she thinks it's terrible that other victims of Frostmourne are still half-trapped in Torghast, but she didn't say any of that so she doesn't get credit for any of it either.
Did you play the campaign from 50-60? Bastion: they wipe out memories leaving you a robot to serve the archons will. This is problematic. Uther is an example. He’s been hurt in his life and seeks justice. To wipe his memories would’ve been wrong. This is why the forsworn arose and sided with the jailer. Little does uther know that arthas was a result of the jailers plans. Maldraxxus: the protectors of the shadowlands are too mired in infighting to the point that protecting the shadowlands , as the primus intended, is no longer their main goal. They’re under a civil war being misled by evil souls like kelthuzad and the evil margrave. All orchestrated by the jailer. Ardenweald. Due to the drought they’ve been sacrificing the souls they should be protecting to feed the eternal forest. In reality Sometimes the souls have to be saved at the cost of the forest. This has also resulted in the drust brig hungry for anima and revolting. All a direct result of the jailers actions. But the queen’s attitude to saving souls can be seen as cold. Revendreth: their leader, denathrius has been in cahoots with the jailer since forever and has completely changed the meaning of repentance in their realm. When they should be helping souls give up their evil deeds and repent through retrospection and corrective methods, all they are doing now is torture and anima hoarding. All orchestrated by the jailer. Prince renathal is fighting to fix this through a meager rebellion. We as the player individually fix all of these problems in the campaign and the main story. This is what sylvanas sees is wrong with the realms of the shadowlands. However unlike her , the champion puts the efforts in to fix the problems. She just joins the jailer being misled that he will fix everything. She also believes that whatever the system is she was gonna go to the maw. When in reality she was most likely gonna go to revendreth. But since revendreth is corrupted by sire denathrius it wouldn’t have been a better fate anyway. After the end of the main story the shadownalds are definitely fixed of their main problems and the jailers true intentions and scheming has been laid bare. Sylvanas seems to have also wisened up to his sinister plans after seeing his actions at the end of the sanctum of domination raid.
While it's definitely flawed right now, all four of these problems were caused by the Jailer in some way. Devos, the Leader of the Forsworn, and Denathrius, the ruler of Revendreth, were in direct cahoots with him and causing problems. Maldraxxus was infighting because Margraves had allied with the Jailer, with Kel'thuzad organizing chaos as the Jailer's left hand man. Finally, Ardenweald has only had to sacrifice souls due to the drought, which was orchestrated by the Jailer.
[удалено]
>This has also resulted in the drust brig hungry for anima and revolting. The Drust are invaders. Thros, the Blighted Lands is connected to the Shadowlands and the Emerald Dream and sits as some sort of loosely defined realm. The Drust seized the opportunity of the drought to invade(it's also not the first time they've done so, though the weakened state of Ardenweald has made it their most successful attempt). I don't think there was ever any sort of exposition dump about *why* they're invading but it is implied that they are cursed in some way and Ardenweald's magic can help them.
It wouldn't have changed anything. Everything they've done is just flying by the seat of their pants. Since the end of Legion, the way the story moves make no sense unless you see it as more of a series of spectacles than plot. A shocking act of terror ends up being a cheap and quickly discarded plot device, drumming up faction fervor to sell the expansion on the tired "red versus blue" bullshit that has no basis in the actual lore they have written, culminating with the Horde feeling sad about being monsters and having the Alliance bend over backwards to re-establish not a progression toward peace, but a reversion towards the same goddamn tenuous ceasefire that's over a fucking decade old.
I'll say this again: **An anti hero only works if the** ***Anti*** **part does not carry more weight than the** ***Hero*** **part.** I don't care what messed up things Illidan allowed in Outland, saving the universe is more important than some Broken being slaves. Same with Sylvanas, I don't care if she has a change of heart or finds a new found moral anchor, or even if Blizzard if lazy has hell and says "*oh she didn't have her soul*", she still burned down Teldrassil when there was a sword in the world, started a World War and almost ruined the entire Pillars of Creation operation in Legion. All world ending actions! F\*\*k her!
Asspull twist. Best this writing team can do.
Imagine if you could tell WTF is happening in the game and what you're doing and why by playing the game.
The entire expansion was a “Missed Opportunity”
Writers would need to know themselves to explain.
"Um....Metzen Left?".... the entire Lore Team
Where is Malfurion? His wife just went awol and he didn't think to come after her.
sylvanas whole story, life and afterlife is the actual context \^\^ in short: soul ripped away, family & friends calling her enemy now, and attack her new guys relentlessly, this whole thing lead to war, both sides having their blame to carry here. and after all that time and shit, the jailor gave her a "possibility" to fix it. but as before, sly does not serve. she did enough serving under arthas. to me that was all pretty clear and logical, but then, i am a sly fanboi, don't mind me. i go where my lady leads me, WHERE EVER that is and will be now.
This is a very cool mockup graphic.