...so basically what I'm getting from this is someone at Blizzard played enough Final Fantasy XIV to get to the point of the story where the PC is confronted by similar hero-PC-type characters who are from a world where they defeated evil so soundly that the perfect unmarred Light they'd unleashed was just as dangerous as if a world had fallen into darkness and went "...hey we've got the Light and fanatical weirdos who did awful $%^& in its name" and then cut out all of the emotional buildup and impact and instead got out the cellophane tape and taped it onto characters who already had spotty development in WoD. This is like ... a macaroni-art D&D campaign.They're really getting heavy-handed in the Tell rather than Show (which you sometimes need for an MMO) department and just sort of spraying $%^& all over a wall and seeing what sticks, it feels like.
It nice to see the flip of the usual. The Light corrupted Draenei instead of the Fel crazed Orcs. But a small change could make it even better.Yrel sees the corruption coming, tries to fight it amd loses, and gets imprisoned like when we first meet her in WoD.And the Frostwolf Horde does lock up Grom after push back from the other Orcs, but is later released when the Draenei come for them.It adds depth and makes logical sense.Edit: Also, i had to retype this several times, because Wowheads captcha is this than stellar.
The ammount of people unaware that the Light is not cutesy-good is astounding.By the way, it just occurred to me that (Lightbound) Orc Paladins are now a plausible thing haha. Not playable, of course, but i wouldn't be surprised if AU-Garrosh shows up as one.Also, to those unconfortable with Yrel development, consider this:Sargeras, a Titan (aka arguably the most powerful and pure being in the universe) was corrupted and turned 180 degrees after eons of exposition to Fel plus realization of the Void threat.Arthas, prince of Lordaeron, in a few months went from good Paladin to mad Paladin just by witnessing the horror of the Scourge, then to Death Knight after Frostmourne, then Lich King after Frozen Throne.35 years is just fine for AU Draenei going full Inquisition. It sounds weird because we're getting it all at once, but not unreasonable at all. Also, we WILL get more explanation, backstory and development, much more than a few leaked spoiler lines on the code.If anything, the guilt is on who thought messing with the timeline was a good idea.
Personally I'm all for this. I really like the idea of the light being evil. I think the lore and story becomes more dynamic overall when the various groups, faiths, and factions have good and evil elements/possiblities.As far as some of the specifics, I enjoy the fact that since the AU was so altered from the MU path that everything at this point has spiralled into something so completely different. As long as we don't have another xpac in an AU I find it fun to occasionally visit and see "what could have been" situations in quests/scenarios.
I wish they'd stop doing things with AU's timelines, its too confusing and it de-values the original timeline's characters. A good Garrosh? I dont wanna see that. Man, I just really hope they don't go that route...Plus, wasn't it Garrosh's mom that died in the Lords of War ep? Unless, that wasn't his mom that was just Grom's current mate? :0I am kinda enjoying the idea of the Lightbound being fanatics though. Nice change-up.
This oh so praised author just got no idea what to write so she just copy-pasted the protoss story of starcraft 2 here. Oh no protoss (aka draenei) are one in the kalaa (light) Now we need to cut their neck tentacles (and crush all the rule 34 kinks about them) to save them from the light's corruptionmeanwhile ... I can literally hear the dev team shouting 'go team orcs'
I'll pass thanks.
Can we stop with the "waaah Blizzard is favoring this faction over that faction!" crying already, it's been more than a decade. Nothing is black and white and good and evil are subjective.
Oh my god, it's everything I wanted, just about.I look mad forward to this. Regret spoiling myself, but how could I expect to avoid something this controversial?Almost feels like it could be setting up another expansion. Blizzard hinted at planets where the Light was an oppressive force.
I love this whole thing with the Light here.. With Xe'ra, we've seen that the Light isn't as good as we once thought. I wonder if Xe'ra existed in this universe aswell and had her stupid prophecy which ''must come to be''?
I'm usually pretty hands-off when it comes to the subject of Blizzard lore. The reason for this has always been because I know what they've written is bad, and that if I'm going to enjoy it, I'm going to have to derive that enjoyment from micro-level things like character interactions. However, even the character interaction in this one is awful, if the dialogue is any indication.I usually love this awful, awful lore. I don't look to Blizzard for talent or nuance in this department, I look to them to take characters I like, as if they were barbie dolls, and mash them together and go "now kiss." You know, like they did with Velen and Illidan and Khadgar for the past couple years.This is not that.They had a chance, that started with Xe'ra and her attitude about conversion, to introduce nuance and distrust to the subject of the Light for maybe the first time in WoW's story since the Clerics of Northshire decided to tell everyone about this nice yellow thing they found. What Blizzard has done with that chance is deliver a message that goes like this:"The Draenei, who are as a species infused with the Light of the Naaru, have turned down peace with their neighbors in the name of waging holy war, fashioning themselves as benevolent angels uplifting Draenor's natives out of 'savagery' and carrying out, presumably, the actual ongoing will of their Naaru masters, who have impressed a new zealotry upon them for reasons unknown. The moment the Draenei could stop being refugees, they chose to become conquerors, or were so weak-willed that when they had that choice imposed upon them, they reveled in it and took up arms against native people who were still rebuilding after the previous war."This spits in the face of the Draenei legacy. It undermines their bravery in choosing against the Legion, their thousands of years spent as nomads in search of a home, their roles as peacemakers who, upon finding their backs against the wall, always choose the path of cooperation and friendship rather than isolation and violence. They crash-landed a spaceship in ancient Elven territory. You know what happens when you do anything to ancient Elven territory? The elves kill you!The elves didn't kill the Draenei because the Draenei are always like this. They chose a path that would allow them to be allies with the very people whose lives and lands they disrupted. They made no effort to convert any elf- remember being a level 10 Draenei, and you go on a quest to learn the language of the Furbolgs? That's what the Draenei we know are like. They'd rather learn to communicate with furbolgs than raise a weapon against them even for a moment, if they have the choice.And Blizzard wants to tell me that these Draenei, or that some alternate universe reflection of them, would engage in a holy crusade to convert or condemn the 'savage' orcs who were living on Draenor first? It isn't the mirror universe from Star Trek. That would have been a neat angle for Warlords of Draenor, everyone having a mustache and a more or less entirely flipped moral center, but it didn't happen, that's not the choice they made when they decided to play with an AU. Blizzard wants me to look at the Xe'ra incident, and then look at this, and say "oh, I guess the Naaru are just like that, and this is what happens when you listen to them."But O'ros and A'dal have been jingling at everyone they can since 2007, and at no point did the Aldor mobilize all at once to beat up all the Arrakoa in the Lower City because they wouldn't convert. This isn't how the Naaru have been shown to us. It's been a Xe'ra thing. A Naaru Prime thing maybe, but even then, the first thing we were shown on no uncertain terms is that you can choose to resist that influence."I'm secretly a huge monster and I'd love to terrorize the orcs just to feel on top for once" should not be Yrel's dark secret. This is revolting, and you can tell that the writing comes from people who haven't been tracking the characterization of these cultures- not for a couple years, certainly not for ten or twenty. And I know, if you want writing to get done, you can't always pull from a stable of writers who have been with you forever- they have other jobs to do and families to feed. But asking the new writers to brush up on the established lore before they write something as abominable as this seems like a necessary measure to ensure a consistent and interesting ongoing work, and I'm coming out of the other side of this post thinking that the writer(s) of this scenario really don't know anything about the decade or more of context and labor that has gone into making these cultures something we recognize.That's a more tragic story than the one they're trying to tell, but I hate it just as much.
I do find it a bit amusing how many people are apparently complaining about this being poor writing and being out of nowhere given "what we know about the characters" (who we only knew for a year of lore time) considering this takes place 30-35 years after we finished WoD.For context, in the last 35 years in the main universe we had two Orc vs Human wars, rise of the Undead, a Legion invasion, a cataclysm that reshaped the world, a few more wars, several races fundamentally changing.That's a lot to happen in 35 years. I don't see why it's so unbelievable that the Draenei, especially if they were tricked/corrupted by the zealot naaru, like Xe'ra, couldn't get to this point. Draenor has a lot less world-ending threats to distract them, after all.The "poor writing" part only really comes into it in the context of us missing a huge chunk of the story between then and now, and honestly I'm so done with the faction war I'd rather just stay in Draenor building on that world rather than what we know so far of BfA.