Do you think Blizzard "abandoned" the faction war storyline halfway through BfA?

[Seylene]

Completely and utterly abandoned halfway through, you can tell the disconnect especially in the opening cinematic which I Metzen was sketching out in which it was A v H and then the pre event was just an utter fiasco, the WoT left such a bad taste in the mouth that they tried to skip to Jainas wild ride and the Zandalar of which the Jaina story was well done but the Zandalar felt a bit rushed as well.

The main problem with this is that right off the bat the faction war was second fiddle to yet another old god story and the main "Selling" point of this was left on the cutting room floor without any resolution. I can tell you as a NE player there was no moving forward in this expansion due to the WoT remaining in limbo. Which basically has led to my abandonment of the game.

[Doffen]

All those cinematics is not made in a heartbeat. It was planned all along. It was just not good enough.

And the "BfA is only about the faction war, old gods who?" isn't a meme for no reasons. We knew from very early on that BfA would go towards the bigger picture in the end, aka old god stuff.

[Heladys]

It was only ever the play in front of the real play. It was always going to get pushed aside for the real story to come forward.

Now you can quibble about *how* they did it and feel unsatisfied all you like.

[XDurionX]

The question shows how little you understand. Things like these are planned years in advance, you cant just scrap half of your xac and develo something new within 6 months.

[Nyel]

The question shows how little you understand. Things like these are planned years in advance, you cant just scrap half of your xac and develo something new within 6 months.

You can scrap stuff and then adjust other stuff to fit into, e.g. like they did in WoD. Or was WoD not planned years ago? Come one.

I mean nobody can tell me that the stuff we saw in game represented for the faction war makes sense. There's just a gigantic middle part missing. There's the beginning, there's the end yet in the middle a lot of stuff is just... not there. Going from BoD to 8.2.5 makes not much sense and is lacking a lot.

[Lothaeryn]

The question shows how little you understand. Things like these are planned years in advance, you cant just scrap half of your xac and develo something new within 6 months.

Warlords of Draenor would like a word with you.

As for BFA however, that was not the case. It was simply bad writing from the start. Bad game design compounded the problem of the story being jarring as both felt underbaked and doesn't seem to have much editing or testing done before being greenlit.

Was it cut however? Definitely not. The huge swathes of Saurfang cinematics suggest this was all planned from the start. CGI cinematics are extremely time consuming and costly to render quickly. Storyboard design would have to have been approved months in advance, and considering how many we got, possibly the same time BFA was in production.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I think the N'Zoth pivot was always planned. I would not be surprised if we find out that Sylvanas bailing was meant for the 9.0 pre-event and got bumped up because players were not as enthused about the faction war as Blizz hoped.

[Puddlejumper]

Really? Then how do you explain the hard turn with the necklace? To Essences I mean.
How do you explain the ending of WoD? That was a big WTF? again.

When looking at something, you have to compare imaginary prices. For example. How much imaginary dollars could cost to make new additions to garrisons? Meaning: art, building functions etc. and how much does it cost to make A cinematic. the cinematic can be about anything, and usually there is a cinematic at the end of bigger stories. The only question is just what do we see in that cinematic. Like how did we end up with the ending of WoD?

Artifact weapons were harder work probably than the necklace. It involved art (skins), the mage tower. What does the necklace have? Popup windows that are not really labor intensive. Essences? Ditto. Missions within the shipyard? Low cost. The expensive stuff in the shipyard was the art. The actual place with the boats and submarines.

I don't believe it was a hard turn, with Essences. I think the only change they made to their plan was in the artifact level requirements, but essences were always going to happen. It's too closely tied in with the plot not to have been a thing: the whole thing mirrors the Dragon Essences too much not to have been the plan all along.

This is actually exactly what I'm talking about: everything is tied up into a big knot. It isn't just about systems development alone, but also about how it works with the plot and the characters and all that nonsense. They can't change all of that easily, and when they try they get dinged for inconsistency with writing or characterization or whatever. The shipyard mission table might have been easy to change on its own, but with all the art commissioned and quests designed and voice acting commissioned and all the rest, they had to do something with all that and the mission table came part and parcel with it.

[huanjia]

Sorry but Blizzard can't turn around content fast enough for them to be able to do a full 180 in regards to the direction the game is going. Just because a bunch of people complained about how the story was going doesn't mean they were capable of scrapping everything they'd already worked on and then quickly pumped out an alternative direction. Do you know how long it takes them to make those cinematics? They made FIVE of them for BFA; that means it was planned far in advance. You may not like it, but it seems pretty obvious that this was the path we were heading down from the beginning.

[Burning4]

There may have been more to it at some point, but I don't think too much more, and it was probably only going to add more context for things. I think we clearly got all the major plot points, seeing as how we have that CG show for Sylvanas v Saurfang that everything was clearly building to. But I think the real problem was terrible writing. In fact, I think the more they write the worse the story and characters are. Less is more. Give me what I need and let my imagination fill in the spaces.
I kind of hate how the story has shifted from being about the player characters as they encounter various people and places, and more about a bunch of NPC and their character drama. Wrath to MoP did a good job of juggling those two, WoD and Legion went a bit over board on lore character stuff, but they still had plenty of focus on us and our personal stories. BfA often feels like this whole MMO/player experience is getting in the way of their terrible GoT rip off. Like, they wrote the story and then they had to find a way to shove the player character and all that gameplay and questing into it. And you can't really retro fit it like that, especially in an MMO which isn't like single player games, so you can't write narratives like you do for them, or for most movies/books, really.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I stand by what I've been saying since Legion. Any post MoP faction war plot will feel contrived and will never be as satisfying as MoP's conclusion.

Worse, is that the new faction war plot was fundamentally built on the conceit that almost every single character involved in it has to be uncharacteristically braindead stupid. It required several dozen leaps in logic:

• The Warchief of the Horde not bothering to call her allies and say "hey, sorry we had to leave"

• Genn being braindead stupid thinking that they were betrayed on purpose, when given the sheer threat-level of the enemy they faced, there was no reason for her to betray them.

• Genn and Admiral Rogers being uncharacteristically disobedient, vengeful (Genn hates Sylvanas but he'd never endanger the people he loves to carry out his revenge. His people was always #1), and stupid enough to attack the Horde during the Legion invasion.

• The burning of Teldrassil is dependent on SI:7 inexplicably failing to notice the Horde preparing for a campaign to march North (no folks, you can't just suddenly veer right at the Crossroads and you're army will be all fine. You have to account for logistics, send forces ahead to clear the way and find watering holes, and so on).

• The fact that Sylvanas can apparently just pull an army out of thin air that can crush the entire Kaldorei army in a week is ridiculous.

• The Alliance has mages which can open portals, and the world's largest airship fleet, and yet they somehow couldn't send any reinforcements.

• The Horde were travelling on foot to Darkshore, while the misdirected Alliance forces were traveling by sea. The moment they realized that the army was actually going to Darkshore (remember, there is instantaneous communication in this world, see the Alliance opening cutscene for MoP), they would've set sailed for Darkshore and would have most certainly made it there faster than the Horde forces on foot.

• Sylvanas orders an entire civilization to be wiped out and absolutely NO ONE IN THE HORDE speaks up about it. Remember, this Horde was created BECAUSE they were being genocided. The Orcs were being rounded up into camps and systematically wiped out. The trolls were historically hated. The Tauren were being wiped out by the Centaurs. The Forsaken can't reproduce. The Blood Elves were nearly completely wiped out. These people would have very real hang ups with being handed down an order to then turn around and brutally massacre the innocent men, women, and children of another race.

• The Horde had fought alongside the Alliance to retake Orgrimmar from an evil dictator who committed genocide against his own people. The Horde would feel most gracious to the Night Elves for opening those gates so that they could retake their own capital.

• The Tauren and Kaldorei are very close thanks to their druidic connections. As a Druid (who is canonically apart of the Cenarion Circle), why am I attacking my Night Elf allies?

• The Horde had fought alongside the Alliance to defend their world from the Iron Horde and the Legion.

You expect me to believe that ALL OF THEM will just turn around and silently launch catapults, no questions asked? Bollocks.

While I'm glad we are done with the abortion that was the new faction war plot, I have little hopes for the next expansion given that Sylvanas will continue to be a prominent character, as evidence by her front and center presence on the Blizzcon 2019 key art.

Faction war should've ended with MoP. It was the perfect ending point: the Horde gets to overthrow the dictator that they hated for replacing Thrall and get their Old Horde spirit back with Vol'jin. The Alliance established their tactical superiority and moral righteousness by choosing to forgo crushing the Horde in its weakened state and saving it from itself. The Horde gets their "FUCK YEAH", the Alliance gets their "FUCK YEAH", the Alliance-Horde story ends on a high note, everyone is happy. We can now move on to Azeroth working together, perhaps the Horde-Alliance faction limitations will be removed to allow anyone to play together...

But no, Blizzard had to go back to the well and revive a story that had a perfectly satisfying ending, nullifying the consequences of the Horde leaders affirming Vol'jin's Old Horde spirit and Varian completing his character arc to affirm the Alliance as men of righteousness, contriving a scenario in which - after having fought side by side with each other against extra terrestrial threats for years - everyone becomes stupid and stops talking to each other or thinking so that the war can erupt again. It's even more irritating when Blizzard completely sucked the nuance out of the war by making Sylvanas warchief to appease her fanboys and to make her Ms. Evil dictator. The war was nuanced when the Horde was fighting for its survival and the Alliance (as exemplified with Varian) had to question whether or not their pursuit against the Horde was morally right, and the Horde had to struggle with what it was. With Sylvanas as Warchief, the gets shafted in the story department as the Alliance doesn't have to question itself anymore because there is absolutely no moral ambiguity as to what the Horde has done under Sylvanas, the Horde gets shafted as they have to retread the exact same plotline that was done years ago but this time its executed poorly, but I've already gone to great lengths on that. Point is: nothing about the current story is interesting; there are no greater themes to contemplate, intriguing character arcs to follow, and the story is actively off putting.

[DeicideUH]

Talanji's bloodline (and race, maybe) are pledged to an acolyte of the god of death. The god of death whom Sylvanas is summoning in 8.3.

Na man, it probably won't come up...

I don’t think Bwonsamdi is on Sylvanas’ side. There’s many death entities who compete for souls, and Bwonsamdi seems interested in keeping “balance”. He’s known to dislike undeath, and he even proposed to free Talanji if she killed Sylvanas.

There’s nothing supporting the notion that Sylvanas works for Bwonsamdi’s boss. Whatever Sylvanas’ master is, it seems to be a “rogue” death god not interested in balance.

[azka]

Not with a cinematic like that. You can't just pull those out of your hat.

This is true, they plan these at least 2 years in advance.

[GreenJesus]

I mean sort of. But not really. It is more that a faction war doesn't make a whole lot of sense in WoW anymore. Every other expansion both sides are die hard allies fighting to save the world. Then the expansions between for some reason they fight so the next big bad can establish itself to try to take out the world again. Top it off that it is really hard to make it feel like a war is actually happening in WoW. I mean a group of NPCs just hammering it out endlessly for 6 months in one spot? A cut scene that shows fighting that you dont really see before it started or after it ended. A few quests that show you it each patch that last a couple hours tops? Just doesn't work very well. I mean the alliance lost a primary city without being able to do anything about it. Just plot armored into happening. Great war in an MMO.. yeah.. if you want to have a faction war you need the players playing the faction to make things happen. Not just a story that gets pushed along and concluded if players are there or not.

Did you forget that the horde and alliance fought each other DURING the raid on icecrown citadel? There was a raid encounter based on it. In cataclysm there was a huge war and even when there were dragons everywhere they couldn't stop themselves from attacking each other. During a legion invasion Gen launched an unprovoked attack on Sylvanas' fleet at Stormheim and then "Greymanes forces hold this warden tower!". "Both sides die hard allies" is a farce. Even when they were "teaming up" they would usually still try to kill each other but on a slightly smaller scale.

[MoanaLisa]

26 minutes of high-quality cinematics--prepared months and years in advance of release--should pretty clearly demonstrate the lack of thought and logic in the thread premise.

There is always going to be a problem in telling any sort of elaborate story when the plot can only advance less than half a dozen times over the course of 18 months or so. So you end up with simplified, truncated stuff. I don't much care for the big stories they tell but I'm at least cognizant of the fact that telling them in an MMO that's only updated every few months is difficult if not impossible. There's little room for subtlety or anything else.

[Thetruth1400]

They literally just concluded it.

It was just half arsed.

Agreed.

I feel they were way too slow with the story and it just grew stale. The story we got (which was apparently very little of what was actually happening) for the faction war was convoluted and got twisted up with the Sylvanas story as well, almost like they just moved on.

[Lodreh]

Faction war was a weak premise for an expansion. They knew this.. you should have known this... everybody knew that Azshara would be more important. I do not believe the War was abandoned as much as there was no fist pump resolution. If we just go back to status quo after this expansion... then it was an utterly pointless expansion. There needs to be a major change up in the Alliance/ Horde dynamic. A faction war is played out... Alliance and Horde should both fade away.

Instanced PvP queue as a mercenary... doesn't matter if you are taking orders from an Orc or a Dwarf. Warmode becomes Free-for-All PvP unless you group up. Groups have friendly fire turned off. Anyone can join your group... no more predetermined sides.

[Soulcatcher3]

You might be getting mindfucked if you think Sylvanas is the driver here though.

She could be, but N'zoth's whole thing was making people do stuff that ultimately supports him.

Sylvanas thinks she is setting up Azshara/N'zoth for a double-cross, but she could be getting played by N'zoth. We simply don't know. It could turn out this whole death god person doesn't exist and it was N'zoth screwing with her the whole time.

Indeed, it could be that N'Zoth himself had Azshara to arrange the deal with Sylvanas for one purpose or another.

[Mirishka]

Artifact weapons are not a bigger system and were identified from the beginning as a temporary progression path.

World PVP being removed from the game is not something that is going to happen, and the blowback would be astronomical.

World PVP is even the flavor one of the temporary progression paths (azerite neck) in BFA, making it a core game component.

Sorry but yeah, they were. Artifacts were absolutely integral core to playing Legion: absolutely everyone who went through that expansion had to progress them. War Mode on the other hand is a thing that people opt into and is entirely optional. And a whole hell of a lot of people don't bother with it.

So yeah, relative to the player experience of their respective expansions, Artifacts were absolutely bigger/more important than War Mode is. And in response to your 'blowback would be astronomical' comment... and? The blowback was astronomical when they announced the 'LOL PANDAS' expansion, it was astronomical when they cut talents down to 6 rows of 3, blah blah.

The game would survive War Mode being a BFA-only thing, I promise. People would be mad, people would whine on forums, people would REEEEEEE and then they would give Blizz their money anyway to go play Classic instead. lol

[Lightforged]

The Battle For Azeroth always had two meanings, the faction war only represented one half of it.

- - - Updated - - -

This was what they did with MoP too, so I'm not surprised. It was supposed to be about a "faction war" but then you realize oh nevermind it's old gods again.

That's why anyone with a memory has been saying Garrosh 2.0 for so long.

Kind of. Except Sylvannas is not Garrosh. She's more like Illidan, staring down the barrel of a "fall from grace" only to be redeemed as an antihero who was playing 4D chess against cosmic horrors.