WoW’s “feel” of the world.

[VladlTutushkin]

Its just a small post about the unique “feel” WoW had for me, which i think a lot of people shared based on what i read here and on other forums. The feel that is now totally gone, and last time i had it was when i played GW2 for a while, but there it was still a different thing, even if similar.

So, WoW had that unique atmosphere to it, mix of nostalgia and adventure and the spirit of factional rivalry… Somehow even when they added new stuff the general feeling remained mostly undiluted, giving that WoW vibe without fail, even in Pandaria. Draenor began to sort of “lose” it, Legion had it but it began to gradually melt away, but since all else was good it wasnt obvious…

And then the big “crash and burn” began - with BfA being one huge shitfest of depression, hamfisted moralisation and overblown drama and edginess and gloom… And of course utter cuckoldry if you played Alliance.

SL and DF no longer even feel like WoW at all, SL being so disconnected you may as well call it another game and DF being too milquetoast and still disconnected from Azeroth, despite being on Azeroth.

So, any of you share that sense of fading soul/feel of WoW? When you began to notice it going away first? Or is it entirely a false assumption on my part?

[Skytotem]

I'm gonna copy/paste a response I made on reddit to a similar thread there

So there's a few parts to this, I don't think it's necessarily that it's 'less warcraft' but more that as devs change over time they've changed 'what warcraft is'. This will have its pros and cons, but after the mess of BFA and SL I think some new blood will do the setting some good (especially after what came out in the lawsuit blizz had like SERIOUSLY ugly stuff in there). But let's break it down a bit.


1. **Dragonflight is an overcorrection from SL.** SL was bleak, took place in a weird death realm with no one asking obvious questions, and lots of hollow torture, mostly to souls and people we don't know. DF is its opposite, people actually ask questions and we have a better idea of what's going on and are seeing more familiar groups (Gnolls, Tuskarr, Furbolg, etc). It's a bit too fluffy/friendly and this was already starting to happen with the prevalence of Belfs/Vulpera/Nightborne in the Horde, and Blizz's refusal to give the Tauren any real teeth, while overdosing on Forsaken Edge until pulling a hard swerve with Calia. Same issue with the Alliance essentially not having any flaws but not being allowed to have any rough edges or initiative, and losing a lot of its core themes to neutral groups. This feeds into the second issue...

2. **It still Feels Disconnected from old Lore.** Dragonflight doesn't have the Horde and Alliance as nation states or characters exist outside of the expeditions in the first zone and a few rather disjointed quests for Tyrande/Malf with the green dragons, and Baine doing his own thing with the Centaur. This is what makes it feel weirdly disconnected despite it taking place back on Azeroth, Blizz is afraid to really develop the member races of the Horde/Alliance and deal with Consequences, likely in part due to the mess that BFA left the factions in, so they're moving at a glacial pace and only doing things to wrap up the Nelf SL seed, and Baine got pulled along for the ride as the Horde counterpart to those events. Without consequence or development from any of the groups that make up the factions, the stakes feel innately lower than other expacs. Making it unclear what the Nelf seed does has been a huge mistake on Blizz's part, as is trying to move the nelfs out of Kalimdor, and making so many nelfs villains in the primalists without really exploring that in the lore. This is also true for the non-playable races in the isles. The Marukai being separate from the Kalimdor centaur feels weird since we know the Kalimdor ones came from Theradras and Zaetar... but we don't know where this original group came from, and it makes the timeline feel wonky. It's also just straight up weird that the same species would just... come into existence twice. That's wonky. Same with the gnolls which were a 'young' race, existing in the isles so long ago. The Tuskarr, as more recent arrivals, and the Furbolg still worshipping Ursol/ursoc, feel a bit less wonky.
1. As a sidenote, the Horde and Alliance are too friendly with each other, the writers who are working on DF clearly want to sweep BFA and SL under the rug but they're doing it too abruptly.

3. **The Primalists weren't seeded properly.** They're a big twilight's hammer without the void stuff from old gods, but they came out of nowhere. Blizz very bluntly has them be Anti-Titan but it's not clear WHY they're anti-titan, since Azeroth without the titans was an elemental hellscape infested by old god minions, most races wouldn't exist without the titans intervention and while things like Titan preparations to glass the planet if the old gods got loose DEFINITELY provide fertile ground for exploring titans that aren't benevolent and reasons to be hostile to them... we haven't seen any of that FROM THE PRIMALISTS. It's also odd that the Primalists even know about the big Primal Dragons since they were sealed up for so long, there's nothing clearly connecting them to the Elemental lords, and no clear PoV about the Old gods. While blizz has done better in that characters ask obvious questions in some cases (Like Wrathion asking why the aspects were worried about Iridikron, that was a good thing! That was good writing! That's a good question to ask!) they haven't filled in a lot of other problem areas.


4. **Ultimately the problem is Blizz is writing new (COSMIC) lore using the same setpieces, but not bridging it from the Old Lore.** This is much the same problem they had in SL, in that they aren't really using other writers work as a foundation to build on top of, they're trying to write for themselves using the old lore as parts they can pull from and don't seem to understand why people aren't just running with it. They're putting in a lot of cosmic buzzwords like ORDER MAGIC and DECAY MAGIC but that doesn't really... WORK with the way Warcraft was constructed as a setting, it feels too inorganic and forced in the dialogue.


**All of that said, Blizz has done a lot of good things this expac too.** The sheer number of NPCs with more text and dialogue has added a lot of depth to this new stuff. I don't think they did a good job with the quest about the old dragonmaw dying but I appreciate them \*trying\* to tackle a sensitive issue and not mishandling it entirely. They also did an interesting thing with the Drakonid/dragonkin rebellion plotline, even if it ended with Alexstraza feeling a tad preachy it was an interesting development. Do I think this outweighs the bad? Not at all, and given how little blizz has changed -as a company- I'm not likely to resub since I quit in BFA, but the lore analysis is still fun for me and for the first time in years this feels like an expansion where it's trending in the right direction, and I hope Blizz can right the ship even if I can't get past their corporate issues.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

WoW lost its soul when they stopped placing severed heads on sticks, and then suddenly characters started having moral qualms over killing people who are trying to kill them.

Remember when we chopped people's heads off to turn them in to quest givers? Remember when we put people's heads on sticks? Remember when we decorated our mounts with the severed heads of our enemies? Remember that Hillsbrad Foothills quest where you took a shovel and walked up to humans buried up to their necks in dirt and bashed their skulls in? Remember when it was cool to invade Ashenvale and kill elves and chop down trees and dig holes and spew muk into them? Remember when we raised people from the dead and told them "serve or die"? Remember when we were performing human experimentation upon captives in the Undercity to craft new abominations and bioweapons?





Now you're not allowed to chop people's heads off anymore or desecrate their bodies. Now you're not allowed to decorate your mount with body parts. Now you're not allowed to commit war crimes. Now you're not allowed to do anything that is un-environmentalist. Now you're only allowed to make love, not warcraft.

Also, look at how the art for the franchise has changed since the past decade. You used to see art of WAR, of Orcs chopping Gnome skulls, or Dwarves shooting Horde soldiers who were trying to surrender, or a Troll executing a Dwarf sprawled on the ground. It's hard to imagine any art like that being created by NuBlizzard, a testament to how Warcraft has been disneyfied. Old Warcraft would be ashamed to look upon what it has become.







Edginess was a core part of the franchise, now lost.

I'm gonna copy/paste a response I made on reddit to a similar thread there

**Dragonflight is an overcorrection from SL.** SL was bleak, took place in a weird death realm with no one asking obvious questions, and lots of hollow torture, mostly to souls and people we don't know.

I liked Shadowland's serious tone and sense of urgency. To me, the issue was that 1. Blizzard failed to get me to care about these new characters and factions, and 2. the lore abortions. Dragonflight is fluffly, which isn't what I come to WoW for, and neither have the writers gotten me to care about sad black dragon cow or emberthal or the centaur lady or whoever else came in that expac.

Dragonflight doesn't have the Horde and Alliance as nation states or characters exist outside of the expeditions in the first zone and a few rather disjointed quests for Tyrande/Malf with the green dragons

I think you can have Warcraft without the Horde and Alliance. See TFT. The issue is that Dragonflight's narrative centers around... the Dragonflights, which are very disney and not mean badasses like the Horde/Alliance/Night Elves/Scourge/Illidan's forces.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Only times I’ve felt a lack of wow “feel” was in tbc Wod and shadow lands.

Azeroth is what for me into wow and leaving feels hallow as I couldn’t care less about other planets or realms.

[Super Dickmann]

Nothing to add to what @Val the Moofia Boss said. Warcraft needs edge. DF is an overcorrection from SL, but SL's comically bleak subject matter didn't reflect on its Saturday morning communication, ditto BFA. The reason DF marginally works better is because tone, story and visuals actually mesh together, rather than it being Baby's First Ethnic Cleansing Adventure or the Teletubbies go to Satan's Bondage Dungeon.

The books haven't actually had this problem, and if anything actually have more of that tone than the ones way back, but basically no one reads them and they're dressing on top of a game that doesn't.

[Aresk]

And then the big “crash and burn” began - with BfA being one huge shitfest of depression, hamfisted moralisation and overblown drama and edginess and gloom… And of course utter cuckoldry if you played Alliance.

Now you're not allowed to chop people's heads off anymore or desecrate their bodies.

The last head collection quest that really stood out to me was in BfA, where the Zandalari task you, the Horde adventurer, to go around and collect the severed heads of their allies just to teach them some lesson, the details of which were quite vague. It seemed like they really just wanted an opportunity to kill off fellow trolls. I feel like WoW, in general, didn't get much edgier than BfA, and it's often placed among some of the worst expansions.

WoD had some issues with the whole time travel/parallel dimension shenanigans, but Legion is where things really felt un-WoW to me. After the Broken Shore, I didn't see one clear explanation for why the Legion didn't overrun the Broken Isles and wipe out all of our forces there. After killing three faction leaders and driving a wedge between the Horde and Alliance, the Legion couldn't capitalize on their advantage? They really stopped feeling like a threat at that point.

For me, the "WoW" feel was best established by a sense of wonder and adventure. Classic had it. MoP did a great job with it. WoD, if one could look past the aforementioned timey-wimeyness of it all, had it. And I feel like DF, thus far, has it. TBC was one of the worst offenders, with the draenei/eredar retcon and the sci-fi Legion splintering far from the vibes established in Classic, and Cata/Legion had some of the worst believable villain threats in the entire franchise.

[Shadowferal]

There were moments when I did get that "feeling" in WoD, but they were too few and far in between to keep me from quitting. And ultimately it was because of the lore. (Okay, the fact that I felt I paid full price for 1/3 of an expansion didn't help my temper either)
The wonderment I felt ingame seemed to epitomize when flying by Ulduar in the Storm Peaks. The music would kick in of something melancholy yet triumphant...
And then there are those ingame stories...and memorials of real life people (i.e. "Alicia's Poem")...and real life cultural references that always brought a chuckle.

One of the biggest thematic loss are the races themselves. The differences should have gone more than skin deep or vocalization. Of course this was from the first opening of the game.

The bigger issue was the fact of a race-based war. And while it might not have began that way, that's what we're left with. Racism. And instead of having story-led moments where step-by-step we slowly get our collective heads out of our asses, we get garbage and hamfisted justifications to keep our noses in shit...and worse, we get a rudely abrupt ending to "War"craft, when we deserved an epic sequential growth that could have spanned multiple expansions.

[Ameonna]

I know this might be an hard take but :

Have you ever ask yourself that the "issue" came from you and not from wow?

[VladlTutushkin]

WoW lost its soul when they stopped placing severed heads on sticks, and then suddenly characters started having moral qualms over killing people who are trying to kill them.

Remember when we chopped people's heads off to turn them in to quest givers? Remember when we put people's heads on sticks? Remember when we decorated our mounts with the severed heads of our enemies? Remember that Hillsbrad Foothills quest where you took a shovel and walked up to humans buried up to their necks in dirt and bashed their skulls in? Remember when it was cool to invade Ashenvale and kill elves and chop down trees and dig holes and spew muk into them? Remember when we raised people from the dead and told them "serve or die"? Remember when we were performing human experimentation upon captives in the Undercity to craft new abominations and bioweapons?





Now you're not allowed to chop people's heads off anymore or desecrate their bodies. Now you're not allowed to decorate your mount with body parts. Now you're not allowed to commit war crimes. Now you're not allowed to do anything that is un-environmentalist. Now you're only allowed to make love, not warcraft.

Also, look at how the art for the franchise has changed since the past decade. You used to see art of WAR, of Orcs chopping Gnome skulls, or Dwarves shooting Horde soldiers who were trying to surrender, or a Troll executing a Dwarf sprawled on the ground. It's hard to imagine any art like that being created by NuBlizzard, a testament to how Warcraft has been disneyfied. Old Warcraft would be ashamed to look upon what it has become.







Edginess was a core part of the franchise, now lost.




I liked Shadowland's serious tone and sense of urgency. To me, the issue was that 1. Blizzard failed to get me to care about these new characters and factions, and 2. the lore abortions. Dragonflight is fluffly, which isn't what I come to WoW for, and neither have the writers gotten me to care about sad black dragon cow or emberthal or the centaur lady or whoever else came in that expac.




I think you can have Warcraft without the Horde and Alliance. See TFT. The issue is that Dragonflight's narrative centers around... the Dragonflights, which are very disney and not mean badasses like the Horde/Alliance/Night Elves/Scourge/Illidan's forces.

Its true, but somehow i also feel that before BfA edginess was… different? Like whole “genocide” thing just didnt fit in well. Plus the inadequately weak response from the Alliance mixed with Horde’s another “we wuz tricked” excuse really soured the experience to an impossible degree.

[Le Conceptuel]

I feel like WoW, in general, didn't get much edgier than BfA, and it's often placed among some of the worst expansions.

Referencing Dickmann above me, the issue with BfA was not so much the bleakness as the absolute lack of catharsis combined with the childish and one-dimensional handling of the bleak subject matter. Brings to mind the likes of One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, another work in which dreary subject matters are handled in conjunction with material comparable to a children's story, and not a particularly profound or interesting one. Similarly, the cause of the bleak subject matter was a set of expressly-evil malefactors in conflict with purely benevolent entities like Anduin.

[Ghost of Cow]

WoD had some issues with the whole time travel/parallel dimension shenanigans, but Legion is where things really felt un-WoW to me. After the Broken Shore, I didn't see one clear explanation for why the Legion didn't overrun the Broken Isles and wipe out all of our forces there. After killing three faction leaders and driving a wedge between the Horde and Alliance, the Legion couldn't capitalize on their advantage? They really stopped feeling like a threat at that point.

Well, this is a staple of bad(?)/frustrating dramatic writing.

It's why the bad guys never just shoot James Bond. Writers want to create drama, and the easiest way is to have the good guys lose. But then they're written into a corner because the good guys can't really lose-lose so the bad guys have to stop to monologue, or "savor their victory" or simply stop for no clear reason at all.

[VladlTutushkin]

Referencing Dickmann above me, the issue with BfA was not so much the bleakness as the absolute lack of catharsis combined with the childish and one-dimensional handling of the bleak subject matter. Brings to mind the likes of One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, another work in which dreary subject matters are handled in conjunction with material comparable to a children's story, and not a particularly profound or interesting one. Similarly, the cause of the bleak subject matter was a set of expressly-evil malefactors in conflict with purely benevolent entities like Anduin.

Or rather because edge was TOO much, exceeding any usual WoW standards and then… no catharsis as was said. But it is only because catharsis for such amount of edge was impossible without blowing up both factions or at least one and that is not possible.

And then they tried to make us just forget and forgive and “choose renewal”.

[Aucald]

WoW is almost 20 years old, and I think a lot of the arguments about "it's not what it was" boil down more to the fact you're looking at your own relationship to and emotions about the game from half a lifetime ago as opposed to any real substantive change that's taken place. WoW has always had its ups and downs - it's not really a general decline in quality over time, it's a series of summits and valleys, with the sense of diminishment being more a product of time and entropy as any lack of care or change in narrative. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and it has a tendency to twist if not outright warp perspective. On top of this, a lot of people who've played WoW for the majority of its lifetime have also made the transition from childhood to teen to adult with WoW being some part of their lives - making the sense of when they started playing even more impactful to them as a touchstone. Kind of like how I personally resonate most strongly with the music of my teenage years, back in the 90s; and find most of today's music to be... well, not really my cup of tea. I was 24 when I started playing WoW, so I think I missed that part of WoW being formative to some degree in terms of life - I can look back on Classic and TBC and even WotLK with objectivity I think some people have difficulty mustering.

TL;DR version: the game hasn't really changed in the modern era, it's always been a road with ups and downs, and this likely won't change in the future.

- - - Updated - - -

Well, this is a staple of bad(?)/frustrating dramatic writing.

It's why the bad guys never just shoot James Bond. Writers want to create drama, and the easiest way is to have the good guys lose. But then they're written into a corner because the good guys can't really lose-lose so the bad guys have to stop to monologue, or "savor their victory" or simply stop for no clear reason at all.

Do you think a James Bond story would be somehow improved by the villain just killing the protagonist?

[VladlTutushkin]

Nothing to add to what @Val the Moofia Boss said. Warcraft needs edge. DF is an overcorrection from SL, but SL's comically bleak subject matter didn't reflect on its Saturday morning communication, ditto BFA. The reason DF marginally works better is because tone, story and visuals actually mesh together, rather than it being Baby's First Ethnic Cleansing Adventure or the Teletubbies go to Satan's Bondage Dungeon.

The books haven't actually had this problem, and if anything actually have more of that tone than the ones way back, but basically no one reads them and they're dressing on top of a game that doesn't.

I think the overdose of edge in BfA created a scenario where catharsis was simply impossible… BUT even then they somehow went below and beyond in making it feels even worse and less, you know what i am talking about.

[Ghost of Cow]

Do you think a James Bond story would be somehow improved by the villain just killing the protagonist?

It's not about killing the protagonist, it's about making the villains believable or just not annoyingly stupid/clumsy/etc.

I'd love to cite some examples off the top of my head, but that's hard on the spot...but the point is that it's not particularly fun or engaging writing to say, "Oh no! Look! The good guys are losing! Isn't that dramaaaatic!? But wait, now the bad guy will choose to stop winning! What a twist!"

Basically, it's much more fun when it's written such that the protagonists win by doing something, rather than the antagonist doing nothing or doing something painfully stupid. (Some allowances given for when it outlines a meaningful character flaw in the antagonist, but that's rarely written for shit.)

[The Stormbringer]

WoW lost its soul when they stopped placing severed heads on sticks, and then suddenly characters started having moral qualms over killing people who are trying to kill them.

Remember when we chopped people's heads off to turn them in to quest givers? Remember when we put people's heads on sticks? Remember when we decorated our mounts with the severed heads of our enemies? Remember that Hillsbrad Foothills quest where you took a shovel and walked up to humans buried up to their necks in dirt and bashed their skulls in? Remember when it was cool to invade Ashenvale and kill elves and chop down trees and dig holes and spew muk into them? Remember when we raised people from the dead and told them "serve or die"? Remember when we were performing human experimentation upon captives in the Undercity to craft new abominations and bioweapons?

Now you're not allowed to chop people's heads off anymore or desecrate their bodies. Now you're not allowed to decorate your mount with body parts. Now you're not allowed to commit war crimes. Now you're not allowed to do anything that is un-environmentalist. Now you're only allowed to make love, not warcraft.

Also, look at how the art for the franchise has changed since the past decade. You used to see art of WAR, of Orcs chopping Gnome skulls, or Dwarves shooting Horde soldiers who were trying to surrender, or a Troll executing a Dwarf sprawled on the ground. It's hard to imagine any art like that being created by NuBlizzard, a testament to how Warcraft has been disneyfied. Old Warcraft would be ashamed to look upon what it has become.

Edginess was a core part of the franchise, now lost.

I liked Shadowland's serious tone and sense of urgency. To me, the issue was that 1. Blizzard failed to get me to care about these new characters and factions, and 2. the lore abortions. Dragonflight is fluffly, which isn't what I come to WoW for, and neither have the writers gotten me to care about sad black dragon cow or emberthal or the centaur lady or whoever else came in that expac.

I think you can have Warcraft without the Horde and Alliance. See TFT. The issue is that Dragonflight's narrative centers around... the Dragonflights, which are very disney and not mean badasses like the Horde/Alliance/Night Elves/Scourge/Illidan's forces.

I think you're probably onto something here, though the truth was that Warcraft always had a balance between edginess and silliness. Back in WC2 and WC3, you had people killing each other in gruesome fashion, but if you clicked on your units enough they said funny things, or if you clicked on critters they would EXPLODE in a shocking and humorous fashion.

To me, the roots of World of Warcraft are set heavily in these two games. Not just for the aesthetic, but the mix between grittiness and comedy. Warcraft 3 took this to the peak, having people impaled on pikes and on fire, human sacrifices to demons, kids being kidnapped, massacring innocent civilians and piles of bodies in the streets, while at the same time having giant pandas, playful penguins, pop culture references, and an entire post-credits music video with the main antagonist. Warcraft 3 also had its share of edgy (and also funny) concept art or related materials.

So yeah, I think you're onto something. Old Warcraft kept a good balance of brutal violence and war, while also taking the piss a bit to lighten the mood and make it known that things weren't always so serious. It was meant to be a good time to enjoy, not brood and obsess over.

[Aucald]

It's not about killing the protagonist, it's about making the villains believable or just not annoyingly stupid/clumsy/etc.

I'd love to cite some examples off the top of my head, but that's hard on the spot...but the point is that it's not particularly fun or engaging writing to say, "Oh no! Look! The good guys are losing! Isn't that dramaaaatic!? But wait, now the bad guy will choose to stop winning! What a twist!"

Basically, it's much more fun when it's written such that the protagonists win by doing something, rather than the antagonist doing nothing or doing something painfully stupid. (Some allowances given for when it outlines a meaningful character flaw in the antagonist, but that's rarely written for shit.)

I'm still not sure what exactly you're referring to. I know not every Bond story is made equal, much less played by a capable actor - but generally speaking, the villains in Bond stories don't tend to be painfully stupid or inactive. The last movie I can easily recall, "Spectre," basically has its villain nearly win and only get derailed because Bond happens to have a concealed weapon in the form of his wristwatch which the villain wasn't aware of - had he not had it, he would've been successfully lobotomized while the sociopathic villain kept on monologing.

Drama can be created in a lot of ways, but generally speaking, you don't want any kind of fictional story told for entertainment value to replicate the banality and predictability of work-a-day real life. People don't engage with fiction because they want more of life's unfairness or vagaries - they want to be entertained and generally want a story where the protagonist prevails and overcomes the odds to defeat the antagonist.

[Le Conceptuel]

Or rather because edge was TOO much, exceeding any usual WoW standards and then… no catharsis as was said. But it is only because catharsis for such amount of edge was impossible without blowing up both factions or at least one and that is not possible.

And then they tried to make us just forget and forgive and “choose renewal”.

That latter part is where it really falls flat; although forgiveness in the face of your malefactors is a very strong theme for a story, it doesn't work when forgiveness for genocide is handled with the grace of a mother telling her five year-old to accept her sibling's apology for breaking her toy. BfA was hardly 40k, it just handled its subject matter terribly.

[Ghost of Cow]

I'm still not sure what exactly you're referring to. I know not every Bond story is made equal, much less played by a capable actor - but generally speaking, the villains in Bond stories don't tend to be painfully stupid or inactive. The last movie I can easily recall, "Spectre," basically has its villain nearly win and only get derailed because Bond happens to have a concealed weapon in the form of his wristwatch which the villain wasn't aware of - had he not had it, he would've been successfully lobotomized while the sociopathic villain kept on monologing.

Drama can be created in a lot of ways, but generally speaking, you don't want any kind of fictional story told for entertainment value to replicate the banality and predictability of work-a-day real life. People don't engage with fiction because they want more of life's unfairness or vagaries - they want to be entertained and generally want a story where the protagonist prevails and overcomes the odds to defeat the antagonist.

I feel like this concept is ubiquitous enough that you're either missing it because you're fixating really heavily on Bond specifically, or just feigning ignorance of it for the sake of discussion. There are enough codified tropes on the topic, that's for sure.

There's a huge difference between a protagonist winning because they did something great, and the antagonist losing because they chose to not win even though they just won. The former makes for pretty interesting stories, the latter is (usually) the product of bad writing for the sake of cheap drama.

[Super Dickmann]

I think the overdose of edge in BfA created a scenario where catharsis was simply impossible… BUT even then they somehow went below and beyond in making it feels even worse and less, you know what i am talking about.

The thing with BFA is that it was ball-less despite the constant decapitations, gas bombings, farmers nailed to walls in front of their weeping children etc. It's not just the fact that the lesson of the expansion was "working for An Evil Force (TBD) is bad", it's that it didn't commit to its own themes. At every instance it took the cheap, easy way out. Jaina is immediately societally accepted despite there being no reason for people not to consider Daelin to be right, the Alliance holds no real grudge over the Horde, the Forsaken lose their agency and it's all placed on Sylvanas, etc.

A microcosm of it is how it treats friendly fire bits. In the siege of Lordaeron you have this scene where Sylvanas drops the plague on ally and enemy alike to hold off the Alliance breach and then raises the others. Then her and Saurfang have a fairly decent argument about how justified this is given the circumstances. Now, notwithstanding how she actually works for the Devil (not that the writers knew it at the time) or how the Horde should be more upset about necromancy, this doesn't have a follow up. Because the Alliance is no real threat to the Horde and is wholly benevolent, their argument about pragmatism vs. values has no meat because there's no threat, it's all on false pretenses. But even if the situation wasn't on false pretense, they themselves don't represent their positions. Sylvanas because she works for the Devil and Sadfang because we're later told he had deliberately thrown the fight by that point and was secretly hoping Anduin won. So we've a values conflict that isn't real based on character opposition that isn't real. The only thing real is the situation of friendly fire and the implication that this is what happens in war and it's something worth looking into.

Except that isn't real either, because in a patch, you have a quest where you, Rexxar and some dickheads are holding a position vs. the Alliance and Rexxar tells you to fly around and drop bombs into the clusters of ally and enemy fighters. Unlike the Plague, the bombs are able to form allegiances and so don't hurt anyone except the guys you're aiming at. The quest is just a throw-away hand clap to continue what passes for a plot in that absolute shambes. But that it exists means that even the physical rules of the war don't apply. if you're a good dude, your bombs are too and don't hurt anyone, if you're bad, then your bad bombs kill your own guys purely so you can twirl your mustache about it. There's nothing being interrogated here - everything from the positions, to the characters to the actual physical events taking place are entirely based on narrative convenience. Yet there's also no spectacle to it. Even though it doesn't follow any rules, the narrative keeps demanding you to take its arch, high-minded grade-school tier messaging seriously, its characters going on and on without contractions about how serious it all is and how we should all be friends.