Quick thoughts about two sentences

[Mehrunes]

If anything you're proving my point even more, if Sylvanas and Deathwing have motivations beyond just killing (which I'm not saying I disagree with) then that means literally no villains in WoW have the sole motivation of killing as a justification for their actions - which is my whole argument to begin with. Thanks for agreeing

How many times did you have to bend over backwards to pretend that I was agreeing with you or proving your point? Because no, your previous position was not that no villain in WoW has the sole motivation of killing as a justification for their action. It wasthat there are some that aren't like that. You yourself tried to use Sylvanas and Deathwing as examples of villains that are like that, completely unprompted by anyone else. Moving the goalposts from "we have WoW villains that aren't this bland" to "no villain in WoW is this bland" just because I pointed out that your examples of those that are this bland are false is an utterly bizarre way to cope with how you were wrong about those two.

Meanwhile I also pointed out how your claims about Kil'Jaeden being oh, so concerned with the fate of Eredar don't mesh with him hunting Velen because he rejected (again, this is the literal wording of the Chronicle v1) Sargeras' grand design and not because he abandoned him to protect their people alone. Which you somehow failed to address. Could it have something to do with how you can't thank me for agreeing on that one?

[Arrashi]

> Garrosh wants to ensure the survival of "true" Orcs and their culture
> Garrosh wants to kill everyone

One of these is wrong. One of these is established lore

Yeah, in the end we don't really hear that much about orcs, but lots about HIS WORLD, PILLARS OF SKULLS and RIVERS OF BLOOD.
Then again, given nature of orcs those two may be one and the same.

Unless you wanna tell me that stormwind and all the leaders we see in SoO are result of firm but fair negotiations?

Also, how many of those true orcs were out there after 90% of his race stood against him?

[Arrashi]

Well, obviously Garrosh was wrong, and got increasingly unhinged. That's never been the argument - the argument is he didn't start off wanting to kill everyone did he?

But he ended that way which is what matters when discussing why his victory was impossible from gameplay/narrative standpoint which is point of this thread.

[Arrashi]

But that's not we were ever talking about was it? Must you move the goalposts to avoid being wrong?

Nope, this is exactly what we were talking about, you can reread my original post. Villains can't win because all big baddies goal is genocide by it directly or indirectly with shitty excuse of "im protecting azeroth by killing everyone here so X won't do it".

And to make it worse seeing how we are dealing with legion/void whatever just fine without eradication of life, we can easily see how shitty excuse that is.

[Arrashi]

But that's not even true though, many villains didn't want to genocide us

No, only the big important ones do.

Unless you are telling me that legion/void/scourge really intended to use diplomacy. Or that deathwing was misunderstood.

The only villains that didn't wanted to wipe us were illidan (who once again was doing his evil acts for some weird reason) and iron horde that would put us in chains.

So lets recap
vanilla doesn't have world ending threat
TBC has KJ and legion giving us hugs.
Wotlk has LK giving us presents.
Cata has DW clearly fighting climate change (what a nice lad)
MoP has garrosh being freedom fighter (which is why stormwind is last bastion of resistance, he fights for freedom too hard)
WoD has archie giving hugs again
Legion is even more hugs from legion
and BFA is N'zoth clearly wanting to enrich us.

[Arrashi]

Nope. Just because their goal isn't genocide doesn't mean they have to be good. This is another strawman

Vanilla did have world ending threats, but no big villains in vanilla existed purely to kill - they had motivations aside from murder
The Legion, JK and Archimonde do as Sargeras commands. Sargeras believes in purging all life to stop the Void Lords - he is the biggest example of a villain who is literally just evil and wants to kill - but he is the essentially Warcraft's version of the devil
The LK wants to unify Azeroth to stop the Legion
Deathwing is under control of the Old Gods, he wants to bring about his hour of twilight etc
Garrosh wants to ensure true horde supremacy and survival at all costs
WoD, the same as MoP and TBC
Legion, yes Sargeras pretty much wants to kill us
BFA, N'zoth, like other Old Gods remains pretty much a mystery in his true motivations aside corrupting all else and converting them to his black empire

So, of all the expansions, only one bad guy has the express motivation of genocide - which is Sargeras, which makes sense as he's the big bad

Ok so i see that you believe that end times, garrosh future, and all planets bathed in fel/void are happy fun places.
Its really fun how hard you are trying to ignore that all those guys are trying to achieve their goals...through genocide.

Its like nuking whole south america and saying that our goal was war on drugs. Its just that as humane and civilised being we achieved it by depopulating south america.

[Minikin]

Interview:


Expansion philosophy now doesn't limit a story to one expansion.


and another

Ion talks about the disappointment some felt for N'Zoth's end, but at the end of the day we are the heroes of the story and we will always defeat villains and make way for new villains to enter.


What do you think about that we will allways win, and every villain will in the end loose so or so... doesn't matter how big strong or how big of an threat the biggest king of jailers is.... you are the hero! you will win..

How can you make a good story, or interesting villains when you know it doesn't matter what or she does you will win in the end.

And what you think about the Expansion philosophy?

"Sometimes the hero dies in the end" - Samael Darksiders 2.

Technically he wasn't wrong, as death does sacrifice himself to bring back humans but in essence that's how a story would be.

Somewhere somehow a hero gets taken out but the bad guy still loses. It is just tough to do in WoW based setting when the games meant to go on.

[FelPlague]

Seven, Usual Suspect , Empire Strikes back, Basic instinct, No country for old men, Silence of the lamb.Watchmen, Ex machina, Life is beautiful, The Dark night. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, 12 monkeys...
Yeah, those are the movies that poped into my head, and yeah everybody knows that those movies "fucking sucks"...
War3 ft sucked too I guess... go back playing pokemon.

many of those either
A. end at that, as in they dont continue on, and more so hit a neutral ending, not a "the evil wins"
B. didnt actually have the villian win, like empire strikes back
C. have sequals that then correct this, like the dark knight, where the "villians win" but well in the next movie he comes back and finishes it off.
guess what. maybe read the rest of the post.

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Sometimes the villain has to win. Having the hero win all the time makes the feeling of danger become trivial.

And question, how would you do that in an MMO like wow?

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It's literally always been this way, since day 1, we have never "lost" to the big bad... Ion putting words to it doesn't make it more true than it used to be, it has simply always been like this.

In other words, nothing has changed.

i mean we did lose to the lich king a few minor times.
we also did lose to guldan right out for awhile. but again these were either minor, or only lasted a patch. so few consider them "losing to the villian"

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It's not about us beating N'zoth, it's about N'zoth, arguably the most built up Old God out of all of them being relegated to patch content.

1. cause old gods have always been patch content, atleast he is the first to be a final boss in an expac
2. cause an old god expansion couldnt really work well, there is not many types of enemies, there is not much room for expansion, its like the emerald dream, it is a very specific and small concept, meaning there is not much room to make an entire expansion around it. would you really want 20 crab bosses, 18 tentacle bosses, and 42 corrupted player race bosses?

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I am sure figuring it out is the job of some overpaid hacks that write the current tripe.

"Just invent time travel fucking duh!"
"Well how do you think we could invent time travel?"
"I dont know, that is the job of the overpaid hacks that preform science"

You have to be kidding me. the "I dont know, thats their job not mine" logic...

If you dont know, then dont push a point, easy, get it through that skull of yours.

[FelPlague]

In the Series 24, one of the best series imo... is a good example how the good can win in the end, but at a great cost. And sometimes it doesn't feel like a win when seeing back what happened to reach that point.

So sorta like how we beat the legion but lost varian, tirion, voljin, ysera, X'era, darkshire, amber kernen. and a huge amount of nameless alliance and horde members.

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Wow's lore has been garbage since they ran out of warcraft 3 content to recycle in WotLK. If you want a good story, go elsewhere.

you know cataclysm was a ton of recylced stuff from warcraft 3 right? deathwing, the black dragonflight, etc

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1. "It's always been like this" is a terrible argument because it doesn't mean that it SHOULD always be like that or that it CAN'T be any other way.
2. I disagree in much the same way that I think an expansion could've been made out of the Emerald Dream. Blizzard itself may be incapable of pulling it off and you may be unable to see it in your mind's eye, but it's entirely doable. There's no reason why void corruption couldn't affect the world and it's people in a myriad of different interesting and unique ways, it all comes down to how much or how little Blizzard is willing to develop it, and when it comes to N'zoth, it wasn't a lot. A few obelisks in some zones and a raid, that's all they could be bothered to do.

1. yes, it should, because again. "Do you want 20 crab bosses, 18 tentacle bosses, and 42 corrupted player race bosses" the old gods are suprisngly limited, there is only so far you can go without changing from something you can see to something you can only attempt to describe. you try to come up with enough varieties of content to fill an expansion with old gods why dont cha?
we got bugs, crab men, tentacles, tentacle men, and fish, and thats literally it for old gods.

2. You verdugo's alt account? you both seem to love the "I dont know, but thats not my job" flawed logic.
No one is capable of it, because its impossible, without right out changing the old gods into something entirely different, there is only so many things they can do before it becomes boring of "Well its crab boss number 8"
hell how many crab bosses did we have in BFA alone? 10, yes 10 of them.

[Flantini]

I feel like they are addressing this via the time skip after SL. I forget where I saw it, but I thought a dev (maybe Ion) was quoted to say something like, "with N'zoth, the master of visions/altering reality, if you really think we got rid of him that fast/easily you didnt take away any of the lessons hes taught us." Again no idea where this quote is/was if it even was real so I cant link or verify :c

But id like to think N'Zoth isn't done and since we "go away" for SL it'll be something like swotr where the bad guys been winning for the past X years while you were gone type deal.

[FelPlague]

I feel like they are addressing this via the time skip after SL. I forget where I saw it, but I thought a dev (maybe Ion) was quoted to say something like, "with N'zoth, the master of visions/altering reality, if you really think we got rid of him that fast/easily you didnt take away any of the lessons hes taught us." Again no idea where this quote is/was if it even was real so I cant link or verify :c

But id like to think N'Zoth isn't done and since we "go away" for SL it'll be something like swotr where the bad guys been winning for the past X years while you were gone type deal.

No there is no confirmation or ANYTHING of a time skip, it is literally just 100% fan theory.
the only time thing mentioned is the same thing on argus we had, where time there travels faster, so being there for months, it would only be days on azeroth, same thing in the twisting nether, so well that pretty much confirms the opposite of a time skip, and instead is a time strech.

[Schattenlied]

i mean we did lose to the lich king a few minor times.
we also did lose to guldan right out for awhile. but again these were either minor, or only lasted a patch. so few consider them "losing to the villian"

Well, yeah, I'm talking about entire conflict victory or loss, not individual battles. We cannot and will not ever lose the entire conflict, which is what OP is talking about, because if we did the game would end, because at this point in the game every "big bad" wants to destroy the world, and the consequence of us losing the overall conflict would be the end of the world and thus the end of the game... Which is obviously a problem from both a gameplay standpoint and a moneymaking standpoint for the people who are running the game.

[Tarba]

many of those either
A. end at that, as in they dont continue on, and more so hit a neutral ending, not a "the evil wins"
B. didnt actually have the villian win, like empire strikes back
C. have sequals that then correct this, like the dark knight, where the "villians win" but well in the next movie he comes back and finishes it off.
guess what. maybe read the rest of post

A. The vilain wins in those movies.
B. In the empire strikes back Vador capture Han Solo, and defeat Luke and cut his hand. Good guys end up on a pretty big loss. Funny thing, it is considered by most people the best star wars. Like episode 3 the best prequel.
C. Still waiting for the sequals of 90% of my list. And no the movie after the dark night confirm a complete loss. Batman is broken the city is completely corrupted. No one took the mantle of Harvey Dent. The Wayne's ecological "world saving/war ending" power plant is weaponised. The only thing Batman manages to do is defeating Bane and saving the city from total destruction. Then abandoned it in ruin and still as a shithole. Even worse than how it was after the dark night.

[FelPlague]

Tarb, I literally explained it in the first post. But seems you can't read that far back.

But yeah no totally the good guys lost in empire strikes back and the bad guys won. There was never ever a sequel ever nope it never happened. There was never a follow up where the good guys won. Nope. Not at all, nope it didn't happen.
And nope, in dark Knight and such yeah no totally, they never had the villian lose, nope never, Baine was never defeated, even if the world around him was still in havoc, the bad guys still won and the hero died. Wait.

[catalystical]

Stories not being tied up in the expansion feels like it's setting up the next and forgets that it needs to finish telling it's own story.

For the most part Marvel's movies are their own shows, and then filmmakers for the newer films take bits and pieces from the older movies to support their own story. In Bfa an example of that is us finding out Taelia being a Fordragon and the telling of stories of Saurfang and Anduin. The problematic way of setting things up would be to introduce all the deathly and spirit stuff from both stuff in such a major manner for both Horde and Alliance and not finding a proper resolution to that theme. Bfa's main fault is it leaned too much into death and not into the old gods enough and that's also why it feels the old god stuff is relegated into just a single patch.

[Itori]

The last one means we're in a shonen anime, and as long as the game keeps getting money we will never have a shortage of big bads pop up that need killing. Welcome to Everquest xD

[kranur]

Stories not being tied up in the expansion feels like it's setting up the next and forgets that it needs to finish telling it's own story.

For the most part Marvel's movies are their own shows, and then filmmakers for the newer films take bits and pieces from the older movies to support their own story. In Bfa an example of that is us finding out Taelia being a Fordragon and the telling of stories of Saurfang and Anduin. The problematic way of setting things up would be to introduce all the deathly and spirit stuff from both stuff in such a major manner for both Horde and Alliance and not finding a proper resolution to that theme. Bfa's main fault is it leaned too much into death and not into the old gods enough and that's also why it feels the old god stuff is relegated into just a single patch.

Exactly. It feels bad to always feel like you're playing the sidestory and then there's the shit introduced and left with no end. Lile how they started hinting and devloping void lords at the end of legion and then left that hlup in the air. One would have expect to continue into the void lord story but no.

[A Blue Smurf]

I mean... that's literally what happens in 99% of the stories? I can't think of any franchise in which the villain ultimately wins, or at least any popular franchise.

And besides this has always been the formula in Warcraft. Yes, even in The Frozen Throne, because Arthas was the hero/protagonist that you were playing, and he won at the end. TFT didn't end with the antagonist Kil'jaeden and Illidan blowing up the Frozen Throne.

In WCIII Arthas beats Mal'ganis only because the Lich King engineered it as such.
He didn't beat the Scourge, in fact he ultimately lost to them and joined them.
He then went on to destroy Lordareon, wipe out the remnants of the Dark Horde, commit genocide against Quel'thalas, raze Dalaran to the ground and summon The Burning Legion - instigating the third invasion.

None of that is a "win" for Azeroth, none of that could be argued as the "heroes" or "good guys" winning. Arthas was a playable antagonist, not a protagonist, and its actually what made him so well-liked. He was the literal depiction of the mantra "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", and the fact you got to play as him through the entire scenario was the golden piece made the WCIII narrative so memorable.

This holds true to WCII and the duality of being able to play as the Horde or the Alliance in those campaigns. It was developed as staple for Warcraft narratives and this... "team" that now run it have all but destroyed these perspectives.

[Arrashi]

Quote me where I've ever said "you believe that end times, garrosh future, and all planets bathed in fel/void are happy fun places."

Or stop being a complete liar please

Here you go

BC : Illidan = wants to create an army against the Legion, uses underhanded/ morally bad tactics, Kil'jaden = is part of the Legion, simply doing his master's bidding
Wrath : Lich King = wants to unify azeroth as scourge to resist the Legion/ external threats
Cata : Deathwing = wants to destroy azeroth and her people's for the Old Gods
MoP : Garrosh = wants to destroy the alliance/ most of the Horde to establish his true horde and rule the world his way
WoD : Grommash = wants to create an orcish army to conquer countless worlds, Archimonde = same as Kil'jaden
Legion : Gul'dan = wants to bring sargeras to azeroth, Sargeras = wants to create one uniform force against the void lords
BFA : Sylvanas = wants to kill as many as she can, Azshara = we don't know her full plans yet, but she wanted to get out from N'zoths grip, N'zoth = Old God shit

So, turns out villains don't just want to destroy the world

Most of the villains I listed do not want to destroy azeroth, contrary to your idea. Deathwing wanted to, and Sargeras tried to, that's about it

(both on page 2)
You make fascinating point that LK and others tried to achieve their goals totally not wiping life on azeroth.

[Varodoc]

In WCIII Arthas beats Mal'ganis only because the Lich King engineered it as such.
He didn't beat the Scourge, in fact he ultimately lost to them and joined them.
He then went on to destroy Lordareon, wipe out the remnants of the Dark Horde, commit genocide against Quel'thalas, raze Dalaran to the ground and summon The Burning Legion - instigating the third invasion.

None of that is a "win" for Azeroth, none of that could be argued as the "heroes" or "good guys" winning. Arthas was a playable antagonist, not a protagonist, and its actually what made him so well-liked. He was the literal depiction of the mantra "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", and the fact you got to play as him through the entire scenario was the golden piece made the WCIII narrative so memorable.

This holds true to WCII and the duality of being able to play as the Horde or the Alliance in those campaigns. It was developed as staple for Warcraft narratives and this... "team" that now run it have all but destroyed these perspectives.

Arthas was still the protagonist. The protagonist defeated the antagonist Mal'ganis, then went on to defeat the antagonists Uther, Sylvanas, and Antonidas, and successfully summoned Archimonde, which was his mission.

The protagonist always wins in Warcraft. This did not change in Warcraft RTS, and did not change in WoW.

There is no such thing as a "playable antagonist". The antagonist, by definition, is the one who opposes the player. Arthas was the protagonist, and Uther, Sylvanas, and Antonidas were the antagonists.