Originally Posted by
Super Dickmann
I know we've been over this a million times back when it was current content, but I'm feeling nostalgic, so why not.
There's not one person with a pulse who disliked BFA because of its depth, as it had none. The main protagonist is purer than the driven snow, the main antagonist literally works for the Devil to raise an astral kill counter and everyone else is a piece of flotsam pushed around by the plot. You are however right that the main difference between BFA and the prior expansons is that BFA wasn't about the factions, it isn't about societies, it's entirely about interpersonal drama.
Where Vanilla, Cataclysm and even Mists in its broad strokes endeavoured to emphasize the actual local, racial and individual character motivation of the parties involved that push them into conflict, with the reasons the orcs and night elves fight being drastically different from the human-forsaken one, BFA is entirely about Sadfang's predicament. The sack of Night Elven Kalimdor, an orcish objective since the first Warsong-Night Elf skirmish doesn't show us how the orcs at large react to finally achieving this goal, nor how their society changes as a result - in contrast to how Vanilla showed what Thrall's Horde was and Cataclysm got into the shifts in society through individual stories and long-running questlines depicting different parts of it. It's even less about the Night Elves and their coming up against how they got up to this point - it's entirely about how sad it makes Saurfang. Jaina's (inexpicable and nonsensical) conclusion that her dear old dad is wrong somehow filters out over her entire population off-screen, who immediately adopt her political beliefs despite having zero reasoning for it. The conflict over Lordaeron, the fundamental plot point of that part of the setting in which the entire Forsaken identity as well as that of their primary antagonists is tied up, does not even come up after it happens. Save for some lounging saddos and a pair of Forsaken, no one brings it up or reacts to it, because it's also not about Lordaeron, it's about Sylvanas twirling her mustache and Sadfang honorably throwing the fight his surrogate son is engaged in.
Shifting the focus of a story towards a tiny cast rather than the large-scale groups and geopolitics that are the nature of the setting, by default, as it started with an RTS, an inherently large-scale medium and then an MMO, where the same applies and the focus is the scope of the world, and boiling down said geopolitics to the laughable drama of half a dozen priks shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths of what you've got. But one way to take this inherently shit idea and make it all the worse, is to also make sure all the character drama is incoherent, shallow piffle. Take that bit with Sadfang and Memeboi earlier, I'm sure there's already some version of "But Dickmann, that's not what the story wanted to show us, the writers' point wasn't that Sadfang had already given up by the time the fight had gone on, meaning he'd thrown the fight and his entire moment with his surrogate son character was Sadfang throwing him and the Horde soldiers under the bus on the off-chance it took out Sylvanas." floating about.
Indeed, but authorial intent isn't authorial execution. The fact that the writers mean for something to happen, though with BFA even determining that is a tall fucking order, doesn't mean they actually accomplish it. The writers want to convey that Sadfang is an honorable warrior pushed to the brink and restoring the soul of his people, but what they've presented him as is a perennially inept, passive traitor lacking any public support and reliant on a foreign power to execute his plan, all on account of a failing in a plan that he devised and then didn't follow through on. This informs every aspect of the plot - the story, which aims at the deconstruction and abolition of what's left of the Horde after taking out its racial heart in the orcs back in Mists ends via the Horde means of succession being the tool that wins the day. Jaina's turn towards thinking her dad is wrong about how conflict with the Horde is inevitable and her hesitation will only mean others will die is depicted concurrent with the Horde waging total war on Kul Tiras itself - her own conclusion also doesn't evince any scrap of human motive, notwithstanding how it reduces the entire kingdom into a mood ring who goes from hating her based on that difference with Daelin to liking her when Daelin is proven irrevocably correct.
BFA wasn't a tough story asking tough questions and interrogating its setting, it's a fundamentally weak story that, per that example with Rexxar and the bombs earlier in the thread, applies its moral framework only as convenient, attempts to deconstruct the societies involved while never actually featuring them as such in favor of character melodrama, then fails at that, because unlike in Mists, every positive character's motive and personality are identical. All that could by itself be ignorable if it wasn't for the other point - you are quite right that the setting's faction war is mechanically, in marketing and in setting meant to go on forever. Neither conflicts over tribe or resources in general, nor those in the setting in particular ever permanently end, and the game's races are vessels for just that. In rebelling against its only purpose for existing, BFA did permanent, irreparable damage to the main vehicles through which the setting functions, i.e the conflicting playable races and factions.