Patch 9.2 PTR - Build 41360: Sylvanas Cinematic

[bitterwinter]

Blizzard: *Elegantly handles Sylvanas's transition from baddie to good*
Community: *Doesn't like it because they're filled with spite*

There is nothing elegant about this transition. The story has been a complete and utter carcrash from start to finish.

[Capultro]

hunter armor sets are shit. Pure rubbish, they are sad ... but, yes, the sylvanas armor set, it is incredible!, of course..blizzard no have forgiveness.

[Triceron]

So...

is there any out come to this that isn't gonna be complete horseshit?

[Belloc]

Elegantly?

We re being told in this cinematic that the sylvanas we ve known from WC3 to now is basically not sylvanas but a fraction of sylvanas thereby destroying her entire character arc. Literally 17 years of her arc can now officially go to the garbage bin. Everything the banshee sylvanas did basically means jack shit because it was not the real sylvanas who did this. Her revelation at icecrown means absolutely nothing.
To me this is on the same level as destroying Anakin's sacrifice and story arc at the end of episode 6 by bringing back palpatine in episode 9.

This is anything but elegant.

And, yet, when Christy Golden writes a book about the exact same thing happening to Arthas, it's quite favorably received, indeed!

[B a B y D o L L]

So, I’m confused where to go so I’m posting here in hopes someone can point me to the right place.

I was told there were more cinematics than the sh*tshow that was the Sylvanas one.
I also heard there were Tyrande voicelines revealed!!?
Um, where is all of that? Idk why I’m hoping those are better but yeahhhh, I still want to see them and read anything about Tyrande.


Thanks guys.

[shimargh]

Blizzard: *Elegantly handles Sylvanas's transition from baddie to good*
Community: *Doesn't like it because they're filled with spite*

you spelled "awfully" wrong-

[B a B y D o L L]

So...

is there any out come to this that isn't gonna be complete horseshit?

Probably not.
I mean the only endings I can envision at this point are:

- Sylvanas becomes a good girl again (give her a treat!) and after helping us save Anduin sacrifices herself in the jailer fight - dying a martyr.
- Sylvanas is a good girl again who is rewarded with more reverence and power than she ever deserved by becoming some Avatar of Azeroth.
- Sylvanas is the hero who saves Anduin, survives the Jailer fight, and everyone - including Tyrande's heartbrokenly poorly written character, comes to a "well she should be punished and I'll never forgive her BUTTTTTTTTTTT it wasn't really her fault" understanding and she's allowed to face the Martha Stewart type of punishment off in self exile somewhere vs. real punishment, put in the Illidan box* until further notice.
- Sylvanas saved Anduin, escapes everything, comes out good hero girl, her and Anduin fall into some f**ked up relationship, his NoBeL ReAsoNiNg saves her from being executed and Tyrande "while never being able to forgive her" WiLl PuSh ThE PaIn AsIdE and fall in line behind the idea of not killing her but letting her go off into self exile, again being placed in the Illidan box.
- THE WORST CONCLUSION OF THEM ALL: Sylvanas is big good, good girl, give her big big treat! She survives everything, is viewed as heroic after saving anduin and helping defeat big scary boi Zov-who-tf-cares, and even though many can't fully forgive her and force her to relive her atrocities, she'll still rejoin the Alliance at the end, reunite with her sister, and "The Circle of Life" starts playing in the background.


Like, all of those are trash, big fat steaming piles of dino poo TRASH, but I can't see anything else happening.

What have they done to Sylvanas....Tyrande......EVERYONE.
TF is Malfurion? WHERE IS MALFURION?!?!?!?!
Why did one tiny stab = COMA FOR ALL OF THIS!?!?!?!?! We have people stabbed in much more severe ways running around the game like mad lately......
UGHHHHHHHH!!!!


*Illidan Box is my name for the box they put all the old characters in that they plan to use later for a nostalgic trip down memory lane for old asf players who fall for it.
They pull out these old asf characters who have been off-screen for a while in hopes of stirring up hype behind their returns.

Lots of ppl are in that annoying little scam of a box atm....biggest one is Illidan imo since ppl come back for him no matter how sh*t the story is.

[javierdsv]

Why are people so fixated on Sylvanas getting a redemption arc being a bad thing?

If they keep killing important characters for good people will leave this game faster.

[khazmodan]

Why are people so fixated on Sylvanas getting a redemption arc being a bad thing?

If they keep killing important characters for good people will leave this game faster.

After being a genocidal psycho, the only redemption is an honorable death. Players are leaving for many reasons and while the loss of good voice actors is a bummer, this game has way more problems than can be fixed by saving an unredeemable character.

- - - Updated - - -

I just can't stop watching how this game keeps self destructing. Glorious trainwreck

It's like watching a train crashing into a burning dumpster at the bottom of a cliff with the smoke being filled with every cringey word and image ever created. I keep hoping for some sort of artistic justice for these short bus Kotick cronies, but they just keep doubling down on stupid and making the memory of the good times seem like a dream that might not have happened at all.

[Armael]

Except what @Armael was saying was simply jumping on the bandwagon of your post that couldn't even stay on point it was actually addressing, making both their remarks about Dunning-"Kreuger" (it's actually Kruger, making it all the more ironic) effect and your remarks about what @Jastall was saying being false blatantly wrong. And I'm sorry to inform you, but your projection about dem people who hate Sylvanas!!1! with some nebulous agenda is not going to fly here.

I'm sooo sorry I misspelled "Kruger," it, however, doesn't mean I didn't understand the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[Chromeshellking]

Holy shit this is even worse then some people were speculating....wtf

This entire thing was at least really good for a laugh. Kudos finding a silver lining on it.

- - - Updated - - -

Why are people so fixated on Sylvanas getting a redemption arc being a bad thing?

If they keep killing important characters for good people will leave this game faster.

Because the way its being done is the way every story gets lost and becomes utter garbage to your audience.

When you insert yourself into the story and making yourself the end all be all center of everything and get what you want no one wants that in a story. People didnt want to leave but were being left with less and less reasons to stay.

Though I found Terraria and a ton of mods so I have been good but cant say the same for others.

[Alanar]

The mos painfull thing for me that appearntly sylvanas wasnt sylvanas and she was never in control while they obviously made her look like a strong characrer.

To hear that.. basically ruined the character. Her whole arc was to get rid of scourge and of arthas... to hear she was never in control even when they broke lose from them??
Silverpine, battle for undercity.. 2004 til 2021 feels like we never knew or or something.

Damn this is realy bad.

[B a B y D o L L]

Why are people so fixated on Sylvanas getting a redemption arc being a bad thing?

If they keep killing important characters for good people will leave this game faster.

For what it's worth, since ppl only seem to respond to ppl they know here, I don't have an issue with the redemption if it was done years ago and properly.
My issues is that it's written so freaking poorly in the here and now.
You can't have someone turn into Hitler and then try to redeem them overnight with a poorly written excuse-card of a story, and be shocked ppl are like "wtf?!?"
Also, the total retcon, re-contextualization, reworking, WHATEVER YOU WANNA CALL IT, of so many pivotal huge character's and stories just to put some crappy Villain like the Jailer as a puppet master is farrrrrrrrrrr more insulting than just killing ppl off.

I understand what you're saying about us not wanting to see favs go, and tbh I was ready to book it and never return for good if they killed Tyrande after how poorly they've written her and anything nelf related, so I get not wanting to see favs die, but even with that said it's not realistic to just keep all the old characters around for eternity. At that point, make WOW2 or end it.....vs. writing horrible stories and making ppl NEVER have to face consequences for INCREDIBLY AWFUL THINGS DONE all to "keep characters we love around for eternity because we grew up with them and will miss them" - ya know?
I loved old Sylvanas, but watching what the writers have done, and keep doing, with her character is honestly more painful than us just killing her in the raid and her having like a mini ghost-redemption scene like arthas talking to his dad, before legit dying for real.

[crusadernero]

It was a joke my dude.

hehe ok then im sorry. Can sometimes be difficult to know that, especially here on this forum. My bad!

[Eldar45]

I wanted to hate this story line for Sylvanas.





I can't. It's really not bad. It completely fits with the lore of Frostmourne in WC3 - WOTLK. It takes at least part of her soul. All that was left was the hatred and vengeance. When Frostmourne was destroyed the fractured part of her soul returns to her body, but the other part is still in control.

Whatever the Jailer did to her brings that other part back a bit, and since two parts of her soul are at war she is basically comatose.


I mean, it's basically the Darth Vader redemption arc all over again. All the corruption and the hatred pushes away and locks up the decent human being that is still in there, but something triggers the goodness to surface again and push back the darkness.

I can't bring myself to hate this part. I figured it would be entirely Sylvanas doing a 180 and just deciding that "Oh I've made a lot of mistakes". The stupid part of this story is not realizing what the Jailer was from the get go, but I'll overlook that for now. Not to say that me liking this part of the story makes the rest of the story good. It doesn't. The story for WoW has never really been great since 2010, but this isn't that bad.

[Delekii]

Why are people so fixated on Sylvanas getting a redemption arc being a bad thing?

If they keep killing important characters for good people will leave this game faster.

Which important characters have they permanently killed? And even if there are any that are currently dead, on what grounds would you believe that Blizzard wouldn't bring them back if they thought they could milk them for more "content"?

If only they would fucking kill off some characters, redemption arcs would be meaningful instead of utterly nonsensical and predictable. As it stands, there is no depth of depravity that would seem to put a character beyond redemption, up to and including the genocide of a near entire race of people.

Sylvanas is a gross, terrible character, and they have basically hand-waved away the past 15 years of her bad behavior with a "woops, she was mind-controlled". It entirely undermines the concepts of retribution, vengeance, justice, responsibility, consequence, and many more. Any character in the game can do whatever the fuck they want, because the entire concept of action and effect are fundamentally broken.

[roboscorcher]

Do you think Arthas will play any role in the next xpac or will he be there as a means to "finish" everything up with him? In any case, it might be about time to end everything about Arthas.

Pretty sure Shadowlands will conclude his arc, along with every other prominent character who is already dead (Sylv and Uther). It's the only thing that would really bolster their claims of 9.2 being "the conclusion to the WC3 arc."

I'm also thinking that while Zovaal dies at the end of the raid, our journey back to Azeroth may lead to a timeskip, or maybe the land will be mangled from Zovaal's attacks. I am really only basing this off of a comment Ion once made about "we may not recognize what we come back to after Shadowlands". He said something like that in an interview once, and that's really all we have to go off of of right now.

[Vorkreist]

Well, that's true though, isn't it? If you enjoy a story it doesn't matter how poorly it's actually told or nonsensical it is. People like what they like. That doesn't mean it's not hot garbage, but people can still enjoy things everyone else recognizes to be terrible.

So this story is for those few. The rest of us can point and laugh.

No its not true. When you don't really understand the story and implications you don't really like it. Its like saying you like a book because it has a nice cover. We are not talking about attributes like a boring story, weak story, silly story, stupid story etc. Those still imply that the most fundamental rules of storytelling are there and functional and you have an actual story.
Having all agency in all choices and literally the entire development of such a central character over so many years stripped and rendered meaningless is something so stupid nobody should accept but then again people that say they like it don't understand it all. They looked at a cinematic and thought it looked pretty hence "i like it" with zero thought and consideration of what that kind of redemption setup pulled out of the ass means.
The major issue is not a redemption arc in itself. They could write a decent one if they had the least bit of care or talent. Its the stupid invalidation of literally everything before with that split soul bs. An incredibly lazy and stupid quick "work" instead of spending the time and effort to make it work in the story.

[crusadernero]

Pretty sure Shadowlands will conclude his arc, along with every other prominent character who is already dead (Sylv and Uther). It's the only thing that would really bolster their claims of 9.2 being "the conclusion to the WC3 arc."

I'm also thinking that while Zovaal dies at the end of the raid, our journey back to Azeroth may lead to a timeskip, or maybe the land will be mangled from Zovaal's attacks. I am really only basing this off of a comment Ion once made about "we may not recognize what we come back to after Shadowlands". He said something like that in an interview once, and that's really all we have to go off of of right now.

I hope they live up to that. I love Arthas(Lich king) and Sylvanas(worse last few years) as characters in wow, but it needs to stop now. Especially with Sylvanas. Shes been the front focus long enough. I can honestly say the same about Jaina & Thrall too. Anduin is fine cause he is afterall the king of alliance, as Bane with Horde. Besides that, give us something new!


A changed Azeroth would be baller. We got chromietime+classic if we miss the old world.

[Zora-Prime]

No its not true. When you don't really understand the story and implications you don't really like it. Its like saying you like a book because it has a nice cover. We are not talking about attributes like a boring story, weak story, silly story, stupid story etc. Those still imply that the most fundamental rules of storytelling are there and functional and you have an actual story.
Having all agency in all choices and literally the entire development of such a central character over so many years stripped and rendered meaningless is something so stupid nobody should accept but then again people that say they like it don't understand it all. They looked at a cinematic and thought it looked pretty hence "i like it" with zero thought and consideration of what that kind of redemption setup pulled out of the ass means.
The major issue is not a redemption arc in itself. They could write a decent one if they had the least bit of care or talent. Its the stupid invalidation of literally everything before with that split soul bs. An incredibly lazy and stupid quick "work" instead of spending the time and effort to make it work in the story.

Because it explains why she turned into the psycho that she is now, post getting killed by Arthas. It's actually simple...

Good Ranger General >> Killed / Soul Stolen By Arthas >> Inexplicably Turned into a Sadistic Psycho Bitch >>
>> Got Soul Back >> Good Undead Ranger General is back.

The idea of giving a sadistic monster their humanity and compassion back as a form of punishment is what I find appealing here.

As for being shallow and saying we like it because it looked "pretty", I assure you i thought about the context of this cinematic much longer than you have.

Anyways, the character was not invalidated. You just know nothing of the lore.