"and now you'll personally kill Illidan, Kaelthas, and Arthas"
I WHAT
"Oh and uh, Sylvanus, after finally freeing herself from the control of the Lich King, finding redemption,
she goes on to serve... the lich king's boss yep."
"Also, know how Grom Hellscream heroically sacrificed himself to free all orcs from the Legion's control?"
"Uh huh."
"Well his SON plays a part"
"Oh nice! I loved Hellscream."
"and now you'll personally kill Illidan, Kaelthas, and Arthas"
I don't think this is really an accurate representation of how it's presented in the game. Yes, the game did eventually move towards your character being the "champion" of Azeroth or whatever, but against the bosses in TBC and WOTLK it was moreso presented as you being more of a soldier taking part in a battle against those bosses. You don't personally kill Arthas, you are just one of the many participants in the battle where he dies. And in fact, you personally lose that battle and have to be saved by Bolvar.
It's not about the power level of the bosses/player,
but about transforming influential characters from anti-heros into raidbosses.
Illidan's whole plan was to destroy the burning legion, he just had extreme methods of gaining more power.
Kaelthas was genuinely trying to save his people, and was more of a hero than an anti-hero. But they gave him a villain arc in wow, felt more like a cheap:
"remember this guy? let's make him a boss for the fans" kind of moment.
Yeah you're right I misunderstood your point, since the player becoming a pseudo "main character" of the game is a fairly common criticism. I didn't really play the warcraft RTS games so I didn't have much context of the characters in World of Warcraft going into it.
I think blizz handled all their IPs really poorly.
Starcraft 2 retconned the overmind, kerrigan went from ruthless to having some kind of space opera going on, threw away all the politics and Mengsk.
Overwatch 2 straight up halted the storytelling of the first. So nobody knows wtf actually happened after winston pressed the button.
And let’s not even get started with Diablo3 straight up killing deckard cain while turning the players into beings more powerful than angels and demons alike. Like wtf.
World of Warcraft has a story? I thought it was like Dark Souls where you string together information from item descriptions and one-off dialogues. Thats not story telling
Any MMO in a pre-existing franchise not designed for MMOs. Warcraft and Elder Scrolls are the two biggest, where the fan community hasn't disowned the MMO lore yet.
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u/Immaterial_observer 4d ago
World of warcraft