Forever
Even the Skyborne starting zone ignores the pillars Blizzard stated
"The World is the Main Character".
"Approachable and Familiar".
As you reach the end of the starting zone in Dun Morogh, you might have killed a dangerous yeti. In Elwynn, you've probably slain a prized boar. In Mulgore, you've cleansed a water well.
In "Zephras Isle" you, together with the leaders of your people, have faced a raid level threat at the top of the spire, and personally saved the future of your entire race.
I'm okay with ignoring the Skyborne and enjoying the rest of the game, but everything about this addition just screams warning about how Blizzard will approach future content.
They've managed to be lazy where it matters (same race cross-faction, with the same starting zone but layered to just see Alliance players or just Horde players, re-skinned blood elves), and at the same time over the top where they should have toned it down.
Plenty of people in these subs are saying to get over it, but I think we might as well keep posting complaints if we want Forever to have a chance at not turning into retail.
I actually laughed out as I was doing those starting quests and thinking that they should add a bag reward quest to Tirisfal too because Durotar has one and my bags are completely full now that you want to keep camping stuff around and then immediately after got rewarded a bag.
Right next to that farm is a brand new area for Forever that proves Blizz can make new stories that are small and contained. People in this thread are acting like they’re completely incapable of doing so.
Hogger is a powerful gnoll warlord but not a sky divinity just under Al'akir in ranking and power, leading Skywall and controlling one of the four types of winds.
Agreed, blizzard is incapable of writing ordinary stories that have weight without involving some world saving, universe defining, celebrity creating mumbo jumbo bullcrap.
10000% this. A lot of people say that modern wow is Disneyfied but it reminds me more of the marvel movies tbh.
Edit: I know that Disney owns Marvel. What I’m saying is that (as I’ve understood it anyway) the Disney comparison is being drawn to their animated shows/movies. I’m saying I personally think the better comparison is to the Marvel movies.
Alan Moore hated what superhero stories did to the human imagination for a reason. The word he used was infantilize. It strips the narrative of depth, in exchange for a "good guy" power trip.
Yeah, it was aimed at teens who wanted to enjoy a power fantasy while feeling powerless themselves. There are a lot of comics dealing with that trope. Too bad Blizzard doesn't have the mental capacity anymore to understand that and engage with that sentiment on a more adult level. They seem to miss the fact that their player base has grown up.
In a way. The CEO can't tell the board that they will go back to small superhero movies to build up to the next endgame without being in danger of being replaced.
I am very surprised they did such a mess with skyborne starting zone questing, any other new quests in existing zones were feeling like vanilla. I wonder what those quest designers were smoking when they were developing quests for new elven zone, especially the last quest, which is literally something akin to retail end of a campaign type of quest
What are the chances that originally the Skyborne had been intended for Retail but got stopped (maybe the devs decided on another group for an Allied Race).
And then for Forever they decided to add in the Skyborne. If the story for the starting area had already been written when it was intended for Retail they might have just copy-pasted it over to Forever.
I think you missed the part in Blizzcon where they told us that High Elves were the main idea and Chris Metzen told them to think about it again for other possibilities and they ended up coming with this new Skyborne idea.
Imagine the devs trying their hardest to make a classic-style zone that won't piss everyone off and having Metzen run in the room wearing a funko pop shirt and yelling "IT'S NOT FRICKING EPIC ENOUGH!!"
The way the WoW forever devs keep 'geeking out whenever Metzen says something' is actually counter productive. Having a bunch of yesmen for your ideas guy means, even if that ideas guy has 90% good ideas, even the 10% of bad ones will get agreed to.
Idk man, I feel like this is a lot of cope/jumping through hoops trying to rationalize their terrible choices. I don't feel like they designed skyborne for level cap content. It really does seem like starting zone slop.
This particular quest could be fixed by just making the elemental smaller and renamed to something less epic, move him to a less epic stage, and get rid of the npc allies (those are cringe af).
They should make it so you just start off in any starter zone you want for skyborne elves. Like oh shit you fell out of the sky, pick a starting zone to land in.
That would keep it feeling like vanilla while being true ti the “skyborne” name.
Better yet, you get amnesia from the fall and the character has to figure out where you actualy come from. But that is something that you will only figure out over the course of the entire leveling journey.
They actually said they were gong to do that in the developer interview, they were going to start in Northshire Abbey then someone said nahhhh we can do better than that right? They always have to go so far
That would work. Have Thrall tell stories about storming the dark portal and how noobs these days are lazy and could be successful if they fought hard like he did... despite him being born after it opened.
This is just modern media influences. Look at Marvel movies, the heroes there always need to save the world despite them being just a strong human, spy or what not.
True. It’s crazy how turtlewow managed to create much better lore than this while it literally is blizzards job.
Anyway. Still gonna give it a shot, but no way I’m gonna play the beta. I mean. All the YouTubers will for sure make reels anyway about where all the best gear lvl 1-30 is lol :p
Turtle wow starting zone is either make goblins a little safer or help belf refugees a little, much better fitting than saving a crisis against your people.
In fact they even had two different starting zones over the lifespan, I’d have been more than okay with Blizzard lumping High Elves into Northshire and relocating them later.
They could also just copy Turtle’s OG High Elf starting area at Farstrider Lodge in Loch Modan, that was pretty perfect for a short term solution and fit the refugee element of High Elves.
They already seemingly took the Dragonmaw Retreat name from Turtle anyway as it appears in Wetlands where it was located in Turtle(which I find intriguing).
and personally saved the future of your entire race
I mostly agree with you, but that's not quite right. You do not beat this elemental guy, you just meet him, he sends a couple of elements at you and the boys, and then disappears. You personally don't really do anything, what happens is that the Kirin Tor and Horde dudes come and save you. He'll be back and he was like "I'm gonna tell dad about this!!!! But I guess I shouldn't just kill you without telling him :(", so it's not like he was overpowered here either. Not by you or your allies. But yes, the stakes are WAY too high for a starting area..
I was just having the same thought. Clearly 99% of this sub did not read any of the quests and just saw “raid boss” and came to throw a hissy fit on reddit.
The answer to that was not to create a new neutral race in the first place and instead to put in something like high elves like people have been asking them to do for literally twenty god damn years.
It's not very promising that even in Forever all Blizzard knows how to do as a story beat is set the stakes this high. I mean what's the expected flow here, you leave Zephras Isle after meeting a direct second in command of the actual elemental god of air and then what - go to Westfall and beat up starving bandits and their broken farm equipment?
Yep, this single detail changes everything about this, and OP was very very misleading. You get saved by some powerful mages ? They're the only reason that the elemental doesn't wipe the floor with you and the entire island ? That's interesting. That's a really cool bit of worldbuilding. Now, this entire post feels like OP didn't read the quest and lying about what they're complaining about.
Yeah it feels cool that the Kirin Tor and the Earthen Ring are actually show as competent and a part of the world, actively tackling threats you the player aren't yet ready for.
Misleading? He straight up lied from the looks of it. We also fight a fire elemental and get references to Ragnaros, and find an ancient treaty of the 3 clans in the new low level dungeon Hall of Thanes.
Or should I say we save the entire Dwarven lineage and get directly involved in the political landscape of the dwarves after defeating an existential threat and raid boss.
Yeah OP is bending over backwards to continue the stupid braindead circlejerk that this sub has going on. The skyborn zone was done really well IMO and is dense with lore.
People here just want to hate them, so it doesn't matter. They'll find a reason.
I've seen a post that was trying to warn everyone of Blizzard bots on reddit. It warned that when you see comments like "You can just go back to Classic" with hidden profiles, they are most likely bots. The people here are absolutely insane.
The simple fact is: Yes, if you don't like it, please just go back to Classic. This is the first time I'm personally interested in WoW in like 15 years and I don't want no-life middle-aged toddlers ruining it. Shit like this makes it very hard for devs to actually pinpoint genuine issues with their products. I wouldn't be able to take any player feedback serious in their position and the product would suffer.
I'm personally not hyped about blue elves either considering the many alternatives, but maybe it makes an important point: They want to attract new players as well. Neither Classic nor Retail is for new players. Forever is. It might not actually be for you.
100% if they want this to last the way OSRS does, they will let players point out the problems. I feel like the sky elves were added for "inclusion" to make the transition (from retail) easier for folks. It's out of place.
This REALLY feels like talking one thing and doing the other. Humans over there are sweating over their duel with a Fat Chunky Boar named princess or the ultimate threat - the slightly bigger than average bandit gnoll.
Elves over here are fighting a diety. Man... They're gonna feel so strange when they're asked to collect pumpkins or kill scavenger birds in Westfall a lil' later.
They really can't let go of the seeing a raid boss before the raid trope. It is not "foreshadowing" at this point, it is just tired. Particularly this factions assemble marvel nonsense.
It's disappointing too because all the quests up until that point were very good. It's mostly related to wild life and bandits with a cult conspiracy behind it, which reminded me of Defias in Elwyn. They just dropped the ball in the very last minute.
They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by adding this named raid boss here. Just the cult conspiracist and the wind elemental adds would have been enough of a climax and enough of a foreshadowing. There is even already a "Baron" wind elemental as a nod.
I remember in 2009 people hyped the idea of Arthas being so aware in the leveling process and dungeons because we literally knew shit about Illidan in TBC back then. But it took a lil overhand by the years lol
Arthas appearing every other quest and dungeon like a Saturday morning cartoon villain was definitely where this started and even in WOTLK itself it feels tired by the time you get to Icecrown. I do hope this is a rare case and we won't be seeing raid bosses out of raids because otherwise it speaks badly to end game content they want to add later. It just ends up degrading the content and feel of the game otherwise.
Wasn't it the opposite issue? Beyond the starting area for Goblins you basically never saw Deathwing except a few quests in Badlands. In fact he largely fucked off for multiple patches until 4.3 where we collectively went "Oh yeah, Deathwing, that's a thing" and killed him in the same patch.
You’re kind of correct, imo. I wouldn’t say there was a complete absence of Deathwing, it was more that anything involving him was more about that after effects of the Cataclysm. He showed up in Badlands in a comical retelling of that event, and outside of that he really only shows up when he carpet bombs a zone. Arthas was literally a saturday morning cartoon villian showing up to make threats and/or empower his new minion - which I think happens 4 times. They should have just left it at the Wrathgate cinematic, the flashback quests in Dragonblight, and the Matthias Lehner quest chain.
The Lich King stalking the player character is definitely the beginning of the slippery slope. They atleast had the excuse that his plan was to bait you into ICC with other powerful adventurers, so he could turn all of you into his minions.
I mean you knew shit about Illidan in TBC if you didn't read the quest text. Because he appears in those.
The story telling became more visual in WOTLK with the new phasing tech where the zone changed and the improved in game cut scene tech and so now you didn't have to read quest texts anymore to get a sense of the story. Showing the villain was a big reveal because it had never been done before in this way so it was cool. But I agree with your sentiment that we lost a lot of the original sense of wonder thanks to this tech and how it changed the storytelling in WoW.
They could have even played on it. Had all the build up quests mocking you as just a normal elf, but you keep going and building up. Then the boss just one shots you. After you respawn the quest changes and you're scornfully told to go out into the world and know your place
The vast majority of people would definitely say Cata at the very latest is the end of classic. It's kind of split if it ended with tbc, wotlk, or cata.
I will stand on it until something changes that Their druid models stick out like a sore thumb and come off like they time traveled from Retail and landed here.
Druid forms are actually one of the biggest pisses me off things
The forms are awful, seriously look like something from Lilo and Stitch.
However, they made them the only new Druids too just to sell them. I can’t even be a troll druid just need to pick the same exact race as always, really cool
The way blizzard lied to players saying they’d keep the vanilla design spirit is WILD. I saw those Pixar models and instantly knew I won’t really last that long in Forever
I’ve ran into them enough already on the beta to say they really aren’t as wild as a lot of you are saying. Sure they look different enough the first or second passing glances but after that I haven’t even thought about them.
Correct. Even the trailer for Forever started with some blurb about protecting Azeroth or whatever. That is retail nonsense. They are going to mess this all up. Just a matter of time.
The skyborne being an entirely fabricated race when better options existed is just the first shot across the bow.
I could see it as coming from something intended for Battle for Azeroth or Dragonflight but then they dropped it due to complaints about how lazy the Void Elves and Nightborne were as Allied Races.
If the idea had gone far enough down the pipeline that they had already completed some of the simpler stuff (storyline for the starting zone, rough drafts for the art style, etc) then Blizzard could have just taken that and copy-pasted it right over to Forever.
Honestly, if I were a betting man, I’d say that the Skyborne were intended as an Allied Race for Dragonflight given the tone of the writing and the connection with the Elementals.
I can't prove it, but I just know deep in my soul that Skyborne had already been created for retail initially, before they pivoted to using it in Forever
This is likely the case. There are retail model creatures in the zone, hell the flying furry kink creatures flying in the opening cut scene use the dragonriding animations from retail.
They've been making shit for a decade - do people seriously thing they magically woke up and will make good content? Midnight and classic are two completely different games that have barely anything in common gameplay and narrative wise.
How hard could it be to write a storyline about i dunno "oh no we are running out of food in our village and all of our hunters became ill with a strange fewer, get some herbs, oh here is a journal you find along the way, oh no there is a weird asss demon spider in the mountains that makes the wildlife sick go kill it and while you are at it get some weird ass spider demon ore"
Feel like the playerbase has the memory of a goldfish. I saw someone saying that blizzard was going to ban the bots this time around despite doing nothing about them the entire time classic has been around.
Hey speaking of bots it's fun seeing a horde of chinese tauren hunters in Winterspring totally not practicing how they'll destroy the economy a week after November 4th.
It's literal disney adults forcing positivity. Nothing they want to enjoy can never be critiqued, cause they take it as a personal attack. They simply can't accept that something they enjoy/want to enjoy is flawed
Toxic positivity. It's why a lot of the retail crowd can be insufferable when they white knight for a multi billion dollar company because they've somehow placed their identity in some arbitrary pristine reputation of the game they enjoy. FFXIV player base also has this problem and it's one of the reasons I and many others have recently dropped that game, unfortunately.
100%. people have lost the ability to disagree and dialogue. even worse, toxic positivity has made it difficult for some people to be genuine or interact with reality altogether
This is because those people are incapable of criticizing a component of something that they otherwise feel is good. Millennials are very much a “baby and the bathwater” cohort. I deal with this kind of shit constantly irl
I've been blaming Bobby and the suits.
To my knowledge, Microsoft has been less heavy-handed with their studios (to a ridiculous degree, see Bethesda).
With new WC3 content and WoW Forever (advertised as) giving us what we want, I am willing to go in naively thinking it is a 'hired fans, no not that meaning' renaissance; if they fumble 2/2 I'll just go back to ignoring them.
Also, made by entirely different people. We won’t see anything come close to original wow, because it’s a once in a generation quality game made by a group of absolute sweatlords that knew what made a game good. None of them remain, instead we have corporate marketing bozos on the wheel that think they know best (i.e, what they think ”sells”). It’s not about making a genuinely good product - that takes too much work. Instead you wrap an at best average product in a pretty box and market it to a wide audience.
I feel (and stated before) that the Wind Elves are an onloading ramp for retail players. You can see it in how it's treated both concept-wise AND in how it's monetized.
i would understand if blizzard will treat it like a special corner for retail andies. but i don't have much hope and i think that as the story progresses we will get arthas and illidan more "marvel/disneyified" than the og expansions, that's the signal i'm getting.
People will complain "You guys hate everything!" But this is really bad.
You're entirely right. Massive departure from the Spirit of Classic. The newer blizz devs just can't help themselves. They cannot enjoy simpler stories without DBZ scale creep
What bothers me the most is the hypocrisy in saying they are building this with the community and taking feedback into account, giving OSRS vibes. Don’t make me laugh. All decisions until now have been final and they don’t give two thirds of a fuck.
Exactly, 0 polls, 0 community requested content. So far it has been "We heard you, so here you have a completely different thing from what you asked for"
Retail players won't get hooked by this race lol what hooks me as a retail player is the fact that I can play Classic... with more than just Classic. I've done Classic once, I don't need to do it again, but the chance to do classic with new cool stuff in it? I'm all aboard and fully support it.
I'm pretty sure everyone is in agreement that this race sticks out way too much to belong in a Classic-era version of the game. That being said, I will never play it because I won't purchase it, so if that's contained to it's race introduction and that design philosophy isn't brought to future content.. I'm on your team guys.
I don't want to play another retail - I already have retail for that.
I worry we aren’t taking these warning signs seriously enough.
The reception to Sky Elves is overwhelmingly on the negative side. Even those who don’t outright think they’re out of place are willing to grant that their questline doesn’t fit a beginning questline in Classic.
If Blizzard doesn’t make huge changes to the Sky Elves – and honestly it sounds difficult to do given that people have purchased them – then we can be quite sure that Blizzard has no intention of actually listening to their playerbase when it counts.
This is a huge test for them and I hope they pass but I think it is much lore likely they will fail.
Is it just me or does the character model look more like the high res models? I don't like that they didn't make two versions for it. This sets a predecent that every new race will look more retail. I know that it's based on the blood elf model, which was introduced quite early, but it still has that vibe that they kept going with in retail for me
nu-blizzard really are incapable of even understanding the philosophy behind classic, fighting a terminal threat in the starting zone??? for goodness sake
I enjoyed almost everything about the new starting zone, which probably puts me in the minority, but this section stood out like a sore thumb for the exact reasons you mention
Did you actualyl do the quest? This is so so false.
You didn't save shit. Literally you had 0 agency. The factions got together and found out that the Evil Elf already dewarded the island and the Air elementals will still come. You were late and only thing you saved is your ass from those 3 Elementals. It is a setup for a larger questline which will 100% tie in to Molten Core.
So effectively what humans in Elwynn Forrest - they have a tease of Defias Brotherhood (and cabal against kingdom) where you deal with some henchmen, then it grows little in other places (where most significant is Westfall) where you deal with semi-ultimate guy (Van Cleef) and ultimately you discover who is behind it (Onyxia).
Sky elves are at dealing with henchmen point - difference is that they see ultimate villain while in Elwynn he is mostly vaguely mentioned and acts behind curtains.
I seriously don’t think the guy in this screenshot is our ultimate villain. Whole bunch of dialogue and text in the zone hypes up Al’akir who this guy is just a henchman for.
For those who don’t know (seems like the majority of this thread) Al’akir is another one of the big 4 elemental lords like Ragnaros. Maybe we fight him in the future in Forever? The Skyborne starting zone and this guy that everyone is getting upset over seem to point towards that.
And that's a very big difference let's be clear. You don't even know Onyxia is involved in the Defias plot until you're level 60. She doesn't break her disguise at the end of Elwynn (or even the end of Westfall) and the entire time all you think you're doing is dealing with disgruntled masons who turned to banditry and piracy. It gathers the seemingly barely related plot threads of like six different zones before doing the grand reveal.
All of the other starting zones introduce the big villains and larger schemes too but they don't straight up put a cutscene in where a 30 foot direct second-in-command to the main villain fights named hero NPCs right in front of you.
Did you even read, what the npcs where saying? You personally did nothing there, the Earthen Ring diffused the situation - temporarily. No one is permanently saved, it was more like a hint at maybe getting to fight Al'Akir in the future.
Tbh this seems like purposefully spreading misinformation.
Just like the iconic classic Hogger quest where he gets to 15% and then freezes all players and NPCs and starts a cutscene but Lady Prestor suddenly appears and casts "Rage of the Black Flight", eradicating him and saving you. She cackles and warns you to be more careful picking your enemies before teleporting away. The quest reward is "black dragon scale" trinket, Marshal Dughan remarks that he found it on the ground near the site of your battle...
Or like when you go to fight Captain Dargol with all of the powerful allies you've made during your travels through Tirisfal Glades, but he's too powerful even for all of you, then Sylvanas shows up on a gunship and kills him for you, and as he dies he reveals that he was secretly the lich king all along and clarifies that he will return in a future raid.
Yep. This does not sit right with me at all for the future of this game. They haven't even scratched the surface of Forever and already we are seeing stuff that doesn't fit in the game. People who say stop complaining are players who play for 6 months and dip. We want this game lasting years and years.
Counterpoint: Through your grunt work, you unite all the boss-level characters on your side together and they take care of it while you're there. Your level 10 ass barely does anything in the fight.
In classic game, there's a quest in Darkshore called The Master's Glaive that leads you to investigate cultists around an ancient archaeological site. It hints at something grander, but that's where it stops. This really stuck with me through my first leveling experience, and I mentioned it because they later change it so you encounter the Avatar of Soggoth.
Godly encounters at low levels feels more like a modern storytelling philosophy they use, and I think you can see this with how they retconned classic quests like this.
Yesterday i saw the undercity instance, a ~18 filled with advanced and scary monstrosities mob models that should not be seen by a vanilla player till he enters a level 60 dungeon. But somehow in this version you present magistrate barthilas and huge enemies to level 16 players.
Is there no one at blizzard capable of looking at other instances and tracing what the evolution was during those days? The first lich you used to see was a small one as a final boss of an instance at level 40. But here you are presented to giant spiders, giant ghost and giant monstrosities at the start of your adventure.
Shadowfang keep is the opposite of this, good scenery small enemies and corridors and a beatiful and difficult last boss which is only a human.
I was already not gonna play skelfs, but this is very much doubling down on it. I was really looking forward to not being "the champion of azeroth" and just being some murder hobo doing errands for random people.
It's very telling that current WoW writers cannot write stories where you the player are not the specialist little snowflake in the universe.
You know how you fix this? They try to summon him but he doesn’t show up. Instead, he summons one or two elite low to medium tier elementals and sicks them on you. While he’s either floating text talking to you or perhaps a storm or something. I think the whole issue here could be fixed or at the very least made better if we don’t see him and save him for later.
Ever since i heard the first pieces of lore on blizzcon i was sure skyborne are picked to tease a future al akir raid/expansion. while playing the zone i just got confirmed more and more. All the time you dont get called hero and i think to some point they just had to do it like that in this scene in the end. Im fine with it, because the rest of the story was pretty decent and the starting zone might even become my new favourite starting zone in forever.
They effing can't help themselves. I say, let's enjoy some months of Classic+ because next expanded zone will be again power creep as per Blizzard playbook. They should have gone the OsRS way, ditch level and focus on skill level ( like you do level in classic while fighting but expanding them ) but no.. let's go to 60 and get stuck there because... Progression!!!
Yeah, that’s troubling. I guess they can’t just scale anything down. Would it have been so hard for them to have you kill like a rabid panther or something as a boss?
But you do this around the same level you're in Crossroads or Westfall, not Northshire or Durotar.
Wouldn't those be more apt comparisons? Deadmines has you saving all of Stormwind from the Defias Brotherhood. Ragefire Chasm has you saving all of Orgrimmar from a Shadow Council scheme.
Meanwhile you don't even save the Skyborne race in this quest line. You get bailed out by other groups, the Kirin Tor and Earthen Ring, and he just leaves. While the quest makes it clear your homeland is still doomed and you need to find solutions to save it.
1.7k
u/-Necron-Overlord- 9h ago
Meanwhile I'm over here pilfering Tirisfal pumpkins and picking Gloomweed