#varimathras

The fight for control of the Undercity begins.

I'm so damn happy that I finished this before the end of January. This month marks two years since I posted the first chapter of this fic :D It's been slow, and sometimes painful, but I'm thankful for everyone who's stuck with it (and me) for this long.

Uh so either this is potentially one of the biggest retcons in Warcraft history OR Afrasiabi is talking out of his ass. Even though the Battle for Undercity questline/scenario isn’t available anymore, it’s pretty fucking clear that Varimathras and Putress were Legion collaborators trying to deflect blame onto the Forsaken/Horde. Varimathras literally starts talking about ‘The Master’ during the climactic battle where he’s holding open portals to the Twisting Nether for demons to come through. There’s no grey area in this.

If Sylvanas was actively involved, it was only in setting things up (moving Blight production to Northrend), then allowing Putress and Varimathras to do what she expected them to. That’s still far from ‘ordering’ the attack itself. Afrasiabi is full of shit. We were there, we played the questline, we saw what was going on. Blizzard, please stop trying to support your awful writing retroactively.

EDIT:

I read the article that THIS article was quoting, and something really struck me, a quote from Afrasiabi.

"Any time we get a player base that's divided in their support for a character, I feel like we're doing our jobs. Any time it's one-sided to the point of 'this is clearly the right direction', it's not as interesting.”

I’ve bolded the important part, because it potentially says a lot about Blizzard’s story choices and philosophy, the philosophy of keeping things ‘interesting.’

I literally took a class on this, and it can be summed up in one phrase:

A leg wound is interesting.

In that class, we learned to differentiate between interest and entertainment - they’re both close to each other, but there’s some distinct differences, differences to be aware of when writing and designing games/stories/etc. There’s only one requirement for something to be interesting, and that’s this: it has to hold your attention. For entertainment, there’s more complex requirements: it has to provoke a response that the viewer wants to revisit, see more of, and/or continue experiencing. Obviously, all entertaining things are interesting, but not all interesting things are entertaining.

When I’m talking about ‘wanting’ to experience something, that’s not just referring to positive experiences. Schindler’s List isn’t a movie that most people ‘want’ to see in the basic ‘looking for a good time’ definition, and yet people intentionally choose to sit down and watch it. They want to have that experience, even if that experience entails grief and horror. The bottom line is that the brain is craving a certain experience, whether naturally or because it was surprised by novelty and desired more input. That’s what I mean when I’m talking about want and entertainment.

Interest, on the other hand, is completely devoid of any emotional charge. It can produce an emotional charge, but it is itself a neutral word. Someone in a hockey mask hunting you through your house is interesting. So is a pair of socks you’ve never seen before. An interesting thing holds your attention by virtue of its difference from everyday existence, not because of any content.

This leads me back to Afrasiabi talking about things being not as interesting when everyone’s agreeing. This sort of thought process is pretty dangerous, in my opinion, because it only attaches value to interest, not entertainment. This design philosophy doesn’t care how the game makes you feel, only that it makes you play; every event, no matter how triumphant or horrendous, has the same transactional value - it keeps you in the seat, so they’ll keep doing it. There’s no care for the emotional arc, character fidelity, or narrative weight - just ‘push button, receive attention.’

In my opinion, this is a terrible - and furthermore lazy - way to write a story. If you view your players as just reserves of attention to endlessly mine, then all narrative accountability goes out the window. You’re writing a narrative with the mindset that setting the house on fire is as valid a choice as cooking a surprise dinner - and, more insulting, you’re expecting that players should want to be interested instead of entertained; you’re expecting that they’ll put up with any nonsense you vomit out because they want their attention to be held, not because they actually give a shit about anything or anyone in the game world. And if you’re designing/writing a game with that mindset knowing that your players are wanting to be entertained, it’s even more irresponsible, because you’re taking characters and places and worlds that people have serious attachments to and you’re disregarding any narrative context as you bang these elements together to produce loud noises.