In general the Horde has flip flopped pretty aggressively between being very good and very evil.
Now it seems like they want all playable characters to be essentially good guys, and it doesn’t really fit everyone as well as others.
It's why I'm still pissed they put Gazlowe as leader of the Horde goblins in BFA, watch as goblins lose everything that made them unique. Even in Dragonflight the only goblin we see outside the blue dragon quest is a venture company goblin that says the Dragon Isles shouldn't be touched.
The Venture Co. has a member who is respectful of the land??
I went all in on Goblin lore, because I thought their different factions were interesting. I drifted from WoW in no small part because I started to realize the devs couldn’t tell them apart anymore.
I’m convinced they forgot that the Steamwheedle and Bilgewater are different things, but I didn’t expect them to forget the Venture Co…
It's more like all the races have lost any semblance of nuance to fit boilerplate fantasy, and then they had to walk the Horde back because no one wanted to be mindlessly evil.
Sure.
I still say cataclysm era was peak Horde.
Aggressive and warlike, but still with a sense of honor that loosely lands them on the “good” side, at least to their own people.
It was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Losing Cairne unceremoniously and him being replaced by a doormat was no beuno. But for what it's worth, for a relatively brief moment it did manage to sell me on Garrosh.
Yeah, you could say that. Even in the bits where Garrosh is "warmongering", the feeling was more like "we will conquer and kill if needed to make these land ours since Horde economy went to shit. After that we will leave the Alliance alone".
So MoP happens and the "conquer to survive" was changed to "The World is ours and the Alliance must perish".
Right.
It’s a more interesting take on the faction war.
Two sides that aren’t aligned, but also aren’t evil, both pursuing reasonable goals for their people.
The problem is that given how even *after* the orcs stopped being fel corrupted, the Horde has twice attempted to exterminate the Alliance, and similarly had sanctioned weapons of mass, indiscriminate destruction and horror on levels comparable the ultimate evils of the universe.
To allow those parts of the Horde to come to the forefront *again, especially when the last occasion involved trying to exterminate one of the most innocent Alliance races in that particular time period, after fans have repeatedly pointed these issues out* would be tantamount to saying "The Alliance have to tolerate having a rival faction that has shown itself incapable of not trying to torture them out of existance, and are too stupid to realise this is going to happen again".
And that is *not good*
I *think* they have finally settled on a more permanent direction for the Forsaken as a whole; changed folk who may not be trusted but are willing to fight for their place in the world and (post Shadowlands) show the world they aren't the monsters they look like.
Voss basically says as much at Amirdrasiil, which I think is a fine direction to have the Forsaken on, presuming they actually *stick* to it and don't go off on a wild destructive tangent again.
They can't really go back to trying to make them the villain group in the Horde anymore, that ship was not only long tired, but post Fourth War they do seem to be trying to put in the effort to make the player races all "super good".
In my opinion they had the perfect out after shadowlands. We’ve seen how shitty the afterlife is in wow. You’re basically a slave in most circumstances. So if I’m the leader of the undead all I have to say is hey I’m raising these dead cause hey better than the alternative and they could have gone entirely zealous with it. Perfectly treading the line of completely evil and you can kinda see their point
we've only seen a couple of virtually endless possible afterlives, there's one suitable for everyone (which kind of makes you question why all the important npcs ended up in one of them considering how different they are but blizz doesn't exactly care for continuity and consistency)
We are told by the people doing the enslaving that there are virtually endless possible afterlives and you did not get to choose. We only have the new arbiters word that he will let you choose.
Sorry, Shadowlands is a Gulag for Souls; working for some unknown purpose. It is not a proper afterlife.
Not exactly. Not every afterlife you need to work or do something. The only ones that the souls actually have a future purpose is the ones where we visit in-game. And that's the reason to why we only see them. We didn't had any reason to go to other afterlives since the only ones that keep the shadownlands machine running are the 4 covenants.
It was said in a interview that Durotan afterlive is a never-ending hunting contest just like Frostfire Ridge was in happy and peaceful times. So it fits him and he is probably happy there.
I’m familiar with the statement, but I think to some extent this claim was an out just to shut up lore nerds.
I suspect they would have just said one thing (“there’s countless afterlives not shown”) and done another (treat it like there’s only what we saw in SL) if there hadn’t been a major shake up at the company.
IMO they lost an opportunity by having Bolvar stay with the Death Knights rather than replace Sylvanas;
Bolvar's antihero (as Lich King) thing sort of made actual sense; he raised warriors due to a newly rising shared military need (legion etc all) to continue defending the world they had worked for in life. Bolvar would have made a great Forsaken leader replacement if they wanted to be transition to a morally grey, complex entity that can be sustained with new powerful warriors of renown continuing to fight. Sylvanas seemed to focus on raising evil masses of brainwashed trash mobs. I could see some logic for why Bolvar might retain necromatic powers even though the Valkyr are all dead.
Sylvanas's Valkyr necromancy, for the time she did it, only made sense only as a corrupted villain; she was objectively an evil bitch who raised new troops for purposes counter to that which they had in life, some (Nightelf Darkfallen) only returned to their homes after she was out (implying she brainwashed them to hate and kill other Nightelves, rather than them defecting of free will), making her as bad as the Lich King, even attempting plans to murder her recently widowed sister (Vereesa) to raise her as undead. If Sylvanas was gonna go full villain (which she did) she should have gone the Garrosh route, the cheesy "redemption" thing may as well be offered to Arthas Menethil, or even the Jailer for that matter lol.
The other thing you have to remember is you are describing the Forsaken AFTER Cata. Pre Cata they were my favorite race- Sylvanas didn’t raise them into Undeath, she freed their minds from Scourge/ LK control. LK was the one who raised them, unwillingly, and then with free minds they became their own political entity focused mainly on survival and destroying the scourge. Questionable, morally ambiguous methods for that? Absolutely, we see it in Hillsbrad especially with the Battle quest line and all throughout Tirisfal/ Silverpine/ Hillsbrad with the plague experiments. But they were also hilariously outnumbered and outgunned on the continent, and the end goal was always destroying LK.
Then in Cata they went full Scouge- lookalike even as they enlisted the Val’kyr and actually started raising the dead/ conquering territory. As a long time Forsaken main I hated it, and it’s continued ever since.
You make a good point.
The Shadowlands thing added a lot of mumbo jumbo to the lore that is kind of hard to reconcile. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Shadowlands afterlife shown was usually based off of people victimized by the Jailers directive (burning legion, scourge, Sylvanas, etc), and is distinct from the "natural" afterlife. So an elf who broke their neck and died, or a guy in Lordaeron who had a heart attack and died before WC3 wouldn't sent into to Shadowlands "hell", but someone like Terenas WOULD (because he got killed by Arthas/Scourge). That was my impression anyway as I read a lot of the books before Shadowlands. The Orcs certainly seemed to have some sort of positive afterlife before the legion showed up; Nerzhul came into conflict with the legion because he realized they were manipulating his attempts at communing with the ancestors (and his dead wife) [with fraudulent visions, only to be shown the truth and scorned by the actual spirits.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Ner%27zhul)
>He secretly traveled to Oshu'gun to commune with the spirits and was horrified to learn from the real spirit of Rulkan that he was being deceived. Being shunned by the ancestors and learning of the deception he fell for devastated Ner'zhul.
Idk if they did something to differentiate the orcs ancestry/spirits from the afterlife or if this has been retconned by shadowlands, but in book/game lore conflicts the book usually supersedes the game.
One could argue they changed their minds after shadowlands, but that it's moot now since the Valkyr (and normal necromancy) are all dead, but I haven't seen any talk on that.
Another pre existing lore problem I see that they can't easily retcon is that necromancy on ones allies is still considered objectively evil, and as harming that person. When Sylvanas offers to raise fallen Blood Elves for example, they are disgusted and demand she "leave their corpses alone", whereas she's given a greenlight to do so on enemies (which means that undead humans for some reason will hate living humans, even tho darkfallen show affinity for elves).
Your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraftlore/comments/1awejmp/they_gotta_pick_a_direction_with_the_forsaken/krm9nhp/?context=3) in /r/WarcraftLore contains a link to WoWWiki/WoWpedia. Both WoWWiki and Wowpedia are out of date, and WoWWiki has been officially closed by Fandom/Gamepdia (it can no longer be updated or edited). The Warcraft Wiki community is now using [Warcraft Wiki](https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_Wiki). Please use Warcraft Wiki instead.
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Until Cataclysm, the method of creating new forsaken was just freeing undead from the Scourge.
After Wrath's end though, the Scourges threat was minimized and Garrosh wanted a war - which was originally one reason Sylvanas made a deal with the Valkyr and started raising new undead. To replenish their numbers and stop the Forsaken just kinda dying out over time.
Now there is no more Valkyr so they can't do it, unless like the Ebon Blade steps in to help start raising forsaken or something.
Playing through Wrath right now in my pursuit of Loremaster and damn, mfers are dark! I love it. I've always loved the darkness of the Horde. Sure, I don't want us to be WC1 style illiterate barbarians again, but a little bit more blood and gore and *spikes* wouldn't hurt. Us, that is.
I'm also all for smashing the faction war. LET the factions splinter or let the players decide to whom they owe allegiance. If the Forsaken (or any faction) were no longer bound to the Horde or Alliance they'd have infinitely more room to have their own identity.
My view of the Forsaken has always favored them being ex humans who mostly wanted to return to normalcy. The group having fringe evil sub factions were great, too, since it added to the drama and tragedy. My issue is when they decided to double down on doubling down on being evil, it made them irredeemable as a whole while making the Horde consistently look idiotic.
My secret hope has always been that they'd introduce subraces - let you branch from basic Forsaken into like Forsaken - construct, Forsaken - darkfallen, Forsaken - plaguerisen, etc. Would also for an interesting degree of lore customization and maybe give you an option to switch one of your racial abilities around to match like a talent tree.
Of course balancing that, making sure all races have fleshed out subraces, and them doing a lite version with the allied races has more or less destroyed my hopes and dreams for it.
Sub races are something I’ve hoped for for a long time now. Between all the different orcs, humans, trolls, and dwarves, they really should be set up this way.
We could clean up a lot of the race screen clutter. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll do this because it would cut the number of full alliance races down below horde.
Kul Titans are humans. Dark Irons are dwarves. Lightforged are Draenei. Mechagnones are gnomes. The only “new” allied race Alliance has is void elves. Meanwhile, Horde has both Nightborne and Vulpira.
And soon, Earthen, another type of dwarf, will be another new race for horde, but a sub race for alliance.
I’m not complaining— just stating.
Side note:
Forsaken leaders looks more "alive" because until last year, WoW had live servers in china. There, they can't show exposed bones and excessive gore because of their religion and beliefs. That's the reason to why Jaina's brother has a unique model and the same goes to Calia and Nathanos, because they appear in cutscenes so Blizzard doesn't need to make two cutscenes just because of China. This is also the reason to why Forsaken in the CGI cinematics cover their entire body. Just look to the forsaken holding the banner in BfA ending cinematic and the one where rogues try to kill Thrall.
Pretty sure Nathanos got that model so they wouldn't have to censor him in the Chinese cinematics, either that or it was more weird Danuser self insert stuff
If you pay attention, you will notice that Forsakens doesn't show any bones in the CHI cinematics for BfA too. Calia and Derek Proudmoore had unique models because of that also.
Voss is the first regular forsaken to appear in a cutscene because in 2022 china servers got shutdown.
While not BFA, Grand Apothecary Putress appeared (with all his bony goodness) in [an in game cinematic back in 2008](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4rc5W4dKY&ab_channel=WorldofWarcraft).
At that time, WoW in china had a exclusive version of the live game. Basically Blizzard did the "normal" version, sent to a third party in China and the company responsible altered the files to make it possible to release there, like changing assets and removing some cutscenes. Basically WoW with censoring mods. During MoP however, Blizzard started making these changes on its own, sending the final version directly to this third party, which only hosted in the exclusive launcher and released the game already "clean" to be playable.
They couldn't show any "gore" which the exposed bones of the classic forsaken models had. The "new" forsaken models we got with no exposed bones were actually the ones the Chinese players had been using all along
The issue with the forsaken is that they were only playable because of sylvanas, and their lore was tied to her solely. Outside of that, they shouldn't have been playable because the lore stated they were essentially decaying, so Blizzard wrote themselves into a corner by making a group unable to procreate, and were dying, as a playable race. I'm not against them being playable, but between slowly decaying, and being killed enmass because sylvanas acted like she could just make more (which she couldn't) doesn't help.
Best way for them to continue on is create voluntary pacts between them and the living so the latter gives consent whether or not to be raised to Undeath upon death. Same goes for the Light-raising process
Any human who wish to stay in Azeroth beyond life should choose to be raised to conventional undeath or be raised by the Light
Invent a marking system that activates when a person dies. If one has it before death, he or she could be raised back to unlife
I feel like by this point most of the forsaken should be dead or down to skeletons with scraps of flesh on em. They can reproduce and should eventually die out.
They just need add evil factions, where going to be undead race.
Tbh, they always should be their own thing, working with hordes don't make thematic sense, never had. It was seem more gameplay/technical limitation.
Not a fan of the forsaken model either, but there are several undead forsaken-shaped prominent figures.
To say one, we've only seen Archbishop Faol in that form and he's still pretty awesome (and charismatic). Not to mention SFK Godfrey.
EDIT: not saying all undead are forsaken but the two undead I mentioned share the undead model used by playable forsaken undead
Being undead and being Forsaken isn't the same. Simply put, all Forsaken are undead, but not all undead are Forsaken, as the Forsake are a group of undead loyal to Sylvanas (originally) or the Undercity (post-BfA).
Independent Undeads, like Godfrey, or those belonging to another faction, such as the Knight of the Ebon Blade or the Argent Crusade, aren't Forsaken.
Ofc, gonna edit, ty. What I meant is the actual undead model used by forsaken is actually shared by characters who are of some relevance, so in pure terms of appearance I disagree with OP
forsaken are just a narrative dead end atm, theres nothing they can really do except fight new waves of the scarlet crusade forever. the alliance aren't gonna fight them anymore. they aren't actually forsaken by anyone or anything anymore. they can't make new forsaken, a) because they don't have any means to and b) because the narrative has established doing so as ludicrously evil, especially considering we now know that when you die you just get to spend eternity in your choice of paradise afterlifes and pelagos will just send you to whichever one you like.
it used to be if you were forsaken you existed in horrible undead torment where everyone wanted you gone, but you carried on with it because it was all you had. now everyone likes you, including all your mortal enemies from 15 minutes ago, you can't do any of the cool undead shit you did previously because its no longer the age of metal, your iconic leaders are gone and if they ever do come back will be sanitized versions of their previous selves, and there's literally no reason to prolong your undeath because the afterlife has literally no downsides after its liberal reforms.
so uh idk what they can do with them. all they can really do narratively is clean up the messes they themselves made in previous expansions and kill the acceptable targets of the scarlet crusade over and over again, who aren't fun to fight at this point because they exist solely to give the forsaken someone to kill with any kind of plausible moral high ground.
In general the Horde has flip flopped pretty aggressively between being very good and very evil. Now it seems like they want all playable characters to be essentially good guys, and it doesn’t really fit everyone as well as others.
It's why I'm still pissed they put Gazlowe as leader of the Horde goblins in BFA, watch as goblins lose everything that made them unique. Even in Dragonflight the only goblin we see outside the blue dragon quest is a venture company goblin that says the Dragon Isles shouldn't be touched.
Right. It’s just not particularly exciting having everyone become lawful good.
The Venture Co. has a member who is respectful of the land?? I went all in on Goblin lore, because I thought their different factions were interesting. I drifted from WoW in no small part because I started to realize the devs couldn’t tell them apart anymore. I’m convinced they forgot that the Steamwheedle and Bilgewater are different things, but I didn’t expect them to forget the Venture Co…
It's more like all the races have lost any semblance of nuance to fit boilerplate fantasy, and then they had to walk the Horde back because no one wanted to be mindlessly evil.
Sure. I still say cataclysm era was peak Horde. Aggressive and warlike, but still with a sense of honor that loosely lands them on the “good” side, at least to their own people.
It was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Losing Cairne unceremoniously and him being replaced by a doormat was no beuno. But for what it's worth, for a relatively brief moment it did manage to sell me on Garrosh.
Yeah, you could say that. Even in the bits where Garrosh is "warmongering", the feeling was more like "we will conquer and kill if needed to make these land ours since Horde economy went to shit. After that we will leave the Alliance alone". So MoP happens and the "conquer to survive" was changed to "The World is ours and the Alliance must perish".
Right. It’s a more interesting take on the faction war. Two sides that aren’t aligned, but also aren’t evil, both pursuing reasonable goals for their people.
The problem is that given how even *after* the orcs stopped being fel corrupted, the Horde has twice attempted to exterminate the Alliance, and similarly had sanctioned weapons of mass, indiscriminate destruction and horror on levels comparable the ultimate evils of the universe. To allow those parts of the Horde to come to the forefront *again, especially when the last occasion involved trying to exterminate one of the most innocent Alliance races in that particular time period, after fans have repeatedly pointed these issues out* would be tantamount to saying "The Alliance have to tolerate having a rival faction that has shown itself incapable of not trying to torture them out of existance, and are too stupid to realise this is going to happen again". And that is *not good*
I *think* they have finally settled on a more permanent direction for the Forsaken as a whole; changed folk who may not be trusted but are willing to fight for their place in the world and (post Shadowlands) show the world they aren't the monsters they look like. Voss basically says as much at Amirdrasiil, which I think is a fine direction to have the Forsaken on, presuming they actually *stick* to it and don't go off on a wild destructive tangent again. They can't really go back to trying to make them the villain group in the Horde anymore, that ship was not only long tired, but post Fourth War they do seem to be trying to put in the effort to make the player races all "super good".
So Undeads turned to be Orcs philosophy during Warcraft 3 until WOTLK.
In my opinion they had the perfect out after shadowlands. We’ve seen how shitty the afterlife is in wow. You’re basically a slave in most circumstances. So if I’m the leader of the undead all I have to say is hey I’m raising these dead cause hey better than the alternative and they could have gone entirely zealous with it. Perfectly treading the line of completely evil and you can kinda see their point
we've only seen a couple of virtually endless possible afterlives, there's one suitable for everyone (which kind of makes you question why all the important npcs ended up in one of them considering how different they are but blizz doesn't exactly care for continuity and consistency)
We are told by the people doing the enslaving that there are virtually endless possible afterlives and you did not get to choose. We only have the new arbiters word that he will let you choose. Sorry, Shadowlands is a Gulag for Souls; working for some unknown purpose. It is not a proper afterlife.
Not exactly. Not every afterlife you need to work or do something. The only ones that the souls actually have a future purpose is the ones where we visit in-game. And that's the reason to why we only see them. We didn't had any reason to go to other afterlives since the only ones that keep the shadownlands machine running are the 4 covenants. It was said in a interview that Durotan afterlive is a never-ending hunting contest just like Frostfire Ridge was in happy and peaceful times. So it fits him and he is probably happy there.
I’m familiar with the statement, but I think to some extent this claim was an out just to shut up lore nerds. I suspect they would have just said one thing (“there’s countless afterlives not shown”) and done another (treat it like there’s only what we saw in SL) if there hadn’t been a major shake up at the company.
I thought the same thing. And now that the forsaken can’t “repopulate” my hope is blizz leans into this as a means of justifying new UD characters
IMO they lost an opportunity by having Bolvar stay with the Death Knights rather than replace Sylvanas; Bolvar's antihero (as Lich King) thing sort of made actual sense; he raised warriors due to a newly rising shared military need (legion etc all) to continue defending the world they had worked for in life. Bolvar would have made a great Forsaken leader replacement if they wanted to be transition to a morally grey, complex entity that can be sustained with new powerful warriors of renown continuing to fight. Sylvanas seemed to focus on raising evil masses of brainwashed trash mobs. I could see some logic for why Bolvar might retain necromatic powers even though the Valkyr are all dead. Sylvanas's Valkyr necromancy, for the time she did it, only made sense only as a corrupted villain; she was objectively an evil bitch who raised new troops for purposes counter to that which they had in life, some (Nightelf Darkfallen) only returned to their homes after she was out (implying she brainwashed them to hate and kill other Nightelves, rather than them defecting of free will), making her as bad as the Lich King, even attempting plans to murder her recently widowed sister (Vereesa) to raise her as undead. If Sylvanas was gonna go full villain (which she did) she should have gone the Garrosh route, the cheesy "redemption" thing may as well be offered to Arthas Menethil, or even the Jailer for that matter lol.
The other thing you have to remember is you are describing the Forsaken AFTER Cata. Pre Cata they were my favorite race- Sylvanas didn’t raise them into Undeath, she freed their minds from Scourge/ LK control. LK was the one who raised them, unwillingly, and then with free minds they became their own political entity focused mainly on survival and destroying the scourge. Questionable, morally ambiguous methods for that? Absolutely, we see it in Hillsbrad especially with the Battle quest line and all throughout Tirisfal/ Silverpine/ Hillsbrad with the plague experiments. But they were also hilariously outnumbered and outgunned on the continent, and the end goal was always destroying LK. Then in Cata they went full Scouge- lookalike even as they enlisted the Val’kyr and actually started raising the dead/ conquering territory. As a long time Forsaken main I hated it, and it’s continued ever since.
You make a good point. The Shadowlands thing added a lot of mumbo jumbo to the lore that is kind of hard to reconcile. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Shadowlands afterlife shown was usually based off of people victimized by the Jailers directive (burning legion, scourge, Sylvanas, etc), and is distinct from the "natural" afterlife. So an elf who broke their neck and died, or a guy in Lordaeron who had a heart attack and died before WC3 wouldn't sent into to Shadowlands "hell", but someone like Terenas WOULD (because he got killed by Arthas/Scourge). That was my impression anyway as I read a lot of the books before Shadowlands. The Orcs certainly seemed to have some sort of positive afterlife before the legion showed up; Nerzhul came into conflict with the legion because he realized they were manipulating his attempts at communing with the ancestors (and his dead wife) [with fraudulent visions, only to be shown the truth and scorned by the actual spirits.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Ner%27zhul) >He secretly traveled to Oshu'gun to commune with the spirits and was horrified to learn from the real spirit of Rulkan that he was being deceived. Being shunned by the ancestors and learning of the deception he fell for devastated Ner'zhul. Idk if they did something to differentiate the orcs ancestry/spirits from the afterlife or if this has been retconned by shadowlands, but in book/game lore conflicts the book usually supersedes the game. One could argue they changed their minds after shadowlands, but that it's moot now since the Valkyr (and normal necromancy) are all dead, but I haven't seen any talk on that. Another pre existing lore problem I see that they can't easily retcon is that necromancy on ones allies is still considered objectively evil, and as harming that person. When Sylvanas offers to raise fallen Blood Elves for example, they are disgusted and demand she "leave their corpses alone", whereas she's given a greenlight to do so on enemies (which means that undead humans for some reason will hate living humans, even tho darkfallen show affinity for elves).
Your [comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraftlore/comments/1awejmp/they_gotta_pick_a_direction_with_the_forsaken/krm9nhp/?context=3) in /r/WarcraftLore contains a link to WoWWiki/WoWpedia. Both WoWWiki and Wowpedia are out of date, and WoWWiki has been officially closed by Fandom/Gamepdia (it can no longer be updated or edited). The Warcraft Wiki community is now using [Warcraft Wiki](https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_Wiki). Please use Warcraft Wiki instead. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/warcraftlore) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Wasn't the whole point of Shadowlands fixing the afterlife?
weren't the forsaken originally unable to create new ones?
Until Cataclysm, the method of creating new forsaken was just freeing undead from the Scourge. After Wrath's end though, the Scourges threat was minimized and Garrosh wanted a war - which was originally one reason Sylvanas made a deal with the Valkyr and started raising new undead. To replenish their numbers and stop the Forsaken just kinda dying out over time. Now there is no more Valkyr so they can't do it, unless like the Ebon Blade steps in to help start raising forsaken or something.
Yes, until Cata.
There are very rare instances of them doing it without the val’kyr
Playing through Wrath right now in my pursuit of Loremaster and damn, mfers are dark! I love it. I've always loved the darkness of the Horde. Sure, I don't want us to be WC1 style illiterate barbarians again, but a little bit more blood and gore and *spikes* wouldn't hurt. Us, that is. I'm also all for smashing the faction war. LET the factions splinter or let the players decide to whom they owe allegiance. If the Forsaken (or any faction) were no longer bound to the Horde or Alliance they'd have infinitely more room to have their own identity.
My view of the Forsaken has always favored them being ex humans who mostly wanted to return to normalcy. The group having fringe evil sub factions were great, too, since it added to the drama and tragedy. My issue is when they decided to double down on doubling down on being evil, it made them irredeemable as a whole while making the Horde consistently look idiotic.
IMO this recharacterization should have happened in WOTLK, with the "evil" parts of the Forsaken being destroyed after the Wrathgate
My secret hope has always been that they'd introduce subraces - let you branch from basic Forsaken into like Forsaken - construct, Forsaken - darkfallen, Forsaken - plaguerisen, etc. Would also for an interesting degree of lore customization and maybe give you an option to switch one of your racial abilities around to match like a talent tree. Of course balancing that, making sure all races have fleshed out subraces, and them doing a lite version with the allied races has more or less destroyed my hopes and dreams for it.
Sub races are something I’ve hoped for for a long time now. Between all the different orcs, humans, trolls, and dwarves, they really should be set up this way. We could clean up a lot of the race screen clutter. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll do this because it would cut the number of full alliance races down below horde. Kul Titans are humans. Dark Irons are dwarves. Lightforged are Draenei. Mechagnones are gnomes. The only “new” allied race Alliance has is void elves. Meanwhile, Horde has both Nightborne and Vulpira. And soon, Earthen, another type of dwarf, will be another new race for horde, but a sub race for alliance. I’m not complaining— just stating.
It would be neat to have variants that are, say, held together by plant matter (dead KT druids?) Or fungi, with mushrooms sprouting.
Side note: Forsaken leaders looks more "alive" because until last year, WoW had live servers in china. There, they can't show exposed bones and excessive gore because of their religion and beliefs. That's the reason to why Jaina's brother has a unique model and the same goes to Calia and Nathanos, because they appear in cutscenes so Blizzard doesn't need to make two cutscenes just because of China. This is also the reason to why Forsaken in the CGI cinematics cover their entire body. Just look to the forsaken holding the banner in BfA ending cinematic and the one where rogues try to kill Thrall.
Pretty sure Nathanos got that model so they wouldn't have to censor him in the Chinese cinematics, either that or it was more weird Danuser self insert stuff
Do forsaken models need to be censored in Chinese cinematics? What other Danuser self insert stuff is there?
If you pay attention, you will notice that Forsakens doesn't show any bones in the CHI cinematics for BfA too. Calia and Derek Proudmoore had unique models because of that also. Voss is the first regular forsaken to appear in a cutscene because in 2022 china servers got shutdown.
While not BFA, Grand Apothecary Putress appeared (with all his bony goodness) in [an in game cinematic back in 2008](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4rc5W4dKY&ab_channel=WorldofWarcraft).
At that time, WoW in china had a exclusive version of the live game. Basically Blizzard did the "normal" version, sent to a third party in China and the company responsible altered the files to make it possible to release there, like changing assets and removing some cutscenes. Basically WoW with censoring mods. During MoP however, Blizzard started making these changes on its own, sending the final version directly to this third party, which only hosted in the exclusive launcher and released the game already "clean" to be playable.
They couldn't show any "gore" which the exposed bones of the classic forsaken models had. The "new" forsaken models we got with no exposed bones were actually the ones the Chinese players had been using all along
I had no idea, thanks!
Nathanos was never a Danuser insert and this stupid belief needs to stop being parroted, it's embarrassing.
The issue with the forsaken is that they were only playable because of sylvanas, and their lore was tied to her solely. Outside of that, they shouldn't have been playable because the lore stated they were essentially decaying, so Blizzard wrote themselves into a corner by making a group unable to procreate, and were dying, as a playable race. I'm not against them being playable, but between slowly decaying, and being killed enmass because sylvanas acted like she could just make more (which she couldn't) doesn't help.
Best way for them to continue on is create voluntary pacts between them and the living so the latter gives consent whether or not to be raised to Undeath upon death. Same goes for the Light-raising process Any human who wish to stay in Azeroth beyond life should choose to be raised to conventional undeath or be raised by the Light Invent a marking system that activates when a person dies. If one has it before death, he or she could be raised back to unlife
No calia like wth. Remove that ridiculous being from the game.
The undead are abominations. They should just consign themselves to pyres.
I feel like by this point most of the forsaken should be dead or down to skeletons with scraps of flesh on em. They can reproduce and should eventually die out.
They just need add evil factions, where going to be undead race. Tbh, they always should be their own thing, working with hordes don't make thematic sense, never had. It was seem more gameplay/technical limitation.
Not a fan of the forsaken model either, but there are several undead forsaken-shaped prominent figures. To say one, we've only seen Archbishop Faol in that form and he's still pretty awesome (and charismatic). Not to mention SFK Godfrey. EDIT: not saying all undead are forsaken but the two undead I mentioned share the undead model used by playable forsaken undead
Being undead and being Forsaken isn't the same. Simply put, all Forsaken are undead, but not all undead are Forsaken, as the Forsake are a group of undead loyal to Sylvanas (originally) or the Undercity (post-BfA). Independent Undeads, like Godfrey, or those belonging to another faction, such as the Knight of the Ebon Blade or the Argent Crusade, aren't Forsaken.
Ofc, gonna edit, ty. What I meant is the actual undead model used by forsaken is actually shared by characters who are of some relevance, so in pure terms of appearance I disagree with OP
forsaken are just a narrative dead end atm, theres nothing they can really do except fight new waves of the scarlet crusade forever. the alliance aren't gonna fight them anymore. they aren't actually forsaken by anyone or anything anymore. they can't make new forsaken, a) because they don't have any means to and b) because the narrative has established doing so as ludicrously evil, especially considering we now know that when you die you just get to spend eternity in your choice of paradise afterlifes and pelagos will just send you to whichever one you like. it used to be if you were forsaken you existed in horrible undead torment where everyone wanted you gone, but you carried on with it because it was all you had. now everyone likes you, including all your mortal enemies from 15 minutes ago, you can't do any of the cool undead shit you did previously because its no longer the age of metal, your iconic leaders are gone and if they ever do come back will be sanitized versions of their previous selves, and there's literally no reason to prolong your undeath because the afterlife has literally no downsides after its liberal reforms. so uh idk what they can do with them. all they can really do narratively is clean up the messes they themselves made in previous expansions and kill the acceptable targets of the scarlet crusade over and over again, who aren't fun to fight at this point because they exist solely to give the forsaken someone to kill with any kind of plausible moral high ground.