Patch 10.0.7 went live today, and in most expansions you'd get maybe some rebalancing and maybe some new bandaid on a partially functional game system in a patch like that, here we've gotten access to a new (well, technically not new, but new for most characters) zone and some interesting story quests.
Emberthal has tracked the Sundered Flame to the Forbidden Reach, where this less cooperative and altruistic group of Dracthyr have come to claim the power left there by Neltharion. They're not alone, of course - the three surviving Primal Incarnates, released at the end of Dragonflight's opening raid, have also come here to look for resources in their fight against us (it's actually kind of cool to see that Iridikron is not arrogant - he recognizes that we're a real threat, and that his team needs something to even the odds.) But while the Incarnates are there more or less just to tease the trip underground in 10.1, we're treated to a series of quests that show us around this new zone and deal with the dark legacy of Neltharion.
And, in fact, legacies - particularly problematic legacies - are kind of a running theme here.
Spoilers for quests that just went live ahead, specifically the intro quests to the Forbidden Reach, the Baine questline in Ohn'aran Plains, and the Human Heritage Armor quests.
The Dracthyr were created to be soldiers. But they're not automatons with no inner life or soul. The ones we play are, of course, possessed of all the agency that any other WoW player character has. Now, as we discover, losing control over the Dracthyr in his fight against the Incarnates seemed to be the crack that burst the dam holding Neltharion's descent into corruption by the Old Gods back. But even if we've generally been told that "well, he was a good guy who suddenly turned evil" - itself a recurring theme in a lot of Warcraft villain stories, I think we're invited here to consider that maybe what he was doing previously was also evil.
The timeline isn't 100% clear, but at one point as we are chasing down Sarkareth, the leader of the Sundered Flame, we go through a cavern that was some kind of proving ground for Scalecommanders - the leaders of the various Dracthyr weyrns - and where those who failed their trials seem to be curse to an endless existence as skeletal wraiths (oddly listed as humanoid rather than undead). Was this cruel, unforgiving trial implemented before or after Neltharion drank the Old Gods' kool-aid? The recorded messages he leaves for his candidates don't have the monstrous reverb he had when we met him as Deathwing, but he still sounds like a psycho tyrant cult leader.
Another legacy is examined when we meet up with Baine in the Ohn'aran Plains. While we've had pretty good relations with the Maruuk Centaur (other than the Nokhud Clan and that one allied clan doing all the weird necromancy stuff) one might be forgiven for forgetting that historically, the Centaur were the greatest threat to the Tauren people of Kalimdor. It was actually the raiding of the Centaur that led Cairne Bloodhoof to team up with Thrall and join the Horde. And for Baine in particular, he was kidnapped by the centaur in his youth and only barely survived long enough to be rescued (this was a mission in Rexxar's campaign in The Frozen Throne). Baine arrives on the Dragon Isles to discover that the tauren who was integral to his childhood rescue has been taken by the Nokhud while he was leading an expedition to meet up with the green dragons there.
Baine's attitude toward the centaur is a complex and, actually, quite realistic portrayal of how PTSD can manifest in attitudes and behaviors that we might judge as simple bigotry without context. We're forced to play the mediating mutual friend between Baine and Scout Tomul as they try to find the missing tauren. Baine cannot even bring himself to enter Maruukai or any of the other standing centaur villages because, to him, that's like walking back into the camp where he nearly died. Ultimately, the quest line accomplishes a few things. First of all, it shows us that, despite all the times he's been captured or outmaneuvered in recent expansions, Baine is an absolute beast of a warrior. One is reminded that if Magatha hadn't poisoned Garrosh's weapons, Baine's elderly father Cairne would likely have killed the younger Hellscream who was a famed warrior of his own at the prime of his life. One actually has to wonder if Baine might be the most powerful warrior in the entire Horde (especially with Varok Saurfang dead). But we also see as he works through his deep-rooted hatred and anger toward the centaur - yes, ultimately he unleashes brutal violence against a clan of centaurs, but in doing so, he witnesses the honor of the Shikaar Clan, and is able to process those generalized feelings created by his trauma to see the humanity (humanoid-anity?) in this other people.
I believe Tauren get a special reward from this questchain, so I'll likely have to do it again on my Shaman, but doing it on my human paladin main actually made it resonate even moreso - after all, isn't the post-BFA story of WoW one in which the Alliance and Horde are finally beginning to process their resentments and enmity? Baine is someone who has, better than most, been able to look past the faction divide, and is close friends with Anduin Wrynn. So, there was something kind of interesting and nuanced about helping a prominent Horde character process a racial prejudice while playing as someone who probably has to process similar feelings to work with someone in the Horde.
Speaking of that character: my main is a human paladin. While I love all the strange fantasy races one can play in RPGs, I find myself often defaulting to human (really I think I either want to play a human or something very unusual - I'm far less drawn to the middle ground of "standard" fantasy races like elves or dwarves).
And the human heritage armor quest chain brings back stories that can be traced back to vanilla. While all of these quest chains are something of a return home, this one really feels like it reexamines stories that were most prominent in 2004 and 2010.
We're contacted by Matthias Shaw, who has us meet him on the ramparts of Stormwind Keep, where a Defias thief's body lies dead. The Defias, it seems, have stolen an artifact - actually a major quest item from vanilla that one needed to retrieve in order to attune to Onyxia's Lair (for people who started playing in... Wrath or later, I think, it used to be that most raids required you to complete a somewhat lengthy quest chain to even walk in the front door, often requiring you to beat the previous raids and/or several dungeons.) Shaw introduces you to a contact - Vanessa VanCleef. Again, I was doing this on my paladin, so I'm assuming there's different dialogue if you're on a Rogue, but Shaw vouches for VanCleef as someone who proved she was more than just some bandit leader in her efforts with the Uncrowned to fight the Burning Legion. VanCleef has been struggling to wrangle the Defias, who have been forgoing the peasant class revolution she envisioned in favor of cutthroat banditry.
What I find really cool here is that there's a recognition that Vanessa, even if she did some reprehensible things, had a noble goal. The aristocratic system of the Kingdom of Stormwind is not super fleshed-out - the world's not really big enough to see how it's divided into feudal fiefdoms and noble territories, but we're meant to understand that there is a kind of medieval class structure despite the other ways that the Alliance feels in many ways more modern in its sensibilities. The Defias, especially as portrayed in Cataclysm, take on a bit of an almost Marxist flavor. I imagine that readers of this blog might have varied opinions on Marxism and whether it's a good, bad, or too-complex-to-be-categorized-one-way-or-another thing, but the grievances that Vanessa fights to address are very real.
We also find out, later in the questchain, that the efforts Anduin took to rein in the House of Nobles when he became king during the Legion's invasion actually wound up taking the wind out of her Defias' sails. With the Kingdom actually making serious efforts to address the betrayal of the Stonemason's Guild and the poverty in Westfall, the need for the Defias began to dry up, and so Vanessa found that all the people fighting alongside her for a better world were leaving the Brotherhood, and the only people who were staying were the ones who wanted an excuse to be able to steal and coerce.
What we discover is that the Drakefire Amulet was used by Onyxia to manipulate the conflict between the Stonemason Guild and the House of Nobles, but that the amulet was surprisingly subtle in its effect - she never mind-controlled anyone. The amulet simply allowed her to guide people to the logical conclusion of their deep-seated biases and worst impulses.
And this actually does something interesting: much as the story of Sylvanas in Shadowlands was unwilling to let her off the hook for her deeds, forcing her to accept her culpability in the atrocities she committed as the first step on her road to redemption (and not its endpoint,) here we see that while, yes, a secret corrupted black dragon was manipulating things behind the scenes, ultimately Stormwind has to reckon with the fact that class resentment that turned into class warfare was lying there under the surface in the first place. The House of Nobles, dragon or no, did fail to value the workers who had rebuilt the city. Again, the legacy of this conflict and the choices that led to so much suffering are things that we have to own up to and confront if we ever want to grow beyond them.
Given Blizzard's past couple years, as the horrible truth of the sexual harassment and racist bias and toxic work environment that was at its height even during the studio's "golden age" has come to light, you can't help but feel that a lot of the story in WoW in those recent years is about reckoning with that legacy.
And, really, isn't that what our culture as a whole is doing? I don't want to get too political here on a blog post about a game that has never claimed any pretense of being a deeply intellectual work of art, but it does seem like the tension in today's cultural controversies is whether we want to actually reckon with our past and try to build a freer, more equitable and egalitarian society, or if we want to shut down any discussion about the failures of our forebears and the lived experiences of people whose experience of our culture has not been as happy and prosperous in order to broadcast the idea that there's nothing to fix.
Emberthal is presented with a choice at the end of this week's chapter of the Forbidden Reach story. She and Sarkareth each see one another as betraying their people, and her conditioning as a soldier tells her that she must kill him to avenge her fallen comrades who were killed by the Sundered Flame. But she decides, speaking with Ebyssian, that she does not want to kill him - that this notion that she's there to kill the enemy is a program that was instilled in her by Neltharion, and that she doesn't need to follow it.
We don't know (or at least I don't know) where this story is going to resolve. Maybe we'll be forced to take Sarkareth down eventually. But if we do, it'll be tragic. A legacy is there for you to claim, and by claiming it, you make it anew. Emberthal is ready to move past Neltharion.
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