The story of World of Warcraft has never been criticized as much as in WoW: Shadowlands. The reason for this is Sylvanas, with its strange story, which is currently offending lore veterans in particular. Some well-known lore experts like Nobbel and Pyromancer even threw in the towel recently and took a break from WoW. They believe that after the success of WoW: Legion, the stories of BfA and Shadowlands steered World of Warcraft into a dead end. The character development of Sylvanas and the story of Dungeon Master come off particularly poorly in their videos.
04:37WoW: Shattered Legacy - German version of the Sylvanas cinematic
The big question currently being asked is: Who is responsible for this catastrophe? A few days ago, a hot discussion broke out on the net. The WoW community has heard that a certain developer is to blame for the story mess - namely Alex Afrasiabi. Blizzard fired the former creative director of WoW after various sexism scandals in 2020.
Alex Afrasiabi vs. Dave Kosak
According to a Blizzard insider who has long been in close contact with WoW content creators like Bellular and Taliestin & Evitel (of WoWHead), Sylvanas' story was intentionally sabotaged. This was allegedly a "personal vendetta" by Alex Afrasiabi. To explain the whole thing, we have to backtrack a bit and go back several years.
Alex Afrasiabi was the story chief and successor to Chris Metzen as creative director. According to an insider, Afrasiabi was a big fan of Garrosh Hellscream . Alex reportedly personally lobbied for Hellscream Junior to be promoted to Warchief in Cataclysm. He had big plans for Garrosh, but nothing came of them. With Mists of Pandaria, Dave Kosak came to the helm as story chief for a short time. He proposed to spice up the story of Garrosh Hellscream and the Horde. This idea was well received by the team, which eventually led to Garrosh ending up as a tyrant, war criminal, and final boss of Mists of Pandaria.
Garrosh Ruined
In fact, Alex Afrasiabi's vendetta was so successful that players wished for Garrosh Hellscream to return as a warchief. Source: r/nandugrinsecatze For Afrasiabi this was a bitter blow and he felt Garrosh's fall as a personal slight. When Dave Kosak became less involved with the WoW story and more dedicated to Hearthstone, Afrasiabi allegedly sensed his chance to get back at Kosak. He knew that Dave was a big fan of Sylvanas and Alex decided to ruin the story of the Banshee Queen. According to the rumors and descriptions, the burning of Teldrassil was Afrasiabi's idea all by himself, which he pushed through as the story chief of BfA before he had to leave the game studio in 2020. Thus, Sylvanas would meet the same fate as Garrosh Hellscream once did.
On Twitter, YouTuber and WoW fan Bellular recently brought this story back into focus and promptly got a lot of attention from the community.
Recommended editorial contentAt this point you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external embeds will not be displayed until you confirm this by clicking "Load all external content":Load all external contentI agree to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. More about this in our privacy policy. External content More about this in our privacy policy.Recommended editorial contentHere you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external content will only be displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content":Load all external contentI agree to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. More about this in our privacy policy. External content More about this in our privacy policy.Recommended editorial contentHere you will find external content from [PLATTFORM]. To protect your personal data, external content will only be displayed if you confirm this by clicking on "Load all external content":Load all external contentI agree to external content being displayed to me. This means that personal data is transmitted to third-party platforms. More about this in our privacy policy. External content More about this in our privacy policy.This story is not new. The rumors about Afrasiabi's grudge against Dave Kosak and Sylvanas circulated a few years ago. However, there was no solid evidence for it. This still does not exist, but after the scandal and numerous layoffs at Blizzard, more and more former Blizzard employees confirmed that Alex Afrasiabi intentionally drove Sylvanas' story up the wall.
06:52World of Warcraft | The expansions in the ranking
Beware of rumors!
The whole story about a developer who sabotaged the Sylvanas story because of a personal slight sounds very dubious to us. What the community tends to forget with these lurid rumors is that there is an entire team behind the story of World of Warcraft (buy now ). Even as creative director and story chief of WoW, Alex Afrasiabi did not have absolute power. So there's no question of him going over the heads of his team with Sylvanas' story. Also, why did WoW's writing team stay the course in Shadowlands when Afrasiabi was long gone? Steve Danuser, WoW's current story chief, could have steered against that, couldn't he?
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A new beginning for Calia Menethil and the Forsaken? Undercity and Tirisfal get a new map with WoW Patch 9.2.5! O.OAs exciting as the discussions about WoW's story are, you should always treat these rumors with caution. After all, there is usually no evidence for it, the information comes largely from private conversations, which we can hardly call a reliable source. After all the scandals at Blizzard
, this story still leaves a bitter aftertaste in the WoW community. to the homepage to the gallery Jump to comments (10)