I did the first chapter of the Kyrian campaign today. It's quite good, but also kind of weird.
Basically you're following one of the Aspirants around as she prepares for ascension. The two of you go to Azeroth to escort a soul back to the Shadowlands. In Azeroth, you meet the soul of Ben Howell and relive his last day.
It's a pretty cool quest, one where you're just a good, average man with a family. I won't spoil how he dies, but it was pretty touching and tied in with the original story back in Azeroth. However, once you finish that part, you escort the Ben's soul back to Oribos where he is promptly thrown into the Maw!
It kind of illustrates how wrong the Kyrian are. If the Forsworn were a pure third-party faction, then it would be very tempting to join them. But instead they're allied with the obvious bad guy, which just makes them seem stupid as well.
I guess we'll see how Blizzard resolves this in future chapters, but so far I think the execution of the Kyrian parts of the story have been pretty poor, and greatly hurt the faction.
Blizzard has never bothered to show / explain why Kyrian have to lose (suppress, really) their memories in order to guide souls properly. I think if they had properly established that 'why' in the leveling process more folks to understand why the Kyrian are the way they are.
ReplyDeleteI think this shows one of the big weaknesses in Blizzard's style of "show, don't tell" storytelling. Much of the story seems to be obvious to the creators, but is so poorly laid out that someone experiencing it is quite confused. This is a case where you need to quite explicitly *tell* the story without being vague. Leave the show for nuance, but they should always tell the major points so that everyone understands them.
I thought the very first Afterlives movie (on Uther, Devos and Arthas) explains the memory wipe: it looks like there can be so-called "conflict of intrests" if Kyrian transports the soul of a person that s/he interacted with while alive.
DeleteE.g. Uther should have just transported soul of Arthas to Oribos for Arbiter's judgement - and he would have done that if he was properly purged of memories and acsended like all other Kyrians.
I agree with you, and I think I've said similar things before. Especially with Sylvanas. Blizzard has some sort of vision for her, but have been utterly unable to convey it to the players, making her parts of the story seem really random.
DeleteMy theory here is that the jailer is Illidan 2.0, what with the breaking of cycle and whatnot.
ReplyDeleteWith that context, it makes a LOT of the other factions start to make sense.
Hmm, that's an interesting theory. I'm not sure the previous state of affairs was bad, though. Things seemed to working pretty well.
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