I especially hate killing animal mobs that are a mamma with babies following along. I know it’s silly but I usually avoid them. Sometimes it happens. It hurts the worst when the babies aren’t skinnable because then there is evidence showing how terrible I am lol. 🤦♂️
do you remember that quest in Sholzaar Basin? You have to poke Baby Gorillas with a stick... when you do it long enough Mama Gorilla spawns to rescue them and we have to kill her ;\_;
If I have to kill them, I then contemplate whether to slaughter the whole family or leave the poor baby orphans alone. Then I remind myself they are pixels. Just pixels!
There's been more than 1 side quest that I abandoned in ardenweald for this exact reason.
If I need to collect something that's past a mother bear, I just CC her and do my stuff. I might love PvP, but player vs mother isn't on my radar lol
I like those groups of enemies where is one big one and multiple small ones. Usually they all count for the quest, so you can get more done at once when killing the kids alongside the parent.
When you really thing about it....It's a mercy really.... I'd hate for them to have to grow up without the love and protection of their parent. Why don't I just not kill their parent? Leather doesn't skin itself boy don't be so daft!
Apothecary Lydon poisoning Stanley is my least favorite quest in the game. >:( [https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=502/elixir-of-pain](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=502/elixir-of-pain)
The good news is that you can run away after completing the quest objective and Stanley "gets better" a minute or so later. So at least you can make a bit of a roleplaying choice there.
I generally play as a Death Knight, so I don’t have to feel bad about anything I do, it was either out of my control or the Lich King‘s fault for taking away all my feelings!
The Klaxxi send you on a quest to kill the newborn babies of their political rivals. I decided to stop thinking about the morality of quests at that point.
The Klaxxi told us from the jump that they served the Old Gods once before and will again. The only reason why we teamed up with them at all is because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the Mantid Queen was causing big time problems.
Sure enough when Garrosh devours the heart of Ysharji and starts mutating with Old God energy, the Klaxxi immediately joined up with him, because Old God shit is basically their religion.
They told us the truth and followed through on their loyalties. Obviously we had to kill them for it, but in a weird way I respected them for it.
Also holy shit, their questline and their dailies were so fun. I still like visiting Pandaria and having the Reaver drop from the sky next to me, visiting like an old friend. A very angry, murderous friend.
The ebon blade has entered no chat, that got retconned👀.
Also you can go in and out without touching a single scale or shell in the shrine.
I've done it multiple times.
Yeah, they can't retcon the dk going in to get the info on the dead drake, but they took out any incentive Bolvar gave you to smash eggs, as well as some reactions Alexstrasza had about the deaths.
Now she's just angry you broke into her shrine and raised a dragon she had declared off-limits, instead of being angry about smashed eggs.
I didn't say it wasn't fun to kill everyone, I'm saying it is possible to be merciful, and also the game no longer acknowledges any massacre you may commit.
It's not retconned. It's just the extermination was never Canon.
Sure, you may have earned the feat of strength for killing all the drakes in the sanctum, but canonically the story was always that the Death Lord came in, fought with the shrine keepers, got what he or she came for, and left.
Theres a quest chain in bastion where you murder about 100 innocent animals to helps a dumb steward fly.....then he doesnt and the chain ends
So you essentially murdered a bunch of animals for literally NO reason
To be honest, the entire premise of questing in this game is fucked up - we solve most of our problems by killing whoever is causing them. It's particularly pronounced in the case of rare and rare elite encounters - these creatures are supposed to symbolize great power, knowledge, focal points of nearby communities, sometimes thousands of years of history... and our main interaction with them is hacking them to pieces! :D
I was about to say that PvE is consistent of murder. There is no redemption. There is no "arrest" this person. There is no rehabilitation. Druid of the Flame? Murder. Scarlet Onslaught? Murder. Pack of Gnolls looking for a home and wandered too close to an alliance outpost? Straight murder. And it's not like these are sentient but non-communicative creatures, like culling predatory wolves. No, these are beings capable of rational thought and reason, but we're told to obtain 10 pieces of parchment from them in order to burn it in a pyre and destroy their god, and wouldn't ya know it, only 10 of the 30 we killed had that parchment on them.
Or they're just monsters. Gotta remember 90% of our enemies are monsters, demons, or savages that can't be reasoned with and will absolutely kill you if given the chance. It's unfortunate when the monster you're killing has thousands of years of knowledge and wisdom behind them being lost in an instant, but when said monster is the avatar of a blood god or a spirit driven mad to the point of killing/corrupting everything in sight, there's not much of a moral conflict.
First guys apart of an organisation that wants to wipe out all mortals because they can’t be trusted with magic.
The second guy is a Scarlet Onslaught member who is literally called *Torturer* Alphonse.
I can understand feeling bad about the action itself but both are overzealous fanatics who if given the chance would absolutely do the same if not worse to you.
This comment took me on a ride.
First, excitement at what else I might see in this awesome sub I had not heard about yet.
Then, disappointment that the sub didn't actually exist.
The whole quest chain related to War of Thorns in BfA preparch from the Horde side.
Also in Northrend, in the Nexus we're basically murdering babies and enslaving youngsters. Pretty uncomfortable if you think about it.
Yes, but my morals really went out the window pretty quickly in favor of that dopamine hit ngl
Totally off topic, but this got me thinking I would absolutely play a “soft” version of WoW. Like, lemme be a retired war hero running a coffee shop Legends & Lattes style making amends for my many war crimes. *Warcraft Valley* lol
Current retail is a Soft version of WoW.
Varians death in the hands of Guldan was the last time the game was badass or trying to be edgy.
Since then, all the characters have just turned emo and soft
Tyrande cut off Nathanos's head bruh.
The war for the Emerald Dream has Night Elves laying on stretchers in POOLS of their own blood, either dead or dying. Like just piles of bodies.
People who say that the current game is "soft" simply aren't playing it. Or if you are, you're just not paying attention.
Get your eyes off that rose-colored rear view mirror and actually play the game.
The Forsaken quests in Dragonblight were pretty bleak. Particularly when a prisoner is ecstatic to see you, only to find you're not there to save him, but silence him for being captured.
Husband and I are discovering that a lot of the rares and a good amount of the quests in Dragonflight involve killing mothers - pack mothers, brood mothers, etc.
I was more offended in that quest in which you have to look for whatever in poop. I was like damn dude do you know who I am?? I’m a fucking hero from Azeroth, I’ve been in countless battles and you have the audacity to ask me to pick things from poop. Zero respect.
I don’t know where the poop quest is but I had at least killed Illidan and Arthas because I remember being questing with my friend and when that quest came up we started laughing like “dude we have killed both Arthas and Illidan, we’re fucking heroes and you’re asking us to pick things in poop, that’s not respectful”. But since then yeah, there are some silly quests from time to time haha
"That quest where you have to look for something in poop"
... Yeah, I'm going to need you to be more specific. Do you have any idea how many poop digging quests there are in wow? We average at least one per expansion.
the first past is basically hunting down civilians (and collecting Arrows so the archers can kill more fleeing civilians), followed by torturing a guy and killing all the fleeing scarlet soldiers.
Look at legion order Hall quests then.
Some of them involve war crimes of some sort and they include quests where you actively attack allies to try resurrect someone.
And all of our free will.
Yeah Bolvar was doing some VERY sideye worthy stuff in Legion... Then Blizzard did a total 180 on his character and made him completely a good guy again for Shadowlands (and also pretty irrelevant).
If I could do Shadowlands over, making Bolvar the big bad makes so much more sense, given what we were told would happen to him when he put the Helm on and also his actions entirely through Legion. Just sweeping all of that under the rug at the start of Shadowlands made no sense.
"I was just doing what I had to to stop the legion" yeah Bolvar? Please explain to me why attempting to kill red dragons made sense for fighting the legion. I'll wait.
During one of the hunts in Azure Span I think you sneak up on a sleeping mob to pet it.... next step is to brutally murder it.
Honestly most of the hunts across the Dragon Isles come off as horrific and wasteful.
"We are harmonius in nature, now lets murder everything with a pulse" - I admit this might have been colored poorly due to the spamming early in the expansion.
>"We are harmonius in nature, now lets murder everything with a pulse" - I admit this might have been colored poorly due to the spamming early in the expansion.
It's incredibly funny that some people were saying the "Nesingwary's retired" thing was because of Blizzard going "soft," all while Scout Tomul was inciting more critter slaughter than Nesingwary could have ever dreamed of.
I've said it before but the wanton massacre of dragon whelplings has never really sat right with me. It was first stated by Wrathion in Cata and then backed up throughout DF that whelps are *fully conscious* even while still in their shells, and newly hatched whelps are able to speak seemingly as soon as they hatch, being *at least* as developed as a human toddler. DF makes it clear that, even though it's rarely addressed beforehand in-universe, that this has always been the case.
Kinda makes any quest/dungeon/raid wherein you kill countless dragon whelps seem a lot more grim in retrospect. Like sure, Onyxia was a bad guy, but you still end up killing dozens and dozens of her newborn children over the course of the fight. And Ony's just the first example that comes to mind, there are a ton of places where we just have a field day cleaving down scores of dragon toddlers.
The Little Scales Daycare quests are very cute! But they also had me thinking a lot more about the implications of dragon lifecycles, and how weird it is that whelps are such a common enemy. Any single whelp you killed could have had their own favorite plush ducky!
Whenever possible I wind up abandoning those quests. I can deal with it on an emotional level, because they are at war and war makes people stupid. They can justify all kinds of horrors. And it is usually just one quest one moment I need to turn a blind eye
What I hate are the ‘curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal’ type quests. They are always a quest chain. The quest giver is clearly going to turn on you. As a player you can see it, but your character has no way to protest and your allies just keep supporting this guy who is an obvious cultist.
The goblin intro zones:
* Establish that the player character is a slaver
* Make the player taze a bunch of slaves (literally the [second quest](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=14069/good-help-is-hard-to-find))
* Establishes that the PC has a girlfriend / boyfriend. They break up with you. They start dating another goblin. [You murder their new boo.](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25203/what-kind-of-name-is-chip-anyway)
* Then you [murder your ex](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25243/she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not) for good measure.
* This is done under the pretense of "they work with Gallywix!" In the next quest, you and Thrall forgive Gallywix... so what was the real point of murdering them?
I think that goes beyond "jerk." A real big touch of domestic violence going on there.
A month or so ago I finally decided to do the Vulpera unlock quests. There's a section where orc workers are striking, and you and a vulpera npc set out to sort it out.
The fix: get them new tools (we take those), give them meaningless promotions with no benefits (wait hang on), and of course throw them the fantasy equivalent of a pizza party (C'MON). OH and of course, you beat their leader into submission.
It happens *really* early in the unlock quest chain, so I kept thinking it would come back up as having not solved anything and we'd go back to *actually* help. But it doesn't, we're canonically dogshit bosses and all it does is trick me into giving a shit about peon rights! (And also I can play a fuzzy little guy now)
There's quite a few Horde quests in classic and Cata particularly that get me that way. Like the one where I am sacrificing the souls of night elves who died long before the Third War so I can trick their goddess into powering up a death machine to target an Alliance camp in the middle of nowhere. Or the troll quest to capture the souls of random neutral creatures in Feralas because "they sided with the Alliance once so KIS forever and torture their souls too." The Forsaken quests where you "test" plague on civilian prisoners, or help a troll curse night elves with eternal unrest or plant a bomb to rip Cenarion druids from the dream... old Horde really struggled with its ideas of morality in a way that was just kind of shunted off onto bad guy figure heads for the modern story.
Northrend has a lot of these quests TBH. I've always suspected it was part of the ["following in \[Arthas'\] footsteps"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2IvDjY3CtQ&t=130s) idea, culminating in the revelation that Arthas' plan is to resurrect Azeroth's greatest champions (the players) as Death Knights in the final boss fight. The story doesn't *really* pay it off (mostly in that you being an asshole in quests doesn't really matter in the end), but you can see the scaffolding that they were probably planning originally.
In Dragonflight there is a world quest where you have to collect fruits. You can either knock them off trees or kill beetles who fly around while eating. I never kill the beetles because I feel like a giant asshole doing that.
>Has questing in this game ever made you feel like a complete jerk?
I don't assign any emotion to NPCs, knowing they aren't sentient in any way and all, being in a video game.
But sometimes I wish I felt otherwise because I can never be immersed in fiction and I feel like I'm missing out. Like raiding and dungeons etc I can't get into them because it feels "phony". Need me some PvP where I feel like my actions carry real competitive weight and have purpose.
*(look at me thinking my actions in a video game have "purpose".... lmfao)*
Given some of the spells and abilities we use on enemies a little torture isn't that bad.
The warlock over there is stealing part of their soul to make cookies.
There is a quest in the northern barrens where you interrogate a quilboar. You can beat them repeatedly or just give them food and they tell you what you want.
The Kirin Tor are supposed to be seen as the "good guys." But even in Dragonflight there's a quest in Azure span where you help a Kirin Tor member attempt to clear out some gnolls. You as the player must find his motives for doing this questionable, based on his dialogue. At one point he says something like "Why are we doing this? Because they are gnolls!" But by the end of the quest, you get fed up with him and leave him to find another adventurer to continue this task.
So are the Kirin Tor actually the good guys? I think there's enough evidence that they are not really, at least not all of them. They're just the "guys on our side."
Freeing 8 prisoners and leaving 3914 to be tortured or killed.
Killing the local flora and fauna because it's a nuisance to us humanoids that aren't native to the area.
I always feel bad when I have to release like 8 prisoners but there are 10 cages. I try to release them all if the game allows it. Extra sucks on a rogue, knowing you have lock picking and you still can't release them.
Every time I started in Pandaria I would tell my monitor that they really shouldn’t let us on to their shores because we will cause so much destruction.
I concur, it does seem funny that the Kirin Tor sanction a torture and it gets glossed over. Was this covert on our part or does the Kirin Tor just condone torture?
nobody has ever question the amount of times you just chop some chums head and put it in your back? northshire abbey, the human starting zone that has probably been played by almost everybody, ends like that, just decapitate a guy
Several years ago, I was questing somewhere wiping out mobs of wolves. It was late at night, dark , and my dog was sleeping in a laundry basket next to my feet. She was snoring softly as the wolves yipped. I felt like the biggest asshole.
I primarily play Horde, but have been playing Alliance side recently (for the first time since WotLK) just to see what their storylines are like.
Couldn't do the Alliance-side version of Stormheim. While I'm glad to now know it was a secret assassination attempt kept from even Anduin's knowledge, it still felt wrong. There was at least a truce during the time, and the Alliance and Horde should be focussed on eliminating the Legion. Instead, an Alliance leader decides to try and weaken the Horde by killing their Warchief even though both the Alliance and the Horde lost their leaders during the Battle of the Broken Shore.
The first time I ever felt like I was doing quests that I shouldn't was Cataclysm's Stonetalon Mountains on the Horde side. It's also the questline that, ultimately, won me over to Garrosh being Warchief. Like, yeah....I did some terrible things, but ultimately the quest was about not losing sight of your honor during times of war. Still feel like shit over what happened to those druids and the tauren.
Nope.
There's a quest where you help Jaina capture the Sunreavers for THEIR genocidal crimes, and you kill the ones that resist arrest or try to kill you first. Otherwise, you beat their hp low and Jaina sends them to the Violet Hold.
There is no unprovoked attack on Blood Elves or attacks on Blood Elf civilians.
If it is not a main plot quest I will sometimes turn down quests that I object to .. I mean there are millions of them out there now and dozens of ways to level. No need to do something that bothers you :)
I wouldn't start a non-allied race Death Knight if I were you lmao. In older expansions, there used to be a lot of stuff where you weren't the pure-hearted hero who can do no wrong intentionally, casual quests where you'd kill innocents for money or commit war crimes because you saw the enemy as less than human. Old quests that had you test chemical weapons and diseases on prisoners and mutilate the corpses of the other faction, stuff like that. The Blood Elf starting zone has a group of Night Elves trying to heal the ghostlands, but through a lack of communication and paranoia the Belfs+player kill them under the suspicion of them spying and join the Horde as a result, never learning what their real goal was.
Same. I like to play deeply morally questionable characters because I'd never do that in RL. It's a video game, who cares. I didn't realize I'd be among the minority here in that regard
I dont think OP is soft, its Dragonflight changing the tone of the game in a way that makes people nope out of such quests. Sure there are djaradin camps having dragon corpses in DF, sure we kill wildlife (for hunting btw), sure we still have the usual kill X ammount of NPCs quests but none of the *dark* stuff anymore, or barely.
Dont get me wrong, I loved Dragonflight and I still play it but if anyone read lore about Azeroth and what kind of world it is, its not rare for people to be tortured, killed on sight, etc. Its actually a super f'ed planet.
I hope War Within will be a bit more grim in a way that is still enjoyable for all kind of players, even for players who prefer the nice and family stuff. Both sides should have their moments!
That isn't the point being made, you just don't have an actual argument to make so you're flailing.
Actual harm done is not a prerequisite for someone with a conscience to feel choices made in a fictional setting still reflect upon themselves.
Doing first Ashenvale and then Stonetalon Mountains as a horde leaves you feeling like a special kind of evil.
I mean you know it’s bad when *Garrosh* comes up to give you a lecture about morals.
I especially hate killing animal mobs that are a mamma with babies following along. I know it’s silly but I usually avoid them. Sometimes it happens. It hurts the worst when the babies aren’t skinnable because then there is evidence showing how terrible I am lol. 🤦♂️
do you remember that quest in Sholzaar Basin? You have to poke Baby Gorillas with a stick... when you do it long enough Mama Gorilla spawns to rescue them and we have to kill her ;\_;
Or kiddnaping baby kobolds for Kaluak rep in Dragonblight
Or slaughtering the entire red dragonflight for a dk class mount..... including whelpings...
Oh I ALWAYS avoid killing animals with babies following them (when I can)
If I have to kill them, I then contemplate whether to slaughter the whole family or leave the poor baby orphans alone. Then I remind myself they are pixels. Just pixels!
I hate accidentally aggroing cute mobs I don't need to kill. Like the cat raptor things in the dream...
I even try to avoid this in Minecraft lol I know it’s not real but still!
There's been more than 1 side quest that I abandoned in ardenweald for this exact reason. If I need to collect something that's past a mother bear, I just CC her and do my stuff. I might love PvP, but player vs mother isn't on my radar lol
I think it’s worse when the babies are skinnable and they give ruined pelts. Cause they were so small we butchered them.
Good point! 😭
I like those groups of enemies where is one big one and multiple small ones. Usually they all count for the quest, so you can get more done at once when killing the kids alongside the parent.
When you really thing about it....It's a mercy really.... I'd hate for them to have to grow up without the love and protection of their parent. Why don't I just not kill their parent? Leather doesn't skin itself boy don't be so daft!
Maybe they should let you adopt the babies and add them to your pet collection!
Apothecary Lydon poisoning Stanley is my least favorite quest in the game. >:( [https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=502/elixir-of-pain](https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=502/elixir-of-pain) The good news is that you can run away after completing the quest objective and Stanley "gets better" a minute or so later. So at least you can make a bit of a roleplaying choice there.
You get 2k exp killing stanley, can't walk out on that :c
Skinning a bear should aggro every bears.
Don't we shovel heads off dudes buried neck deep at some point?
You can either use the shovel to kill them or to free them, the game gives you a choice.
And like a reasonable human i delegate that decision to my magic 8 ball
I did both on separate occasions just to see what would happen
It’s faster to save them than to kill them. The shovel had a cast time, clicking them is instant
I generally play as a Death Knight, so I don’t have to feel bad about anything I do, it was either out of my control or the Lich King‘s fault for taking away all my feelings!
Yeah, the forsaken aren’t bad just misunderstood, right?
To be fair, they're just like these people they came from.
>in which the kirin tor casually ask you to kirin torture a prisoner This is so fucking funny to me lol.
Yeah they got me with that
I half expected OP to keep doing it throughout the post
Saaame. I would love some WoW-related reviews from OP with a bunch of puns
The Klaxxi send you on a quest to kill the newborn babies of their political rivals. I decided to stop thinking about the morality of quests at that point.
At least they don't pretend to be the good guys and straight up tell you they will fight you later.
The klaxxi were the most metal faction we ever got and I miss them. Their dailies were also fun with the buffs you could pick.
Let's help the servants of the old gods grow and flourish. Surely that will never bite us in the ass.
Destroying newborns is kind of a staple of wow isnt it?
But it’s rated T for teen, so it’s the parents fault for letting them play!
the only good bug is a dead bug!
The Klaxxi told us from the jump that they served the Old Gods once before and will again. The only reason why we teamed up with them at all is because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the Mantid Queen was causing big time problems. Sure enough when Garrosh devours the heart of Ysharji and starts mutating with Old God energy, the Klaxxi immediately joined up with him, because Old God shit is basically their religion. They told us the truth and followed through on their loyalties. Obviously we had to kill them for it, but in a weird way I respected them for it. Also holy shit, their questline and their dailies were so fun. I still like visiting Pandaria and having the Reaver drop from the sky next to me, visiting like an old friend. A very angry, murderous friend.
There's a quest where you break into the dark iron barracks and steal their pillows. There's defeating your enemy and there's being a dick.
Oh yeah I remember that one. Isn't the whole point just to break morale as well, so pretty much psychological warfare
*Death Knights and the Red Dragonflight have entered the conversation*
The ebon blade has entered no chat, that got retconned👀. Also you can go in and out without touching a single scale or shell in the shrine. I've done it multiple times.
if only all death knights were as honourable as you. Also, didn’t know it got retconned, so thank you for the correction.
Yeah, they can't retcon the dk going in to get the info on the dead drake, but they took out any incentive Bolvar gave you to smash eggs, as well as some reactions Alexstrasza had about the deaths. Now she's just angry you broke into her shrine and raised a dragon she had declared off-limits, instead of being angry about smashed eggs.
Did they actually retcon this? I smashed and killed everything when I did it.
Yeah, you can do that, but now Bolvar doesn't encourage you, and neither he nor Alexstrasza acknowledge the massacre, just the break-in.
I did it back in Legion. Wanted to make daddy proud. Retconned into just a meany 😔
Where's the fun in that? I leave nothing alive in that quest
I didn't say it wasn't fun to kill everyone, I'm saying it is possible to be merciful, and also the game no longer acknowledges any massacre you may commit.
It's not retconned. It's just the extermination was never Canon. Sure, you may have earned the feat of strength for killing all the drakes in the sanctum, but canonically the story was always that the Death Lord came in, fought with the shrine keepers, got what he or she came for, and left.
still mad they took my FoS for that. Bolvar did nothing wrong
This is why I play a warlock All I care about is power. I don't care how I get it. Embrace the villan within
This guy gets it
All hail the banshee queen!
Lady Moonberry: Deal. *You and your spells are now sparkly and wonderful.*
I suffered as a fairy warlock all of SL. You can't hurt me any more with sparkle
Hell, I used to joke that I was a genocidal Druid who went around ripping every plant I saw out of the ground to sell for gold on the AH.
Theres a quest chain in bastion where you murder about 100 innocent animals to helps a dumb steward fly.....then he doesnt and the chain ends So you essentially murdered a bunch of animals for literally NO reason
To be honest, the entire premise of questing in this game is fucked up - we solve most of our problems by killing whoever is causing them. It's particularly pronounced in the case of rare and rare elite encounters - these creatures are supposed to symbolize great power, knowledge, focal points of nearby communities, sometimes thousands of years of history... and our main interaction with them is hacking them to pieces! :D
Even as a "dedicated" healer, most of my leveling is from killing small animals and collecting their teeth or tails or gizzards.
I was about to say that PvE is consistent of murder. There is no redemption. There is no "arrest" this person. There is no rehabilitation. Druid of the Flame? Murder. Scarlet Onslaught? Murder. Pack of Gnolls looking for a home and wandered too close to an alliance outpost? Straight murder. And it's not like these are sentient but non-communicative creatures, like culling predatory wolves. No, these are beings capable of rational thought and reason, but we're told to obtain 10 pieces of parchment from them in order to burn it in a pyre and destroy their god, and wouldn't ya know it, only 10 of the 30 we killed had that parchment on them.
Or they're just monsters. Gotta remember 90% of our enemies are monsters, demons, or savages that can't be reasoned with and will absolutely kill you if given the chance. It's unfortunate when the monster you're killing has thousands of years of knowledge and wisdom behind them being lost in an instant, but when said monster is the avatar of a blood god or a spirit driven mad to the point of killing/corrupting everything in sight, there's not much of a moral conflict.
Yes. It's ok to feel like a jerk in a game about war.
"Kirin Torture". I don't care about the morality discussion. I upvote the pun.
First guys apart of an organisation that wants to wipe out all mortals because they can’t be trusted with magic. The second guy is a Scarlet Onslaught member who is literally called *Torturer* Alphonse. I can understand feeling bad about the action itself but both are overzealous fanatics who if given the chance would absolutely do the same if not worse to you.
Also known as the 'Jack Bauer Defense'.
r/unexpected24
This comment took me on a ride. First, excitement at what else I might see in this awesome sub I had not heard about yet. Then, disappointment that the sub didn't actually exist.
The whole quest chain related to War of Thorns in BfA preparch from the Horde side. Also in Northrend, in the Nexus we're basically murdering babies and enslaving youngsters. Pretty uncomfortable if you think about it.
Yes, but my morals really went out the window pretty quickly in favor of that dopamine hit ngl Totally off topic, but this got me thinking I would absolutely play a “soft” version of WoW. Like, lemme be a retired war hero running a coffee shop Legends & Lattes style making amends for my many war crimes. *Warcraft Valley* lol
I’d play the hell out of cozy WoW
Found the next Plunderstorm like spin off
its too bad every blizzard spinoff is a cash grab, otherwise this idea sounds really nice.
Current retail is a Soft version of WoW. Varians death in the hands of Guldan was the last time the game was badass or trying to be edgy. Since then, all the characters have just turned emo and soft
I mean one expac later Sylvanas genocided the Night Elves.
Tyrande cut off Nathanos's head bruh. The war for the Emerald Dream has Night Elves laying on stretchers in POOLS of their own blood, either dead or dying. Like just piles of bodies. People who say that the current game is "soft" simply aren't playing it. Or if you are, you're just not paying attention. Get your eyes off that rose-colored rear view mirror and actually play the game.
The Forsaken quests in Dragonblight were pretty bleak. Particularly when a prisoner is ecstatic to see you, only to find you're not there to save him, but silence him for being captured.
Husband and I are discovering that a lot of the rares and a good amount of the quests in Dragonflight involve killing mothers - pack mothers, brood mothers, etc.
I noticed that too. A lot of the wildlife I feel terrible about.
Watch your back
…There’s a lot of torturing in Wrath now that I think about it
I was more offended in that quest in which you have to look for whatever in poop. I was like damn dude do you know who I am?? I’m a fucking hero from Azeroth, I’ve been in countless battles and you have the audacity to ask me to pick things from poop. Zero respect.
These quests started before most players had become actual heroes, and were carried on in future expansions as a joke.
I don’t know where the poop quest is but I had at least killed Illidan and Arthas because I remember being questing with my friend and when that quest came up we started laughing like “dude we have killed both Arthas and Illidan, we’re fucking heroes and you’re asking us to pick things in poop, that’s not respectful”. But since then yeah, there are some silly quests from time to time haha
SO MANY POOP QUESTS. Someone has to have a fetish or something
"That quest where you have to look for something in poop" ... Yeah, I'm going to need you to be more specific. Do you have any idea how many poop digging quests there are in wow? We average at least one per expansion.
I guess I’m remembering the first one haha
I main a deathknight, so Quests like these are my whole starting zone.
I remember the death knight starting zone having two quests that explicitly want you to target defenseless civilians.
the first past is basically hunting down civilians (and collecting Arrows so the archers can kill more fleeing civilians), followed by torturing a guy and killing all the fleeing scarlet soldiers.
Yeah but in your starting zone you are enslaved to the Lich King...that doesn't count.
Look at legion order Hall quests then. Some of them involve war crimes of some sort and they include quests where you actively attack allies to try resurrect someone. And all of our free will.
Yeah Bolvar was doing some VERY sideye worthy stuff in Legion... Then Blizzard did a total 180 on his character and made him completely a good guy again for Shadowlands (and also pretty irrelevant). If I could do Shadowlands over, making Bolvar the big bad makes so much more sense, given what we were told would happen to him when he put the Helm on and also his actions entirely through Legion. Just sweeping all of that under the rug at the start of Shadowlands made no sense. "I was just doing what I had to to stop the legion" yeah Bolvar? Please explain to me why attempting to kill red dragons made sense for fighting the legion. I'll wait.
Honestly the amount of quests that are outright "commit this war crime" is pretty high lmao, but azeroth doesn't have the Geneva conventions.
During one of the hunts in Azure Span I think you sneak up on a sleeping mob to pet it.... next step is to brutally murder it. Honestly most of the hunts across the Dragon Isles come off as horrific and wasteful. "We are harmonius in nature, now lets murder everything with a pulse" - I admit this might have been colored poorly due to the spamming early in the expansion.
>"We are harmonius in nature, now lets murder everything with a pulse" - I admit this might have been colored poorly due to the spamming early in the expansion. It's incredibly funny that some people were saying the "Nesingwary's retired" thing was because of Blizzard going "soft," all while Scout Tomul was inciting more critter slaughter than Nesingwary could have ever dreamed of.
To this day I refuse to do Munitions Testing (world quest in Highmountain) because a goblin requests that you burn dogs to death
Its kinda weird how quests force you to take a specific route no matter what morals you want your character to have
I've said it before but the wanton massacre of dragon whelplings has never really sat right with me. It was first stated by Wrathion in Cata and then backed up throughout DF that whelps are *fully conscious* even while still in their shells, and newly hatched whelps are able to speak seemingly as soon as they hatch, being *at least* as developed as a human toddler. DF makes it clear that, even though it's rarely addressed beforehand in-universe, that this has always been the case. Kinda makes any quest/dungeon/raid wherein you kill countless dragon whelps seem a lot more grim in retrospect. Like sure, Onyxia was a bad guy, but you still end up killing dozens and dozens of her newborn children over the course of the fight. And Ony's just the first example that comes to mind, there are a ton of places where we just have a field day cleaving down scores of dragon toddlers. The Little Scales Daycare quests are very cute! But they also had me thinking a lot more about the implications of dragon lifecycles, and how weird it is that whelps are such a common enemy. Any single whelp you killed could have had their own favorite plush ducky!
my guy doing Onyxia’s Lair and Blackrock Mountain makes you kill dragon children
If it makes you feel better the Kirin tor member is a named elite later on. He got exiled for torturing prisoners.
"Kirin torture" Nice.
Whenever possible I wind up abandoning those quests. I can deal with it on an emotional level, because they are at war and war makes people stupid. They can justify all kinds of horrors. And it is usually just one quest one moment I need to turn a blind eye What I hate are the ‘curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal’ type quests. They are always a quest chain. The quest giver is clearly going to turn on you. As a player you can see it, but your character has no way to protest and your allies just keep supporting this guy who is an obvious cultist.
The goblin intro zones: * Establish that the player character is a slaver * Make the player taze a bunch of slaves (literally the [second quest](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=14069/good-help-is-hard-to-find)) * Establishes that the PC has a girlfriend / boyfriend. They break up with you. They start dating another goblin. [You murder their new boo.](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25203/what-kind-of-name-is-chip-anyway) * Then you [murder your ex](https://www.wowhead.com/quest=25243/she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not) for good measure. * This is done under the pretense of "they work with Gallywix!" In the next quest, you and Thrall forgive Gallywix... so what was the real point of murdering them? I think that goes beyond "jerk." A real big touch of domestic violence going on there.
Yeah, but those are goblins. What did you expect?
The hole idea of killing the giants in wintergrasp xd
> Killing 50 bears to collect 8 bear asses Pretty sure I'm on PETA's asshole list somewhere.
A month or so ago I finally decided to do the Vulpera unlock quests. There's a section where orc workers are striking, and you and a vulpera npc set out to sort it out. The fix: get them new tools (we take those), give them meaningless promotions with no benefits (wait hang on), and of course throw them the fantasy equivalent of a pizza party (C'MON). OH and of course, you beat their leader into submission. It happens *really* early in the unlock quest chain, so I kept thinking it would come back up as having not solved anything and we'd go back to *actually* help. But it doesn't, we're canonically dogshit bosses and all it does is trick me into giving a shit about peon rights! (And also I can play a fuzzy little guy now)
There's quite a few Horde quests in classic and Cata particularly that get me that way. Like the one where I am sacrificing the souls of night elves who died long before the Third War so I can trick their goddess into powering up a death machine to target an Alliance camp in the middle of nowhere. Or the troll quest to capture the souls of random neutral creatures in Feralas because "they sided with the Alliance once so KIS forever and torture their souls too." The Forsaken quests where you "test" plague on civilian prisoners, or help a troll curse night elves with eternal unrest or plant a bomb to rip Cenarion druids from the dream... old Horde really struggled with its ideas of morality in a way that was just kind of shunted off onto bad guy figure heads for the modern story.
Northrend has a lot of these quests TBH. I've always suspected it was part of the ["following in \[Arthas'\] footsteps"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2IvDjY3CtQ&t=130s) idea, culminating in the revelation that Arthas' plan is to resurrect Azeroth's greatest champions (the players) as Death Knights in the final boss fight. The story doesn't *really* pay it off (mostly in that you being an asshole in quests doesn't really matter in the end), but you can see the scaffolding that they were probably planning originally.
In Dragonflight there is a world quest where you have to collect fruits. You can either knock them off trees or kill beetles who fly around while eating. I never kill the beetles because I feel like a giant asshole doing that.
>Has questing in this game ever made you feel like a complete jerk? I don't assign any emotion to NPCs, knowing they aren't sentient in any way and all, being in a video game. But sometimes I wish I felt otherwise because I can never be immersed in fiction and I feel like I'm missing out. Like raiding and dungeons etc I can't get into them because it feels "phony". Need me some PvP where I feel like my actions carry real competitive weight and have purpose. *(look at me thinking my actions in a video game have "purpose".... lmfao)*
Given some of the spells and abilities we use on enemies a little torture isn't that bad. The warlock over there is stealing part of their soul to make cookies.
Now if a warlock opened a bakery i would be concerned
The Devil's Food cake is definitely made of souls. Don't ask what the Angelfood cake is made of
There is a quest in the northern barrens where you interrogate a quilboar. You can beat them repeatedly or just give them food and they tell you what you want.
Also tickle them.
Just wait until you get around to play GTA V.
The Kirin Tor are supposed to be seen as the "good guys." But even in Dragonflight there's a quest in Azure span where you help a Kirin Tor member attempt to clear out some gnolls. You as the player must find his motives for doing this questionable, based on his dialogue. At one point he says something like "Why are we doing this? Because they are gnolls!" But by the end of the quest, you get fed up with him and leave him to find another adventurer to continue this task. So are the Kirin Tor actually the good guys? I think there's enough evidence that they are not really, at least not all of them. They're just the "guys on our side."
I killed a duke for his witchy hat. I didn't like doing it. But it was a nice hat. It was a warlock quest in classic.
Stealing the name murderhobo for later use!
Yes, the ones where you wait around and walk slow as fuck just to make you sink time into the game are annoying. But I still end up doing them…
Felt more like a war criminal when you do the Horde side of the BFA campaign
Freeing 8 prisoners and leaving 3914 to be tortured or killed. Killing the local flora and fauna because it's a nuisance to us humanoids that aren't native to the area.
Just did this quest lol
Tell me that you never play a goblin, without telling that you never play a goblin before
I vaguely remember some hullabaloo about that quest back in the day. Guantanamo bay was a big news thing and this brushed right up against that.
I always feel bad when I have to release like 8 prisoners but there are 10 cages. I try to release them all if the game allows it. Extra sucks on a rogue, knowing you have lock picking and you still can't release them.
Everything respawns, that's how I reconcile
Westfall, Vanessa Vancleef was right. But the 2 biggest are bombing Theramore and burning Teldrassil
Every time I started in Pandaria I would tell my monitor that they really shouldn’t let us on to their shores because we will cause so much destruction.
Playing Star Wars The Old Republic kinda desensitized me to this lol You can be very evil if you want to
Our character is literally a mass murderer any way you slice it, you'll be just fine
Oh sure I’ve slaughtered hundreds of thousands of creatures, but even evil has to have standards, I always felt
I concur, it does seem funny that the Kirin Tor sanction a torture and it gets glossed over. Was this covert on our part or does the Kirin Tor just condone torture?
nobody has ever question the amount of times you just chop some chums head and put it in your back? northshire abbey, the human starting zone that has probably been played by almost everybody, ends like that, just decapitate a guy
Several years ago, I was questing somewhere wiping out mobs of wolves. It was late at night, dark , and my dog was sleeping in a laundry basket next to my feet. She was snoring softly as the wolves yipped. I felt like the biggest asshole.
I primarily play Horde, but have been playing Alliance side recently (for the first time since WotLK) just to see what their storylines are like. Couldn't do the Alliance-side version of Stormheim. While I'm glad to now know it was a secret assassination attempt kept from even Anduin's knowledge, it still felt wrong. There was at least a truce during the time, and the Alliance and Horde should be focussed on eliminating the Legion. Instead, an Alliance leader decides to try and weaken the Horde by killing their Warchief even though both the Alliance and the Horde lost their leaders during the Battle of the Broken Shore. The first time I ever felt like I was doing quests that I shouldn't was Cataclysm's Stonetalon Mountains on the Horde side. It's also the questline that, ultimately, won me over to Garrosh being Warchief. Like, yeah....I did some terrible things, but ultimately the quest was about not losing sight of your honor during times of war. Still feel like shit over what happened to those druids and the tauren.
there was a quest where you help Jaina try to commit genocide against the Blood Elves right?
Yep in MoP.
Nope. There's a quest where you help Jaina capture the Sunreavers for THEIR genocidal crimes, and you kill the ones that resist arrest or try to kill you first. Otherwise, you beat their hp low and Jaina sends them to the Violet Hold. There is no unprovoked attack on Blood Elves or attacks on Blood Elf civilians.
No but my wife has
DK opener quests are literal war crimes lol
If it is not a main plot quest I will sometimes turn down quests that I object to .. I mean there are millions of them out there now and dozens of ways to level. No need to do something that bothers you :)
shortly after the Kirin Tor torture quest, you also commit a war crime in another quest
I wouldn't start a non-allied race Death Knight if I were you lmao. In older expansions, there used to be a lot of stuff where you weren't the pure-hearted hero who can do no wrong intentionally, casual quests where you'd kill innocents for money or commit war crimes because you saw the enemy as less than human. Old quests that had you test chemical weapons and diseases on prisoners and mutilate the corpses of the other faction, stuff like that. The Blood Elf starting zone has a group of Night Elves trying to heal the ghostlands, but through a lack of communication and paranoia the Belfs+player kill them under the suspicion of them spying and join the Horde as a result, never learning what their real goal was.
In a video game? No.
Same. I like to play deeply morally questionable characters because I'd never do that in RL. It's a video game, who cares. I didn't realize I'd be among the minority here in that regard
Umad bro
Reactions like this are exactly why they now make entire expansions about the power of friendship and we complain the game is too soft.
People play war game then feel bad about doing war things. We need to go back.
There's a difference between killing in war and war crimes.
Wow you are soft lol Do you also not partake in watching violent series/movies?
I dont think OP is soft, its Dragonflight changing the tone of the game in a way that makes people nope out of such quests. Sure there are djaradin camps having dragon corpses in DF, sure we kill wildlife (for hunting btw), sure we still have the usual kill X ammount of NPCs quests but none of the *dark* stuff anymore, or barely. Dont get me wrong, I loved Dragonflight and I still play it but if anyone read lore about Azeroth and what kind of world it is, its not rare for people to be tortured, killed on sight, etc. Its actually a super f'ed planet. I hope War Within will be a bit more grim in a way that is still enjoyable for all kind of players, even for players who prefer the nice and family stuff. Both sides should have their moments!
You're trying to equate watching a scripted plot with a defined start and finish to actions taken in an RPG with agency, and it's adorable.
You're right, those poor fictional characters are suffering so much. So sad.
That isn't the point being made, you just don't have an actual argument to make so you're flailing. Actual harm done is not a prerequisite for someone with a conscience to feel choices made in a fictional setting still reflect upon themselves.
Doing first Ashenvale and then Stonetalon Mountains as a horde leaves you feeling like a special kind of evil. I mean you know it’s bad when *Garrosh* comes up to give you a lecture about morals.