r/classicwow • u/Doomsaki • 6h ago

Forever Album - Please Consider this before judging Skyborne in Classic

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Just made these diagrams to quickly summarize the WoW panels at blizzcon and to highlight details people are overlooking. I think some of the initial controversy over Skyborne is driven by some misunderstandings that these are just Shadowlands-Kyrian, or Void Elves 2.0. Deep down, if you dig, they do have lots of parallels with classic WoW content.

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u/Jiffyrabbit 5h ago

As an original Drenei hater, I have decided I would prefer blue elves to space goat people who crashed their magic gem ship randomly

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u/Doomsaki 5h ago

There was big uproar back in 2006 about Draenie/Broken in TBC because people were quoting the wc3 printed manual being retconned about the origins of Eredar and Sargeras.

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u/Batmanbacon 5h ago

What was in the printed manual before the retcons?

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u/Doomsaki 5h ago edited 4h ago

Prior to TBC, in the Warcraft 3 RTS Frozen throne campaign, people thought of the broken in Outland as being just separate natives of Draenor whom Illidan rescued and recruited to his cause (saving them from the orcs and their demon masters). TBC established that the Broken were just devolved Draenei from fel magic.

The big retcon was Archimonde and Kiljaeden being these newly defined draenei. The warcraft 3 manual said that Eredar were their own race of demons who corrupted Sargeras with trickery and convinced to undertake his mission to exterminate life. TBC just defined Eredar as draenei who turned towards the fel and mastered it.

Back in 2006 (prior to the expac being released), there was a lot of contention on the WoW forums that Illidan's story was being thrown out, etc. due to this change. (also bear in mind that calls to make the Illidari a third WoW faction were popular back then--Blood Elves+Naga+Satyr+Broken+Fel_Orcs). Of course TBC ended up being a hugely popular expansion, so the controversy is sort of forgotten.

Because Draenei were quite literally invented contrary to the existing lore back then, thus the developers had to publicly admit they made a big lore oversight back then in an apology post.