Garrosh is Stupid

Warcraft doesn't have a story, it has "lore".

This is perhaps its biggest failing as a game; while it is interactive, it misses out on the biggest promise of gaming: telling a story through a new medium. Really good games integrate the story and gameplay into a coherent whole, with the two reinforcing each other. Bioshock, Silent Hill 2, and Portal all do this marvelously, and we rightly remember them as real gems. WoW needs to get a clue.

Take Garrosh, the new poster boy of the Horde. In BC, he was a whinny pansy who we all knew and hated for said whining. Now he's a balls-to-the-wall warrior and general. That's a fair character transition, and good growth fundamentally, but as players we saw NONE OF IT. It just happened, as if 3.0 patch notes included a 50% Garrosh ballsiness buff, with a 40% chance to proc retarded. In their rush to characterize Garrosh, they made him an idiot, not being able to see past RAWR ALLIANCE SUX, even when it's pointed out to him directly. So we went from a wimp (albeit well characterized through quests) to a parody of the Horde. Sweet.

Nessingwary is one of the coolest characters in WoW, by contrast, because he was developed as a character in WoW. With his strange, tongue-in-cheak big game hunting lust and now the excellently done DHETA quests, he is a playerbase favorite, maybe a bit like Barney in Half Life. Yet Blizzard only seems willing to develop characters like this if they're totally ancillary. The big movers and shakers, by and large, get their character development through novels, comic books, or aren't even developed at all besides totally un-spoken changes. Apparently Garrosh is badass now, OK, whatever. Show me how that happened, don't just say it did in a blue post and leave it there.

God I hate Garrosh now; I can only hope his crazy tyranny over the Horde that's coming in Cataclysm doesn't all take place in the hour I download patch 4.0.