The Video Game Revue

Torture Quests in WoW

I recently noticed the news story on Kotaku about Richard Bartle's arguments on why torture is inappropriate in WoW. It hadn't escaped my attention that there are Horde quest chains involving torture in WotLK--in Dragonblight especially. Bartle's arguments got me thinking about whether or not they're appropriate.

I most want to address the following argument:

When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting.

Contrary to what Bartle says here, I don't believe that torture quests are a new thing in WoW. Players who've done certain quest chains for the Undercity already know that certain Forsaken NPCs do things like intentionally infect captive Alliance NPCs with horrible plagues for the purposes of experimentation. These quests have been around longer than either of the expansion packs.

Another thing to consider here is that Blizzard is using these quests as a means to establish that a certain faction within the Forsaken is, in fact, evil. On this point, Bartle has the following to say:

I wasn't complaining about some Death Knight quest that involves torture. See, at this point Death Knights are evil — so evil, they torture people — so it makes sense. It's in context.

It's my experience with WoW that the characters who give the Horde torture quests are also evil. Not that the Horde is evil, of course, but certain characters and groups within the Horde are. These torture quests are used as one means of establishing that.

I don't entirely disagree with Bartle's main points, but I do disagree that the torture quest The Art of Persuasion is as bad as Bartle makes it out to be. Torture commonly plays a prominent role in fantasy storytelling (see Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride), and I didn't find Blizzard's treatment of the subject to be an endorsement of torture at all.

posted by Parappa @ 8:20 AM