The new patch 10.1.5 for World of Warcraft is currently on the test servers and contained a very controversial quest. In it, you should make sure that the dragon Alexstrasza is really being tortured and forced to lay eggs against her will. Players protested and now the quest has been deactivated.
What was that quest about? The quest “A Missing Soul” was intended as part of the upcoming update 10.1.5, which is titled “Rifts in Time”. You travel back in time with Chromie, approximately to the era of Warcraft 2. It goes to the time when Alexstrasza was captured by the Dragonmaw clan.
Your task is to return the Demon Soul to its rightful place. The controversy here is:
- The Demon Soul is a powerful artifact of Deathwing that was used by the Orcs to imprison, torture, and force Alexstrasza to lay eggs against her will.
- By not having the Demon Soul in its place, the dragon could have escaped and spared herself and her clan a lot of suffering. Players have to decide against it to avoid changing the current timeline.
- Chromie herself tells us that it is a hard decision and that we should better not tell the “current” Alexstrasza anything about this time travel action.
What has happened now? Blizzard has removed the quest from the test server after some internal discussions.
You can play the current patch 10.1 for a few weeks now. Here you can find all the info about it:
Players criticize the theme and “bad humor” of the quest
What exactly are the fans criticizing? Alexstrasza is – thanks to all the presentation and promotion surrounding Dragonflight – kind of the female main character of the expansion. Playing through themes of torture and rape in a side quest and even becoming part of the process did not sit well with some.
They called for a rephrasing or deletion of the quest so they would not have to make this moral decision.
Quests with Chromie, where you have to replay bad events in the past and ensure their continuation, have occurred before. However, the difference now is that it specifically involves a character whose suffering we have to endure, unlike the opening of the Dark Portal, where it was about a general event.
Additionally, the dialogue with Chromie was criticized. That the dragon Alexstrasza does not want to tell anything about the mission is met with incomprehension. Even the slang throughout the quest series and the “I think she knows” at the end seem to trivialize the event.
Although Alexstrasza suspects what is happening in the quest and still says: “Even though it is important to adhere to the timeline, I still don’t have to like it,” that has also been criticized. The dragon is said to have given a kind of trauma response when speaking to her.
On Twitter, some users also referred to the real-life issues that Blizzard has faced with sexism. 37 employees have been fired and in 2022 the company paid 35 million dollars in fines for the lack of mechanisms and methods to monitor these issues.
The quest also contradicts all the efforts to make WoW more inclusive. These included:
- More diverse characters
- The adjustments of dialogues
- The removal of discriminatory and offensive emotes.
How does Blizzard respond to the criticism? In an official forum post, it states:
We have seen the comments in the community regarding some Chromie quests in Rifts in Time on the PTR and we understand your concerns. We have internally reviewed all these quests, discussed them, and are in the process of adjusting and removing them. These changes will be available in one of the upcoming PTR builds. Thank you for your feedback!
What other quests are there with Chromie? Another time travel quest revolves around the childhood of Jaina Proudmoore. However, this is rather cute, as the mage simply turns guards into animals:
