Please no more mmo´s
Just make single player offline expansions please.
I don´t want to have a internet to play it =(
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I would certainly buy an RTS continuation as well. A Warcraft 4, that goes after Warcraft 3’s story.
World of Warcraft’s story is too much built up on hyping for “next big baddie”, instead of a well-made story like the Warcraft RTS series have had.
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Non-target combat is trash. Tab-targeting all the way.
See, and my favourite third faction would be the Illidari, and your concept of a faction entire composed of decomposing bodies is boring.
It’s too vast for your comprehension.
If what that article writes is true and they change WC III in anyway, besides Classic, I have no more business with activlizzard.
WC III is the last stand lorewise, and what brought so many into WoW.
You disgust me activlizzard.
Unless I make some friends in Classic, I will be done with it in 2 months, and for sure I will be done with this company forever, as long this changes keep on.
Everything that I loved is getting destroyed by greed and nonsense.
I wonder if it’s time to give up in videogames, certainly comics are death long time since, thanks to Disney.
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Though I personally like the various stories in The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Legion, Battle for Azeroth, etc., I can agree that MMO as a storytelling format is not as a versatile as RTS. More often than not, a twist or conclusion of any plot just depends too much on the rise or demise of a single villain~
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Well I do hope that they will not go WoW lore in future. If they decide to create W4 one day, they have to create separe lore entity from wow. WoW bipolarity (AvsH) destroyed their game. I know it sounds rediculous that something that started the lore and game destroyed it, but it’s the truth. We were shown in W3 that nations do not fight only for horde or alliance, but that there are also NE, undead, naga, Belves who left Alliance etc. The world became full of life and full of politics and every race wanted to push their agenda and it was great. In WoW everyone has to go with Horde or Alliance or are destroyed, all of the great characters got flattened because now its about the player. Worst of all nothing happens in that world… yeah there is this great evil, yeah you killed it and hey there is another one, great you killed that too and it goes on and on and on and the lore became boring real quickly.
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I honestly would love a universe split between TfT->WoW and TfT->WC4.
The idea indeed of having multiple nations with complex intercultural intrigue sounds so much better than: “Red vs blue until bad guy shows up. Fight bad guy together. Learn lesson about not being dicks to each other. Incident happens to show red/blue are bastards. Repeat.”
It would also help preserve the charm of the various species. WoW completely neutered the Night Elves from “Savage warrior women and armies of forest beasts (+their sleepy husbands)” to just random generic fantasy elves who happen to have purple skin.
I give the odds of that happening a close to 0 though.
That said: There are facets of WoW lore that could very well be interesting to play with.
Having a “Black Empire” faction, possibly broken up into subfactions of Silithids, Nerubians, Mantids etc would be fun.
The Mogu, Zandalari, post-retcon Draenai, Gorian Empire, Arrakoa and a few others all have potential to be interesting additions to an RTS.
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What nobody touches upon is the whole titan-related stuff. All those prisons guarding the Old Gods. The Holy Light coming from the Naaru. Life coming from Eonar. The Shadow of Death and what it’s about. The Legion having a murky agenda. Deathwing being Death incarnate. Sargeras’ sword having an Old God eye in the hilt. The old Eredar homeworld housing a Titan of [Death?] which was constructed by someone around him (according to the Alleria audionovel).
The issue with all that is that it both turns the events of TFT quite insignificant in comparison, yet at the same gives them even more repercussions if you look at it.
My impression is that vanilla was a good and tame continuation of TFT, then TBC and WotLK were an utter trainwreck (with a few decent points), and then Cata onwards is becoming decent storytelling in retrospect.
I agree that two factions are the weakest point. I would also mention the slow pace. What takes them a decade to tell now took them literally two years in 2002-3.
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Pretty much this.
Blizzard’s storytelling back in TBC and WotLK seemed restricted by the idea that “there must always be a clearly defined and visible villain for the story to progress”. Cata was more liberated from the idea and we didn’t even know who the big baddie in MOP was until the later patches (which is good). Legion also delivered a few pleasant surprises including Illidan becoming a renegade hero instead of the villain people like myself was led to believe. Jury is still out for BFA but things have been interesting so far.
MMO nature. I am not sure if any genius can figure a way out of this mire. Guild Wars 2 tried to have dynamic, fast-paced Personal Stories in its early days but later discarded the method and went back down the “big villain” cliche
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The 2 faction setup is the crux of the narrative problems.
Even when they try to tell a GoT-esquecivil war within factions or a leader who has become corrupt, they can never develop the overall narrative without retaining the faction at equal strength to each other. Instead of a progressive narrative, we have a 80s cartoon where god guys fight bad guys and at the end of the day everything is reset for the next adventure. Sure lines get shifted, but they don’t go through any significant change.
If Garrosh and the Iron Horde were told in a linear story, by all means it would not be good guy vs badguy with all the poor writing that went into painting Garrosh as an iredeemable villain. And thats what makes WoW storytelling so bland. Every villain is 1 dimensional.
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Do you think they’re going to regrow Teldrassil? Or rebuild Theramore? They aren’t. There are definite and significant changes.
would not have been*
Was he painted as such? He dabbled with the heart of Y’shaarj. And even after that, Thrall’s actions at the Mak’gora were so questionable, spirits abandoned him and he went away.
The entire MoP debacle was about the Alliance supporting one of the factions in the internal Horde strife. What’s so unusual?
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Do you think they’re going to regrow Teldrassil? Or rebuild Theramore? They aren’t. There are definite and significant changes.
The greater narrative established these places as important, but there isn’t really anything narratively tied to those places. Keep in mind, Stormwind was razed in WC1 and Dalaran was destroyed by Archimonde; both come back in full force in WoW.
Warcraft has never been really able to depict the true population of any given race. Even if 99% Night Elves were wiped out with Teldrassil, the story would move on with the same amount of Night Elves you see around. The dead end up being statistics that are never consistent in the story.
In regards to WoW’s narrative, I don’t see the Night Elves losing territory being very significant any more than the Gilneans losing Gilneas. Despite not having their own territory, they’re still a part of the Alliance, and the bigger picture is that Stormwind is everyone’s home.
Even with the Trolls and Taurens narratively getting kicked out of Orgrimmar in MoP, there wasn’t really much impact to that outside of story. Everyone was still able to freely walk around Orgrimmar in game. And thats where most Horde hang out anyways.
Was he painted as such? He dabbled with the heart of Y’shaarj. And even after that, Thrall’s actions at the Mak’gora were so questionable, spirits abandoned him and he went away.
He was written to be the next hyped warchief, and I don’t think the devs intended for him to be a bad guy. Players just didn’t like is rough approach and villified him, so they wrote him into a villain. The novels are indicative of this. Pre Cata, novels hyped him up. Then Shattering put in some misunderstandings, which could lead to him being ‘redeemed’ or ‘villified’. But even during all of Cata, fans didn’t really like him (despite him being honourable like denouncing the dude who nuked the Night Elves in Stonetalon) and it was announced with MoP (at least on the second day of Blizzcon) that he would be the end villain. As people wanted it to be.
And from there he was written as a villain. Despite wanting to fight with pure strength, he chooses to tap into Heart of Y’shaarj. Despite being honour-bound to fight as equals, he was totally cool with hurting Anduin (still a child) and leaving him to die. There was no way to empathize with Garrosh even if you wanted to, after Cata he was written to be bad to the bone.
They wrote it that it was his own actions that lead the Horde splintering and fighting against him, rather than making it a much more complicated and empathetic situation. They wrote themselves into a hole and tried to fix it by killing off their character. That’s what was unusual.
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I don’t really agree with this assertion as pretty much from the get go Garrosh did quite a few questionable things that I feel like even Thrall wouldn’t have been ok with. Garrosh was just a major douche that let power go to his head.
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In Wrath of the Lich King, he was written as Varian’s counterpart, the influential Horde character willing to go with war and destroy the other faction, rather than work with them.
But narratively speaking, the character of Garrosh started as a weakling from Outland with no ties to the Horde or Alliance. All he knows of the Alliance is through stories told by Thrall and others. Yet Thrall is the one holding him back?
Everything questionable that Garrosh did was in the interest of having a character that continues the Faction War. Thrall is the obvious peacekeeper, so they needed someone to stir the pot. Garrosh ended up being the voice of the Horde, you know, the guy who spits on the Alliance and gets everyone in the crowd cheering “For the Horde!”.
The problem is he wasn’t very much liked, narratively. And I don’t think it’s a fault of the character, but a fault of the story. People were beginning to get tired of Faction War getting in the way of the main ‘Big Bad Villain’ narratives. The way any faction tension was written was done so clumsily, because narratively speaking the Alliance and Horde should be relatively at peace.
I mean if we really break down when these ‘questionable things’ happened, they all line up with how fans were slowly getting tired of him being their ‘voice’. Honestly, it was surprising to me seeing his character taking such a drastic turn, since I half-expected them to write a redemption story or a ‘clear up mistakes’ story for Garrosh after the events of Cataclysm. If you read the Shattering, most of the stuff he does wrong isn’t actually his fault. The whole book starts the faction war with Garrosh as Warchief, and a bunch of Night Elves being killed by Orcs who happened to be Twlights Hammer in disguise. That was never resolved, even when they do address those high-ranking Twilight Cultists like Benedictus at the end of Cata. Usually, those are the moments where they twirl their mustaches and reveal to the audience that they were the ones who orchestrated the deaths of the Night Elves, and Garrosh gets a free pass. Cept by the end of Cata people already hated Warchief Garrosh. That’s around the time when Basic Campfire for Warchief memes popped up.
I think the story could have gone very differently if Garrosh weren’t so openly reviled.
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So, Blizzard might have had brilliant ideas, all spoilt by the incessant whining from the MMO playerbase? See WoD’s content cuts, see the reaction to Slvanas being an interesting character.
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I have nothing against having something new with Reforged. Mainly because the old ‘‘Warcraft 3’’ would still be around to remind us of all of this.
And even if they didn’t go with the retcon and changing the lore. It wouldn’t change the fact that the lore changed because of World of Warcraft.
So yeah, there isn’t really much that can be done and it sure would make more sense to align Wc3 with WoW. Even if some may hate this.
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In effect it’s spoilt by whatever pandering is done either for the fans or for the ‘greater effect of the game’.
Some lore stuff was shifted for the sake of gameplay, like Night Elf females being Druids (something I still hate today) or heck, Druids being opened up to other races (something I also hate).
I have a very fond love for Warcraft being an homage to Warhammer Fantasy. In Warhammer, each race has a unique archetype. Dark Elves are always evil-aligned, Wood Elves are the only true druidic magic users, etc. They aren’t like D&D where you can mix and match races and classes and have a Kobold Bard or a Half-Orc Priest. World of Warcraft has turned the setting into D&D, and that has brought with it a bunch of good and bad things.
In terms of Brilliant ideas being spoiled, I think it’s usually a case of Blizzard biting more than they can chew. I mean even with WoD’s storyline, they had dev interviews explaining how they came up with the entire story. They started with Garrosh and the Mongrel Horde, then they decided to ressurect the Warchiefs of WC2, then they moved even deeper into Dark Portal/Alternate Universe shenanigans. So this sort of spawned out of internal team voting on ‘rule of cool’ concepts, and not really any one person’s vision of what the story should be.
And that’s kinda what is happening to the story overall. It’s being cut and stitched together from a whole bunch of random ‘It’d be cool if’ stories, and only now are they trying to push the Alliance/Horde story forward, and I don’t think they’re really able to sustain it while telling some bigger story about the next ‘it’d be cool if’ bad guy (N’zoth?).
If it were actually written with a linear narrative in mind, then I don’t think the Night Elves would join other factions or open up Druidism to other races, or change their own gender-defined culture to mimic the other races. I don’t think Sylvanas would have given up her freedom to join the Horde. I don’t think Kael’thas would have sided with Kil’jaeden, and I don’t think Lor’themar and the Blood Elves would have joined the Horde. A lot of these things are results of trying to please fans (giving them pretty race on Horde) or just running with a cool what if (playable Undead, playable Night Elves, but keeping it a 2-faction system).
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But the Sargeras thing has been the same since the mid-2000s. The titan Panteon shaping planets and ordering life. The Burning Crusade and how it is tied to various happenings around the world. And the rationale behind all of this. It has been going on for years, with a single laser-focused direction that is now blossoming into a huge reveal.
Even WoD might make sense in the long run. Just look at the Mag’har starting storyline where they are consumed by crazy Yrel and her Lightforged.
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Not necessarily true.
We have to regard it as an evolutionary process, one that is changing more than revealing.
Warcraft 1 had a very simple premise for Demons, and that’s in a Lovecraftian classic horror style where they are otherworldly entities that torment the minds of men.
Warcraft 2 legitimizes demons in physical form in WC2, but only to promote that idea of an otherworldly terror that spills into the real world.
Warcraft 3 takes the physical threat further with showing us the Burning legion, and the Demons, and their entire army. But in doing so, it also revises some of the story to tell us that they’ve invaded twice before, and that there’s a pecking order, and that invasions are a re-occuring thing. While this is great world-building, it also disconnects us from the Lovecraft style horror theme of WC1. The otherworldly threat isn’t just otherworldly, it’s very much worldly multiple times.
From there, it kind of separates. The RPG books were the first reveal of the Titans to the audience, and that’s when we learn about Sargeras being a titan. WoW also hints at this, but doesn’t really regard the Pantheon the same way. The whole Sargeras being a former Titan lore is something that’s more recent, and has become the creation story for the WC Universe as a whole. And with the whole story of them fighting the Old Gods and Sargeras becoming Fel-infused because he wanted to and all those reveals… They’re telling a much different story from what it originally set out to be. Instead of being the demon that manipulated Medivh into opening the portal, he became a fel-corrupted titan who invaded the world once before, lost, then tried again, lost to Aegwynn, then decided to corrupt her baby just so he can open a portal for Orcs to come in, only for years later to scrap that entire idea so instead he comes in physical form to stab Azeroth. It makes the whole Orcs and Portal event seem insignificant, if you see what I mean.
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Weird. This is the first time I see someone viewing WC1 as more Lovecrafting than the Old God shenanigans in WoW. But I get what you’re saying, you mean “other worlds”, whereas in modern WoW, it’s more like all the same Universe with different players.
He was depicted as a fallen titan since the first WoW RPG books.
No, he only stabbed her because the Pantheon started dragging him back. He was gently caressing the planet before it. As if trying to poke it, hear her dreams, and break the shell to let her out.
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