Your view on Post-Warcraft 3 lore

General Discussion
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I happen to be one of those people who never really liked WOW much and thus never played it. Not to mention that being subscribed would take a lot of money, especially where I live. I must say, however, that in the past few years, I often check on the latest development in the WOW story. And no wonder! After all, in follows up on the epic story of Warcraft 3. I do not think there are many people on this forum who dislike the latter. I wonder, however, if the same is case for WOW. Frankly, I do not think that MMORPG genre is a very good vessel for a great storytelling compared to RTS, nor that WOW can match W3 in this regard. Now, it all makes sense for Blizzard, as they earn a massive revenue from WOW, so blaming them is not on my agenda in this thread. Some plot-related elements that annoy me in WOW are:

  1. Top Warcraft characters effectively playing second-fiddle to player characters. I prefer the focus staying on the real Warcraft characters
  2. A new Lich king was crowned for a really weird reason. I do not see how a leaderless Scourge is any stronger than when it is led by one of the strongest and talented characters in Warcraft’s lore.
  3. Garrosh, who was a major character in 3 expansions feels completely bland. Not to mention that he murders one of his subordinates for killing civilians one day and drops what is basically a nuke on an entire city soon after.
  4. Tyrande and Malfurion going berserk after a World tree that only stood for few years was burned down, while the Burning Legion did pretty much the same thing on a much larger scale. Not to mention that many elves who loyally fought for their kin suddenly flip and join Sylvanas, because, reasons. In general, many characters feel like empty shells that act according to Blizzard’s whim instead of acting in accordance with their character.
  5. Time travel/Parallel Universes: This is very subjective, but I greatly dislike such features, in part because it makes virtually every event potentially reversable. Just imagining what even the potential use of such story devices could mean for the Warcraft world makes my head spin.
  6. Death of a multitude of major characters is tied to the raid system. Personally, l consider these deaths to be way more immersive inside cinematics and large-scale battles rather than using a bunch of anonymous ‘champions’. You can of course disagree with me on this.
  7. When designing WOW, Blizzard wanted to split the playerbase into 2 halves and so artificially put every race into huge factions which are unrealistically cohesive, stable and even centralised… and this all was somehow accomplished in less than a decade. No race has tried to stay even remotely neutral, which, considering that both factions are in one way or another in a state of perpetual total war either against eachother or against ‘insert current threat’ , would be something most of them would try to do.

So, what’s your take on this? Also, once Reforged is finally released, how open is this community to custom maps and campaigns that disregard Post-Warcraft 3 lore and instead choose to start where The Frozen Throne left off? I am asking partially, because I am curious, and partially, because I might try to make my own campaign and have no idea whether people would want that or they would simply be confused by the retcon.

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Alot of original WC III players ignore the WoW lore and somewhat make their own version for the future, you can check Rise of The Blood Elves and Curse Of The Forsaken from HiveWorkshop for example, they share similarities with WoW but they are really written alot better

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I absolutely loved WoW and its lore up until Cataclysm. I still play it now, though I enjoy it much less.

The issue with your first point is that WoW is a MMORPG with a massive world, thousands of NPCs and thousands of quests. Blizzard obviously needs to focus on the player character and they can’t have every iconic NPC for a given expansion lead the charge every time the player wants to do something. In a RTS like Warcraft 3, each mission only featured a small handful of iconic characters and each campaign followed the story of the same small handful of characters depending on which faction / race you were playing as. However, I have noticed a major shift in the player’s role in WoW: we used to be random adventurers, but now we’re the saviours / champions of Azeroth.

Concerning your second point, we want an active Lich King in order to contain the Scourge and prevent them from running rampant. With the first Lich King, part of Arthas was holding back the Scourge and preventing them from annihilating everything. With Bolvar, who seemingly has no subconscious contenders, he is able to maintain control over the Scourge even better than Arthas was able to.

Garrosh ended up being fairly boring, I agree. He went from being an angry Hellscream to a power hungry hypocrite.

Your fourth point doesn’t really make any sense, considering that the destruction of Nordrassil was wildly different from the destruction of Darnassus. While the Night Elves had to sacrifice their immortality by using Nordrassil as bait, Kalimdor was still largely intact with most of the Night Elves’ lands remaining untouched. In Sylvanas’ war campaign into Darkshore, many Night Elves were slaughtered, many towns / outposts were destroyed and Darnassus was burned to ashes along with inhabitants that were not fortunate enough to escape.

I more than less share most of your gripes mentioned in your remaining points.

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I am generally a stickler for lore and I stick to canon. That being said, I see both good and bad things that WoW brought to the table. They best is the world building and plethora of new races, the worst being revisionist lore like demons reborn in the twisting nether.

As for post WC3 lore, I think anything pre BC is generally acceptable. There are certainlu factional changes I dont like, such as Night Elves bo longer being gender dynamic or Forsaken allying with Horde or classes like Druid opening up to Tauren and Warlocks on the Horde.

Lorewise, I am fairly comfortable with what goes down on the world. Ragnaros and the Dark Irons, the Black Dragonflight residing in Blackrock Spire, the War of the Shifting Sands, Hakkar the Soulflayer, etc. I thought it all worked out fairly well. Its not without criticism, but I mean, War3 isnt foolproof either and also had a hefty dose of cheese and suspension of disbelief.

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World of Warcraft story is fun. Fun in a very specific comic book “this is over the top whatever will they think of next” way.

I still enjoy the quainter and older Warcraft lore from the old games just as much as I do the new Warcraft lore. The RTS games and the lore dating from that era are really good for their hyperfocus. The MMO and lore from it and other, more modern media are good for the large expansion of the setting.

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NO SUCH THING AS POST WARCRAFT 3 LORE!

WOW is another game/lore that just happens to also be called warcraft :smiley:

DON’T MIX THEM TOGETHER!

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Whole heartly agreed

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They were though because Warcraft 3 lore contributed as a basis for World of Warcraft.

:thinking:

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the only real difference between wow and warcraft 123 is that in wow things are staged out a lot further apart. Where as big arcs in warcraft 3 may happen every 2 maps or so. Its almost the same as comparing movies to books a lot of the times.

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NOTE: Warning! A lot of broken English ahead! You have been warned!

I would like to start with a quotation:

Ah sh*t, here we go again. - Carl Johnson, 2004 (1992)

Well, WoW is MMORPG which means you need to add some expantions to the game to keep it going. This is very unhealthy to the lore as you have to milk all the juice out the universe you have to create something fresh of “fresh” and the story never comes to an end. Now let’s go through some points:

That’s how you create bosses for future expantions in WoW manner

Not to mention that with his expantion the threw Cairne to a garbage bin.

This point to a complete lack of ideas and it’s the last thing you should do when making a continuation to a story, unless it’s time trave based story (Ex: Back to the future)

This is what is great about single player. You can play as a preestablished well written characters. This contributes to emmersion and helps to emphasise it better, while getting first-hand experience.

Kael, Vajsh, Cairne just RIP. But let’s resurrect Illidan twice, why not? I can’t really emphasise Muradin and Illidan any longer they are sort of invincible and their deaths are just zilch.

This is the most as I have said unhealthy thing for the lore. 1 faction has new race - another does, hero of 1 side dies - so does the hero for the other, heres is the traitor and there is the traitor and so on. Horde has always been the bad guys of the universe (maybe not so much in wc3) but in WoW if 1 side does something bad another does as well because the players whine “whie do u macke my faktione bad a u a fan of another faktion, Blisard?”. And one more. Do you remember Night Elves from WC3? Well, i do. Xenophobic self proud people. Yes the made allies before the face of Great Evil but after the event of wc3 and a bit awhile they probaly would say something like “Normies, get out!”.

Also personaly I don’t like when WoW turned into Star Wars with space goats and space ships. Also this robots in the dungeons that semm too technologically advanced for the setting. Warcraft was in a medivhal setting, people couldn’t even know they live on a planet or something. Seeng like Dreadlords having tea party in somekind of a hell alike place nobody know where. Demons where comig though portals with the lep of magic form nowhere whih made it even more dangerous. They also splited wc3 dwarves in dwarves and gnomes.

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I liked the “lesser” lore in WoW a lot. Like all those not-so-important characters, places and quest stories. There are a lot of great, awesome moments and exciting places to visit and see. And generally, the (5-man leveling) dungeons are pretty cool too.

What I don’t like about the WoW lore, is the actual main lore. The story just simply isn’t very good, mainly because of MMO elements: it’s hard to tell a story only from a perspective of one champion (and I also disliked how all players at some point suddenly became guardians of Azeroth, leaders of their classes and right hands of kings and warchiefs). The perspective issue leads to a lot of the story actually being forced to a narrow path of Raids, which ultimately always leads to goodies winning over the baddies, nothing gray between. There can’t really be real drama and exciting moments. Every bad guy is just another raid boss and we always know that he’s being defeated in the end.

However, I’m not really mad or upset about this. I’m not yelling and crying around “ZOMG WOW sucks!12!!!one! its not real lore i decide whats real lore and all who disagrees is wrong!!” Instead, I just simply haven’t been keeping keeping up with the story anymore. I watch some cinematics now and then and maybe watch a “Recap of WoW story so far” videos, but that’s pretty much it. I’ll stick with the novels.

This is probably the one worst thing about WoW.

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Exactly this, and whenever they are out of stories Lich King-Legion-Old Gods comeback just like a ‘they actually did not die’ plot twist and WoW nearly turned into a >fight old gods>fight legion>fight undead thing in exact order…

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i dont like most of WoW Lore but in the same time i dont like to see 2 stories in the same franchise

so this is why i belive if we ever Gonna get a New Xpacs in Warcraft 3 Reforged its better if the Lore to be conected to WoW for 2 reasons
_making the 2 games related will make more of WoW players base play WC3 Reforged
_they can use WC3 Reforged to Fix and explaine more WoW Lore

so for Example we see Kael have changed from the person who do everything to defend his people to the betrayer who left his people and fallow the Demons
but we did not see how Kael’thas change , maybe he was defending his people from the Demons bay fallowing Kil’jaiden because in the end of the Humans campaign in TFT we see Kil’jaiden give Orders to Illidan to destroy the Frozen Throne or Face his eternal Wrath , but in TBC we know they fail but nothing happen to them so maybe Kael’thas become Kil’jaiden servent for the exchange of his people’s safety ( again poor Kaelthas was forced )

and maybe they end in the WotLK event by Killing the main character of WC3 Arthas without reaching the lvl of Thrall the Green.j Kong fu Panda Back to the future …
and if we ever get WC4 i hope it will be after many years from WoW events so we have no Big Alliance or Horde just many races in chaos and we start from 0 ( maybe show some hints about the old world and what happen to make us reach between the events of WoW and WC4 )

and about the playable characters in WoW in many of the raids there is important Lore character who lead the Attack and i allways imagine myself as Grunt (orc warrior player) summoned to help so there is many characters can be the playable heroes in many events so for example in TBC the black tample events you can make Maiev as the main character who killed Illidan
in WotLK you can Make Tirion as the main character who will kill Arthas …

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Really interesting post, i agree that a MMO is an awful genre to tell a story, especially for how big the in-game world is in these type of games and how hard is to change it.

1 I agree with this point, but it’s even hard to make it the other way on an MMO, since i saw a lot of people bytching that their MC on BfA isn’t the full centre of the whole f*cking universe like it was on that abhorrent abomination of Warlords.

2 The whole WotLK ending was a cheap @sspull with your typical cilchè plot device aka Ashbringer and it was just a foreshadowing of the complete butchering of Sarah Kerrigan as a character on the whole StarCraft 2 trilogy, i hear people complaining about Illidan on Legion, he didn’t fell hard as Kerrigan did, plus the fact that on Legion his motivations have at least a bit of sense

3 Didn’t like Garrosh that much either, but he became a Chad when he labelled Sylvanas at what she truly is and truly was even when she was alive.

4 Blizzard storytelling after WC3 in a nutshell, most characters like empty puppets with no purpouse and also Maiev… That magically “forgive” Tyrande after she killed her friends for the lulz after 10k years of bonding ¯\ (ツ)/¯

5 Did you ever heard of Bioshock Infinite ? On the surface level its story sounds great and i admit that i loved it when playing it, even if i had to make a paper of notes just to keep up to what the hell was happening.
But if you analize it deeply after finishing it, what you truly have it’s a convolute mess that looks cool and doesn’t make any sense, with huge plot holes, retcons and incosistences that completely shatter the core plot. If WoW doesn’t stop here with this parallel universes thing, it would most likely happen the same thing.

6 Well, people want to fight the cool guy/chick right? Who cares about a proper death or a proper death sequence? This problem is directly linked with issue #1

7 I don’t even understand why they decided to sort of integrate PvP on WoW lore, all that it did was having Horde and Alliance make pointless wars between every major lore event, like its happening on BfA that clearly is nothing more then a filler between Legion and the Old Gods new invasion; And don’t even get me started on the edgelord descent of Sylvanas after wc3 ffs

My take? WoW lore it’s trash, very few great stories, surrounded by mediocre ones and trash, all of that packed on an inconsistent lore and setting; I know that you didn’t play WC3 for the superb story telling or lore either, but at least it was memorable, consistent (on most cases) and well written overall, it was a bunch of clichès perfectly mixed together, like Dead Space 1 did if you want.

Finally i would definitely play a custom campaign with retold lore, i just hope that it won’t have a lot of three-thousand-hours-siege missions like a lot of campaigns like to do; And that it’s not something like the “Arthas Campaign”, i am sure that it’s a good campaign, but i didn’t like it, it basically ends up the same for a lot of characters, so i dropped it after the first chapter, plus i found some missions horrendous to say the least, but hey, just my hopinion, another disappointment on this regard was "Rise of the Lich King"

On the other hand Tomoraider and Turnro efforts on alternative or post wc3 lore campaigns are simply legendary

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Well I disagree with you on many things but I still love WC3. I did not dislike WoW.

I am still relatively new to WoW and I really need to read all the replies to your OP, but here goes my take.

Time travel in the WarCraft universe is basically a chrome dragonflight thing, as much as nature and the Emerald Dream are green dragonflight stuff, etc. You are welcome not to like it, but that’s basically the origin of that story “artifact”, and the explanation behind it not going anywhere.

Your own campaign can be (obviously) whatever you want it to be, but considering more than 10 MM players liked and enjoyed and came to know WC because of WoW, I don’t think your “deviation” from it would go too well.

About the multiple “champions” and “random heroes”, there is something I’ve come to conclude; Blizzard did not intend WoW or any of it’s expansions to be thought of as if any one of the billions and billions of Player Characters could have done those questlines, but rather a single entity. Let’s call him, I don’t know, Saamwyse. :smiley:

Saamwyse did all these things on his own (and of course he should be commended, as he actually kind of his with his garrison on Draenor and his order hall high status as Highlord or whatever). Now, the issue is, what the f is Saamwyse’s race and class? I mean he could be a Night Elf Druid (like Furion),0 a Human Warrior (like Lothar), a Draenei Paladin (like Maraad)… he could also ofc be Horde, as a Blood Elf Mage (like Kael), an Orc Shaman (Go’el), Pandaren Monk (Chen)…

I could see Blizzard doing what they did with “the player” and characters like James Raynor, Sarah Kerrigan and Artanis, but the problem is the possibilities are far more diverse. Still, I would say it’s a single person who goes thru all of WoW, not many different “champions”.

And for closure, I’d like to point something similar out about rare mobs, dungeon bosses, etc; I’d say some of them were actually killed by the player (mostly minor, like Cho’gall or demon lord ‘X’ on Outland), while most of them (Illidan especially) were just knocked out! Well that explains it for me at least, try to think about it like that for a moment. :stuck_out_tongue:

Now to actually close, I’d like to make a quick overview of what I experienced in this WoW story that some people have come to despise: Classic had “Saamwyse” scale thru the ranks (of his race Y and class Z) to actually become someone important, maybe like Arthas when finishing Paladin training or Furion’s training with Cenarius, 10,000 years ago. Then he goes and helps King Varian Wrynn escape Onyxia and stop Deathwing, while Burning Crusade basically has “the guy” (always Saamwyse and never “us” or “the player”) come and see what Draenei and Blood Elves have done with the place, to then side with the Scryers or the Aldor (kickass groups of people if you ask me, no need to call them “factions”) to stop Illidan’s use of demons and unmask Kael both on Tempest Keep and the Sunwell Plateau.

This might take longer than I thought, and you can find this on the web so stop reading here if you prefer; Lich King has Saamwyse go and stop Arthas and finally kill him (this time for good), and to see that “weird new Lich King” sit in his place to keep the wills of the dead in check. That’s the whole reason behind that, I don’t really see that being a big problem. Then, it’s Neltharion and his wreck of half of Azeroth, to eventually stop Ragnaros and help Go’el end it (with the help of the dragon aspects). The rest you guys know, the matter is, there is no big issue to be made about “WoW lore VS WC lore”, that’s not a thing! I see WC3 changing a bit to fit the lore behind the sequel, but also the sequel could be changed a bit once facts are put in paper and an eventual WC4 is turned into a script; did the bronze dragonflight travel back in time? Yes, and mostly kept things intact, except maybe Draenor that is not both a wreck of a place and a beautiful one, and you can explore them both in WoW without too much impact into the lore. That, OP, is my take. :smiley:

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True. I mean, think about how long it took the Horde to form? Each game had a different iteration, sometimes with Ogres and Goblins, sometimes with Trolls, and finally adding in the Tauren. I totally agree with you, the Forsaken make very little sense being added into the mix, and in such a short time scale to top it off.

In my opinion the problem stems from two sources. One is the changing of hands for lead writers, giving every set of expansions its own feel and take on characters (look at desperate for survival Wc3 Kael versus insane-leader WoW Kael) making them swing wildly in personality types. The other would be as you mentioned the RTS vs MMO differences in storytelling. For a good MMO story to be told, random players need to be able to be inserted into the story, which fundamentally shifts focus away from the major NPC characters. They serve primarily as a backdrop to the players success or defeats. RTS’s on the other hand, the player shares in the victory or defeats of their NPC’s. When you succeed in killing Mal’ganis as Arthas, you feel the victory as your own while the story unfolds around our unfortunate prince. You can’t get that same feeling of Arthas then wandering off into the snowy wastelands in an MMO setup.

I can agree with this. I think it’s possible to do with Wc3, but obviously it’s a lot easier to structure the kind of detailed, day-to-day storytelling that a huge MMO Sandbox can do, as opposed to the RTS side-quest mechanic. That being said, I think Vanilla especially captured the Wc3 essence of having interesting but believable problems from people around small towns who were a little over their heads. I’d love to see if they could tie this into the new Reforged maps a bit.

The Founding of Durotar is a great example imo of an RTS doing something similar to this. It would be amazing if some later updates would release mini-campaigns like that one.

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