Yet another thing I would chalk up to the transient property inherent in WoW character advancement, I don’t think we’re really any more powerful in-universe than we were during Vanilla. I’d say the exception to this is Legion, where we fought a Titan with legendary ultra-weapons. But for the rest of it, why would AU Kargath Bladefist be 15 levels more powerful than giant, molten, OG-powered Deathwing? Why did BC Archimonde take just as many (actually more) raiders as WoD Archimond did? We’re just as weak/powerful compared to Tyrande & all the other faction leaders as we were then. Level advancement exists strictly for gameplay purposes & IMO shouldn’t be considered an in-universe measure of character power.
The writing since WoD has been pretty horrible, it’s almost amazing people still pay attention to it.
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It’s because Steve Danuser (the new Senior Narrative Designer) is essentially a big Sylvanas and Nathanos fanboi and due to that, they have given both of those characters the almighty “Mary Sue” roles in the BFA storyline
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/9maocs/senior_narrative_designer_steve_danuser_treats/
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I’m going to say the Val’kyr are more of the reason why Nathanos stood a chance. I noticed during the fight that he had a protection buff from them.
We have killed demi-gods, or old gods, or their avatars before, so maybe Val’kyr are somewhat close to them in power?
I do believe without the Val’kyr there, the fight would have played out much differently. I’m not saying all the writing was great, but we shouldn’t just assume that Val’kyr are not great sources of power.
In addition, the stuff about the Night Warrior could be remembered by the Night Elves as much more powerful than it actually is. They also mentioned us dying when we watched the transformation. I was holding that stone right next to Tyrande, and several other NE’s were right next to me, we all made it out just fine.
This is exactly the problem. Everything is built around a big visual “wouldn’t it be cool if…” set piece, and since those cinematics require a lot of time and money they’re not going to change much, if at all. Everything else needs to be shoehorned in to make that set piece work. So if there isn’t a clear path to how the cinematic happens right from conception, we get the halfbaked writing we’ve been seeing lately.
It’s like coming up with a flashy movie trailer, making the trailer, and then writing the entire movie to make the trailer work.
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Nathanos is written like a stereotypical Internet troll. My guess is whoever is writing his lines is one. Openly or covertly.
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I’d say he’s more or less written in a sterotypical “Mary Sue” edgy fanfic fashion, rather then as a sterotypical troll.
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He’s a sassy one, alright.
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Just to this point, there are actually different kinds of val’kyr. Not going to lie, I wasn’t sure about the mechanisms behind it and it’s not explained well in game, but there were nine more powerful val’kyr that bound themselves to Sylvanas that were the Lich King’s own val’kyr (well, eight, because one had to sacrifice herself to make it happen). There are actually lesser val’kyr, like at Andorhal.
So, perhaps still bad writing since that isn’t really explained all that well, but there is a pretty big difference between the val’kyr that serve Sylvanas and other val’kyr.
As for the bit about content, your points are well taken. I think that the game definitely suffers right now from age. 14 years of constantly escalating things and trying to keep things fresh leads to very nonsensical moments, not to mention leaving you open to contradiction when there is that much prior material.
Actual dialogue and things, also point well taken. They could definitely use better dialogue writing.
I guess most of that isn’t to give them a pass, but I suppose I sympathize a bit with the difficulty of keeping a story going for 14 years (more if you back to WC3 and the like) while trying to avoid becoming a soap opera.
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I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, OP. Your points are on point and I agree 100%
Get it together Blizzard!
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Kudos for actually paying attention enough to provide examples. As a person with a degree in writing, I had to stop paying close attention to play the game, lol.
I’m not a literary snob, either. I can appreciate good pulp fiction. WoW isn’t even at that level of writing.
What makes me sad is that I have had DMs in tabletop RPGs who had so much more talent than Blizzard writers it isn’t even funny. They were essentially writing games, doing it for free, and were more creative and consistent and entertaining than Blizzard’s best stuff.
Bad leadership. Bad game design.
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The problem with Nathanos is that he’s everywhere and they ignore all of the character growth he does in classic.
In classic when you first talk to him yes he is sarcastic, snarky, and acts like you’re beneath him. WHEN YOU FIRST MEET HIM. However later on you end up saving his life from a group of enemies and he addresses you by name and acknowledges that you are in indeed a champion.
This is all tosses away to make the character a 1 dimensional snark machine.
Almost every character is flanderized and becomes one dimensional. Hell the writing is so bad I was able to write a different version of the 8.1 story on reddit and it got thousands of upvotes. The story is a joke to anyone who cares about it, which Blizzard clearly does not.
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I agree op , its like I’ve been saying long before the patch went live. Gotta keep showing players the bad writing its the only way to combat it. Is to expose it for what it really is, lazy hack writing. Tyrande probably wont get any more development past this. Just like with warfront bosses, her story ends with this patch . They’ll start pushing Sylvannas more with anduin and possibly jaina following.
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About new writers coming in as an excuse…
TV series have new writers come in regularly and have scripts submitted from outside as well. They have a reference “book” where they keep track of each character’s details and what has happened to that character in the story so far. So, for example, you wouldn’t have a new writer come in to “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and pitch an evil twin for Data in season five because any new writer would have studied the reference (and watched the show).
Changes in character are fine but they have to be accounted for. Blizzard tries to do this, I think, but doing it in a game is difficult because we get the story in tiny bursts.
Still there is no excuse for some of the awful writing at Blizzard. We’ve all played games with amazing writing, I bet. Games with characters you love long after you finish the game. Blizzard has an awful tendency to either kill or otherwise wreck their best characters. ![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")
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I don’t think them borrowing anythi was an issue, but they haven’t bothered to expand on any lore outside of Burning Crusade, Cataclysm, and Mists of Pandaria after Warcraft III, leaving their story stagnant, stale, and bitter. It was kind of a wonder we even got invested in the story in the first place once Wrath was over and done.
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The problem with the Val’kyr is that they are pretty much the mascot of “Show don’t tell”…rather, the mascot of doing it really REALLY wrong.
From the Alliance perspective, Valks only show up when we need a participation trophy. Take Andorhall for example. It was basically “We lost…but hey! Killed a Valk!”
Whenever a Valk shows up, no one bats an eye, whenever they die, we are told that we dealt a massive blow to the Horde with nothing to show for it. We don’t see the desperation in the Forsaken, we don’t see any real impact on the story whatsoever…and since we’ve been killing them since Cataclysm…by the time the deaths actually pay off or have some kind of visible impact, I’m afraid that instead of it being a massive pay-off after years of essentially grinding valks, it will just be relief that it’s finally over and we can move on.
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I’ve said many times,
Good writing has your characters do the right thing, make logical and rational decisions, and still manages to introduce growth, plot twists, innui, etc.
Bad writing has your characters do stupid things - REPEATEDLY - and profit.
Hence why I no longer watch The Walking Dead.
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This might be exactly what is going on. You can see the lack of effort and ignorance.
Prior expansions / story lines all worked like this:
Event A —>Event B—> Event C—>Event D—> Final
And each of the events were meaningful and could stand alone on its own merit.
This is BFA plotting:
Event A (Big shiny fire!!! For the Horde!!! For The Dark Lady) --> something, something, something, Nathanos quips, something else something else, uhhh what were we doing here again? something else–> Event B (Saurfang Cinematic Sad Orc)
Its just a terrible mess written only to connect point A to point B with no development or meaningful content. I cant decide if its because they are trying to stretch out what little content they have and can’t afford to devote real writers or effort into developing good “scenes”, or if they just have run out of material to borrow from other fantasy stories. The writing and plotting has been weak since the end of WotLK, but this level of ineptitude is unacceptable for paying consumers.
If they want us to pay for cinematics, why not make a full length movie and sell that and make the game F2P.
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Exactly how Archimonde used a ritual spell to rip Dalaran to pieces, is how the Blood Elves and Nightborne could obliterate the Xenedar. You don’t think a couple of mages are that powerful, but go watch that WCIII cinematic again and you’ll think differently.
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Yes exactly, the fact that one other Valk died is meaningless if there are no consequences. And we have heard directly from developers that there will be no consequences, since they have confirmed Sylvanas will survive.
Additionally, even if this was a “special” Valk, they have done a poor job of illustrating how it is different than any other val’kyr. And unless Tyrande has become an expert on them herself, there is no reason for that character to be so proud / excited over destroying a val’kyr. It is yet another example of Bad Writing.
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