Seriously, the writing of the original DK starter zone was masterful. Truly made you feel like a DK and touched upon that class fantasy perfectly. New DK’s, LOL, go through starter zone and have tomatoes thrown at you in Stormwind. Anduin still with Varian’s dialogue, “Speak or I will kill you myself.” Reads Tirion’s letter “Hmhmhm, Tirion old friend. I see you old dog.” Immediately gets shoveled into BFA as best friends with Anduin and crew, no idea who they are going on pirate adventures. Doesn’t even know Tirion is dead as well Arthas.
6 Likes
In all they basically started killing off old npc’s to bring in newer stories to rewrite the whole game this would also include the lore based on them. You can’t have the game without the lore because the story came from it.
I pretty much ignore the lore. I read two Golden books and that was enough for me. She’s a hack. But I guess she’s as good as the game writers so mid tier at best. We get what we deserve I suppose for allowing them to branch the story off into different platforms.
My Other problem is I despise almost all of the Mary-Sue main characters. So looking forward to not having to listen to the maudlin Jaina explanation of the Maw, or walking Thrall through the mall to pick out new pumps. Oh, wait, it was an axe.
I mean all they stole from 40K for Starcraft, they should have learned a thing or two in the process. GW lore might have been bad too, I haven’t read it in years, but it was at least entertaining.
1 Like
Mostly agreed. The lore/story must be expresed in quests, dungeons,raid, cut-scenes,cinematics, in game.
I can “accept” that you MUST read the oficial web site to complement it, but i totally understand if you disagree or don’t like it.
For example, In game the transition from Pandaria to Draenor was inexistant, you NEED to read the official site of the expansion to know whats going on.
Finally, books should only expand the lore of your favorite character or themes but in any case should be necessary.
NOTE:
The weakest story was Sylvanas in the whole BFA expansion, motives unclear, ambigous, in game everything she has done was “for the horde”, the Jailer was unexistant even in the end of the expansion.
In books i readed a extract that said something like: "She (Sylvanas) when touched the azerite saw a lot of plans coursing her mind… " trying to justify her cunning, predictions, 4D chess, etc. Lazy as f. Our character carried the HEART OF AZEROTH the whole game and still we gave an ancient artifact to an Old God and then we RELEASE HIM, we are dumb as f.
I enjoy the game overall myself but I can’t argue that the lore isn’t completely screwed up.
Someone starting out in the game today would be utterly beyond confused. And that’s a shame.
3 Likes
Kind of difficult to do when Blizz keeps removing story content.
5 Likes
Agreed. However i really like the “Chromie timewalking campaing” makes sense to choose a expansion timeline or start inmediatly in lvl 1 on the last expansion before the current one.
I like Chromie Time too, but it goes by so fast!
It seems like your character hits Level 50 before you quest your way through two zones.
Yeah, you can turn off XP and stay there but I’d prefer if we could just stay in CT indefinitely as long as we stay in whatever expansion we chose.
2 Likes
Hahha omg, what a mess.
2 Likes
from what i can see, the current lore issues is more to do with the related scenarios being yeeted from the game. its not so much that you need to go looking at other sources for info, its that the info has been removed and replaced with "oh well thing happened so one thing lead to another and now Andy is ebible and Sylvanas is into puppies and rainbows and everything nice. or something like that.
“how did it happen?”
who knows, you had to be there.
“BUT I JUST GOT HERE, its been like 3 mins since we left the Maw and came here. how did THAT MUCH HAPPEN in 3 Mins?”
who are you again? someone else saved me. i never met you before. 
3 Likes
Yeah and as said the lack of continuity is infuriating. Like Jaina porting us out time and again, such as she did when Varian was about to fight Thrall or to save us from the frostwyrm only to suddenly disappear from existence at the Broken Shore when we needed her most. Not even there in the cutscene or anything just…. Not there oddly? When 30 seconds prior she was standing right next to us.
1 Like
They retconned some of those stories to line up with WC3R, so that doesn’t really help lore enthusiasts. Legitimately trashed the lore for Sylvanas and her soon to be redemption arc.
2 Likes
The basic lore is fine but it didn’t get the usual amount of depth that it normally gets this expansion. Each covenant should have its own book, but we got nothing for them.
1 Like
No but there are so many ways they could do this effectively. Like a Caverns of Time style leveling option that takes you through the key history points or hell, even the silly night fae “play” was a good short hand for some of the major events.
Part of the problem is, as the game progressed, its obvious the bloat of old content was largely ignored by devs so they could try to create something fresh - which was fine for folks who had been around.
There could have been better ways of developing the story over time, and ways of introducing new players to what matters in lore, but that wasn’t what was done. Old lore was disregarded for game play, which is fine, but it’s also a bit unfair to ask a new player to invest money in outside content just to understand the events and characters.
I don’t think expectation is the right word…
Your correct in that, WoW was never set up that way. Thus expecting it isn’t right, but it’s something that should, not, be attempted IMHO.
Also keep in mind, keeping new players around for WoW is vital. There is a very good reason, why Blizzard spent majority of Shadowlands development time on improving and overhauling the new player experience. Because what we had before Shadowlands hadn’t been touched since Cata and it showed. Thus isn’t very impressive to anyone booting up and trying the game for the first time.
This goes for the Story as well… Yes, anyone with a brain understands that there is no easy way to cram 20+ years of Warcraft lore into the game. But that doesn’t mean that Blizzard should not even attempt to give new players and players in general, a way to learn about vital bits of Warcraft lore that may have relevance at the time, or may not be relevant at all. But it’s something that maybe a lot of players should at least know, considering the primary cast of today’s Warcraft story.
Take Arthas for example, he’s a hot topic considering Shadowlands. Will he? Won’t he appear? etc.
For any new player who’s trying WoW for the first time, in order to even have an understanding of his lore, origin and why he’s such a beloved character in this universe. They would either need to play through Warcraft 3, Read the Warcraft 3 based novels and then quest throughout all of Northrend which is not very pleasant now a days considering those quests were made in 2008. Unless they are super story driven, NO ONE is going to resort to outside sources in order to learn about lore for a 15+ year old game which they’ve barely even breached the surface of. It would be overwhelming as heck.
That’s not good for WoW, at all. WoW’s a MMORPG, RPGs are highly dependent on a semi-coherent story. If I start playing a game, and start half way through the story I’m going to be lost as hell and honestly be uninterested, and not dedicated to what’s happening. Thus I’m less likely to continue to playing or attempt to play further.
The hypocrisy of it all, is Blizzard ignores this major flaw of their game. But proceeds to integrate absolute 
MMO / game design in general into their game. Then proceeds to use story / “RP” as the excuse for it. 
What’s the solution? You may say.
Make every cutscene / trailer / animated short / media that is Warcraft related accessible in game. Have it be based in both Stormwind and Orgrimmar, have nothing restricting the NPC to be used by Free Trials or new players in general.
Have it be organized by Expansion → Character.
Yes, it would just be names on a list that would mean nothing to new players. But at least they would have the option to learn about said characters who have media out there for players to learn about them.
Example:
Warlords of Draenor
Grommash Hellscream
But instead of needing to go outside of the game, to find a video that’s 7 years old. It would be easily accessible from the purposed NPC based in each factions primary city.
My experience as a new player wasn’t nearly as chaotic like current.
I started playing in a WOTLK private server full of bugs with a friend that played TBC back in the time…
“Hey dude want to level in Kalimdor of Easter Kingdoms?” lets start in EK… “Omg we’re stuck lets go a level in a map of Kalimdor” and then we go back to EK. Lvl 60.
We arrived in Outland, “Dude, choose want to level from Hellfire Península to Netherstorm or to Shadowmoon Valley” Ok, lets go from Hellfire to Shadowmoon. Lvl 70.
“Yeah,we arrived at Northrend! Choose left or right”. Left go gogo.
All that between a lot of dungeons and pvp, 0 raids till i get to ICC just to wipe at the entrance lol. I get the CONCEPT of world of warcraft, then we arrived at retail at Cata and it was everything a lot faster.
Im sorry for new players
2 Likes
this is serious… it’s very serious.
DK’s starter zone is/was something amazing.
As well as DH’s starter zone, they did a great job…
What they’ve been doing now is ruining great old ideas.
It says a lot when someone like me is thinking about the story, because I don’t play WoW for the lore, I play to shoot stuff and whatever other nonsense I do. The direction they went in with the Jailer, requiring so many changes to history in WoW (see Bellular lore videos) where he was just there the entire time, mentioned nowhere, but is now some huge villain, was really strange. I hate it, and I will they could just delete this and take another shot.
Build the library of talking books. Every time you click a book it should be added to your personal library. When you open up your magical personal library you should be able to trigger sound files. The sound files will be Nobel reading the book to you.
This will make it fun to hunt books. Have some added thru archeology too. Have new books added thru quests as well.
This will not only explain a lot, it will allow the writers to add in some content by simply dropping a book in a location.
Plus fun story time!
2 Likes
The over saturation of story to drift through and piece together is only ONE issue with the story that’s the issue. The main issue is that story is garbage even without that taken into account. “I will never serve” said after serving for the past three expansions.
1 Like