For me, the writing was on the wall with the time traveling, genocidal, orcs of WoD that were suddenly the good guys by the end of it. Then they had our 10 man raiding team fighting a literal Fing titan in legion. BFA sealed the deal with the incredible amount of wasted potential in Nzoth. Which made watching the Shadowlands plot a total laughing stock and taking the spot for worst story of all time away from Game of Thrones season 8.
Now I literally have no idea whats going on in Dragonflight other than big bad dragon is big and bad…
Shadowlands continued on until DF really. I keep the dialog volume very low so I don’t have to hear the nonsense while questing. I just go do the thing.
I grew up on high fantasy, but this more recent stuff is just not my thing. I love the game play in general though.
My favorite part was how many times Blizzard promised not to make Sylvanas a Garrosh 2.0 and how she would never be a raid boss cause her story is different yada yada yada
I have to admit that while I enjoy dragonflights gameplay, I have no effing clue what’s going on other than big angry karen dragon being mad at things
I never cared about it, I just started playing this game because it was popular and my friends from other MMOs quit to play this in like 2005. I’ve never played WC3; I think it’s weird that lots of people have, actually.
All the way back in Cata when they kept taking shortcuts and then Wolfheart came out and left such a big portion of the war out of the game.
I then just saw the game lore as more of something fun but nothing to be taken too seriously. Theres no politcal intrigue and the world building is standard fantasy tropes.
The community outrage and theories is more fun than whatever the writers release.
Plenty of times, recently was the whole SL bit where the helm was shattered. As far as I can tell nothing should be keeping the northrend undead from assaulting all of Azeroth We wouldnt even notice cause DF. So should be 2 expansions worth of a rampaging uncontrolled horde.
Battle for Azeroth I think is when the suspension of disbelief completely exploded for me. The War of Thorns was the moment WoW was no longer a narrative that I enjoyed, and Shadowlands ended up sealing that fate. Dragonflight I’m enjoying more since it’s a return to simplicity and recognizability, but having been broken from the world, it’s hard to get back into caring.
I loved Garrosh too. What I always loved about the horde is that each race had their own culture, personalities, beliefs, and agendas that made their union complicated. None of that exists anymore.
Which doesn’t sound like anything an actual war would be named after. Sounds like a name dreamed up for a bad fantasy soap opera whose writers were on drugs. I did that content. I don’t remember thorns playing a role.
I lost interest in the story while leveling at the end of mop, because I kept running into things that made no sense to me, and the questgivers would have this “wink-wink” attitude about “you’re supposed to know what this means”. That was when I realized that Blizzard doesn’t care about the new player experience if the game is full of things that can only be understood by having played warcraft games that pre-dated wow, as well as having purchased all the outside media required to understand events as they are happening.
The idea that new players who have never played any of these games before (which describes perfectly the new player demographic they have to recruit from) will still need to know all about background information that has never been released in game means they don’t care that the story appears to be a broken mess to those new players.
It could have been! I’d have used it for a war on the Quilboar, actually making them the threat they’re supposed to be since they were meant to be some big force threatening Mulgore and The Barrens only to be dealt with by new adventurers.
Speaking of which, is there a reason this war was named such other than it sounded cool? There were no thorns in Darkshore or Darnassus, unless my memory is rusty.
