Back To Fundamentals!

Lore Story Forum
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I’m not sure if everyone here is familiar with Warhammer 40k, so this comparison may be lost on some of you, but it might surprise some to learn that my favorite faction in that game is not the robo undead space Egyptians (though I do adore Trazyn) but the Imperial Guard.

If you’re unfamiliar - they’re the faction of completely normal human soldiers being thrown up against impossible space opera BS. They do have fun toys like tanks the size of Omaha, Nebraska but fundamentally they’re normal people going up against planet consuming space locust, teleporting Hell Raiser BDSM elves and the infinite evil of mad, cackling and ravenous gods.

Why do I bring this up? Because WoW scratched a very similar itch for me. To see the perspective of the average Joe throughout these impossible magical conflicts. Legolas and Luke can take a hike, I want to know what Helms Deep Knight #6 and Random Rebel Insurgent are going through.

And WoW I feel provided that fantasy extremely well. Or at least it did. Obviously our PCs are no slouches and are essentially super heroes compared to the random workaday NPCs out here slinging milk and skinner knives. But in this setting on their own they’re not much to write home about.

I don’t care how good you are. Nobody is one manning a dungeon unless it’s horribly designed. And nobody’s winning a 2v1 PvP fight unless your enemies are inept and/or your class is broken (man 8.0 Disc Priest was fun- completely broken but having six people fail to kill me as I pretty casually just ran off was hilarious).

You are just a unit from the RTS. Not a hero one. Not a siege one. Not an end game unit it takes forever to build up to. No, you’re Human Footman or Orc Grunt or at best maybe Undead Necromancer or Druid of the Talon. You ain’t ish, at least not on your own.

Hell you’re not even a full time mage or Paladin or whatever. Your character has a God damn day job. Mine picks flowers to make potions to sell. Maybe yours prefers the active life and strictly mines and skins animals to sell the raw material. But either way you’re not the crown prince of big dick mountain. You’re just some random guy or gal trying to make their way in an extremely hostile world with a little help from their friends.

And WoW has lost sight of that. While I did enjoy Legion I have expressed how utterly stupid it felt to be declared the Chosen Hero and being trusted to wield the Magic McGuffin when roughly 10 to 50 other people were milling around being declared the exact same thing. It’d be like a version of Skyrim with 9,000 other Dragonborn and the one dressed as a ballerina burping the alphabet in the corner is just as chosen by fate as you are.

And its only gotten worse from there. At least then it was more about navigating the awkward politics of trying to keep a loose international coalition of professionals stuck together to face the Legion. It was still chiefly about your toon and their adventures in this world even if it put them on way too high of a pedestal.

But at least it was still fundamentally about your PC and their interactions with Azeroth. I really loved being sent to random places in the world to go chase down leads. Made the story feel bigger when Tirisfal, Dragonsblight, Duskwood and wherever else are still critically relevant to the story even as the biggest fight is happening in the Broken Isles. No part of Azeroth felt irrelevant.

And where the hell are we now? Wandering around zones we’ve only just learned about. And every single action is in service of aiding some Hero character. And your character is more stuck in a ride at Universal than an active participant. You can’t inform the Kyrian about the Maw problem you’re well aware of so they just toss a poor carpenter into perdition and then look shocked. You can’t decide not to take the Maldraxxi sigil to the dumbest possible place you could bring it. Hell were you a Sylvanas loyalist? Might have been fun to alert the Banshee Queen that her understanding of how the Shadowlands worked was based on a bold faced lie. But you can’t.

So we’ve gone from a story chiefly about the world and our small time character’s adventures through it, to a plot chiefly about the hero characters but one wherein despite playing fairly pivotal roles our characters are incapable of informing anyone about fairly plainly avaliable information.

I said this is like a universal ride but now that I’ve written it out it feels more like a hastily constructed rail ride at a county fair in rural Georgia about the glorious history of the CSA, and my mouth has been duck tapped.

And just to hell with all of this. If WoW is to be saved get back to smaller scale stories. I’ll happily go zap some feral pigs in Durotar again if it means I helped Razor Hill’s economy recover. I’m zapping necro pigs in Maldraxxus and I can’t even remember why at this point so nothing will have fundamentally changed accept now I understand the story’s stakes.

And I’m all for new zones but keep them like Kul Tiras and Zuldazar. Places that expand our understanding of the setting rather than putting us in a semi related one that just makes the story more confusing.

Get us back to thwarting villains who threaten Azeroth in a comprehensible way. Garrick Padfoot was a more compelling villain than Zoval. At least I knew a vineyard would burn if he wasn’t thwarted. Those are stakes I can comprehend.

Focus the story back on the world and the adventures we’re having in it. Take the camera off the hero characters and use them sparingly.

Oh and give us some big bads, absolutely. But give me ones I don’t need to wait for a book to understand. Bandit King what wants to pillage, Crazed Zealot who wants to purge, Big Monster that wants to smash things. And so on.

In short;

BACK TO FUNDAMENTALS!

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The gag is I suspect this was their attempt to do so.

Each of the Shadowlands zones is very much based on four realms from Warhammer.

But they just don’t get it.

They don’t get the “fundamentals”.

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Your attack on my personal validity here is not appreciated, the brilliance of the rest of this post notwithstanding.

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Every time we rub elbows with the higher powers, the world/setting shrinks. The sense of wonder or enigma shrinks. The setting should be a backdrop for the stories we create, imo, rather than a bucket list of lore to check off and move on.

That, and current cosmology is echoing Dragon Ball Super. That’s… not a flattering comparison if you’re aiming to be taken seriously.

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Classic was an interesting experience.

Because I’ve been a life long Forsaken fan. Sylvanas has back stabbed them twice now and honestly I couldn’t remember why I once held such reverence for the character.

But then I revisited Classic and naturally rolled a Forsaken, as I had many, many years ago when I was still a preteen. And even though all I harbor is disdain and sadness for modern Sylvanas - I felt a sense of awe in Classic when she finally had a quest for me at about level 50 or so. I’d been in the Royal Quarter before but only talking to her errand boy Varimathras. I never had cause to approach the throne. When I did, it felt like I was a valued Horde agent who’d earned this audience through countless small victories across continents.

Cut to Cata and she’s fist bumping your character and going on exposition dump pony rides with them for doing the bare minimum. And I found this particularly hilarious as I came back into WoW having not played since Wrath during Legion. I hadn’t figured where my profession tab was, how to swap specs and had spent probably an hour in total staring at class trainers like a confused dog, baffled why they weren’t offering upgrades to spells.

And yet my ability to slap around some bears, werewolves and regular ole wolves is impressive enough that Sylvanas herself has to give me a special audience.

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Obligatory:

“It’s notoriously difficult to do in Magic to do anything new to existing things…

…you have to come from a different angle. You have to be super true to the plane [replace with whatever is meaningful for the WoW story], but you have to not figure out what the plane is exactly - you have to figure out what the plane means to people.”

gl hf

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Glory is fleeting, obscurity is forever- The Duke of Wellington. Probably. To obscure to pin on just one man…

(Yes I know who actually said it)

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WoW increasingly forgot the main character was the World and the players in it over the years, in favor of character driven narratives better suited to other media.

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There’s a quest in the Borean Tundra for the Horde. You have to conduct a prisoner exchange. Some rando Orc was supposed to do it, but he’s so disgusted the Alliance prisoners are deserters who surrendered without a fight, and won’t be punished for doing so when they return, that he asks you to do it instead. His infant son is there (why there is an infant on the front lines of the war against the Scourge idk). Son has never seen a human before. Father uses it to make a point that they were okay with deserting and surrendering, while Orcs will fight for their freedoms.

It was touchingly human. It’s one little quest.

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I think we are very much in a “the genie is out of the bottle” situation at this point. The best to hope for there is for them not to advance it further.

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And this is the problem.
Before, if you ever saw a named character is was areally really big deal it was like OH MAN! jaina is here! holy crap!
Now you see jaina and thing
Oh great…more screwing around with jains and her BS…

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You know what- I just want to defend DragonBall for a second here. It was a lot better than this. Why? Because it had fun heroes and legitimately scary villains.

I wish Warcraft had a villain as good as Freiza. This like 4’3ft tall, shrill, pompous, candyass looking wimp. And then you find out he was NOT being over hyped. The guy can blow up planets with his finger. His smug, sneering sense of superiority is COMPLETELY backed up. Insufferable rich kid punk who’s legitimately a cosmic apex predator is just an amazing concept for a villain. And that’s why it’s so satisfying when a well meaning simple guy who just loves a good fight but doesn’t want to legitimately hurt anyone kills him with his own hubris.

Like give DBZ some credit it really did have some highlights. Yeah it’s asinine but, what, Warcraft isn’t?

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There is nothing wrong with Dragon Ball, but people don’t like it because of narrative/ setting depth haha. Something tells me Blizz isn’t aiming for the Shonen genre with their creative team.

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I’d argue DBZ handled genocide, suicide, racial tension metaphors, and even in-universe misogyny way better than WoW atm lol

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Even in solo questing, the player character is well above the average grunt/footman. We clear entire camps of enemies by ourselves. Take on stuff that was giving the local forces of your factions trouble literally on our own. And to say just because we also have group content we are like footman is like saying a Navy Seal is on the level of an Army Private because they work in teams to deal with things that require more than one elite soldier to handle. The hero characters in Warcraft 3 made use of regular units and guard towers and such to achieve their goals in the missions. The PC ranking up over time makes a ton of sense. We are like DnD adventurers. A bit dime a dozen at first but quickly growing stronger as they prove capable of handling increasingly challenging threats the town guard wasn’t willing/able to deal with.

What I do agree is that the cosmic threat chain makes things feel dull despite what is technically happening. I think what made the Legion special was how it felt like a big deal the demons were coming back. Warcraft 3 had a big build up to Arthas’ fall and the Scourge, with demons known to be on the way. Otherwise it was squabbles between the factions or neutral creeps before everyone had to work together against the Legion. Now giant big bad invasion is another Tuesday while they neglect happenings in the world itself outside of bits from books.

I think zone storylines end up more liked because you get a better sense of why you need to be fighting things. Seeing the various tribes of Highmountain in peril and helping them before putting an end to the threat to them was more impactful than “Oh I guess reality is doomed or whatever if the Jailer wins”.

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Beerus: This dish is a little too salty, so I’ll only delete half your planet.

The charm of DBS is palpable. I can’t wait for the recent manga chapters to be animated.

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It took the combined surviving armies of the world to slow Archimonde down long enough to activate the wisp cheat code.

Now we just punch him and KJ to death and carve our way through avatars of Titans and lazerbeam fully realized Old God’s. Inconsistent world, inconsistent characters, yada yada. It’s honestly kinda depressing for me to think about where it started and where it has ended up.

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But Sylvanas is a feminist icon, remember? Remember?

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Chris Metzen used to say “The world is the main character of World of Warcraft”.

I feel of late, since WoD really, we’ve been focusing more and more on the big cool individuals, and not enough on the actual building blocks of the world. The little things, the simple things… the day to day lives of everyday folk, what it means to be X race, and so on.

WoW’s story would be infinitely better if we focused more on that world building.

Don’t get me wrong, the characters have their place! People like Jaina are genuinely nuanced and fascinating people in this world, and I want to see how they’re going for sure. But not to the exclusion of the development of the main character - the world itself.

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As it stands now there is no logic to the pc. The major npc’s are all so overpowered they can do a better job at stopping world ending threads than any mob of murder hobos could. We should all just back on our pigfarms, looms or corner shop.

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