I agree completely.
By the way, if you like Trazyn, I highly recommend reading “The Infinite and the Divine” by Robert Rath (it’s about Trazyn and Orkian’s eons-long feud).
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N’Zoth turned a dragon into his own finger puppet and made him break the world.
Then when it comes time to fight Squidworst himself we completely dismantle the guy over the course of a long weekend with a death star laser channeled through gaudy jewelry. Millenia of scheming in the darkest depths and you get stomped by a teenage black dragon and his mute psycho friends wearing dumb necklaces.
I actually feel bad for N’Zoth. Went out like a complete punk after all that hype. That’s gotta be embarrassing.
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There is something amusing in the notion that our PCs are mindless destroyer husks with no capability for thought that makes us immune to the influence of Old Gods.
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but I do enjoy referring to Zovaal as evil Jiren. Both are just boring gray coloured characters with no personality. And what “character” we do get feels hamfisted at the very end so it gives off the illusion that they are actual characters and not plot devices.
I do like it though when the true evil behind the minion doesn’t have a tragic backstory, as they shouldn’t. Not everyone needs to have a dead mother or a hatred of sand to be a great antagonist. Some people are just evil because they are evil. But they need to have a personality behind it. Zovaal just doesn’t have one.
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WoW seems to be emulating the sort of storytelling that was rampant in Lost and The Leftovers—“Mystery Box” narratives with quadratic question progression. Except they’re also borrowing from popular pop-fiction like Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or the MCU. It’s a piecemeal story structure Frankensteined out of different genres, concepts, and franchises.
Blizzard once excelled at taking other concepts and refining/redefining them, but that isn’t what’s happening here. This is a disjointed, inconsistent mess that is not being written for its own audience.
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I’d argue that started as far back as Wrath. That’s when faction leaders are suddenly in your face all the time and the story started revolving around them.
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I feel like you’re only remembering what you want to.
We’ve been fighting dragons and gods since vanilla. WoW has never been the game you describe, and players were never intended to be footsoldiers.
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Yeah, that’s the approach of Danuser afaia.
I think the role of the content designer should be to provide compelling hooks for player storytelling. And by compelling, I mean both interesting and well-executed. Players should be drawn in by the quest and incentivized to undertake it, but the quest itself should be mere manipulation to get players interacting. It might be through cooperation, competition, or some kind of symbiotic relationship where both sides benefit in different ways.
More at https://ilkohall.blogspot.com/2021/02/shadowlands-empty-manipulations-with-no.html with a few extra links (including ex blog of the ex Everquest dev)
Wrath is the expansion that was still “in spirit” close to the previous WoW experience, but already placed some seeds that would develop into big problems later on.
Now, there is a whole different discussion about why that it, a few thoughts I had I gathered for another discussion, but maybe others can add something.
tl;dr: supposedly a big portion of the dev team was fired after the accets from TBC were finished, and the new direction started going forward alongside WotLK, but came full swing after.
gl hf
I think the fundamental problem is the main character used to be the world. Thrall, Tyrande, Sylvanas etc. would turn up now and again but for the most part they hung around in their throne rooms delegating. As presumably they had more important things to oversee than handling every threat personally.
Like I was really enjoying SL when I was exploring the Covenant zones and learning about the characters and societies that existed therein. Seriously I adore how strangely wholesome the Maldraxxi are; you tame fearsome flayed wings not with martial dominance or necromantic subjugation- but with head pats and a lot of encouragement. And Merelith is just such a sweet heart.
If 9.1 saw us exploring a Korthia more in line with Suramar - this zone sized city to explore and learn more about- I really do think the patch would’ve gone over better. Instead though they doubled down on the Maw. And Korthia doesn’t feel all that fresh. I was picturing their zone looking like the Manhattan business district- all bustling markets, tall towers and flashy advertisements.
And the narrative completely shifted to focusing on hero characters. But it can’t really do that well either because every character’s actions only make sense if they’re an idiot. And even the one bit they handled well - Thrall and Drakka - was still weird. Because Thrall has already met his mom in WoD.
“If I had a nickel for everytime Thrall met the mother he lost in infancy as an adult I’d have ten cents. Which isn’t a lot but it’s still strange it happened twice”
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This has been kind of the part that stuck out to me the most. I was thinking just the other day that there’s no sightlines in Korthia at all. Almost no place you can stand and get a long view of the place and take in an impressive sight. They’ve managed to fill the whole place with the Maw’s signature drab colors - gray, dark green, brown, and that dirty orange smudge of a sky. It feels like you’re going uphill no matter which way you’re going, and scrubby, twisted trees or drab broken ruins block your sightlines otherwise.
It’s so cramped. There’s no sense of mystery here, just more Maw mobs to kill. There’s nothing you really stumble upon that makes it seem cool - it’s all just small, featureless geography. From what I can see they really, really struck out on the Maw (overworld danger or the lack thereof is a result of classes having such a wide disparity of utility spells for handling random mobs and travel) and I was hoping they’d use the premise behind Korthia to just literally smash a completely new style of zone in, even if it otherwise wouldn’t have made sense.
So I guess I’d have to boil it down to two complaints.
- Korthia is small. It is both physically small and made to feel small.
- Korthia is basically a remix of Maw themes that were already not all that interesting.
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But we weren’t slaying dragons one on one.
We were 1/5th to 1/40th of a unit that took down said dragon.
We were elite, glorified footmen, but footmen nonetheless. We weren’t treated as anything specifically but soldiers/adventurers/mercs until WoD, and we weren’t treated as actual well known legends until Legion.
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Ah yes, the footman who cleared enemy camps by themselves and solved everyone’s problems in the zone. Its almost like our classes are the same one the hero characters would have a version of in the RTS game.
I’m just so flabbergasted by the Maw. Because the other zones weren’t just fun to explore but rewarding to. I still remember finding that Dreadlord report in Revendreth. And that was a really cool moment that made me want to play closer attention to my surroundings.
I’m still really shocked stuff like that wasn’t in Torghast. Because my complaints about how aggressively forgettable its aesthetic was it did do a good job of training you to investigate every book and cranny. But outside another power boost or occasionally a side quest that would reward you with a new table follower there was never much of interest there.
Which is insane to me. Because as the maps are randomly rearranged it seems that’s the perfect venue to put stuff that would expand on the lore, and maybe throw in some other rare rewards that would give you special mount or mog options.
The shifting nature of the place would mean you couldn’t just go to WoWhead and look up the exact latitude and longitude location of this stuff. Players would have to play close attention to their surroundings and keen eyed or patient ones could be rewarded with interesting discoveries about the setting and/or fun cosmetic rewards.
Personally my hope for the future would be something like Torghast but with the aesthetic of BFA’s island expeditions. So you’re exploring new territory and are fighting a shifting rogue’s gallery of villains. Maybe add in something like the masks from Horrific Visions that would make the instance drop better and better gear as you layer on the extra challenge modes.
Just so much potential squandered.
Basically this. I feel pretty certain they’re making a deliberate choice for the Jailer and Maw stuff to be “grim and gloomy” without realizing that’s not actually very fun to play through. In other words, sacrificing gameplay value for artistic vision. And, honestly, I feel like that’s driven a lot of the big whoopsie moments they’ve had in the past few expansions.
Removing secondary stats on Azerite gear and filling them with a bunch of generic traits isn’t fun, but it saves on developer work.
Removing raid tier sets in favor of more generic cosmetics isn’t fun, but it saves on developer work.
Making quest objectives harder to accomplish and take longer isn’t fun, but it improves time played metrics.
And so on. I’d heard something along the lines that the team was apparently baffled that people didn’t enjoy the Shards of Domination system because they were intended as a “replacement for tier sets”, but it’s nine small, generic bonuses that powers a larger, also generic bonus. It seems like in almost all aspects of the game they’ve lost sight of the “it’s supposed to be fun” part and are trying to convince players that metrics-improving activities are fun, and then getting annoyed when players respond that they are not, in fact, enjoyable.
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How hard is it to understand getting a new, shiny piece of gear is all games like this need. Either by saving up for one with PvP points or finally getting that drop in PvE. It’s a fun, uncomplicated sense of satisfaction.
If you want to spice that up make the items look cool and add in special, limited time variants you can get only by completing at the most challenging levels.
That’s really all you need to do here. Adding layers of complicated systems destroys the simple reward of a fancy new hat or shiny axe.
I actually recall essentially being finished with characters in BC. But then I’d go start that climb fresh with an alt I’d been leveling. By the end of BC I had a Rogue, Mage and Hunter all reasonably geared and I enjoyed swapping between them for WPvP in the final patch end game.
SL is probably the most alt friendly modern WoW expansion I’ve played. And after getting my first alt geared high enough for the early levels of competive play - I didn’t want to touch another one. Because even just playing one for fun felt tiresome, because if I actually started to take a shine to that class / character my enthusiasm was immediately blotted out by the hours of Torghast and renown grind I could see stretched out in front of me.
I’m not saying make the gear a non issue to get. But I think having at least one fairly formidable toon should be achievable by even a casual player. And those more invested in the game will switch to other toons to gear up. Because the classes are the meat and potatoes of gameplay, they’re well designed for the most part, and their varied enough that they feel like entirely different games.
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I understand what they were trying to do with the Maw. They wanted to make it feel dangerous, make this whole thing seem serious and big. In theory it’s a cool thing to want.
But “wow this place is dangerous” was captured better by say, the fel reavers who roamed hellfire peninsula, catching careless adventurers off guard. Or the guards (especially in elite areas) of Suramar, who would blow your cover dead in the middle of hostile territory if you were not cautious. That felt serious. It felt big and dangerous.
But what the Maw has done, in my opinion, feels less dangerous and more tedious. Things like preventing mounts, or essentially locking you out of the zone for the day if you’ve done enough stuff… personally I’ve found that tedious, unfun, and frankly demoralising.
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I remember them saying this too. And the problem with a zone “feeling dangerous” has nothing to do with the ability to mount, or the number of mobs, or the nonsense they throw at you randomly. It basically all comes down to how much offensive control a class has. What a Priest player will find dangerous and what a Rogue player will find dangerous are two completely different levels of difficulty, because the Rogue can control fights and flee from them with much, much greater ease than the Priest player can.
Basically, if they want zones to feel dangerous, they have to prevent certain classes from trivializing everything, but that’s a difficult balance task, and so it’s much easier to try and do it environmentally. Suramar is a great example because everyone is more or less on the same playing field with the disguise thing and dodging the sentinels. I’d be surprised if the Maw was more than a mild inconvenience to a Hunter player (to give another example). Tanks were also probably never threatened.
I realize this is a bit more of a balance thing than a story thing, but in this particular case I don’t think they’re going to be able to capture an environmental “feel” unless they make everyone have a level playing field like Suramar.
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It is less about the power of the threat (although that’s a part of it) than the fact we are killing foundational elements of the setting. Do you want to convey a living, breathing world or a game of chess? We are removing pieces from the board that underpin the mystique that rpg settings depend on. It is likely what has necessitated the new direction involving an overpantheon, pantheon for each realm, unreliable narrator cosmology, and so on.
Want a relevant and recent example? Try Elune. The rampant speculation and not knowing quite what she was… this was a focal point for over a decade. Now we know, and it is kinda bland and expected. The wonder is gone.
I’ll put it a second way, using That 70s Show as an example. The tension between Eric and Donna (and this is a common trend among a lot of shows involving a similar situation) as they dance around getting together drew viewers in, but when they finally got together viewer interest waned. Even though that is what the viewers wanted to happen, once it had, that anticipation and not knowing evaporated.