BFA Better as a book/movie?

[Gaerstaed-moon-guard]

When I take a step back from the game as a player and treat the BFA storyline as a reader or passive watcher I seem to enjoy it a whole lot more. Not being invested as an active participant but still invested as a fan gives me a different perspective.

I have a great deal more patience to see things play out and even if my favorite character isn’t doing exactly what I want it can be an enjoyable tension waiting, striving for them to make the right turn because I am a rider, a passenger in the story.

As a player I don’t enjoy it because I am forced to accept or tacitly support positions and actions that I never would. It feels like when you are rping with a “godmoder” who forces you to change your character’s story and actions into whatever they want even if it feels violating to your character’s concept if not the chartacter itself.

I find myself playing more for the game/mechanics and less for the story. I am starting to ignore the story while I play but enjoy it more reading about it on sites like WOWhead.

I wonder if part of this is because the Developers write from a more distant perspective and have fallen in love with what they see as a great story when seen in its complete form from high above, not realizing that down on the ground it is not fun to play through for a sizable number of us.

[Tartheod-bloodhoof]

Yeah, because if you’re not being told you’re the bad guy, and you’re allowed to empathize with who you want instead of the color you picked 12 years ago, I’d imagine you’re not so worried about your side being miss-characterized.

[Treng-wyrmrest-accord (Treng)]

It’s better as a book or a movie because you don’t have to wait two years to get to the payoff of being dragged through a muddy field that’s full of glass and shrapnel.

[Pellex-hyjal (Pellex)]

I think it would work much better as a book or movie. I had some similar comments a few weeks ago on another thread:

@Pellex-hyjal

I feel like a problem of this expansion is that they’re trying to treat the story like a book or a movie–something the players consume, rather than participate in. In a book or movie, it’s very easy to say “Sylvanas leads her army on a rampage through northern Kalimdor and burns down Teldrassil for shadowy reasons of her own” and expect people to just follow along for the sake of seeing where that leads. But in a game, not only is the payoff a lot slower, but our characters have to be participants in the story. That makes the kind of story they seem to be aiming for a lot harder to tell. I do think they’re banking a lot on a big reveal about Sylvanas’s true intentions and expecting Horde players to feel satisfied when All Is Finally Made Clear. But even assuming they’re right about that (which I think is unlikely), they’re not giving us anything to chew on in the meantime. They don’t even seem to understand that they need to give us something to chew on in the meantime.

@Pellex-hyjal

As a follow-up to this, the Saurfang subplot is probably the best example of something that works well in a movie or novel but has serious problems in a game.

The first bit of conflict between Saurfang and Sylvanas was in a cutscene, as was his capture by the Alliance, since the Horde PC wasn’t present for it (although the Alliance PC may have been).

Then they had to stuff a random encounter with Saurfang into the Stormwind extraction scenario. In order for us to know what he was thinking, he had to criticize the Horde PC for something we had no choice about (staying with the Horde), because they weren’t ready to give us the opportunity to join him just yet.

Saurfang’s “escape” was then handled through another cutscene because there is no reason for the PC of either side to be present. The Alliance PC would have to be railroaded into agreeing with Anduin’s decision, and the Horde PC is nowhere in the area at the time.

Sylvanas sends the Horde PC to look for Saurfang, and we uncover the traces of proof that he had help in escaping. Good! Solid PC involvement in the story!

But I don’t think I need to go over the mess caused by the next stage, where the Dark Ranger attempts to kill Saurfang and he gets away. It would have been less problematic for the players as a cutscene. But they probably realized that the PC is barely involved in the whole storyline as it is, so they tried to make us part of it, and we all know how badly that turned out. Even the fix of giving us a choice about how to react is clunky, and I think part of the reason is because that plotline up to now has not really been anything that directly affects the PC.

TL;DR: The Saurfang plotline plays out just fine without PC involvement, and when they try to get the PC involved, it gets awkward.