Honestly the novels are nice niche but that’s it a niche. We need more development on ingame lore not outside lore with the books.
5 Likes
I would rather WoW just become a book series so I don’t have to play a subpar MMO just to enjoy the story.
4 Likes
but you see regular DLC doesn’t really work with an already subscription based game so they need to milk us like the stupid mooing money cows we are to them, and putting things other than time wasting skinner box systems into the game isn’t efficient. So into separate books, comic books, and interpretive dance goes all that dumb ‘lore’ stuff that they never pay much attention to anyway…
6 Likes
Just use Wowpedia, or pirate the novel as a pdf. Many old wow novels can be found this way if you look hard enough.
Also, I didn’t expect to see you here. You made a weird GD thread earlier today about whether Demon Hunters or Death Knights are stronger. My answer is “Who the hell knows?”
Also, there’s a person in that thread who thinks the WoD timeline disappeared, for some reason. People have terrible lore knowledge over there.
1 Like
No. If anything we probably need more books. The books are great because characters can just be characters without needing to praise the player character every minute or so and allow them to act beyond the confines of gameplay.
Also, we only get like 1-2 novels per expansion. They are hardly on the excessive side.
4 Likes
The bad thing about them is that they cost extra money, which affects poorer players. Unemployed WoW Token buyers are probably not going to afford books.
1 Like
Thing is though, WoW was never a character-focused game, or at least it’s not meant to be. The protagonist isn’t Anduin or Jaina or Sylvanas - it’s the world.
If there were gonna be more novels, then they shouldn’t be character studies of the big names in game. Something like an anthology of the individual locations with one-off characters, with stories that build the world without being essential reading for the current plot, work fine.
We don’t need more novels for better character studies - we just need less character studies.
3 Likes
5 Likes
They should get jobs.
I’m just being obtuse, that’s a knee jerk reaction. The expectation anyone deserves anything for free is against our capitalist society.
This communist can be a capitalist sometimes.
2 Likes
Better than what we been getting in game 
You’re telling them to turn off a money source… You’re telling Activision or Microsoft to close down a profit river. Yeah that will go real over.
The novels are not the problem… the people writing the novels are not game designers so firing them won’t improve the game.
1 Like
Great then make the novels a perspective of events that take place ingame
The transnarrative should really drive the lore. A virtual world (which wow is an example of, less and less) has a lot of storytelling limitations, one of which is providing gameplay options for a variety of player types.
The player experience is better when that (not continuity) is a priority. Cataclysm starting areas are a mess of inconsistencies, but the player experience is superior to what existed prior.
Their books just seem destructive to the wow universe to me.
I enjoy WoW books. There are valid criticisms, but I don’t think novelization is the entire problem, in and of itself.
Cairne’s death was an example of where it can go wrong. They need to put stuff like that in game - or at least, have something more to show it.
But if Blizzard never released a novel again, and chose to just confirm stuff via tweets, that would still be bad.
Blizzard needs to figure out which tales fit where, and why. Shadows Rising was a good example of a book with a good story, that expanded what we know about the world, without being required reading to understand the Gameplay events.
3 Likes
I really doubt that is a significant base of Warcraft’s players. Suffice to say WoW has always been a middle-high middle income game. Even accounting for that, most of the books have always been fairly extraneous. As an example, you could still play WoW and get the gist of the important story plots of say Before the Storm.
I would say that it is BOTH a character/world focus game. True, BC and Vanilla was focused on the world but by Wrath and onwards the major characters have become very important to the story.
For the majority of Warcraft’s history, this has always been the case. Sure we get major character focused books like Tides of War, Wolfheart, Warcrimes but we have also gotten things like the Warcraft legends, Sunwell Trilogy, Warcraft class manga(I wish they continued this one). More recently we got that short story collection(which may or may not be canon).
You make it sound like both cant coexist when in fact they have always done so!
I am far from wealthy, but not exactly poverty stricken. So I find value where I can.
You know that Visual Guide? I actually went to the library, reserved a copy, and got one that was brand new and never touched - I was the first one to read it. So it was pristine. I read it, and brought it back. I didn’t want it for my collection, I just wanted to check it out. And I paid nothing.
So the library is there. If you reserve a copy early.
Also -
my buddy was in an accident, and he was laying around pretty messed up for a month. I went to a used book store and bought a bunch of WoW books. They were older, but dirt cheap. He was thrilled to read about the game I never shut up about, especially since he was near bed ridden and couldn’t do much. I remember every time I went over to visit, he was in the middle of one of those books.
Libraries and used book stores are still around for us cheapos who don’t want to pay retail just to learn about the lore lol.
4 Likes
Exactly. Sometimes you have to shop around for a while until you find a deal. They are out there 
3 Likes
Yeah I like the books
What I want is blizzard to update the old world
Used to. They don’t really now.