Much to the detriment of the game…
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Uh, what? The story is very far from coherent if you’ve been following it for years. It might make sense if you’ve never been acquainted with a Warcraft game and the underlying story before this point but this is just absolutely disastrous storytelling.
The story being told right now is incompatible with the original story, that’s why there’s so many major retcons pissing people off. It’s one thing for them to screw up the storytelling to the chapter they are writing, it’s a completely different thing when you’re altering the context of past (and usually very iconic) moments in the story to make your bullcrap give the illusion is has legs to stand on. This was apparent when Blizzard started to break the lore established within Chronicle which in the first book contained a foreward from Metzen himself that the book was a meta book on the lore. It was written FROM THE AUTHOR to make sense of the story for people that couldn’t make sense of it. Now it’s “Titan views of the events in history that were never truly accurate.” THAT ALONE should have keyed people in the story was about to get bent beyond belief.1
If the Jailer was actually hinted at having existed in the game for years since the beginning as some kind of mystery it would have been fantastic storytelling if he was actually driving most of these events for this moment. Except that isn’t what happened. This isn’t FFXIV where all the plot points from 1.0 and 2.0 that were established all were meant to fulfill a specific role in the story that felt natural. That is why the story feels better because retroactively you can see the breadcrumbs and how nothing feels like it was forced.
Except that isn’t what’s happening here. What happened is they BS’d a random villain expecting people to care. People didn’t care because there was no build up to this villain. The only mention he received was thinly veiled with Helya ominously mentioning she served a very powerful master. You heard NOTHING about this dude until they announced Shadowlands and needed a big villain, yet we’re now meant to believe he was responsible for every single major event in Warcraft’s history by some grand design like he was truly controlling the Scourge and its creation was according to his grand design because now the Dreadlords actually never came from Nathreza despite for a decade being said they came from Nathreza in all the writing and instead were agents all along from the Shadowlands causing this to happen?
Yeah no, this story is absolutely terrible and its parasitic to the actual story of Warcraft. It contributes nothing by existing, it latches onto the actual story people give a damn about so it can see any form of existence, and it just slowly destroys whatever host it’s latched on to. This host being the Warcraft story that was actually carefully written once upon a time.
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The vision for the game changes every patch, how could they have something written down that they adhere to?
Easy there. Be careful expecting too much from the other half of a relationship.
What’s your vision for you as a player? What are your goals? What are your dreams and wishes, as a player? They don’t need to be realistic. As long as you have them, they are a… direction, a path… to guide you towards them.
So, you want Blizzard to just have these things written somewhere. They might be. They don’t have to be on every page and in our face all the time though.
To be fair: I doubt anyone expected WoW to be as successful as it has been, become that big and stay around for this long.
I wouldn’t write 17 years worth of story for something that could fail or be gone after 3 years either.
The sacred vision of a business is to make money.
If you want something absolutely pure and righteous, then it would be free of charge.
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Actually, for people like that with zero of the background and memories of actions that took place in the story or in outside media, none of it makes any sense.
I can see where you’re coming from but I would honestly disagree. I feel it’s easier to just swallow the current narrative as Blizzard’s writing team wants you to see it if you’re utterly clueless. As if these events were actually planned out well in advance and this is masterful storytelling when if you actually have been acquainted with the story you see how truly butchered it had to be to justify this stupidity.
Though this is just my own personal opinion. I find the story is a lot easier to digest if you aren’t aware of all the retcons that had to take place. To me it’s like a portrait that looks good from a distance, but the closer you get the more screwed up and awful it actually is.
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However a new player made a youtube video about the disjunction of the new player experience. Especially as a deathknight…you are riding into the capital and getting fruit thrown at you one minute…and the next you are suddenly the “champion”.
“Chromie time” has only made this worse.
So basically they cant even make a coherent story for people who haven’t played the last 17 years of content they as devs have trashed.
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Sorry, but I learned while leveling that there are lots of references in leveling content that make zero sense because you have no idea what they’re referring to. “Rescue these people from the recent floods.” Oh, yeah. That’s supposed to tell me the story of Deathwing.
If you aren’t familiar with what happened at the end of the last expansion and kept up on outside materials, and done all the quests and followed all the action all along - much of which has been already removed - it makes no sense. You understand that Blizzard doesn’t care how the story appears to a new player. And that’s about how much you care.
Turning the entire story into a series of “FOMO moments” has been very bad for player retention and the game. But devs really, really like that and fantasize that it’s working to retain that 1 new player a month who makes it to max level. Or something.
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You don’t have to look far to see that the lore is in shambles.
The Goddesses of your races avatar is as dumb as you or me.
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People are used to argue that “the old WoW team” was not “perfect” and bla bla.
However you gotta take into account that:
- The original WoW team got WoW to a point never reached since, coming from literally the starting point.
- The original team made wow what it once was before people actually had a say in what they wanted the game to be
- They made wow feel like a whole new game when it was a whole new game, and after it was already a popular game. This new team couldnt -keep- wow as popular as it already was, and never could make it be even close to the popularity it once had.
- Competition is not a modern factor. WoW buried competitors at its start, and with two xpacs. The arguably as much or more popular MMOs in relation to wow only started to pop up after some severe changes in direction WoW took.
It is actually the “vision” they have about WoW that made me and many people I know jump ship and seek another.
Lets take an example on this particular moment:
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You do know you’re the problem right? No troll.
You know the stages of grief? Right now they’re in denial.
“Our team is working hard on the future stories to come”
They say this. All. The. Time.
I mean, they are working hard on the story. The problem is they keep having to waste time and rewrite the existing lore so they can justify their stupid obsession with doing whatever they want and not working with the established lore to come up with something. They spend more time altering everything that exists about the story to justify their new obsession than just using the existing story as a springboard.
Usually competent writers say one pretty consistent thing with their characters, they eventually end up writing themselves and the story just comes naturally. Problem is these characters are so poorly written and altered from their original states that Blizzard has to keep forcing their motivations to suit their interests which is why every single motivation they have feels so inorganic.
Someone on the writing team thought Thanos was really cool, so now we’re dealing with K-Mart Thanos but because the character was literally BS’d up out of nowhere to fan service Danuser’s Marvel obsession and had no real reason to even exist he’s now responsible for literally every major event in Warcraft’s lore because rather than write the character competently they need to ram him into everything and give him credit he doesn’t deserve.
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Wait, I thought all of that was already discovered as the SL story unfolded. He allowed the dreadlords to take the armor and sword, to make himself a weapon on our weapon. It was just that Arthas was able to resist his control and raised the army for himself.
Sometimes I think it’s the game’s own fault for setting these high expectations of the story when realistically there should be practically none. The game has been out almost 2 decades, you can’t keep any story going coherently that long. Just look what happened to Star Wars. I used to love it, now I can’t stand it, I just watch the trench run from episode 4 and maybe the space battle from Rogue 1 cause I get to see Gold Leader do his thing without eating Vader’s plot armor.
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Well, people disliked Cata, they said they were working in something different. They really did. It wasnt what was promissed, and kinda dipped as soon as they started working in the next.
They didnt handled Warlords well, so they wrapped it up prematurely to work in the next, and they really did. They went looking for Cris Metzen’s and Illidan’s number. They made a good work for the track record, but a very poor job in making one of the most anticipated and sure to be easy to topple WotLK: The war with the Legion. They made some good numbers, but really low if you think about THE WAR WITH THE LEGION. So they said they were working on the next and it would be good, and all the campaign talking about which “side” you would be on. And they really did.
BfA came strong, and with much promise, but BfA has everything but a Battle for Azeroth, it would be a cruel joke if not the truth, it would be more of a “Individual Battle for Azerite”, plus brought some Kul Tirans and Zandali, because, “name recognition”, but we will make some drama about Jaina instead of talk about Kul Tiras, and we gonna do some drama about killing the King, instead of exploring the Zandalari. People started to get fed up with all the retcons and all the “mystery” that did not pay off at the end. So they said they were working on the next story, and they really were. They thought about it for a moment, and they decided to get back the lore for WotLK and try to change it done backwards and then they had the idea of putting Icecrown backwards, and doing the inverse fight, this time we would be in the side of the “Lich King” fighting someone, but who ? Then they had the aha moment: In WotLK, the pin was sylvanas revenge on ARthas, lets invert it and spike it with new terms, new mobs, no one will notice. That might be a doozie. And so Shadowlands was born.
Now they are seeing the crap they are doing and wrote themselves into a corner. So they are working in how to reverse TBC and Vanilla to “go back to known ground”, and taking some focus groups on classic players, experimenting on it to come up with a story that gets back to the real game Warcraft was meant to be.
Sadly, I guess “the big reset” wont work well, and they will be mid xpac working in the next again.
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