Even during the golden Vanilla/BC/Wrath period, IMO story was never any good. Had Vanilla a real story? Had Illidan any sense at all? What did Arthas want, besides spooking me now and then (and the “epic” Arthas/Illidan fight was maybe the most underwhelming quest ever) ? And Deathwing? And Garrosh in Pandaria? And Kil’jaeden in WoD?
As for Sargeras, he’s the best example. Has ever anybody really explained his reasons for launching the Burning Crusade, in any way that made any sense? At least Zovaal’s reasons, albeit simplistic, are obvious. He wants to kill everybody except himself, as the ultimate power trip. Is he a compelling villain? No, but is Sargeras, which never appears except in a short cutscene?
I don’t think Danuser is doing a good job, far from that, but I don’t get all that admiration for Metzen, either. Sylvanas has been butchered? Sure. Always, from start to now.
WoW has always had fantastic artwork and world, fantastic to decent music, excellent base gameplay, decent questing, good dungeons and raids. Story? Sorry, sucks, and always did.
I don’t really get Pyromancer’s famous rant when he felt betrayed, like they had defiled the Mona Lisa. Lore and story have always been the worst aspect in WoW, has everybody suddenly realised that some weeks ago?
P.S.
Indeed, I don’t remember any game with a really good story. Maybe it’s impossible.
He wanted us; the “best fighting force Azeroth has ever seen!”, in hindsight seeing as we’ve killed god-like entities, he wasn’t wrong.
Destroy the universe to prevent us from becoming Void lord play things? A fate presumed worse than death?
MoP worked well because while it had it’s terrible pitfalls (like the flubbed Purge or Garrosh’s villain batting when there were FAR BETTER candidates for mad tyrant cough cough Sylvanas) the idea that what we’re fighting is the seven deadly sins made manifest as the remains of the most powerful Old god worked well. Y’shaarj and his eon old Sha did not need a reason to be pure evil as they were made to be such, and more than this we actually had an expansion and multi-zone wide build up to and explanation of the Sha and heart to finally make killing it and stopping Garrosh meaningful.
The thing is, the Arbiter reveal means Zovaal was already basically in charge of the Shadowlands reality, ultimately he had already succeeded before he tried, so why go after the sigils to begin with?
He wanted more power? Then why didn’t he just ask the First ones to maybe entrust him with the machine? I’m reminded of this one dialogue from Villain Pub:
Zod to Loki-“Wanna know something funny? Had you just been a GOOD child, Odin might’ve just handed you the throne, you know, since Thor didn’t want it.”
WC3 had a good story, or at least I enjoyed it. Loved Celeste’s story. Ori’s story is good. I hear the Witcher story is good. Same with God of War-- at least if we use “well written” as the criteria for “good” on GoW.
Edit:
“I want to use the buildy thingy to fix the system, I don’t like it”
“No”
“SCREE TIME TO BREAK EVERYTHING”
I think WoW’s story is fine. Like it’s not Pulitzer prize stuff, but I think if people stop being overly critical about details and just relax and enjoy the ride then it’s still an entertaining story. It’s not perfect, but it’s not terrible either. I’ve never had any trouble following WoW’s narrative. And it has a lot of cool moments too.
For Sargeras in essence he was terrified by the Void Lords. When he discovered the fallen world-soul he realized just how high the chances were that the Void Lords may have already found and claimed other titans too. He couldn’t believe that even titans like him were not immune to the corrupting power and intense evil of the Void.
So his goal was that a universe purged in fire was better than one erased from existence by the Void. That if life started once then maybe it could restart again later after he was sure the Void Lords could not succeed in their plans. A necessary evil he thought of himself.
Problem is - the lore in Shadowlands does not entirely make a lick of sense at times, and is detached from the world we’ve come to known and love. As cool as the ideas of the afterlives are they can’t save a poorly-executed idea.
WoW lore never was ‘good’, but it was enjoyable - though it had its seasons where the story sucked (WoD, BFA, SL).
I agree fully with your take on WoW’s story. It’s never been even moderately good. It’s filled with shark jumping over the top cartoonish nonsense, and even within that context, it’s not executed well at all. Not even close. Never has been.
I think the stories they’ve told have made an interesting setting to play in. But the actual stories themselves are awful.
(that said, there are more details about Sargeras’ situation / motives out there. Although I’m not sure much of it is in-game. RTS maybe? I didn’t play it.)
(Oh, and there are exceptions. The Darrowshire quest chain always comes to mind, although they’ve even neutered that, but it’s still solid. It’s the big overarching main villain type stories that they struggle the most with.)
I enjoyed the lore for a long time. Even if you want to say it was generic, it was at least a lot more fleshed out more detailed than it is today. Everything flowed together better to create one story without as much left out to keep us going. We knew what we were fighting for.
The enemies like Arthas felt like an unstoppable force without being a god or a titan. It was a man that wanted to do what he thought was best for his people in horrible times while also being misled by a evil force. That is a good story. Even the mounts like Invincible were significant, he has broken front legs showing why Arthas had put him down when he was still himself. Cool small details made everything so cool to dig into and learn about.
We went through some of the greatest magic wielders and threats we have ever faced in simple patches recently and are currently fighting gods and titans. We are seeing things now that has given a sense of mystery to the story before, in a way that either changes our understanding of our own characters to make their new story make sense or they appear not even as great as a dragon aspect did.
It’s becoming harder for me to care to keep up with the story because of how little they have given me to hook onto. It’s all a secret and at this point I think it’s because they don’t even know how to tell the story they are trying to tell. Shadowlands makes me feel that way.
I think the storylines were fun and interesting. I enjoyed all of them up until Mists. I love dragons, so while Cata was cheesy, it was also really fun to me and my characters really fit well into the storylines for RP.
Most of Mists was dumb to me. Kun-Lai and Dread Wastes were the best ones.
Warlords was interesting, but not that interesting. Zone storylines were interesting. Overall storyline was meh.
Legion was fun because it brought back our demons and Burning Legion, but didn’t rewrite all of their history into boatloads of retcons. It had a few, but nothing that bad.
BfA destroyed my connection to this game with the destruction of Brill, UC and Teldrassil.
And Shadowlands just threw all of the lore out the window.
Arthas and Illidan were good because they had WC3 to build them up.
If you look at Arthas in the context of his MMO appearance, he was just as goofy as most of the villains we’ve had since. We basically roflstomped him throughout Northrend with him retreating from every encounter basically going “I was just TESTING my minion and he FAILED because he didn’t kill you. MY NEXT MINION WILL GET YOU FOR SURE”.
Dude was a cartoon villain in the context of just WoW.
But because you actually got to play him in the WC3 campaign, you got the mental image of a menacing and at least competent villain because WC actually allowed the bad guys to win (if you were playing them at least), whereas in WoW, the player isn’t allow to lose, only have set backs.
Now that I think about it, considering how similar Zovaal is TO the Void lords, what if we told Sargeras a giant bald man was coming to enslave us all? He yanks the sword out of Azeroth and tries to go blow to blow with Zovaal…
The lore and narrative haven’t ever been perfect – flawed though endearing at best – but at the hands of one…
Steve 'the Story Butcher' Danuser
…the story has become so unequivocally poisoned that a brigade of fixers armed with Potions of Curing couldn’t undo this disastrous dumpster fire of failure.
The lore was fine, the story was dumb. Arthas twirled his mustache way too much during WOTLK, but the actual background lore of his rise to power and the Scourge is super cool.
Only reason I invest any time into any game’s lore/story is because the gameplay is just that much fun. If not, I’d rather just sit down with a good book.
Not like his reasoning was terrible either. Yeah sure he sacrificed a few thousand Scourge soldiers, but if he had succeeded in raising us as undead as he almost did, he would have gotten 10-25 soldiers more than equal to the army he lost.
If anything I feel like there was some potential for a corruption arc in SL somewhere where either Denathrius or Zovaal himself tried to employ us to his cause but that’s kinda a water under the bridge plot point by now…
This I feel like was supposed to be N’zoth’s specialty as well as the “Old god of corruption”; but WoW’s writers just don’t do Lucifer analogue characters well. For one thing there has to be a reason WHY serving said ultimate evil is compelling or in the very least beneficially persuasive to the person being unknowingly or even knowingly corrupted.
Look at Sargeras and the Legion, why would you join the Legion? A) you’ll live, B) you’ll have power unimaginable in the new universal order!
