What a rip off. What a waste of money. A perfect example of corporate incompetence, greed and stupidity.
-Unneeded retcons. Not only unneeded, but ruin the actual story that was told, which isn’t over of course because we still play it. Because it’s a game, ya know?
-The result of firing all your good writers and QA staff. Unprofessional, unskilled; an insult to any person that appreciated WoW as a fantasy narrative.
-You owe a lot of people refunds.
-But really, if you don’t want to ook your story permanently, you need to halt production of copies and fix your glaring mistakes.
Seriously, the sheer number of errors both great and small are insultingly prolific. The level of unprofessional unmitigated greed is disgusting.
Pull yourself together Blizz, this is really cringe.
I learned my lesson back when one volume of the Chronicle (can’t remember if it was the first or second) released then was immediately retconned by the events of the Argus patch in Legion. I treat Chronicle as I do every piece of content not directly a part of World of Warcraft (meaning not found in the actual game): as fan-fiction.
Is that because people find it so hard to believe that someone cannot innately write and must be taught?
It’s not a writing staff thing. They have a research team called “historians” that does this stuff, not the writers. Many were fired back in the January layoffs.
But… most of the stuff people are complaining about didn’t actually change anything. The BfA stuff certainly did, though.
Chronicles changed the timelines of things in BfA. When they occurred. It makes doing the campaign in the original order and the War Campaign no longer make any sense.
Chronicles 4, being a new set of writers, is especially bad with the retcons and writing quality compared to the previous releases, at least from the bits I’ve been shown that people are mad about.
However, retcons have been an issue from the very start. Chronicles I, which was always advertised as a sort of Warcraft Bible and even described as such in the prologue, got Retconned within a year of releasing.
Blizzard is incapable of committing to their own story decisions, and always has been.
As such, Chronicles, from the very start, has been something to buy to read neat little stories, but should never be purchased as any sort of encyclopedia of WoW lore. It just isn’t consistent enough to fulfil that role.
Buy them as collectors things if you want, but just use the wiki page for your actual lore needs. If it’s going to change anyway, might as well get it from a free source.
"Adding some additional context here:
“Do whatever you want with the canon” is me talking to Warcraft fans creating fan works, not WoW devs.
When it comes to how Blizzard makes the sausage, that’s a different discussion, and frankly Twitter is ill-suited for that.
I feel I should point out I understand there have been, and always will be, retcons in long story arcs like what WoW has. It’s just a part of things that’s gonna happen with a story that is ever growing and evolving.
But the retcons in Chron 4 are unnecessary, clumsy and amateurish. What is worse is they undermine the game (as I assume Blizz isn’t going to throw down the money and time to re make BfA, nor would I think, most players want them to) by making nonsensical changes to the order of events. So players should either not buy/read the book, or they should not play the game, as you cannot reconcile the disparities between the two.
I appreciate some of you saying “Well it’s not in the game so I just don’t treat it as cannon.” My main point however, is that this is marketed as ‘perspective cannon’. These books are supposed to chronicle WoW’s history (even if it’s from a bias character’s perspective) and are marketed as such.
Imagine if an official Star Wars product came out called the Chronicles of Star Wars and it wrote that Luke Skywalker didn’t blow the Death Star up, Han did. And that he did it before he even met Luke. (Or similar).
How do you think the fan base would react? Even softcore fans who just bought the book, no doubt dropping quite a bit of money for official merch would be furious.
And finally I want to reemphasize the total lack of professionalism. The amateurish heavy handed approach, the unnecessary changes, the constant errors in both text and visual references, the clear ignorance of the author and the total lack of editing by their now fired historical team.
Anyway, I think I’m done ranting on the subject.
I doubt they’ll pull/fix it.
I doubt they’ll refund all the people they ooked.
I doubt they’ll even admit their incompetence. They might even double down on it ooking their story forever.