This is a completely arbitrary distinction. I was far more invested in the fall of Lordaeron in Warcraft 3 than I was to Deathwing messing up Stormwind in Cataclysm despite the former being an RTS and the latter being in an MMO and I’m sure that there are many, many others who would say the same. Certainly, many would say that they are considerably more invested in the characters of Arthas, or Kael’thas, or Thrall, or other characters they played as in the RTS games than they would be about their playable avatars in an MMO, who can barely even be called characters at all independent of roleplaying (which is, incidentally, just as ephemeral as something happening offscreen or in a book, in addition to being an element that Blizzard cannot possibly account for, because not everyone’s perceived backstory can be simultaneously canon.)
The idea that losses and gains should be considered inherently more special if they happen in an MMO rather than in another medium sounds to me like it’s just a convenient way to dismiss the losses of everyone else.
No, it is not arbitrary. Visually delivered information is far and away more impactful than text, which is where a lot of your tragedies come from, and the RTS games do not convey the mimesis effect, which is specific to the RPG format. Further, once again, even the RTS format did not force you to play through a crushing defeat that you couldn’t stop. It either found a way to make you win, or made you the conqueror. The MMO did not, and was not able to do that - nor did it really try.
This is bull and you know it! As someone who played the RTS and spent Hours doings mission to stop the Horde in Warcraft 2 only to see both Quel’thalas and Lordearon ultimately turn into rubble was as heartbreaking as Teldrassil’s fall!
And in that time period we have been given glimpses, particularly in WoD and Legion of all the suffering the draenei had to face. Heck, the entire war of the ancients happened offscreen, are you suddenly going to say that lore doesn’t matter just because we only ever get glimpses of it?
Precisely, having said that my only comment is I also cared when Deathwing decided to make a hole in Stormwind. Was never a fan of the city and always favored Lordearon. Heck, I was initially kinda annoyed humans have to start as Stormwind citizens as oppose to getting a choice to start in Lordearon. But Stormwind has been a home for years now and has it has its own place in my heart.
Oh come on, many people can easily argue that books manage to capture our imagination better then visual deliveries of informationb(ie movies). Our minds/imaginations can easily translation information in text form into something that could easily rival visual cues. There has always been a debate that rage about whether X adaptation is better/inferior then when was delivered in a book!
“Show don’t tell” is a narrative truism for a reason.
Edit: I did miss a point you made on the War of the Ancients - yes, the War of the Ancients isn’t something I feel bad about because it happened entirely offscreen and well before I could ever roll the character. It’s prologue, it’s not happening to me.
That truism does not mean what you are implying. Show, don’t tell is a writing technique in which story and characters are related through sensory details and actions rather than exposition.
This is a completely subjective opinion. Jackass: The Movie is not a more impactful work of art than War and Peace just because the former was delivered in a visual medium and the latter in a text medium.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t have been able to feel the pathos of Arthas’ betrayal, or Illidan’s fall, or Sylvanas’ doomed last stand, because in none of those circumstances we were playing on the side of the victims? I don’t know about you, but the presence or absence of a screen saying “You’re Winner!” is not what dictates narrative weight to me.
This seems to correlate with the fact that a lot of Horde fans were obviously narratively impacted by the pathos of the burning of Teldrassil despite being the “winners.”
But that is not what we have gotten. Especially not in terms of how lore was conveyed in both the RTS. In both those case the emotional impact was “shown” by the gameplay/cinematic/dialog. Uther’s line of “Your father ruled this land for seventy years, and you’ve ground it to dust in a matter of days.” can capture the extent of the destruction of the Scourge just as well as showing hundreds of villages destroyed. If anything it is probably more memorable.
Your first item violates comparability. For a better comparison - the Film Dr. Zhivago portrays the events in a way that the audience will remember better than the book. Why? Again, because visual information is far more memorable - that’s just how our brains work.
Regarding the rest - no, but that game does not make you Arthas, nor does it make you Illidan, or Sylvanas. You are a third person observer. You are not in the shoes of those people - it is not happening to you. You can still feel something from it, but it’s not as intense as it is when you have factors that put you directly in the shoes of the sort of person that it’s happening to.
@ Zerde
You’re slipping into an is/ought fallacy, which I will simply call out as such.
Nor are you a night elf when you do the War of Thorns quests. You are just as much a third party(granted a third party that can act) while doing those quests. We are considered adventurers for a reason. Also, saying you cannot feels as intense a feeling is folly considering to this day Arthas’ fall is still considered to be one of the most memorable pieces of gaming lore.
Hell, even the Wrathgate is considered by many to be one of the most impactful event of Warcraft and in that particular event you are literally a passive observer.
This commentary ignores the impact and existence of the mimesis effect - which applies in role playing games and describes the subconscious ascription of an identity to a role that is either chosen or assigned. RTS games lack this effect, and again, they typically do not force you to actively play the loser. The one counterexample to this I can think of is the protoss mission in “Wings of Liberty” where you have to fight until you go down, which removes the investment by establishing that it’s a vision that you can stop anyhow.
Yes, that is how the genre known as “fiction” works. A story can be told in first person or in third person but that doesn’t make one inherently more real or impactful than the other.
Your position seems to be predicated on the assumption that people are extremely invested in their characters in World of Warcraft. That may be true for many people, particularly roleplayers, but that sort of investment requires that we construct our own characterization ourselves. That can be lots of fun, but it’s not something that can realistically be used to inform the narrative because everyone is going to have a different conception of their own characterization, if they have a conception at all (I doubt that Sunderthighs the Dwarf Warrior is particularly invested in their character’s narrative as they might be in, say, Moira’s or Anduin’s.)
Basically, the argument that the MMORPG format somehow makes the game more real or personal requires ignoring that our characters are, as depicted to us uniformly, blank slates that we can choose to fill or ignore as we see fit. You cannot construct a universal narrative around this.
Which is to say, you keep tripping over yourself trying to explain why I should care more about the fall of Teldrassil than I do about the fall of Lordaeron, but the fact is that I still care more about the fall of Lordaeron than about the fall of Teldrassil despite your insistence that I “shouldn’t.” And the implicit assertion that some players sense of grievance at the loss of territory (Night Elves and Forsaken) should be weighted higher than other players sense of grievance at the loss of territory (Humans, Worgen, Trolls, Goblins, etc) strikes me as hypocritical.
It’s better to use the loss of territory to inform character and faction actions and motivations going forward and evolve the story from it rather than scramble to undo narrative development because the narrative development affected things that you like negatively. That’s how arcs work.
So, the Horde must die, because it is evil and it is not required to correct it? And it was the Horde who started all the wars. And the Alliance will embark on a justified genocidal campaign against the Horde. And the Horde will die, because all the super-mages of the Alliance and all the characters of the Horde are “evil” or “indulge in evil”. After all, the Horde was built as an “evil evil”, this is its arch. Yes, consistently angry, consistently weak-willed. Hence - dead.
I mean, that’s definitely one way that these events could inform character and faction actions in the narrative, although I’m not sure that would be a particularly well received one.
My position is that the investment that people have in the role they assume is stronger in an MMO than it is in an RTS - which is an across-the-board consideration, from those who are as into their characters as you or I might be, to those who play the game casually. The format itself is a factor driving intensity.
Regarding your concern for the fall of Lordaeron - if memory serves, you also go by Fojar - who became a meme on SoL due to occupying the unique position of identifying with the kingdom that Warcraft 3 destroyed - and while I could certainly understand how a person might play through Warcraft 2, identify with the kingdom, and react viscerally when they took that kingdom away in the next installment, I do have to meet that with the fact that your vision of Lordaeron existed for 5 years, in content that you couldn’t have engaged with at the same level as one would engage with a persistent MMO. The Night Elves existed for eighteen years before Teldrassil in games that sold better, and in higher-engagement formats post WC3 - and hence accumulated quite a bit more investment - especially again, because a lot of that time was spent in a format where identification is FAR more intense.
I recall a conversation where it became unmistakably clear to me that you were happy with throwing me under the bus because you got Lordaeron back. You didn’t, and I suspect that you are now finally trying to accept that, but I’m also aware that we are diametrically opposed because that conversation framed you getting what you want as destroying everything I want. Unless I’m wrong and that you exist incrementally from Fojar - at which point I have to compare the phenomenon of Night Elf posters as a class and a group being their own meme, versus a single person - or in this case perhaps two.
Regarding the MMO as a format - when you jump to it, I am confident in saying that you don’t get to make the moves that you made in an RTS anymore. It’s too late to do that. You have to focus on giving the fans of the playable races that you offered a good experience, and if you’re unable or unwilling to do that, then you’re writing for the wrong genre.
And the night elves will attack the Horde, since they did not sign the treaty. Anduin will rush between protecting the “innocent” and helping the “thrown” allies. The Horde will have to endure all this in order to prove that they have changed, because if they attack again (go from defense to attack) - this is the end, the rest of the Alliance will make sure that they do not change. Among the common orcish people there will be dissatisfaction with their passivity, “after all, we are warriors, not cowards”! And they will attack, yes, they will attack! And finally, the “dark” Alliance (aristocrats) will appear, which will finance the aid to the night elves, the commoners of the orcs will finally go berserk, because now not only nelfs are attacking us! Now you can kill, because the Alliance has declared war on us again!
It’s okay to admit that you care more about some narrative developments than others, or some characters or groups in the narrative more than others. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the notion that what you care about is inherently more worthy than what others care about is going to be rejected no matter how much you try to dress it up as being some sort of objective reality based on some sort of inherent quality of the MMO genre.
You can’t just nullify other people’s emotional attachments like that. And that was my original point; if we are going to start undoing narrative developments for the sake of the emotional attachments of one group of fans (Night Elves and Forsaken) we’re going to have to start doing it for everyone else.
There is only one case where I have even attempted to question another person’s emotional attachments - and that’s yours - because you presented me with a case where what you wanted was nothing short of the demolition of my racial fantasy, and that of the Forsaken fans who were screwed over by the opening to BFA, which as I recall, you celebrated.
I believe that an MMO can and should be written to accommodate the interests of its various playerbases to the extent possible, but again, unless I’m mistaking you for someone else - you were content to undo the investment of Forsaken fans, and you were willing to cynically sacrifice my investment - and that of Night Elf fans generally - to do it. Which makes it particularly rich for you to show up here now and lecture me on the idea that one shouldn’t inherently regard their own investment as more worthy than what others care about.