Honestly had we actually killed Sylvanas, or hell Azshara killed Sylvanas, I would have been more shocked.
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Its because they can no longer tell the difference between bold face lies and a plot twist.
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I don’t think that’s quite the case. I think that lets them off too easily. Rather, I think that they know exactly what they’re doing and just…don’t care.
Lying to the players, refusing to listen to feedback, manufacturing Q&As–all of these are so easily provable and so easily evidenced. But listening to feedback and trying to improve takes effort and they’ve figured out that weathering the negative press is easy to do once they just turn it off.
Why wouldn’t you lie, dismiss and manipulate when the penalty for being caught doing so is just to roll your shoulders and keep on keepin’ on?
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You know one of the saddest things? When Sylvanas dies, one of the characters that commanded such love and interest amongst the playerbase will depart not with all the pomp and fanfare they were craving, but with the same wet fart noise that ended Garrosh.
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Thats a very good point
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Garrosh’s entire arc was a wet fart so the demise of Sylvanas will be more sad
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Any twist or shock ending requires one thing: investment. If we don’t care about the characters or the story, how can we be shocked when our desires are subverted?
And aside from Sylvanas, is anyone invested in the characters of BfA? Taelia, Lucille Waycrest, Talanji–they’re nice and we like them, but we don’t know them well enough to have any expectations of them. And the events of BfA are so rote that they didn’t even bother to change the main characters of it–Nazjatar is exactly the same as Isle of Thunder, right down to Lor’themar and Jaina putting aside their differences.
How do you get shocked by what you already know what’s going to happen? How are your desires subverted when you don’t feel any?
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It’ll be one of those long farts that never ends.
Taelia, Lucille, and Talanji also just ran out of plot relevance immediately after you finished the leveling zones.
Taelia gets a handful of lines in the 8.1 War Campaign, I think. Talanji becomes queen of the Zandalari, who stop mattering to the storyline as soon as the Alliance retreats from the raid. And Lucille doesn’t even exist outside of Drustvar. You could carve that entire third of the continent out, and the only thing you’d lose from the “main” storyline is… Gorak Tul.
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I’ll go to bat for Lucille and say that she’s charming enough and her presence as a leader who’s a scholar instead of a warrior are really welcome additions. But you’re right, we wouldn’t lose much from her disappearing.
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Coincidentally, when did they out Taelia as Bolvar’s daughter? I remember coming back and doing random quests and here Taelia is with her dad’s surname and I’m just like “When’d that happen?”
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Early on, I think? When Anduin visits Proudmoore Keep, she reveals it.
Oh, don’t got me wrong: Lucille is awesome and I wish we got more of her. It’s just that she’s another case of the “pointless” zone storylines and smaller characters often being so much better than the main story that Blizzard puts front and center.
Hey, I have desires. My interest was piqued when Jaina and Thrall had that introspective conversation about how these conflicts kept happening over and over. Hope continued to mount as Anduin and Saurfang spoke with each other about “breaking the cycle”, hinting at a final end to the dumb contrived faction conflict that repeatedly ruins the story, providing a satisfying conclusion to Battle for Azeroth–even if it wasn’t a great ride, it would all be worth it if it could end the conflict once and for all. Excitement reached its apex as the PTR revealed that there would be no new warchief, for who needs a warchief in a time of peace? All signs were pointing to something I really wanted.
And then…
Consider my desires subverted lol
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The “reversal of expectation” is nice in certain genres of film. The surprise twist is nice when, as noted, you actually care and it’s done properly.
We don’t really have lore characters, at least not anymore, they are all just game/plot devices. To call them 2 dimensional would probably be stretching it, even.
Sylv may become the new Helya or Jailer, or she may actually die and go off-screen… until they need her again. They were bragging about how death isn’t death and they can bring people back.
We used to wonder (maybe) – are the old gods just “sleeping”? What does it mean that they’ll all wake up? What are the “physics” behind this?
Now we’re told no, they’re dead. But they go somewhere when they die and can come back!
The effect on the game is the same, sure, they’re here – they’re not here – they’re here again. But they’re not even trying to make it interesting by using these vague cop outs.
I hope WoW survives this team and the next team is better. It really is suffering with Ion, Danuser etc.
It’s reached the point I find myself hoping WoW fails, Blizzard is sold off for scraps by the Activision machine, and someone buys the IP who re-launches the franchise and treats it with more respect than Blizzard has.
I think all that can salvage Warcraft now is to raze the entire thing to the ground and redo it from square 1.
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I just need to win a billion dollars.
Also I am tired of the narrative of the ‘cycle of hatred’. It implies that there was ever a consistent escalation by both parties. This is not the case, and has never been the case.
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but taurajo
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You think you want honesty, but you don’t.
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The authorship of various parts of WoW is so opaque that I have a hard time telling who made the dev teams good.
Sometimes, it is obvious. Dave Kosak was obviously responsible for turning the world into Flintlocke’s Guide to Azeroth during Cata, which was… not great. And Danuser is probably to blame for Nathanos being everywhere. Golden is probably the one responsible for making characters talk in complete sentences in cinematics. MoP->WoD cinematics consisted primarily of Garrosh or other Orcs (varian counts as an orc) screaming tough guy WWE crowd-hype lines, but she was hired in mid Legion and after that we got some cinematics where there was actual dialog. But beyond that I don’t really know her influence on the story.
Other devs, I dunno. Like… Alex Afrasiabi has been the lead creative dude since WoD, but he doesn’t have a twitter and he doesn’t talk to fans as much as other devs do. How many of the bad creative decisions come from him? WoD was the first expansion with him leading the story, which doesn’t bode well. But I don’t see any short stories or creative works or concept art with his signature on them (as we did when Metzen was in his position). What does he do?
And Ion, I kinda get the impression that he is not a story guy. He was the raid encounter designer and got promoted before Legion. Coming from that background I’m sure he cares primarily about, well, raids, but game mechanics in general, not the narrative. His track record is 50-50 right now since the two expansions he headed are Legion and BfA, one great and one not great.
Anyway it all just makes me wonder, who made WoW fun and the universe engaging to begin with? Who made it decline? I can draw random correlations like “Kaplan left after Wrath and its been all downhill” or “Metzen left before WoD and WoD was really bad”, but I really don’t know.
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