Devs should come out and say

Lore Story Forum
21

I don’t think they’ll do that.

Having whole zones, questlines, mounts, mog items, toys, etc. exist in some non canon area accessible in game would be extremely confusing. Seriously all your Covenant mounts, items, titles - what would those be in reference to now? Do we just head canon all of it because I don’t know how to explain the heavenly Voltron robo lion things from Bastion.

No it seems far more expedient to me to just WoD the whole affair. And by that I mean we move on, take what bits actually worked, and just never speak of the rest of it again.

Seriously I missed WoD and I’ve never once been even slightly confused about the story. Because Draenor rarely if ever comes up. The Mag’Har from that AU became a playable AR and I still didn’t need to know anything about WoD because the one quest there is set decades after the story events.

And I’m glad that was the case as I’ve seen some Mag’Har stuff from the very small amount of WoD content I’ve played. IE; the intro quest like 5 times before the leveling revamp and a lot of raid content for mog items. And industrialized, WW1 tech by way of Mad Max Orcs were a cool idea even if they were a baffling lore decision. I’m happy to have them kicking around and hope we see more of their stuff. I could go for one of those armorered trains of theirs steaming through The Barrens.

Figure we do the same with SL. Sire Denathrius is pretty popular and the setting could use a Lawful Evil big bad. Him and his dreadbois being the settings answer to Lucifer and devils is imho more interesting than just another type of basically interchangeable demonic arsonist.

Maldraxxus more or less worked, I thought. Having them on hand as a Necromancy hotline sounds good. The Forsaken are too partisan for that job and the Knights of the Ebon Blade have the personality of a plank of wood with a frowny face scribbled on it. So why not wheel out Merelith and Kevin next time we need a death goop specialist to spout exposition. Seriously we’ve Lich Hubert Farnsworth and a birthday party blob, I don’t want to see Bolvar grumbling ‘Champion’ at me when ‘MY FAVORITE APPRENTICE!’ is on the table.

I also quite liked Ardenweald. I know it bothers some fans of the Emerald Dream as it’s basically a depressed version of it. But Weald seems like a good compromise as it’s not as tied into Druid and Nelf stuff. Like I was shocked at how not out of place my Undead Warlock felt there as horrific unbreakable curses that give you soul leprosy are a thing. I don’t think you could’ve done that with the Emerald Dream without ruining it. Plus the Winter Queen has a pretty cool Del Torro esque design.

Those would be the only babies I personally wouldn’t throw out with the bathwater. But generally it seems wiser to just ignore it for awhile, see what seems to have any enduring popularity, keep that and then let the rest fade into irrelevance until it’s quietly soft retconned.

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22

Even more realistically, they’ll just stick it in the closet with the rest of the past expansion lore that’sno longer currently relevant.

When Dragonflight launched, they even cut off LFG access to Shadowland’s dungeons even for those still in that expansion’s 50-60 level range.

23

Devil’s advocate here, this might be less because they’re burying SL, rather they might need a rebalance pass if SL levelling now ignores covenants like Legion levelling doesn’t do the artifact weapon system.

Or maybe the covenants are still in, I haven’t levelled a character through it yet post DF and probably won’t ever lol

24

The convents skills are still in game. You can only use them while in the shadowlands now though

25

As someone who’s never done SL when it was current but sent a few profession alts there - you hit level cap before the main questline is done (I hit 60 in Maldraxxus without doing any side objectives), and alts can only get the Threads of Fate skip at level 60. So the covenants are still there, but not for levelling characters.

26

But I liked most of the lore even the Jailer. Even though they did him dirty and he could have been made our boss a later patch.

How are you gonna say that wearing a shadowlands transmog? Shadowlands had some cool transmogs FR.

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27

Because gameplay doesn’t equal lore.

Frankly, a vast portion of the stuff our characters do / wear are preposterous.

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28

Wow doesn’t even have a hardcore mode, idk what people were expecting in shadowlands. To live forever or something?

29

You can put one of your own if you like. A thing on the Classic servers is the Classic Hardcore mod which can be used to enforce Hard core rules plus additional restrictions for additional achievements.

My husband will designate his own hardcore characters which he deletes after their first death.

30

Agreed, yeet BfA while were at it

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31

Gameplay (and content) =/= lore

32

This is what makes me laugh. They wanted Zovaal to be this pure evil guy only to turn him into another Sargeras. Just replace the void with some other threat.

Illidan did evil things to stop Sargeras from doing evil things. Sargeras did evil things to stop the void from doing evil things. N’zoth did evil things in BFA to try and stop Zovaal from doing evil things. Only for Zovaal to do evil things to stop some unknown threat from doing evil things. Like what next? This unknown threat continues this train of “I was actually the good guy the whole time cause there exists a greater, more evil threat”?

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33

Nah short of getting new writers I doubt we will ever get them even admitting the mistakes they made with the story. Ian has apologised for the Gameplay a number of times but we haven’t heard a peep about them mentioning the mistakes in the story.

This is because they still think their story was great and we are simply all smooth brain morons for not appreciating it. Sure they have accepted they needed to change direction(probably forced on them from the top), but I can see them already shifting the story back in the same direction shadowlands was headed.

Our only hope is that Metzen has alot of pull when he comes back and can fix the direction the story is headed in.

Edit: Don’t forget steve even came onto this forum to try justify his 5 year skip. Not because he beleive they had made a mess of the story and needed to move the story away from that. But because he felt it was the natural progression of the story for us to just lose 5 years.

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34

How? If it’s the loss of identity, I find they both did it.

Domination magic alters the victim’s thoughts so powerfully that it interferes with their sense of self, allowing a skilled/powerful user to control their target (not sure how it scales). The Jailer used this to create a literal army of the damned and used Anduin as a weapon/puppet/suicide bomber. I won’t say what happens in Bastion because I think you’re already familiar with it.

imo that would’ve been a good idea. Have it be WoW purgatory instead. I know Revendreth was WoW purgatory, but only in the sense of “penance for sins before redemption (damnation too, unlike the real concept of purgatory)”. Like you, I mean as “intermediate afterlife before the final afterlife”.

35

Sadly, that looks to be the design of how they dig their own grave with lore - Preventing to admit the failures or build lore to fix / heal the divisions their poor writings caused. :pensive:

36

How do you undo an expansion? Is it reasonable to expect a company to recant over two years of story progress? I’m pretty sure the move is to just downplay it (they seem to have so far) and move on.

It clearly wasn’t popular. No harm, no foul. There’s plenty of past chapters in Warcraft history that the story has simply left behind.

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37

kyrestia and the kyrian were aware that the arbiter was broken and all souls were going to ultra hell.

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38

The same way Shadowlands undid a lot of previous lore.

Retcon the hell out of it.

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39

The “First Ones” non-sense really bothers me. Zereth Mortis was one of the worst zones in Shadowlands. No one wants to have an afterlife story with robots.

What is upsetting is that they added a Zereth Ordus reference in Dragonflight. Unless the players keep the lore/story team in check, they will most certainly destroy what we have today!

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40

I already know a list of various ways how they could mend it, or give a reprieve to the players who use to enjoy the storyline & ultimately how to reverse / heal the bungle ups they did.

However with the small-indi-company’s gigantic humongous ego, I doubt they’ll listen — continuing to pat themselves on the back for Shadowlands, believing it was a masterpiece despite the roaring masses & crowds of its playerbase booing @ it.

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