DF Has WoW's Best Story Since '04

Lore Story Forum
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To my way of thinking the patient 0 for WoW’s story ills was Wrath of the Lich King. Let’s be real here Tirion had the final dramatic confrontation with the titular villain. We just happened to also be there. They literally put the guy on ice so we could have a gameplay interlude before he thawed out and the story continued. It was less a fantasy story and more a Christmas pantomime. And that’s the best they ever did with the model.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think it was wrong to experiment with a more traditional narrative with a beginning, middle and end. But it was imo a complete failure of an experiment.

The nature of a MMORPG means you sacrifice extremely important story telling aspects like pacing, tone and hell even the order of events to player freedom out the gate. So already we’re in trouble. But then it gets worse, because WoW is a massive project obliged first and foremost to be a fun and profitable video game. Meaning whole game modes can be scrapped, reworked or added out’ve the blue because of budget, poor design or just a cool idea the dev team had. Which means whole story chapters needing to be scrapped, reworked or added out’ve the blue.

Which would make a lot of the characters act in irrational or outright insane ways even if they were written consistently. Which they’ll never be. As this is a gargantuan project so any main character will be written by multiple people in different rooms in different places on different days and even different years. No one is going to come off as anything but severely schizophrenic with that many voices being handed the mic.

So to reiterate we’ve a medium where you cannot sit down and tell a story as your audience might be slapping eachother or running around making choo choo noises. Where you cannot have a concrete idea for where the story is going as that might have to change at any moment. And you can’t even hammer down a character arc as someone might pick up where you left off and go in a completely different direction.

Suffice to say this is perhaps the worst system designed by man for delivering a satisfying, traditional narrative experience.

But here’s the thing;

It’s not supposed to.

Some would say Vanilla didn’t have a story. And in the traditional sense it didn’t. No acts, no cast of characters, no villain or even real specific setting beyond a big sprawling fantasy world that shifted wildly through tones and even genre.

But I would argue it did as it had a main character, her name was Azeroth, and the story was of your own personal and collaborative adventures through the world. Maybe you read every last quest dialogue and adventured boldly from the depths of Molton Core to the skies above Lordaeron to siege Naxxramas. Or maybe you did nothing but gank people in Redridge until your eyes bled. Either way there wasn’t really a wrong way to engage with it. This is Blizz’s setting but your story.

And DF has captured that feeling in a way even Classic sort of failed at just by being from a different time. Maybe you’re super invested in the dragon drama, maybe you want to be the best soup chef the Tuskaar have ever seen, or maybe you’re just repeatedly flying into branches. Doesn’t matter there’s no wrong way to do it. Yeah there’s some big trouble with a lightning chicken breaking an orb but that’s just kinda there, along with everything else, to be invested in at your own discretion.

But the best part is someone remembered there is one venue in this medium where you can actually tell satisfying stories with a beginning, middle and end. Side quests. Those are short stories produced in relative isolation so they can have actual consistent characters, tone and direction. And when done well they’re used to flesh out the societies and cultures that fill this sprawling world of pretend to give it some much needed sense of texture. Which DF’s SQs do splendidly.

I hope the main lesson Blizz takes away from this is that they aren’t chiefly in the story telling buisness. That’s an important aspect to be sure, but they are fundamentally world builders. DF succeeds not because it’s fundamentally a better narrative than past expansions, but because it remembered the throughline narrative isn’t why we’re here. We’re here to experiences a world full of adventure, some comedic some tragic, some local some apocalyptic, but always something that is simultaneously our own and million’s of others.

TLDR; CDev is more akin to a Dungeon Master than an author or movie director. The game thrives when Blizz remembers this.

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Why is your answer for something being good always that it’s bad? DF is nowhere near having the best story. It might have the best side quests but that is not the main story. DF’s story is paperthin and doesn’t have the dimension that other expansions have. There’s some mental gymnastics there to say that DF has a better story than Wrath just because Tirion got the canon kill.

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Oh that’s not why Wrath’s story was worse than DF’s. That was just an example. It was worse because it tried to be a narrative experience which MMORPGs fundamentally aren’t designed to be.

Because when they try to make it that, it becomes a soap opera about idiotic demi gods with zero critical thinking or interpersonal skills. Characters become plot devices.

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Lets not start using WoW as a the trendsetter for storytelling in MMO’s. I’ve been playing quite a bit of 14 lately, and played SWtoR to death before its funding tanked and it fell apart … just because WoW is too lazy to competently tells stories within its world; doesn’t mean they should be the game we look to for rules on this. Especially in an expansion that’s super surface level, yet still somehow playing fast and loose with the lore of the world they’ve created. Good side quests have existed in every expac. Even BfA and SLs.

Lazy writers, fixating on their “visions” at the expense of the world they created, and repeatedly falling into amateurish writing traps of Self Inserts and Writers Pets … is just BAD writing. Its not indicative of what MMO’s overall can do with a centralized or overarching narrative. Just indicative of WoW’s quality.

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I know this isn’t Final Fantasy but people are always talking about how good FF14’s story is.

I appreciate when an attempt is made to create a story even if it’s bad. To say to not try making a plot because it doesn’t live up to your standards isn’t the answer. It’s what I look forward to most when playing this game and I really hope in the future that the main plot of expansions aren’t as diminished as they are here.

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Yeah I played that for a bit in college. Stopped after I got to the end of the story as it was basically just a pretty good sequel to KotoR with some multiplayer modes stapled on extremely awkwardly. Not surprised to learn that was it’s ultimate fate. And I don’t think it would’ve lasted a year if it wasn’t attached to the most popular fantasy setting on Earth.

The trouble is video games like to crib off film in much the same way film cribbed off theater while in it’s infancy. But it grew up and realized it had it’s own strengths and uniquenesses to play with. Video games are starting to do this. Stuff like Undertale and Paper’s Please come to mind.

But WoW managed something special out the gate by using the medium of a MMO to present a story about a world you less watch or partake in and more broadly experience and make your own.

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SWtOR didn’t fail because of its storytelling. It failed because its funding and proceeds were slowly stripped from it and siphoned into other areas by EA; while also being crippled from its very poor engine, and poorer Origin launcher. But the story, when they had the funding to support it, was stellar. Balancing out a faction conflict with a surprising level of nuance. EA simply stopped supporting it. And after trying out 14 for a while, I’m shocked at how low WoW has brought my standards for CARE in one’s world/characters. Its got issues, but that TLC is absolutely there in every little crevice of 14’s story and worldbuilding at least.

WoW’s writing has just been lazy. An amazing foundation, but one the writers themselves have failed to utilize to provide quality stories in. Even BFA and SLs, despite all their issues, had nuggets and pieces of good ideas within them. But, it was Blizz that failed to bring out the value of those nuggets, and failed to put the pieces together a compelling way. On top of falling prone to every amateurs’ writing tendency imaginable.

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I feel it failed because it didn’t present a world. Much less a galaxy. I remember being shocked they’d have Coruscant avalible as a location as a whole city planet sounded outlandishly ambitious as zones go. But of course you get there and it’s like 6 to 12 corridors with some instanced buildings for missions and dungeons. And man what a let down. Just a few regions in the EK or Kalimdor feel more sprawling and alive than whole planets were.

To elaborate;

The problem is thinking a MMORPG should have a story. No, it should have many, many, many stories. Some big, some small. It is presenting a world. World’s do not have a main storyline. Ours doesn’t at any rate.

Obviously you need some buisness about a big dragon or demon lord or what have you because fantasy RPG. But why is any of that more important than finding an old lady’s cat or boosting a bereaved child’s self esteem? What’s the point in saving a world where you don’t know or care about anyone in it?

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It’s clear they want to tell a coherent overarching story. They’ve wanted to do so since WotLK, and to a lesser extent like half of Burning Crusade.

The problem was they were just bad at doing it. I’d personally rather they figure out how to do so within their means, instead of scrapping all of it and it just being a bunch of murder hobos being asked to hunt bear butts.

This thread already has examples that prove it is possible, and I’d say well within their resources to tell a coherent story. They just gotta ya know…not suck at it.

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Because I have to spend waaaaay more time doing it.

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If that’s how you feel about DF’s content that’s your prerogative.

I don’t. Because yeah I’m just killing XYZ animals but I’m doing it alongside a society I am gradually learning more about as I gain their trust and prove my worth.

That’s proper MMO storytelling. Because it’s about a world I’m experiencing.

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I think DFs story is fine. It’s clear there is an overarching story in it though. Your post made it sound like they should stop doing that though.

In DF, you may be collecting bear butts, but it’s very clear that this is considered the side-show, next to the actual plot which is “Primalist Proto-dragons are trying to destroy the world”.

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Your logic for story doesn’t give way to longterm investment. If everything should just be side quests then I don’t have much reason to be excited about returning to the game. Every expansion will have new zones, but that novelty wears off sooner than speculating about where the story will go. Neighborhood Watch-esque activities can only be done so often. These are not world saving deeds that encourage me to go to a new land.

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It succeeded at creating a world just fine. What it didn’t do was create a “Sandbox”, that you can fill it with whatever you want outside of loose boundaries. Which clearly is the type of MMO you enjoy. But, back to your RP analogy. I’ve been part of D&D Games with a heavy story focus, and ones that are more sandbox in nature. Where the DM guided us on a story we were interacting with, and the DM was there merely as a facilitator for our own guidance. And I’ve been a part of good versions of both, and had horrible experiences in both.

Bluntly, WoW wanted to try to the more story driven approach. And THEY were just bad at it. But their failures aren’t indicative of anything more than their own inability to tell a coherent story. No matter how much you may want to ignore the successes of WoW’s peers in doing the same.

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That’s not how I’m perceiving it. Yeah the planeteer dragons might threaten Azeroth in some non specific way but meh. There’s a bunch of dragons and people who like raiding on that already. It’ll probably be fine.

Storytime with the Tuskaar though? Now that’s the ticket. I got about a billion options for games if all I wanna do is chosen hero stuff. But very, very few if I actually want to get to know the societies, people and places in this land.

That’s where WoW succeeds in storytelling. And it’s been lacking extremely in that department until DF precisely because it was side stuff.

This doesn’t feel like that. There’s just stuff. Some more grand and cinematic, some more cozy and intimate but the game’s not railroading you. Do whatever you want.

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See but WoW has always been doing that. Even with their more focus on trying to tell a coherent story, they actually do a terrible job railroading you into that story.

The leveling content of BFA for example doesn’t require any of the big Fourth War plot that it was supposed to hinge on, and it really barely connected to the Old God plot that just bust through the wall like the Kool-Aid man.

Dragonflight does have a coherent narrative though, and more than enough ways to jump into it, but this time also provides more than enough places to jump off the train and get side tracked, which is a fun change of pace.

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DF is not a very ‘warcraft’ warcraft story, imo. Thats not necessarily good or bad. But I think it has a lot of the same consistency issues and world-building holes that BfA and SL had. But unlike BfA and SL, it doesnt affect something we actually play or the entire universe.

Other MMOs have figured out how to tell good stories through an MMO platform. Given WoWs identity is ‘taking from other MMOs and trying to make our own spin on it’ I don’t think you can really justify them not trying to do the same with narrative effort. Borrow the flight, crafting and world content of other MMOs and we praise them, why would we not push them to look to other MMOs that succeed in storytelling and try to understand why they can manage it?

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The best thing I think WoW could take, personally, would be to actually lock our characters as actual characters.

Right now, you are a nameless, faceless, nobody who has somehow killed more gods than the stars. But narratively, you are a nothing.

Give our characters a static NPC party which they interact with throughout the game, through multiple expansions and such. Give them a connection to the game world beyond what race/class you picked at the character select screen.

Then from there you’ll be able to construct a narrative with some actual focus.

And I say this acknowledging that this is not WoW’s wheelhouse, so it’s unlikely they could do this, and even if they could I doubt it’ll go over well.

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I think WoW would struggle with that a ton because it cant make meaningful player choice. There are many things I as a Druid would never do- and to be blunt, blizzards characters do things they’d never do either, even in this xpac lol.

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I avoided mentioning it but I would also move towards restricting player choice in such situations. It’s not like we have that much choice now anyway, aside a few dialogue options.

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