Did WoW botch their usual story formula in BFA?

Lore Story Forum
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So something I’ve been thinking about lately is how maybe people are more upset at the story lately because the formula that’s gotten us here since day 1 kinda broke around BFA.

Warcraft’s story, and Blizzard’s story in general across most of their games has been something like this:

Something bad happens->As a result of that bad thing, something good happens->The good thing that happened ultimately resulted in victory for the people that the bad thing initially happened to.

The Orcish Horde invaded with the help of Azeroth’s mad guardian->Stormwind Falls->Mad Guardian is revealed and killed->Alliance of Lordaeron is formed to push back the invaders, which they do, peace is achieved.

Orcs were tricked into becoming demonic Horde and do bad things-> Bad Horde ultimately defeated and finds Shamanism → New Horde is formed to defend Azeroth from the Legion.

Silvermoon falls to Undead and the Sunwell was destroyed->Silvermoon rebuilds joins the Horde-> Silvermoon and Blood Elves ultimately help stop Legion invasion and restore the Sunwell with a stronger bond to the light (TBC).

Draenei genocided on Argus/Draenor ->Flee and join Alliance on Azeroth->Ultimately help stop the Legion(TBC/Legion) with a weaker bond to the light(I kid but I had to throw this in here lol).

Death Knights raised to serve Arthas against their will->Commit atrocities for the Scourge->Turn on Arthas and are instrumental in the fall of the Lich King.

etc etc

Some of these have quicker payoffs then others, but the formula pretty much stands, but then we get to Teldrassil and the formula is being tested again, with the writers telling us to be patient and that it’s not done yet, and make no mistake it’s definitely following that story formula. I think the problem is we’re not seeing any benefit the Night Elves have gained. The formula basically states that the people who get wronged, eventually down the line get some sort of reparations, this happens in WoW much faster…usually, but it hasn’t happened with the Night Elves yet, and it’s made people antsy and it looks like all the players around the event are getting more attention then the actual victims. The bad/good thing has only really played out for a few players in the event and the Night Elves weren’t one of them.

Sylvanas Windrunner & The Horde commit genocide against the Night Elves and War breaks out between the Alliance/Horde(bad thing)->War ends and a guilty Saurfang gets his Warrior death saves the Horde and ends the War(Good thing)-> the Horde reforms, and retire the Warchief title so they’ll never be the aggressors due to a dictator again (ultimate good thing)->Sylvanas does more evil things but gets her soul back in 9.1(good thing)->She’s probably gonna help us somehow in a positive way that brings about the end of Shadowlands story(Ultimate good thing).

In there you can probably throw in “Night Elves take back Darkshore(good thing)”, but it doesn’t really balance the scale of the good thing since they lose Ashenvale/Darkshore/Teldrassil to begin with(I think the writers realized that when they decided to add more story elements with Tyrande in the Shadowlands). We could use the Night Warrior as the other good thing, but again, this doesn’t balance the scale, ultimately the Night Warrior didn’t save everyone’s souls during Shadowlands, doesn’t achieve vengeance, and now it’s gone without doing much, so again the scale is struggling to balance itself. Now Tyrande is talking about choosing renewal, so we’ll have to see if the renewal will ultimately bring about some big grand change that’s a net positive for them that made their being victims of genocide all worth it. The writers keep insisting that the story isn’t done yet, so I guess we’ll see.

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About the Night Elves specifically, their story of suffering and tragedy was never supposed to have any pay off or resolution.

The writers wanted to get rid of the Night Elves for some reason, so they took their home and zones away and killed their people off.
Since they obviously didn’t want them to regain any of what was lost, they painted the darkshore warfront as “regaining their lands” and had most of the Night Elf souls obliterated in the maw while only letting us free a very small portion (<10%). This is to ensure that we know that there’s no hope of the dead night elves ever coming back, because there’s no coming back from that fate.

Lastly, they made it so Elune protected Sylvanas from Tyrande because they didn’t want to kill of a character just to get rid of the Night Elves. The reason for that? Obviously never explained, because they can’t just openly say that they wanted to get rid of Night Elves without sacrificing another character for this task.
To make people eat it up, they came up with that Elune reveal where Elune told us that it’s actually all her fault and that we must forgive Sylvanas and the Horde for us to get renewal, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Horde still holds Ashenvale, that Teldrassil is still gone and that most Night Elves were obliterated in the maw.
But you know, it’s all fine because Tyrande and Shandris are fine with it, Elune told them that she wanted to use their people as soul fuel so it’s all okay.

They had many possibilities with Shadowlands, an example would be letting us free the Night Elf souls or letting us bring Sylvanas to justice, but instead they had the Night Elf souls obliterated and Sylvanas absolved of her crimes with our goddess forcefully making us forgive Sylvanas.

Don’t expect anything fair or realistic to come out of the Night Elf story, because it was and is designed to get rid of the Night Elves as a race and people, and this is now completed. And Tyrande and Shandris are okay with it, so we as players must also be fine with it.
Nothing of it really makes sense unless you start seeing the actual motivations the writers had with the Night Elf storyline.

It has been 4 years since the genocide of the night elves now, and things have gotten consistently worse with every patch they were featured in. It’s over for them. Their resolution was the destruction of their people in the maw and the absolution of Sylvanas. Their last hope of recovering was obliterated in the maw. Nothing more was ever intended for them.

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It’s … about killing and rescuing the souls of the night elves from the Maw.
Did other races have quests that directly indicated that their souls were being recycled? It was not meant, “We are all in the Maw, so we have one destiny.” As with a nightmarish amalgamation of night elf souls. M?

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A good Analyse of the Situation.

I would add a few Thoughts:

The Problem - in my opionion - is that the Writer don´t even know HOW they should pay off such an event. The reason all the former Genocide were not faced with such an reaction of the fanbase is only all of this former events Didn´t happened in WOW, in an MMO, with a huge investment in your character and your heritage/Race, especially the Night elf com is a heave invested fancom in their race.

So, blizz struggle to bring a good story, they don´t want to go the way such an event would normaly produce as consequence, as payoff, so they try other ways…but every way failed.

They don´t want to kill Sylvanas for her deeds, so this way is impossible
They don´t want to hurt the horde through the night elves in an meaninungfull way, so this way is impossible

They need a new way, another path, but failed completly every time they tried it because their community don´t allowed them this cheap try of “Payoff”, they want a big payoff…and i´m very doubtfull that the devs will gife the payoff the night elves would deserve…

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The lore according to Ethriel.

Not to be confused with actual lore.

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While we all can definitely see the terrible way which the night elves have been handled, Ethriel takes it a step further into complete lunacy…

I rolled my eyes just looking at that post starting with “About the Night Elves”…

Now! About the topic on hand, since bfa they’ve opted for shock value and an endless box of mysteries with no end or conclusion in sight with only bread crumbs for answers. They should go back to straight forward and simple.

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Just Retcon the last 3 years.

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They do know how. We even told them how. They just didn’t want to pay it off.

Night Elf souls being obliterated in the maw when there was the opportunity to save them is the prime example for this.

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Its exist a difference in “theoretical they know how to pay off” and practiacly…to face an imposible Situation because the story would not be fun either for the other faction…it would still a terrible story to deal with it, one reason why teldrassil sucks is…is because the consequences such an event would produced could neither hit or archieved in an mmo like wow.

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I’m not seeing how freeing innocent Night Elves and children from their suffering in the maw has any negative impact on the Horde as a faction.

Also the Horde was never entitled to Ashenvale, the Night Elves should’ve reclaimed that zone instead of making it a fully Horde controlled zone.

It’s things like these where you can clearly see that the writers never intented for the Night Elves to have a resolution other than “That’s it, you’re extinct and the souls of your people were obliterated, the end”.

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Not that, but I think…a single event ala Teldrassil which saves everyone afterwards…all night elves…would not be possible with the current devs.

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Yea because they are hateful towards Night Elves.

It’s not because the story doesn’t allow it, because the story would (realistically) let us free those souls after they went through so much suffering as individuals and as a race, we even got started with it and freed a small portion but then abandoned that quest.
It’s just the writers being hateful that doesn’t allow this.

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The vast majority of stories start with a, or a group of, Character(s).
Then, Events occur and you watch that/those Character(s) moving through those Events and responding.

This is really the best general start point since you can create Character(s), fully fill them out, and during writing, go back over things and make sure you don’t break the Character.

Once Upon a Time, for multi-writer projects, a “Writer’s Bible” was produced by the original mind, giving the fixed world-view of each major Character. That way there was a thing to refer back to when someone was working on something, and get the Character in the ballpark of themselves.

You can see an early version of this in a copy of Shakespeare, at the beginning of the text is “Dramatis Personae” laying out the names and what of the Character.

WoW doesn’t do this style.

Some stories are based on Events, and then provide different Characters seeing/responding to them. Now, that can work, and be very effective. But it’s also easy to destroy the Characters, and make the Events themselves the center, which people do not generally like. We know the lives of the Characters are the important thing, because we are, and when they are turned into mere objects to drive fictional events we empathize against the story Events - which destroys the story.

WoW falls into this model. It has Events, and then shoves Characters into the Events.
Starting in BFA, WoW writing fell on its face making Events which were then dragging everyone along merely to advance the Events.
Also, in BFA, a grotesque writing style of emotional appeal became the norm. I actually was recently thinking about Stormsong Valley stories as a representation of this mistake: The attack on Brennadam by the Horde is something only the Alliance really sees, and it’s an emotional appeal in fact; “the Horde is attacking civilians, casual slaughter, remember what they did to Darnassus!”
Then you have Huelo as Horde, which the Alliance is left out of: “look at these savage Kul’Tirans, they set a wounded and suffering animal as bait just to do the same to a person!”
The point, without being exhaustive of all the times it was done, was to set off emotion buttons; in other words, to “otherize” the opposing faction as monsters.

That was done some in the RTS’s, but they were not 2 years of developing story, offensively trying to “put the war in Warcraft”. Nor was it to the extremes done in BFA. (Darnassus/Undercity come to mind.)

While BFA was pushing those emotional buttons, creating Player conflict, it also was constantly pushing the Old Gods as “the real culprit”. Even if someone was getting into the Faction War, that was stolen from them by the story saying, functionally: “sucker!”

Both sides’ leadership, since the Events were all that seemed to matter, were subverted into plot devices that made constantly stupid mistakes. And were often devoid of their own Character history.
To quote myself:

Really that was a let down from Legion: We won! The Burning Legion was defeated.
And then: LOL No! Old God make you fight!
And now, yet again: LOL No! Eternal One make you fight!

People play an RPG for that fantasy experience of a different Character it provides. Now in WoW, the story is so rigid, and focused on the Events the Lore Characters are put in, that Player Characters are feeling condemned to whatever whim the story is going to send their way.
We know, in the current style, that no matter what we do in game, some “twist” is stalking us as a “surprise”. We also, are now, up to not being surprised by the supposed surprise, just wasting time on the way to it wondering which one they’re going to do this time.

BFA, as pure underlying story, was not terrible. It was delivered terribly, expounded terribly, paced terribly, and with those…a disaster. Frankly, their Faction War stunt of Teldrassil and Undercity should NEVER have happened.
As story it could work, but with a multi-year cycle of content development, and the inability to move the story reasonably, it should have been cut as an idea.

My advice to the WoW team would be:

  • You need a Writer’s Bible explaining your Characters. And you need to obey it.
  • Cut the emotional appeal writing. You make Player strife, the game will suffer.
  • Stop trying to shove Lore Character story in the middle of Player story, this game is about the Player Characters. (Congrats on making Players not a part of the raid by making a cutscene with only Lore Characters.)
  • Refocus story development: The Player Character moving through the stream of Events. Subscriptions are to play the game, not watch a few second clips of Lore Characters and then click complete.
  • If you do deep psychological in the story you need to expound the grounds of the story in Act 1. Like Hamlet. Attacking Teldrassil, with where you have gone now, would be like Hamlet starting at him slaying Polonius (Act III, Scene IV).

I would not have personally been worried about writing the underlying story they seem to have. But they absolutely missed it and made too many people angry in the process.

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I don’t mind not having my character appear in the end of raid cinematics. Otherwise it will look like those horrible in-game cutscenes. Besides, in the lore our characters are just a blank slate. Which is why they are absent from things like patch trailers or end of raid cinematics.

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I’d argue they blotched it in Wrath, when the “world” of WarCraft stopped being the main character of the game. Instead it got pushed out of the way for trashy cape- superhero pulp.

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As you point out, BfA followed the usual story with the Horde playing the role of villains. Leaving aside the issue of casting one faction as the villains…

They like to provoke players to hate the other side. As the saying goes, an angry fan is an engaged fan. I think they went too far. But I’m not sure Blizzard believes that, even now.

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The problem is they created two timelines in the game, in this case.

Timeline 1: You get a quest to defeat Sylvanas, from Bolvar. You go to the raid and fight Sylvanas.

Timeline 2: You do the end of story chapter, where the Primus says:

I fear our efforts to stop Zovaal have been thwarted, mortal. A doorway has been opened to a forbidden realm… and the Banished One has reclaimed a power taken from him long ago. I sense your allies returning from the Sanctum of Domination. I must know every detail of what transpired.

Both of those existed at the same time in the game. He doesn’t ask you, the Maw Walker, for your experience; oh no, the two we saved from Torghast along with Mr. “I can’t go to the Maw, I might get MC’d” are who he wants info from.

On its own the cutscene could have stood with an airy “can’t show everything!”
But when you add in that the Player Character is getting ordered by the Primus to find out what happened from someone else…yeah…not good.
Compounded with Bolvar, who’s in the cutscene, having asked players to do the fight…ugh.

It’s just a silly mistake. Redo the Primus as asking the Maw Walker what they have seen, go to cutscene - no other changes - and boom, one timeline, nice and tidy.

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Blizzard could have made two different quests and dialogue depending on whether you have done the raid quest yet or not. But I can see why they went with the ‘if you didn’t do it’ option since most players probably have not done the raid yet.

And the last time they made a raid quest be required for story progression (9.1 war campaign along with 8.0 suramar chain) it wasn’t well received. Now both of those chains no longer require their respective raid quest to be complete to continue. (the EN one for Suramar is now a solo scenario event)

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Wait, that’s not how it goes? I assumed the dialogue would have changed if you beat the raid first.

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My opinion is that raid participation is down, drastically. But I know I’m not the person to judge that fairly.

And with this story piece they really wanted people to get the cinematic for future story reasons.

I totally agree with that, they need to not lock Lore behind raids. But you can’t take people and say “do this big thing, and the story is here”, and then turn around and create a vacuum where the Players were left out. It diverts the focus and de-prioritizes Player Characters. WoW isn’t a movie, and I think the story drift in that direction has been bad for the game.

It’s such a silly error when just words fixes it.

There isn’t a good reason to not simply aver the PC as having been there in quest text. From my PoV doing that is the best solution, who cares if they went to the raid when all we’re talking about is a cutscene.
Let the Players insert their headcannon about their Characters.

Story forks, where we have different timelines are really bad for how people take stories, many start checking out.