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.