When noting the stark difference between how events are portrayed to Horde and Alliance players in BFA, I mused how it was a missed opportunity for Blizz to do some unreliable narrator propaganda quests on the topic.
Well to my shock while leveling alts I learned they’ve done unreliable narrator quests. There’s several in Cata and MOP content. Everyone I’ve played thus far is for comedic effect- the old drunks in the Badlands telling you how they totally punked Deathwing springs to mind.
But you could do something like that with darker tones. Perhaps from the perspective of a character we are presumed to trust like Shaw or Garona that are later revealed to be lies. Or, with N’Zoth and voidy mind warping effects in play you wouldn’t even have to give us a different perspective. You could make our own character an unreliable narrator which could be pretty damn interesting I think.
BFA’s wrapping up so this is a cool idea we’ll have to wave to along with all the other missed opportunities in this misadventure of an expansion.
But I think quests that put us the player in a completely different perspective is such an interesting story telling device that I’m disappointed hasn’t seen as much use recently.
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I think player characters are high enough in the ranks of they’re faction that they would be told the truth about what was going on even if the ordinary citizens of the faction were being told lies. it would be an interesting concept though.
That was my assumption but then my Forsaken Priest, named Hero of the Horde by Windrunner herself in a ceremony that gave me a spooky skin for my Light’s Wrath as observed by top Horde commanders in the Undercity, is attacked on sight by Forsaken loyalist NPCs for being on a Forsaken boat.
So the adventurer or Champion or murder hobo what ever you’d like to call the PC seems to have a frankly bizarre relationship to military clearance.
Suffice to say I think they’d lie to us. Blizzaes does, so why not our in game leaders?
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I guess so but that’s partly the incoherence of the plot. they really needed more of a difference between the gameplay of the loyalist/ rebel factions of the horde.
They did that in BfA with the two versions of Genn marching into Rastakhan’s throne room. And arguably with the two versions of the War of Thorns (Astranaar, furbolgs), unless that one was just sloppiness. Both made the Horde look bad. So be careful what you wish for.
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I love me some Rashomon style storytelling.
I think it’s especially effective in fantasy roleplaying games, as one of its central aims is taking the audience out of their own world and transporting them to a more fantastical one. One with different rules, different peoples, different languages, different traditions.
I think there’s far too much emphasis on canon explanations, on perfectly understood cosmologies, magic as an exact science, and a total lack of mystery in a lot of modern genre fiction. Also a tendency to superimpose whatever passes as modern values -i.e. usually Western European- as objective truth or the default. This means that anything not Western European in origin often tends towards caricature to the point of exoticism or villainization.
The unreliable narrator is also a very effective way of communicating complexity and ambiguity and providing depth to what could would otherwise be black and white or plot hole riddled mess.
And finally, “Different people can have conflicting, yet valid perceptions/opinions of a thing,” or “Things are not always exactly as they seem,” is never a bad thing to keep in mind when writing any story.
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I’m wishing for something that would make those two vastly different version of events make sense.
Like, no civilians died in Astranaar in my game. I got to decide if they did, I decided no. I guess another player could have decided to kill them all but either way the Alliance see deathstalkers murdering civilains for fun.
It’s not bad storytelling- it’s outright incoherent storytelling. Are we sure Activision-Blizzard just cut marketing teams? Are they making the quest designers work in offices suffering from gas leaks or with lead poisoned water?
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Eh, if anything people are probably tired of it. Specially with a certain dark lady. We all know some major revelation is going to occur explain everything Sylvanas has been planning and will reframe everything she has done.
I think the question isn’t will it happen it obviously will but should it happen it probably shouldn’t.
As far as I am concerned it depends on whether revelation turns her into a raid boss or not.
Even if that happens, it’s not the sort of thing the OP is asking for.
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they said it wasn’t mop again but to have her overthrown as war chief and then have her cause the next expac is exactly what they did with garrosh lol.
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Well unlike Garrosh, she did not get raided yet and thus her potential of being axed in one is still a big possibility.
Michael Kirkbride made me hate unreliable narrators and tbh it’s doesn’t make sense in a story we’re experiencing first hand. We know what happened, we were there, in some cases merely one of many.
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Alright well sorry you didn’t care for an author but despising a narrative device seems, weird frankly.
And as I cited in these quests you play them from a different perspective. The ones in Cata and MoP are to comedic effect so it’s beyond obvious that the quest giver is lying to save their own butt or ego.
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Blizzard can barely handle one perspective and reliable narration. I think you have too much faith in their writing.
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I currently trust their story telling acumen about as far as I can throw it and since I’m refering to an abstract concept that is to say I can’t.
But I still think it’s interesting to think about. Games are a very unique form of story telling and seem almost better suited to certain narrative devices than any other medium. They do visual storytelling extraordinarily well. Even in BFA I loved wandering through Dazar’Alor and breathing in the atmosphere. You could infer so much about Zandalari culture and history by just wandering around the city and looking at stuff.
So while I can’t trust the head writing team there are clearly still very talented and creative people working there somewhere.
Being unable to handle a singular perspective/narration is all the more reason to go with the unreliable narrator angle. “It’s open to interpretation,” works just as well for the less competent writer.
Well when done badly an unreliable narrator is just above ‘it was all a dream’ in terms of unsatisfying endings.
But I still think these types of quests should be utilized more. And what’s odd is they essentially did this for 1/2 of an entire raid. But it wasn’t used to much narrative effect as much as it was an excuse to let everyone fight Alliance / Horde characters during a war.
Unreliable narrators are perhaps less effective when the other side of the story is available for anyone to go check out.
Now, if both sides were nuanced and had elements of truth and justification to them, that wouldn’t be a problem. When one is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong, it just looks like lying.
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