The lore sucks now. I’ve tried to hold on after the horror of shadowlands but I just don’t care anymore. The Mag’har warlock & lightforged draenei becoming a thing really was a nail in the coffin on lore perspectives. Think they’re trying to salvage it but I dunno.
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Thankfully, it seems the mistake with the lightforged warlock thing is something they won’t do again.
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wish they’d reverted that, but, probably too late now lmao.
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I agree that we’ve lost a lot of faction, racial, and class identity as years have gone by, and I want to see that change over time.
That said, seeing some of the TWW in-game cinematics on YT, you get to realize a lot of people are still into the main story.
Which is a shame, because I was kind of hyped for my lifelong dream of draenei druids to come true. 
But yeah, any lore justification on his part is hysterical after Lightforged warlocks came around, with a whole questline that didn’t actually justify or clarify it. “Hey, it exists now and you can’t argue!” was not satisfying, gotta say.
I think MMOs are just not a good genre to build the lore. Best stories in WoW were related to things that were setup in Warcraft III. The last character that worked for me in WoW was Varian Wrynn. His threat to Horde after Garrosh fight, and his death in Legion was the last time the story worked for me. The uber cosmic titan void lord thing doesn’t work for me at all.
It’s like with LotR. Sure, it’s fun to read about Valar and whatnot, but it’s because we got to love Gandalf and the fellowship. All the lore is just trivia.
They don’t tell the fully story in game. What they do tell is told poorly. They retcon way too freely.
Most of the characters are unlikable and those that I think are alright I try not to get too invested in as Blizzard doesn’t have a finger on the pulse of what the player base thinks and can ruin (or straight out retcon) a character going forward.
Now I just pick pieces of lore that I like and ignore the rest. Definitely ignoring the main storyline.
It depends. ESO, elder scrolls online, really builds up the elder scrolls lore a lot and it is a blast.
And then there’s that forum poster with his D.R.U.I.D. idea. “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and such.
But thanks, that does make me feel a little more hopeful for Short-Lights.
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Is it Sunday? It’s Sunday.
Racialized factions were and remain an original sin of WoW.
It was transplanting an RTS idea in a very hard way to an MMORPG and it has never not been bad. They should have dropped the racialized factions and either reorganized things into more than 2 or at least removed the whole racialized aspect and allow any race to be either faction early in the game. The fact they didn’t by the end of Wrath and kept inserting pointless faction wars for their frat bro fantasies of a sports-team like rivalry just speaks to how shallow the dev team’s conceptions as a whole have long been on WoW/Azeroth as a living place and world with any complexity.
Metzen had some decent ideas, some not so great ideas but he at least tried to flesh out a kind of fantasy world with depth that could be lived in and expanded upon a bit, but after that and the initial revisions to his concepts the lore and world-building began to drop off and become more piecemeal of the moment with less consideration given to anything overarching and more how to shoehorn in current dev whims based on what blockbuster movie they saw or major TV show they like into a WoW-flavored tale.
Do I think the lore is gone? Yes. Shadowlands burned it and DF scattered the ashes by not immediately retconning it and TWW has started planting crops on the cursed soil that results.
Things really went off the rails in the third act, final major patch of Legion. Up until that point things were okay, but in building the next chapter they made some bad decisions and they’ve been doubling down on them ever since. It really started in the first patch of Legion I suppose given how they had Sylvanas acting with plans for the future but if you could put that aside Legion as a whole was fine for the lore up until the last patch when they veered into void/light weirdness in the fight against the legion. But it all came to a head in SL which took all of these not great decisions and used them to chop down the lore basis for the entire universe, they retconned one of their very best ideas in Chronicles as “just an opinion of the Titans maaan” in order to retcon the base lore of the universe to add another bigger bad. And in doing that they retconned a lot of other things, ruined the Arthas story which was one of the best in the franchise, and ruined a lot of characters like Sylvanas.
They also ruined all in-game religions and mysticism by adding certainty to what the afterlife looks like and it’s dumb. In light of how dumb and awful it is it’s hard to imagine the denizens of Azeroth not profoundly changing as a result of this knowledge and yet they don’t. It was an awful choice the way they structured it.
I saw a quote once that said that if someone plants a knife in your back and then says sorry and pulls it halfway out that’s not helpful, that you have to at least remove the knife entirely before the healing process can begin. SL was a knife in the back of WoW, or a giant sword if you prefer, the denial of the in-game reality by the devs perfectly matches their denial of the problem and need to excise the bad lore. Until it’s entirely excised and at this point you need to retcon multiple expansions so it’s never happening, the healing cannot begin. At most they can pack bandages around this permanent wound and scar in the lore, they can pack bandages around it and try to paper over the whole thing, put make-up on it, try to hide it, but it’s still there and they haven’t even tried to hide it or put bandages on it. They’ve drawn arrows to point at it proudly and said this knife being in the back of the lore is important and has changed key characters and will guide their destinies so it must stay.
So yes, it’s entirely hopeless. The lore. Their refusal to address long-time problems with key systems like factions because they built up a sports team antagonistic atmosphere complete with encouraging fans to build their real life identities around their factions, get tattoos, etc is a problem, it stunts the story, it stunts the gameplay for players. Their refusal to retcon SL, their insistence on doubling down on unpopular retcons and bad twists is why there is little hope. They have built their “next chapter” of the game story on a bad foundation. On a foundation of sand with a void in it instead of rock. They can’t add driven piles to this situation to fix it, the only solution is to scoop out the sand, remove the void, remove the buried knife, and start over from that point, building from there. It’s impossible. Their chance in DF to remove it was not taken, their chance in TWW to remove it was not taken. Their chance to ignore it in TWW like say Burning Crusade which had lots of its own lore problems and missteps but was safely siloed off from other developments there-after was also not taken.
They’ve made their choices.
And that’s fine for them because with systems like Mythic+, with leadership like Ion they’ve prioritized not story but gameplay. They want hardcore raiders, they want mythic+ keypusher try-hards, they want people who don’t care about the story, who only care that the set is painted a bit and if it’s all later retconned or the story isn’t that good it doesn’t matter as long as the challenge is there. So those people will keep them afloat. And in addition to those people they now court casuals, many of whom are admittedly RPers or care more about the story, but many who don’t, many who take a mobile game mindset, who see collecting shiny battle pets and making that number and mounts and transmog go up and don’t really pay attention to what’s going on in the background, for them the story is also secondary to their foreground attentions.
But these two groups have plenty of whales in them, they’ll keep the game profitable to remain online for many years to come.
But this game is not an MMORPG anymore. It’s not RPG, it’s not even massively multiplayer thanks to their awful cheap re-architecture they did some years ago when implementing sharding which is a technology to allow them to use cheaper hardware and network configurations by preventing large numbers of players from existing in the same space. So it’s not massively multiplayer, it’s online yes, but it’s also not an RPG, the RP has been stripped out. And people on the last standing large RP server Moon Guard can feel this. They can feel it when Stormwind is constantly lagging because Blizzard will not create special server architecture or balancing for one of the most populous servers and only after extensive begging even turned off sharding to allow RPers to find each others.
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Not gone, just a little messy.
Then again, IRL history is often gets revised as new fact come to light (not to mention it’s frequently under attack by propaganda and denial revisionists), so, in that respect, WoW lore is fine.
Not very enjoyable though. To quote Mark Twain,
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
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The only constant is change. Take it in stride or get left behind.
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Or Blood Elves on the Horde, lol.
Exactly. WoW’s faction system has really hampered the potential story. Blood Elves shoehorned onto the Horde. Night Elves shoehorned onto the Alliance. Heck, in Warcraft III, one of the only races that actually helped the Blood Elves was the Night Elves!
I’ve long imagined a world of Warcraft that actually feels like a continuation of Warcraft III’s story, instead of a “inspired by” version we kinda got with WoW. “The Horde” still exists, but it refers to the Orcs, and their combined tribes. “The Alliance” exists as basically a memory of the nations who combined together to counter the Orcs. But every group is now their own thing. Humans could be on good terms with Dwarves, Dwarves could be on good terms with Tauren, Tauren could be on good terms with Trolls, but Humans and Trolls might be on shaky ground. Instead of a “You’re on Team Red forever” thing, you could have organic relationships between groups. Conflict would still exist, but it wouldn’t have to last forever. You could even have Human vs Human conflict, like existed in previous Warcraft games, but only happens in WoW when one side is a weird NPC evil group that is designed to be fodder.
Yes, it would be a lot more work, but the world would feel more like a world.
Anyhow, do I think “lore is gone” in Warcraft? No. But I don’t really care about it nearly as much as I used to.
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The biggest problem is that WoW’s writing has the attention span of a five year old on speed.
There is just too much lore for me to know. I came to WOW at the end of BFA, and there was too much for me to know. I cannot keep it all straight in my head, nor do I even want to. All I know is some people hate me, some love me, it depends on what character I am playing at the current moment.
I gave up.
I don’t really know how to describe it but ever since Df the lore has gotten rather…bleh?
Even if I didn’t think Le Jailer was a good villain, I was still interested in all the other stuff going on in the Badowlands. The Maldraxxian civil war that frankly, coulda prolly been a raid tier in of itself, Ardenwealds several issues that admittedly made the covenant a bit of a mess story wise, Revendreth and the people who were loyal to Denathrius vs Renethal. Even Bastion which I felt was rather boring still at least had the plot hook of the Forsworn and the legitimate question of whether killing your memories to become a neutral party in ferrying souls was necessary or not. Everything had a bit of: oooh what if this happened? or hey what if x character has a point even if i dont agree with them?
With df and tww they just seem to be going through the motions of a story. I just cannot get into anything because everything seems like its been sanded of all passion.
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Christie Golden and Chris Metzen should write 100% of the lore and no one else at all, ever.
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Unfortunately too late to revert, but they still could(and absolutely should) make mandatory customizations applied to those specific combos much like Death Knights have their glowing eyes and undead skin. Mag’har Shadowmoon “Warlocks” that replace the fel magic with shadow(sorry no Green Fire either), Lightbound demons like Lothraxion for Lightforged, enforce Man’ari skin for regular Draenei, etc.
Then start working on paladin variants like sunwalkers, etc.
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But they can’t reach the light.
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I don’t know what you mean by this because I’ve read all the quest text this expansion and last expansion and DF/TWW finally feel like they’re tying up loose ends in the lore after we went on a weird adventure to the afterlife. We actually got back to the lore’s roots with Titans and Light/Void and all that. We’re meeting the Arathi!
Why does any of this feel new to you?
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