Which is why the new lore we’re getting in 9.2 personally doesn’t bother me, there is a lot of potential that blizz could do with it. But that’s just me 
Do we even know for certain that the First Ones themselves understand what exactly their tech does?
For all we know they are like Aperture Science and kept randomly experimenting until they found a way to digitize Magic.
I’m quite certain Aperture Science doesn’t know the first thing about how it’s Portal Gun works just how to produce it!
Which is funny cuz you’d think that they’d react to the global popularity with sitting down and trying to create the most complex, nuanced, multi-inspired world possible in the style of Tolkien but attempting to surpass him by virtue of the multi-ethnic inspirations
You’d imagine that at WoW’s peak in Wrath, they would’ve sat down and written books upon books of in-universe histories and expanded upon all the various cultures just in case WoW lasts for multiple decades, or to have an infinite playground for the playerbase
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One would think, yes. They were, it seems, too busy being rock and roll nerds and doing “cubical crawls” to do such a thing.
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There is a lot of potential but they are not doing the best they can with that potential. I mean Blizzard at one point took a place Chen mentioned back in WC3: TFT and turned it into one of the most lore rich expansions. Where most of the major characters began in WoW. I think Vol’jin and Jaina were the only ones who weren’t out of the main cast. And the new team has been trying to out do that ever since and they have failed. BFA was a mess and Shadowlands is even worse with their retcons that make no sense in the mega narrative. Like how Kel’thuzad and Balnazzar were now on the same team but were fighting each other for reasons… during the civil war of the plaguelands.
EDIT: Forgot that Jaina had a big role in the AvH MoP storyline. So added her to the list of non WoW only main characters in MoP.
The sad part is, Chronicles was their attempt at doing so. But Chronicles was written by the previous main writers, Metzen mainly and what happened when all of them left? It was made into a biased mouthpiece of titan propaganda.
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Chronicles didn’t expand though, it just solidified what was.
Which is the problem.
I expected charts of the geneaology of the monarchs and chiefdoms (human, troll, tauren, etc).
I expected a standardized corporate/mafia hierarchy of the Trade Cartels of the Goblins.
I expected details of how the High Tinkerer is elected, and how Gnomish government works.
I expected depth with Chronicles, and got three books of mostly summary that were swiftly discarded.
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It did expand in some areas. For example, building upon the ogre and orcish origins that were hinted in WoD. But it was designed to be summaries in those areas so they could be expanded upon in other material. Which is why the whole “it was titan propaganda” retcon annoyed the hell out of me. It was designed to be a summary so other material covering those events in greater detail would still be canon and other areas could be expanded upon. It did not need to be turned into a biased piece of trash for that to happen.
Honestly while this would be cool you are expecting too much from Blizzard.
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Am I expecting too much, or am I expecting Blizzard at least start taking its narrative vaguely more seriously, on par with both its encounter design and art team lmao
what’s the use of having still-celebrated encounter design and God tier artists if the narrative and imagination that threads it all together doesn’t inspire any positive emotion in players who even vaguely care (and expect) a story
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I think you expect too much from a T rated video game produced by nerd bros. I don’t think even dnd or warhammer goes that far.
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Bringing it closer to its inspirational roots wouldn’t make me like it better.
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Could get a more interesting system at the very least; e.g. Dante’s Paradise
I still maintain the current system could work if we got actual hints of such things much earlier. Instead of doing a info dump on us now. But that’s me
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I think they really couldn’t because before a couple years ago it didn’t exist. This is a full out lore overwrite with the new lore team doing their best to make the lore and its cosmology their own.
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You are not the only one. I prefer having constant and consistent build up and pay offs. I find having no build up and only pay offs to questions no-one asked is as bad as nothing but build up with no real pay offs to satisfy the audience. Shadowlands is an example of the former and the Netflix original Disenchantment is an example of the latter. In the case of Disenchantment, a lot of things are set up really early on but there is not consistent flow to the pay offs. Like the only things I can think of that were pay offs was who turned Dagmar to stone and who were the two individuals who sent Luci to Bean. Really that is it and both of those pay offs are connected.
You can set something up early in the story and not pay it off until later. Light Hope being a villain the whole time in Netflix’s She-ra is an example of that. The foreshadowing was her always repeating, “you must balance the planet” to Adora while avoiding or half-truthing any of her questions. That is until a mid way episode of season 4 where the pay off happens when she deletes the remaining memory she has of Mara. Saying that it would compromise the “mission” (obviously Adora is not in the scene when it happens). Adora and company learn the truth a few episodes later in one of the best episodes of the show. You just need some small build ups and pay offs to keep the audience invested and engaged for the big set ups and pay offs to work. And I feel like the MMO genre really hinders that important element of story telling. In the same way that adapting something into a movie can cause a lot of the important details to be removed or changed since there is a lot of them. Like say a whole season of a TV show…
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I doubt that was ever the goal. WoW was always suppose to be game first, story second with a comic book level story telling.
Except most expansion have three tiers of content. Meaning there is only so much lore you can stuff into it. I have always wonder what WoW would have looked like if each expansion arch was two expansion worse of stories(meaning there would be six raid tier minimum).
That mog makes your head look super tiny Zerde lol
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