Thanks Halite finally someone did a post around storytelling on the community council,
" I’m very interested in hearing everyone’s opinions about this! ",
One thing that I don’t see on your post is the impact of Books to the in game story, for example, Why players can’t experience via quest, scenario and even cinematics the following events:
Before the Storm
Meeting in Arathi : Sylvanas realized they’re defecting and all hell broke lose. The rangers with her started shooting down those that dared to betray her, but she was also very smart about it. They made sure to only kill her own Forsaken since that way she wouldn’t be the one to start the Alliance-Horde war and still keep up her end of the bargain when it came to this meeting. Just imagine that cinematic
Calia’s death: The banshee queen herself fired the arrow that took Calia’s life despite Anduin rushing the field and trying to save her.
Shadows Rising
Sylvanas and the Plot to Defeat Bwonsamdi: the whole plotline and cinematics around Talajin that developed a character really well compared to Pelagos, however Blizzard decided to finish the Blood pact between Rasthakhan and his bloodline with Bwomsandi on this book, they decided to end the Talanji and the Loa of Kings storyline on a book when players already received really good cinematics and stories.
Zandalar in Chaos: The whole plot between Nathanos, Zandalar rebels and Dark rangers to kill Bwonsamdi and Talanji, those could be a scenario, questlines, cinematics, they just decided to include Nathanos as world boss for the pre patch…
DRUST
Besides the books, What was the point to include the death part of the druidism with Kultiras and the Drust, a plot line that was moved to Shadowlands and was really great for a side story with a mini raid or dungeon, i think this was cut content and now they’re going to just forget about Drust and Thros, the Blighted Lands, that could be a realm on the shadowlands, a new raid, dungeon…etc, the whole Night fae campaing was the worst stotytelling in my opinion and i did that campaing like 4 times, some chapters are related to Tyrande, others around Bwonsamdi or Drust, there’s not a path, it’s just a mix of several plot lines and the conclusion for each one of those its affected by that.
Major plot points are being sold as books instead of doing another small campaign ingame.
Cliffhangers that last way too long and happen every single patch. Just end the storyline with each patch and then start a new when the next patch is happening. Some important plot points even take years to be resolved! (Example: What’s happening with the Night Elves? How’s that going? And it’s still only implied why Sylvanas burned the tree.)
Too much focus on big overarching stories without the rest of the worldbuilding in mind. Cool, we’re in the Shadowlands now - but the writers almost completely forgot about Azeroth the whole time. One of the most important plot points was that the Scourge is running rampant on Azeroth, but we never explored that idea during the expansion. It almost felt like the problem was solved with the end of prepatch.
Too much focus on the feelings and fates of the main NPCs. I don’t have the feeling anymore that the game is about me, my friends and my/our adventures. It’s about the adventures and hardships of Jaina and her friends and foes and I’m just watching what’s happening while killing some angry creatures. It’s like a soap opera with group content.
The storytelling is incredibly rushed and crammed into tiny campaign pieces, so the lack of time to tell the events leads to extremely awkward and weird moments like … bringing the Sigil of the Primus directly to Torghast or being infiltrated by dreadlords over and over and over despite having the tools to prevent that. The story doesn’t take its time to let the characters develop proper plans or catch up on knowledge we’ve gotten in the past already. Things need to happen, so they just… happen, despite lack of logic.
And the most important…
Massive waste of story potential. I’m looking at you, Azshara, Nazjatar and N’zoth. Those could’ve filled a huge expansion but the writers chose to cram them into a faction war expansion, which led to little to no depth in the story exploration. Nazjatar was a small hole in the ocean with some caves that we mainly used for rare farm and player power gain and then we rushed to a free Old God and just nuked him with a laser before he could do anything. I’m still extremely disappointed about that and they’re doing the same with the afterlife. It’s such a huge and interesting concept, but we’re mostly witnessing the surface of it and it’s just another place where we need to be to see the big overarching story.
So true, both Nazjatar and Nyalotha could be a whole continent for an expansion, now i don’t get what direction Devs will follow, Old Gods were my favorite kind of villain, because are so chaotic, just a copy paste from Lovecraft but with that Warcraft touch and they just finish that plotline
Oh yeah, I’m mostly talking about it from the perspective of what you can experience in-game, and you’re totally right about this! Important lore events we need to know about should not just take place in books. I’m fine with there being books, but they can focus on more personal stories instead - things that don’t work so well in-game :>
Also adding an edit to my original post so others can find this thread :>
Before the storm has a goblin x gnome love plotline that i don’t care too much and it’s perfect for a book but that meeting at Arathi, Calia’s death…etc, those major character developments that could change the playerbase vision around a character should be in game.
Thanks Halite for doing a thread around storytelling, however i don’t know if Blizzard will responde to this even when it’s consider a major failure for a big portion of players.
I don’t think they even know what confusion they’re actually causing with these books.
A short while ago Ion said in an interview that they haven’t put major plotlines in books anymore and that they would do a pretty bad job if it was like that.
But then we have something like “Before the Storm” that you mentioned, in which the whole prelude to BfA and its character arcs are explained.
Something similar happened with “Shadows Rising” again. There is pretty important information in this book that just doesn’t belong there. The romance between Flynn and Shaw is fine, the book is the perfect place to explore a relationship like this. But the political situation with the council in Orgrimmar? The questionable hunt for Sylvanas that involves some serious torture by the hands of major NPCs? The rebellion in Zuldazar? The policital situation between Alliance and Horde? The knowledge that the nightelves are living in Hyjal right now? The capture of Sira? These are things we all need to see ingame! This book could’ve filled another mini-patch as story content that we need so desperately!
I’m just getting mad everytime people are speculating in the forums when we’ll get a new warchief, just because they didn’t buy this damn book.
I would really like to hear Cdev give their thoughts on the state of storytelling in the game—what went wrong (if they even acknowledge as much), how to avoid the problem going forward, etc. It is difficult to know with the PR Wall that this company puts up, but looking in from the outside right now I’m given the impression they feel like the story is incredible and they can’t wait to continue these arcs that players are increasingly checking out of. That is worrying.
I’ve got the impression that they don’t even feel like something went wrong. Mr. Danuser is straight up ignoring every negative criticism on twitter and scrolling by, while giving hearts out to positive comments in between. From other dev departments we’ve got some communication about things that didn’t really work out, but from Cdev… just pure excitement about how great the story is and will be.
Plus there was an interview with one of the creative devolopers a few years ago where he stated that they won’t let negative comments influence their stories and they don’t want any negativity in their “dojo”. Allegedly they’re listening, but they have a plan and don’t want to get distracted from their goals.
I think this is one of the big reasons they never really address criticisms of the story. Admitting fault is often wrongfully considered to be a bad marketing strategy. I’d also love to hear from cdev and pick their brain a bit about this, how they handle criticism and how/why they interact with the public about it.
Something apart from radio silence would be nice. Story is crucial to this game and genre, so it is not reassuring to see no communication about ongoing problems there. I’m glad to see the rest of the dev team opening up, but if they sleep on the story it won’t matter much.
Blizzard is so unwilling to actually develop a fun, solid story that instead they produce a so-called “narrative” so bad that it has literally driven the single most bought WoW expansion to date to the lowest subscription numbers ever!
I think all the criticisms of the story are spot on. I’ve been frustrated by how much great story content is put into each xpac’s launch, only to be followed up with almost nothing relevant outside of the cinematics in the patches. I’ve felt this way about every xpac since I came back at the end of Warlords.
That being said, I think that the Teldrassil-burning-background-gossip discussed on twitter and YouTube by Belular and Taliesin MUST be considered when we talk about story content from now on: huge parts of WOW’s story since BfA came from marketing and hype-building decisions by Afrasiabi (and likely Activision marketing). I imagine the sky above Ice Crown exploding was likely a similar "Building Peaks" moment. The story team working for Afrasiabi (then Senior Creative Director, which I think is the highest position on the WOW team for story direction), was then tasked with trying to stitch together these major “exciting” plot points into something resembling a story arc.
I’m not saying that the WOW story team hasn’t failed to plan for the inevitable patch delays and Wowhead data mining that have happened in the last 5 years when they craft these story arcs. Nor should the annoying amount of fan service and over-reliance on nostalgia by the story team go without criticism. But we can’t lay the blame for all of the issues on the working level folks trying to make something from an Acti-Blizz-King leadership that seems more interested in generating revenue from selling boosts, loot boxes, and WOW tokens than delivering quality, fun WOW expansions that sell subscriptions.
This for sure. “Hey, renew your subscription to play a patch that we admit was rushed” is not a good marketing strategy.
I leave it to the marketing experts, but I do wonder if something in the 10.0 announcement that admits that the World of Warcraft team has not produced the quality games that its fans expect, and that they’re taking their time to bring a new expansion worthy of the Blizzard name to us would be an appropriate hat-in-hand moment that could possibly generate hype within the jaded fan base.
Honestly if they flat out admitted shadowlands was a mess I be open to dragon isles i know it’s not confirmed and that’s a rumor or theory but I’m hoping it is.
The sad part is that it seems like only Halite want to talk about lore and story telling, nobody else on the Community council reply to her post yet. I’d love to see more players talking about their issues or ideas for this part of the game that’s being killed between transmedia and the gameplay development / story progression because if the game requires more time with systems and other issues, that compromise the amount of story that can be provided via new mini raids, dungeons, questlines, scenarios…etc
Yes, this is true, and I originally mentioned it in one of my early drafts, but I decided to drop it both to make the post shorter and also because I wasn’t confident enough to discuss it properly with (potential) devs in the room. It’s really hard to continue to write a story written by someone else in the first place, and to have spanners in the works makes it even harder.
I think it’s important to give everyone on the CC some time to have their own thoughts and opinions form, I can at least tell from personal experience that I put waaay too much effort into everything I write on the CC because it’s such a public platform, so I’m not worried if the others want to do the same :>
Agreed. I read at least 50 books a year, every year. I have not and never will read a WoW book. There’s too much other superior reading material out there.
WoW needs its story told in game, all of it, and no place else.
