To those of you who find this new plot to be poo, I’d like to ask, do you feel the overarching narrative is redeemable? Like, come patch 8.2 and next expansion?
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And that right there is how they could fix everything. I am quite honestly a bit tired of these isolated expansion stories when the game is called WORLD of Warcraft and the other 95% of the world at max level never matters.
As if it isn’t even really there. I can’t remember the last time I even went to Iron Forge and I only go to Stormwind now for a Portal Room or the Auction House. These places are both main cities and they hardly matter in the current narrative.
Didn’t the writers ever learn the lesson about not forgetting were you came from? There is so much to embrace and use across the entire world to easily make the game feel more connected but sadly it is ignored and forgotten.
It is my hope that the developers have learned a lesson this time and maybe in 9.0 we will once again feel a fluid connected world with some real character progression and depth. Sure that could never happen but I have faith in the impossible.
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What is your professional background?
Sounds like you have some sort of industry experience.
The problems you describe can kind of also apply to Game of Thrones as the writers progressively started to ignore the author’s materials in favor of their own.
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I don’t have first hand experience in major “Writing Team” industries, but the very reason I don’t is because I heavily researched how they operate. Writing is my passion, I wanted to make it my work, and when deciding how it would be my work I wanted to be sure that whatever job I got wouldn’t be one of those jobs that made what I love to do become just “what I’m paid to do.”
I have friends who’ve worked in actual writing teams. A mentor of mine worked on the Big Bang Theory, and I learned very quickly that being part of a writing team would probably kill my love for writing.
It’s a very specific style of writing work, and it can be both very rewarding and very soul-crushing.
Redeemable? My thoughts, as follows…
- We get to slaughter off Sylvanas or, at the very least, drive her from the Horde(insert blatant ninja for third (neutral) faction here).
- Tell the Alliance we’ll deal with them when we can talk to an ADULT!
- Flying at cap, like the old days.
- Waffles as a recipe; along with the relevant condiments.
Flips hair, sips tea and braces himself
ADDENDUM: Yes, I know its more of a ‘wish list’ but one must be able to dream.
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They didnt have much of a choice as they got closer to and then past where Martin had written to so they prepped early to make the transition to their own story easier.
I looked at 8.2
Its your general Blizzard idiocy.
Alliance working with the Horde again.
The Horde being completely tone deaf… I think the dialogue lines that bother me the most are Lorthemar’s he speaks like he has any moral ground to stand on.
Everyone conveniently forgetting Teldrassil and any character that brings up any legitimate points gets shouted at with “ENOUGH”.
So yeah… no. 8.2 does not redeem anything.
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I would be a little fed up to of the story line and my faction if after running in battle, destroying 3 capital cities < one which was your own> and starting a full blown war in the past few years, Horde been busy.
I understand that.
But the writers forgot their source material.
Here are few quick examples.
The Dornish and Tyrell leaders die and their combined armies go poof and disappear.
Cersei blows the most holy site in the entire city and… nothing happens?
Robb stark killed a lord that killed children and half his men left and the writers are telling me they don’t care about Cersei?
You got character and army teleportations and so on.
In short all the nuances and detail the show had before is completely lost.
We used to cheer about even the smallest of betrayals and political moves… now days Cersei can blow up our version of Mecca and the populace just shrug their shoulders? Yeah… no…
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And at this point it’s unlikely any individual patch will.
The biggest problem relating to Blizzard writing at this point is that they’re trying to tell a massive, on-going storyline in a style that better presents itself in episodic format.
If you’re going to reveal a little piece of the story with each patch then, yes, it’s good to have some cliff hanger aspect to keep people invested, but you have to balance it with frequent pay off.
You don’t introduce a cliff hanger and prolong it’s resolution for segment after segment, you introduce a new cliff hanger while concluding the old one.
New segment = Resolution of Previous Cliff Hanger and presentation of New Cliff Hanger
Blizz has developed a terrible tendency of:
New Segment = Remind players of the cliff hanger previously introduced and reveal a tiny aspect of the resolution of that same cliff hanger.
That doesn’t tend to satisfy an audience, most often it annoys them, at worst it makes them lose interest completely and “Come back when it’s all done to see how it all played out” which is where a great number of players with interest in the lore find themselves right now.
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Should have gotten Martin to write faster then. He said he would have it ready in time and that was years ago now.
His next book might as well be called half-Life 3 by this point.
That in and of itself is a huge point of contention. After Teldrassil there is no way the Alliance would even allow the Horde to coexist with them on Mechagon let alone work together with them. Unless I am missing some huge plot point in the narrative like dumping everything on Sylvanas as the rest of the Horde are in some way absolved and suddenly innocent.
Yep we are back to story cohesiveness. It doesn’t exist! Maybe if they kept the entire expansion about the faction war, built up to it slower, and steered clear of the unite against a bigger bad. This entire expansion might have actually gone over a bit better.
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Even the story lines don’t match up, from horde to alliance they don’t mesh one side has no idea what the other side is doing.
On my alliance we fight the Vulpera when the horde attack, on my horde we are busy saving the Vulpera from the Sethrak.
The alliance have no idea who Ghuun is, yet on horde side that’s the boss all our questing is abou.
How did such a mess like that happen. You can’t have a proper faction war when the two stories are completely different. I’m sure there’s many more examples but those are the two in my head at the moment
My biggest problem with this whole thing is Teldrassil.
Look if they wanted the Horde to work with the Alliance again why not put extra quests and instances where BOTH the Horde and Alliance save Darnassus residents?
“Hey Tyrande sorry some of us burned the tree but check it out! We managed to get as many as we could out!”
The Horde has Nightborn expert in portal magic… why not use that?
Why make the loss as gross as possible with no redemption for the Horde player or the faction?
Fine, you want this to be a story about total war lets do it.
And then 2 patches later we go back to the regularly scheduled.
We must work together again!
Azeroth is FREEEEEE
We must pursue peace! War is bad!
Meanwhile completely ignoring what the Horde and Sylvanas did.
I just don’t understand this.
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Why did the war start ? the writers have not given a solid reason. I mean the war is started on basis of assumption, our warchief felt that in future the alliance might attack so let’s strike first. That didn’t sound like a proper reasoning to me.
A better plot in my opinion would be where Azshara manipulates both faction into declaring war with each other to weaken them. By manipulation i mean attacking both the faction’s assets and making them believe it was done by opposite faction.
Something like that.
If they pull this kind of crap again…I just…ugh…
On horde side they couldn’t to create faction pride, i felt pretty disgusted with the direction of the horde.
No morally grey situation which they claimed to be.
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There are overarching stories that make sense and I actually enjoy. The big one for me is the void flower left behind in the Emerald Nightmare raid that we see going back. I watched a video where people believe that was the fragment we gave Malfurion after killing Archimonde in WoD, so it’s neat to see that come full circle.
But then there’s the faction war, and oh boy. I have been complaining about this since BfA came out, and it only seems to be getting worse. We were told that both sides are morally grey, and yet it’s as black and white as ever. Not only that, the “black” part is a retread if a far superior faction conflict done in MoP, and even that at the time was written poorly. But it’s Shakespeare compared to this one.
I think the best explanation for why it’s so terrible is that it’s too much time between. We’re given bread crumbs of story and then forced to wait months on end to hear anything to come from it. So many people are upset about inactive (Alliance) or forced villainy (Horde) despite having weeks to fester. I just don’t think it works in an MMO format, at least not how Blizzard does it.
But the overarching issue IS that the faction war is contrived, forced, and absolutely ridiculous at this point. Every expansion, we’ve come together to face the big bad. And then the next expansion, we’re at each other’s throats. Genuine friendships have been formed between Horde and Alliance, but because it’s “the foundation of WoW” we have to suspend disbelief to watch these characters go into battle against each other. We have to believe that certain characters are so ridiculously dumb that the war is still going on.
Beyond that, the most egregious problem I have with THIS version of the faction war is: the Horde has no reason to be fighting the Alliance other than “we want kill, we smash for Queen” whereas the Alliance has EVERY right to want to fight the Horde with Teldrassil being the catalyst that sets this whole thing off. As a Horde player who doesn’t blindly follow the Lich Queen, I have beeen given no reason to want to fight the Alliance because they’re in the right! We’re the bad guys! We’re just as bad if not worse than the villains we’ve all come together to fight! That doesn’t feel good when the Horde is sold as a misfit tribe of unwanted races trying to etch our a life for themselves in Azeroth! We’re aggressors and killers!
I don’t know what their plans are after this expansion. Because the faction conflict cannot continue at this rate. But I’m sure Blizzard will have some asinine and ridiculous reason that it’s still a thing come the next expansion…
/rantover
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I’m going to tell you a true thing that the forum will hate.
Women grow up being sort of culturally bilingual. They have to, from a very early age, understand how men think in order to understand the world because men have dominated the culture for so long. So women can navigate male culture and female culture. Non-White guys have the same deal going on, as do gay men. Women of color and lesbians are actually multilingual, culturally speaking. And lesbians of color? They grow up seeing things from so many foreign points-of-view that they must get dizzy.
This is slowly changing. Power is being redistributed, and it drives many White, straight guys batty. Because they have not been forced to think from a point-of-view other than their own. And they find themselves in a situation where they don’t always get it. For generations White guys never had to understand anything but their own ideas and imagined worlds and such. Now White guys suddenly have to try to learn stuff that isn’t comfortable. Isn’t easy.
Some White guys have the imagination, intelligence, and empathy to get it, and they adapt. Many of them, actually, LIKE having to step out of their comfort zone.
But there are lots who do not adapt. And, oh my, they HATE how the world is changing. It scares them to death. They lack the mental toolkit to identify with a female protagonist (at least the ones who are not written as just men with breasts). They won’t even pick up a fantasy novel that doesn’t cleave to the Tolkien model.
Millions of women had no trouble identifying with Frodo Baggins, but millions of men pitch hissy fits if they have to have heroes and villains who don’t look like and act like them.
Political correctness? That term is a refuge for those who are frightened and incapable of stretching their imaginations beyond their own point-of-view.
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You know I get what you mean.
First off I aint white.
Sometimes when the default isn’t from the white guy perspective I notice. My brain automatically starts thinking of all the political baggage initially before enjoying the content.
However sometimes it is straight up pandering or just so obviously in your face baiting that it just makes me roll my eyes.
I love Marvel movies but Captain Marvel did not impress me at all.
Wonder Woman on the other hand was great and so was Valkyrie in Ragnarok.
So sometimes its not just the different perspective but the execution.
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