You do realize you just helped my point, yes?
Especially the notions about how white straight guys think.
I have known a great many such, in my lifetime(and YES my sister married one!).
I will distill, for brevity’s sake…
There is no race consciousness; we are all individuals.
There are as many different perspectives as there are people.
My biggest complaint, in this game,(which is what I have been speaking to) is how this faction war is divided along RACIAL lines: true races, not just different shades of skin, within a species.
As long as it is in the scope of the GAME, fine. however, when Blizzard starts putting in more and more Real World themes, then the quality of this FANTASY GAME is diluted.
Fantasy should remain so, and as such: if I want the ‘Real World’, I know where my front door is located.
Make AZEROTH great again.
I wasn"t assuming you were White or male or straight. I was reacting to the terminology. The “political correctness” trope is just vile, honestly, because it is used to dismiss stories that are too hard for guys who have either lazy minds or poor imaginations.
What you seem to be reacting to, then, is just bad writing. WoW has always had issues with that, lol. It isn’t like the men are well-written characters.
(Not to derail this thread AGAIN, but they have horribly fumbled Sylvanus. 
)
I was not liking your solutions, but they improve as I go down the list.
I don’t want to kill Sylvanas, but I don’t know how they can save her at this point without getting even stupider; so, waffles it is.
(but real maple not that fake garbage, and with blueberries!)
Also tired of the all the women in leadership roles in the story. I get it, women are awesome Blizzard. Can we stop putting them on pedestals because of muh diversity quotas. Makes the story quite lackluster and uninspired.
It’s because they want to tell a generic high fantasy humans v elves story now, as opposed to in the beginning where they wanted to create a world.
It’s very apparent that the people calling the shots for the overarching story are the ones with the least talent and vision.
Yeah no problem.
I just shared that for the sake of presenting my perspective.
And yeah the bad writing is bothering me and no one seems to be bringing up the important bits.
All the Horde players seem to complain about is being made to work with Jaina again or Baine being a traitor…
I mean am I the only one that remembers undercity and teldrassil happened? Is this a twilight zone episode?
What exactly do you expect them to do when every expansion Ion Breaks into the writing room with his action figures and bashes them together like a 5 year old and tells the writers to make the horde and alliance fight AGAIN. Every single expansion’s moral has been “We must band together for the greater good” and every new expansion everyone gets hit in the head with the stupid stick and starts fighting again.
The only way for the story to move forward is to put the faction war on the back burner cold war style or get the cleaners in to remove the stain blizz has been beating where the dead horse used to be and get rid of the faction conflict already. Do we need to be at war for PvP to happen? No… do you need to be at war with your neighbor to punch him for being a jerk? no… petty squabbles make fights, you don’t need every conflict to be world war freaking three for there to be pvp.
Yeah I remember when Ion spoke about encounter design and how each boss was designed by someone else and in fact said something along the lines that they don’t really have any communication when designing them between the other people.
It’s why the zones feel so different sometimes, and clearly someone who is good at what they do (ex. drustvar was very well done for WoW’s standards) compared to someone else who did Stormsong and some of the war campaign. It’s so apparent. A real shame that the quality can’t be sustained to create a very viable overarching and engaging story.
I know it’s too much work for one or so persons but they definitely should consider looking at communication between teams, and better flow + overall story to make the questing from zone to zone feel overarching but also meaningful.
Debatable. I would say that there may be some decent writings on staff who might not have a voice in the company but on the whole their writers are far from optimal. They have historically struggled juggling their own lore since BC, but back then they understood they just needed to create a world and step out of the way. New blizzard wants to tell us a plot and narrative system that is more complex and this writing crew clearly can not do that.
Kul Tirans Don’t Look at Explosions is the only achievement(and quest line) you need to understand the type of people in charge of story/lore/plot development anymore. It is quite clear they are and have been entirly dependent on the people who came before them.
If this new group tried to make an mmo it would bomb. They have blizzard of old to thank for their jobs.
And according to the ‘writing room’ stories about not letting feedback concern them, their mom straight up is the one telling the writers they’re cool.
This made me laugh out loud and scare my dog, who was napping.
I mean even the NPCs have started calling us out for our stupidity. Talanji all but facepalmed when we tell her about how we released Knaifu.
This is funny, but Ion isnt the biggest problem. It has more to do with who ISNT at blizzard anymore more then it has to do with who is there now.
Everyone that needed to stay at blizzard to keep the culture what it was left. Ion gets a lot of heat and deservedly so, his stubbornness on flying, alone, is bad enough. But he really isnt the biggest issue imo. HR management and some of the old guard who stuck around are part of the problem, imo.
I think he is a big issue, tbh, though I, like you, think he’s the least of the Story’s problems.
Ion seems to be a yes-man who cannot stand up to investors or his higher-ups and bat for the creative vision on his team. Ion also is very myopic. He seems like a bean-counter. Doesn’t care about growth; only managing decline.
A truly passionate game-director would fight for what’s best for this game and that ain’t decline.
Is Ion really the issue or is it Alex?
Ion seems like the kind of guy who doesnt care two bits about the narrative. All he care about is gameplay.
I would agree, I doubt Ion cares even one little bit about the story.
I think that BfA would have really shined as the next expansion.
We should have had an expansion after Legion with the following:
Both factions trying to rebuild after Legion while holding on to peace, stepping on each other’s toes for resources and eventually discovering Azerite in its raw form. This leads to both factions building tension against each other and then spilling over into conflict, like it actually happens.
Vol’jin is still warchief, gets killed by an Alliance element. Maybe some quest line about how he bailed on Varian at the Broken Shore and an Alliance group wants revenge. Greymane would have been fantastic in that spot since he was the loose cannon in Legion, and Varian was his close friend.
This triggers the War of Thorns which is the expansion focus, with Sylvanas calling for retaliation by attacking the biggest concentration of Worgen, at Teldrassil and taking all of the Kalimdor resources for the Horde. Culminating in Teldrassil burning and Siege of Lordaeron as the BfA lead in, as we know it but with a much more robust story of the factions hating each other, compared to a knee-jerk explosion of hatred that is almost entirely based on the pre-launch events and a couple of short stories.
Is it perfect? No, I am not a writer or every creative. But I have a good grasp of cause ==> effect. THAT is what BFA really needed in order to shine. A lot of cause leading to a lot of effect that people actually wanted.
It is because the writers write in reverse. They decide what they want to happen then force that thing to happen even if it makes no sense, would be logically impossible, would require the character to act completely out of character (such as Sylvanas burning down Teldrassil), doesn’t accord with what came before, etc.
Aristotle wrote about what is required for good storytelling, something that the Blizzard writers constantly violate at every single turn:
In the characters, too, exactly as in the structure of the incidents, [the poet] ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort, and it is either necessary or probable that this [incident] happen after that one. It is obvious that the solutions of plots, too, should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance, as in the Medea and in the passage about sailing home in the Iliad . A contrivance must be used for matters outside the drama — either previous events, which are beyond human knowledge, or later ones that need to be foretold or announced. For we grant that the gods can see everything. There should be nothing improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy, e.g., that in Sophocles
— Aristotle, Poetics, (1454a33–1454b9).
Shamus Young also wrote about the dangers of railroading the player and creating so many plot holes that they burst the bubble of the fiction.
Railroading” is a dirty word in a tabletop RPG. Players come to the game with the expectation that they will have some input into the shape of the world besides rolling the dice to stab things. Computer games are delivered and mediated by an uncreative computer, and so we have to accept a certain degree of railroading. A good railroader will make the process natural: The player will be forced to do that which most people would choose to do of their own volition. As long as their actions make sense and fit with their goals, the lack of freedom is usually grudgingly tolerated. (Although we are always clamoring for more freedom whenever we can get it.)
A bad railroader will use their power over the player character to force the PC to do things they would never choose to do on their own. Their (mostly illusory) autonomy is negated so that their character can be conscripted in service of the plot. The player will be forced to ally themselves with people they want to kill, surrender when they would rather fight, show mercy when they would rather have vengeance, blunder into obvious traps, and listen to villainous diatribes rather than simply taking action. You won’t be allowed to make any choices that deviate from your predetermined role as a clueless mute doormat.
Shamus Young, “Fable 2 Part 1: A Bird Crapped on Your Head”
The Mechanics of Story Collapse
In his essay [On Fairy Stories]
Inside [the story], what [the author] relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.
This is story collapse. It’s the point at which you’re ejected from the story and are stuck outside looking in. It’s the Blue Screen of Death of storytelling, If you remember [my write-up on Fable 2:
Waaaaait a second… I’m supposed to give up all my weapons and go into the bad guy’s lair? Why don’t I BRING my weapons, and just kill him? And while I’m thinking about it, why did I go to all this hassle to apply for work for a guy I was trying to murder? Because Theresa said so? But what is her plan, exactly? Why am I listening to her at all? Because she’s supposedly my friend? She doesn’t feel like one. She’s sketchy and untrustworthy and always goes against my goals of killing Lucien. I don’t know her plan, or his. This is a fight in which I have no stake and nobody has a clear goal.
That first item: “Give up all my weapons and go to the bad guy’s lair.” That wasn’t a singular failure of the story. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the point where I stopped believing in the world, but it’s not the point where the storyteller failed. They failed much sooner, back when they wrote a story where none of the characters were understandable or relatable, and where the world didn’t have any rules that meant anything to the player.
A break in trust brings scrutiny. Scrutiny uncovers more problems. Trying to explain or understand problems leads to more problems and more questions. Eventually it hits some kind of critical mass and we have story collapse. Then we go back and point to all the plot holes we uncovered while we were trying to mentally triage the problems with the story.
Shamus Young, “Plot Holes Part 2: Story Collapse”.
The writers are bad railroaders who can’t keep their story straight or cohesive.
tbh i never got understood why WoW even happened, after WC3 you’d think the alliance and the newly formed horde were in pretty damn good terms, their leaders were friendly to each other and saved the Earth from the baddies and all was good. Enter WoW and it’s like that never even happened.
I’m going to be royally pissed if it was N’zoth pulling the strings all along, making the factions fight against each other for his own gain.
The writing and everything about BFA is a joke.
Alliance and Horde united against the Legion to then oppose each other again in a nonsensical war where the planet is dying and a random crab or bear encounter is more dangerous than fighting the Legion was.