How did Blizzard fail so hard?

Lore Story Forum
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Reflecting upon the Battle for Darkshore in another thread got me thinking about the strong parallels to the last faction war. It is obvious that Blizzard repeated the same basic narrative, almost beat for beat. To whit:

A warchief with a secret, evil plan launches a sneak attack on an unsuspecting Alliance in Kalimdor and wipes out a major population center. The two sides engage in an escalating war that drags in new allies and wreaks havoc upon their lands. The Horde commits a bunch of terrible war crimes. Horde leadership is increasingly disillusioned with the warchief and begin conspiring to undermine him/her. The warchief attempts to eliminate the non-loyal. The horde rebels finally forge a secret pact with the Alliance to march on Orgrimmar and overthrow the despot. At the end, there is a return to status quo.

Beat for beat, this was almost the exact same plot. And the last faction war was incredibly unpopular with players from both sides, specifically because it turned Horde players into chumps working for a super villain, and then had them attack their own faction, and it set up Alliance players to want a payback they were never going to get.

And this was no secret. Everyone knew why the last faction war didn’t work, narratively. Blizzard knew!

So why did they repeat the EXACT. SAME. STORY?!!!

Especially since, from beta, players were pointing this out to them. Go back and look at all the threads on this forum from that time. We were screaming at them that this was a bad idea, nobody wanted it, and it was doomed to fail again.

For me, this raises serious questions about what is happening behind the scenes at Blizzard. Are they so out of touch with their own story that they somehow were oblivious to how closely these narratives matched? Are they utterly ignorant of feedback from their own fans, on their own forums? Do they play their own game?

I think this is an utter failure from Blizzard and reflects a deep chasm, not just between them and their players, but them and their own game. I think that Blizzard does not have a clear grasp of the story they are telling. I think they are probably genuinely surprised that the two plots wound up so identical, and identically disappointing, even though they had every warning.

Does one hand know what the other is doing? Where is the leadership? Is there one person who has a clear vision of where this is all going, or are they making it up as they go and lurching from crisis to crisis? I fear, sadly, that it is the latter.

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(Observation): This seems to be the most likely.

(Commentary): Perhaps on some level the new developers, who took over sometime between MoP and WoD, felt they could do a better job with MoP, and this was a matter of their arrogance and conceit blinding them? They felt that we would love their version so much more, because they fixed the problems MoP had? Not that I can figure out what really changed other than swapping the Forsaken with the Orcs in the primary villain role and the lackey villain role.

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The part that really gets me is how in an interview they talked about the issues that Garrosh caused weren’t addressed and how the same system allowed Sylvanas to do what she wanted and I’m just like you could have addressed it if you actually developed Warchief Vol’jin instead of killing him of for Sylvanas.

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I think you give them too much credit by assuming they are out of touch and have no clue. That implies a bit of ignorance and near innocence.

They clearly and knowingly went whole hog with it. I remember they would say one thing, and when it was revealed to be the opposite, they would couch it in terms of “well, we didn’t want to give spoilers, so we were trying to divert attention.”

To me, that attitude means they knew exactly what they were doing and were fully aware of fan reaction, and went full steam with it anyway.

They had that whole “It Matters” Ad campaign, knowing full well that by 8.3, “it” (as in the Factions) would matter very little if at all.

They also would say BfA would not simply be MoP 2.0. Yet by 8.3, it was all but exactly that, except the characters were shuffled like musical chairs. We even had “Wrynn-splaining” in Orgrimmar again.

Saying they were unaware or disconnected paints it in a more innocent light, when it really was a flat out bait and switch.

Yet, the question remains: “Why?”

Perhaps they just wanted to make the Horde super nice, and the best way to do that was to remove Sylvanas and have the Forsaken become cuddly teddy bears. Perhaps they wanted to destroy 2 major cities, have Sylvanas be the one who orders their destruction, and then run away. She is out. The Horde and their cruelest race become Anduin’s cuddly toy collection. Two cities are removed.

Perhaps MoP did not do enough damage, so they wanted to turn it up a few notches. It is as if MoP was the same story, but not impactful enough, so they had to redo it.

I am trying to think of an example. Maybe they saw MoP as an incomplete paint job, and BfA was just redoing the paint job with darker colors and a more prominent veneer.

Or MoP was a line they wanted to draw, but the line was not prominent enough, so they traced over the line with blood and gasoline, and lit it on fire.

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It sort of wasn’t executed well in Mists but it was one of the more interesting plots WoW had, especially for original plots. I think they wanted something like Mists that had deeper morals again, instead of a big otherworldly creature. But they threw N’Zoth in at the end so I’m not really sure. I have mixed feelings on the faction war. I think it is actually good in some respects but it hasn’t been executed well. BfA failed for me because it came out of nowhere after Legion, the context was different than Mists which followed Cata. Also it was a repeat of what came before in a way that made less sense than before. How am I supposed to care about honor and loyalty when I already fought Garrosh without a choice and Sylvanas is worse?

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You know, on some level I don’t blame them for wanting to do a faction war story - if I was in charge of writing WoW after Legion, I would also probably think I could do a better version of the faction war than MoP. It would have been a good pallet cleanser after Legion, as well; you could hardly go right from Legion to, like, the Rise of the Black Empire; at least one expansion focusing on a non-cosmically-apocalyptic problem was theoretically a good idea.

Maybe they were even going to do a better job - we’ve long speculated that the excellent BFA cinematic is representative of an older version of the story in which the Alliance attacks Lordaeron first and Sylvanas is portrayed as sort of anti-heroic. Maybe that was the plan, and something happened? I don’t know.

Though I tell you, the main thing Blizz could do to get me to return for Shadowlands is just have a satisfactory Truth & Reconciliation interview with the writing team. Just tell us what happened. Tell us why you thought it would be good. Tell us what you were thinking. Tell us you know it was bad.

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Nope, maybe in 5 years 2 expansions down the line when we are actually hating even more the next faction war.

As a company theyll not admit it, all i see on the interviews are the doublespeak, the posturing, the lies, this is all corporate strategy you dont mention anything negative and turn it around so it doesnt sound bad, even if the house is burning never admit it, part of this is because it will give the customer fuel to argue about and you dont want that, however it comes as lies if you keep it up for a long time, when you play the numbers game it doesnt matter if 1 or 2 leave unsatisfied, theyre an statistic anyways.

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It’s trippy to even think about. I’m torn on whether to blame creative bankruptcy or just terrible execution, but either way this war was a disaster from start to finish. Another evil warchief? Another war of Horde aggression? Another big war crime to kick things off? Another rebellion? The Horde was aching a bit for recurring heroes to begin with, but another culling of its character roster?

I think it’ll take a while before the gravity of how terrible a decision this all was will sink in. When you line the expansions up and realise that one was, fundamentally, a total rehash of one that came two or three before is just… grim. This will never stop baffling me.

I can’t even begin to imagine how they hashed this out at the brainstorming stage. It’s so bad I hesitate to believe their stated intent to give MoP a proper do-over. That’s a terrible decision on its own, but I’m not convinced that was the intention until it became blindingly, irrefutably obvious to them as well as us that they were writing the same story, perhaps the only story they know how to tell with this faction.

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I think BfA suffered from their decision to have Sylvanas start up Shadowlands. They had the end of BfA/beginning of Shadowlands and worked backwards from there, while combining it with their faction war hard on.

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Hell, it’s been unspeakably hard to RP Horde and be happy at all. My faction has made it clear it cannot keep its ish together and will take any and every excuse it can to behave like the monsters they resemble. It is actually enraging.

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I feel like this is how they’ve done every expansion the last few years honestly.

Since WoD it’s felt like the only role of any given expansion is to set up for the next one, like Blizzard cares more about foreshadowing than about telling the story presently going on. WoD cared more about setting up Legion than about fighting the Iron Horde. Legion cared more about constantly, obnoxiously going “Ooohhh get ready for Old Gods next time I bet you won’t expect Old Gods!!!” than about fighting the Burning Legion. And BfA cared more about prepping Sylvanas for Shadowlands and vaguely hinting at the Jailer than about fighting N’Zoth or the faction war.

And so following this pattern, I fully expect Shadowlands to care more about foreshadowing the next expansion than about fighting the Jailer.

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I want to emphasize that I am certain that Blizzard desperately wants to tell a story that engages their fans, that makes sense, and that has a satisfying emotional resonance. I am not impugning their motives. They work really hard and of course they want the game and the story to be successful. It is both their job and, for many of them, their passion. Their art. I felt a bit bad after posting because I don’t want to give the impression that I am attacking Blizzard employees as people. That is not the case.

But I do think they are creatively stuck and organizationally challenged. I do think that there is a leadership problem.

This troubles me because the story suggests that you might be correct. Except I would extend your statement to include both factions.

The Alliance as the default “good guy” faction goes right back to the bones of this franchise. They were the unequivocal heroes of WC1&2, and I think that Blizzard mostly has trouble seeing past that…

…except for with WC3. WC3 set the pattern for the Horde as wannabe heroes who were literally recovering addicts, prone to falling off the wagon.

WoW is basically a mash-up of the WC1&2 Alliance with the WC3 Horde. And Blizzard just keeps retelling that story. If the Horde is in recovery, we get a story like Hyjal from WC3, where the two factions unite to defeat a greater threat. If the Horde relapses, we get WC1&2, but with no resolution since neither the Alliance (WC1) nor the Horde (WC2) can be defeated because of the two faction gameplay.

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I agree with this. I love the faction conflict. I love defending Ashenvale from Night Elf invaders. I love invading Dun Morogh, Elwynn, etc. You can have a faction war without warcrimes. You can have a faction war without one side winning wholesale. They have this penchant to write the Horde as wrestling with itself while the heroic Alliance defeats them and sets them back on the course of right; they think it’s either new or necessary to do. Maybe both. With how BFA ended I’ll never get my fair victory against the Alliance. They’re never going to do another faction war story.

Maybe I should count that a blessing since they refuse to write the Horde any way but one.

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Ah. It all makes sense now. Your complaining about Night Elf aesthetics so much all the time is just to mask your jealousy and desire to be surrounded by pretty purple trees and get to call them your own when they’re not.

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Apparently Blizzard thought they could do it so much better, we would all be “jee, that is what MoP could have been.” But of course it was worse. So I would say…

  1. Arrogance or incompetence. Repeating the same story is bad writing, but they were either unware of this, or thought they were so good, that it didn’t apply to them.
  2. Being out of touch or arrogance. The forums had a steady stream of “we don’t want Garrosh 2.0”. They either were out of touch, or they thought they could do it so well, they could win everyone over.
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I totally agree. Not only do they have no other ideas for the Horde (their being ignored in Legion is another sign of this), but those writing for the Horde have no understanding of Horde players. I mean they seem surprised at how much Horde players hated Teldrasil and playing the villains.

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Cause the players wanted it, the players want a faction war, but how can you have a faction war with the characters how they are, and with the big fact that no faction can win anything beyond reseting the status quo

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They didn’t want Garrosh 2.0. I mean we talked about it enough the “Garrosh 2.0” label became a meme.

I think there was some willingness to accept a faction war that was specifically not the one they wrote. (Though even then, the “tired of the faction war” meme had a decent amount of steam.")

Of course now, I’m not sure they can do another faction war. I mean, there was already grumbling about it and they have turned people off the idea so strongly.

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On my Horde toons, I don’t even mind playing the villain…from the Alliance perspective. I just don’t want to also be a villain from the Horde perspective. You can do a war narrative where both sides have legitimate beefs. Blizzard just chooses not to.

Here’s how easy it could have been: start from the same place - tenuous peace after Legion, Horde is suspicious of Alliance because of Stormheim, Alliance is suspicious of Horde because of endless reasons.

But change what happens next to something like: Alliance tries to intervene much more aggressively in Silithus, a major battle occurs. Genn, justifiably concerned that the Horde will use azerite to nuke the Alliance (and also with his hatred of Sylvanas), convinces Anduin that now is the time to take out Undercity as Varian once promised. Battle of Undercity occurs, but this time without the Saurfang subplot and the Horde successfully repels the Alliance. The War of Thorns occurs in response, but this time the Alliance successfully repels the Horde.

You still get your big action set pieces, but in a way where players on both sides get a win and no one has to be the bad guy (in their own eyes).

But Blizzard was determined that another Warchief had to go full super villain, and here we are.

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You cannot, who ever attacks first will become the villian in a setting where the status quo must be maintained

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