The same way it worked when you “defended” land from Trolls.
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One thing to keep in mind is that Battle for Azeroth was WoW’s first post-Metzen expansion. The last thing he worked on was the BfA trailer which is remarkably tonally different from where we ended up.
My other thought is in the end Sylvanas will be right about everything and that’s why BfA was worth suffering through, for the payoff in Shadowlands. I still struggle to understand why they added the loyalist quest line. Sure you can say “people whined” but…when has Blizzard ever made story changes just because people whined? They just don’t do that.
My last thought is we have had some interviews and such from Afrasiabi (the current Creative Development lead) that imply that he generally doesn’t like letting negativity and negative feedback enter in their process which makes them something of an Island at Blizzard. I think C-Dev is used to only ever being praised, such as for their cinematics and they just don’t want to hear how badly the story was received.
Look at Danuser’s most recent interview, even when they acknowledge that they’ve learned from their mistakes they still praise themselves. Or look at the “Lore Q&A” we got at the beginning of the Expac where they did nothing but pat themselves on the back and answered 0 lore questions.
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Bear in mind I mostly agree with you, but they spent this whole expansion stating they did exactly that. They took notes from the “Shoulders off for Saurfang” movement. They took notes from people liking Bwonsamdi. They took notes from nelf players crying about their world stump.
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Little reminder one of the devs mentioned in one of those interviews they loved to deploy last year they “work under a 101% positive environment regarding the lore in which criticism is basically ignored” A.K.A. “we ditched actual quality control in our narrative development cause it sucks when people actually evaluate our job and makes us realize we´re not awesome writers”.
I mean they basically admited they work without an actual editor busting their incompetent and inmoral butts anytime they felt like lazing around and copy-pasting entire plot arcs, so… the actual surprise would had been to get an amazingly welldone narrative with 0 quality control involved.
That´s your answer Carma… and no, sorry but I pretty much doubt they actually self evaluate with any modicum of honesty, they´re much too arrogant for that.
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I think at some point they did realize it was bad. Content is planned way in advance though, it’s not always easy to pull the plug. They probably weighed the business side of it and made a decision to keep going.
There was a bunch of stuff like Southern Barrens and Silvermoon warfronts that did get scrapped, so I don’t think they ignored feedback. They probably just didn’t think it was worth the effort to pull the expansion and redo it entirely.
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I think they’re spoiled, basically. The gameplay team usually takes the brunt of the criticisms. They are so used to being praised for their (admittedly) breathtaking cinematics on Twitter and fawning sycophantic youtubers that they lose sight of what they are doing. It’s why so many recent story decisions have felt very meta-driven.
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It´s a f*ing disease in America, I swear. 2019 is gonna go in history as the “writers literally DESTROYED entire beloved franchises thanks to outrageously bad choices done because of lack of actual creative talent and an excess of ego”.
I mean, GoT, SW, BfA… all basically SO badly written and executed the fanfics posted on free on AO3 are gold in comparison.
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Different writers thought they could “do it right”.
Turns out, no, they couldn’t.
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Even if they do try to tell us Sylvanas was right, that won’t make suffering through BfA worth it.
I remember saying at some point last summer, “Why do all stories suddenly suck?”
(Though for me at least, WoW’s story destroyed itself in 2018, when BfA started.)
Well, there’s the conspiracy theory about a certain writer getting revenge for what was done to Garrosh and/or vowing to make the changes that they thought should have been made in MoP. There are days when it seems very possible… (Though I stress, they’re all rumors and we have no way of knowing for sure.)
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A.K.A. uncontrollable ego coupled with lack of actual and objective quality control…
Let´s all be grateful these people don´t work in pharmaceutical or food companies. Now THAT would be a menace.
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An interesting way they COULD of done this story is if they actually STARTED with a Civil War that spun out of control, dragging the rest of the world into it.
Like Started with N’zoth playing a game of dissension and sabotage among both the Alliance and the Horde.
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Well… too late for that now.
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- The Dwarves were the ones who were attacked first in Alterac Valley.
- if the night elves are villains for attacking trespassers then so to are the squatter Frostwolves.
After giving a warning(admittedly a warning the orcs probably didnt understand) on land that didn’t belong to them.
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If we are talking about Mists here it was actually fairly well recieved. Hell, better than at least Cata. One thing we can also say about it is Mists lore has managed to influence WoW’s path to day.
Heck, if anything I see what happened to the night elves as Garrosh’s plan finally coming to fruition/an extension of Garrosh’s war. Hell, Garrosh’s destruction of Theramore laid the groundwork for allowing Sylvanas to do what she did.
Similarly, I think BfA will do the same. Blizzard left plenty of story threads in BfA that I think will ultimately push WoW story forward.
If I had a gripe for BfA it would mostly be 3 things. 1) it felt like Blizzard wanted to cram everything into this Expansion for whatever bizarre reason. Azshara, Faction Wars, Old Gods, heck, they should have just picked one and focused on it! 2) Gameplay wise it felt weaker then Legion. Our artifact weapons are leagues above the Heart. The mage tower always gave me a reason to keep playing. Vision is fine, but I kinda wish there was more to it. 3) I would have preferred that the faction wars actually be global! Hell, Legion questing for the various order halls had the various classes going to nearly every major location in WoW. They should have given the War Campaign that sort of scope instead of having it focused squarely on Kul Tiras/Zandalar!
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They want to move on to the post-Azeroth exploration of the Cosmos and the 6 primal forces for expansion themes for a while, I suspect that’s why they made BfA to wrap up as many loose ends as possible.
From the original (probably quite old) Shadowlands leak (where the logo is basically the same we have now) the Old God and Ny’alotha stuff was part of the Shadowlands map. So I think probably around the time Chronicles was published they decided to make Shadowlands the first of a series of expansions exploring the greater Cosmology and pushed the Old God stuff into the “South Seas Expansion” that people have been expecting for a decade.
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I think the biggest failures of BfA were in terms of gameplay, and gameplay often flavors how well/poorly we receive the story. Even if Battle for Azeroth had the best written story ever, I don’t think it would have been enough to save it from it’s unpopular gameplay decisions.
Unfortunately, the quality writing was kind of all over the place. Most of the stuff in Kul Tiras/Zandalar was amazing. Most of the stuff directly related to the war campaign was meh-to-bad.
But all of that would have been forgivable if not for BfA’s larger failures when it came to gameplay.
The biggest selling points of the expansion were allied races, azerite armor, warmode, warfronts, and island expeditions.
Allied races were fairly successful, although the delay of Zandalari/Kul Tirans ticked off a lot of people. Many were also upset at getting/not getting a given race. And of course the rep grind.
Warmode started off strong, but as everyone hit level cap and disparities in gearing and raw numbers of players, it lost a lot of luster.
Azerite armor crashed and burned so hard that they had to go back and completely overhaul the system and spent the remainder of the expansion experimenting with other itemization models.
Warfronts were received with a big meh, and it seems several of them were completely scrapped because of it. Same with Island Expeditions.
The daily quests, professions, and titanforging didn’t endear people to the expansion either.
I like to compare it to Bizzaro Legion- which also had a pretty crappy and goofy story with all kinds of retcons, inconsistent characters, and very bad/cheesy dialogue- but damned if they hadn’t nailed gameplay itself and offered a whole lot of new stuff to keep players engaged.
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BFA for me proved that Blizzard has no cohesive vision for the story of World of Warcraft.
I’m sure there are plans in place for each expansion’s narrative, considering how well in advance they are charted; however, it seems as though those plans are liable to change at any time during development, including when they’re at a point where doing so would be unwise.
The overarching story of BFA was terribly haphazard outside of the zone-centric storylines for Zandalar and Kul Tiras. There are so many baffling decisions, plot holes, and fragments that seem left over from previous directions. It makes me morbidly curious what we’ll eventually learn over time about BFA’s development.
I personally wager that much of the issues stemmed from them being fixated on each expansion directly leading into the next. I understand the appeal, but it feels as though they’re struggling between telling the current expansion’s story and setting up for the following expansion.
I strongly suspect there was also the desire to “subvert” expectations, following an old storyline and arc, only to try and pull the rug out from under the audience at the very end. The parallels are far too similar to be coincidental.
Either way, it was disappointing.
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Quality control issues and lack of feedback would be my best guesses as to what happened to BfA. This applies not just to the story but, well, everything. They had the feedback about things like azerite well into beta, but ignored it. They then had to spend the rest of the xpac running damage control (2nd trait ring; essences; etc) trying to fix everything. Let’s also not forget that this expansion was buggy as hell, and often referred to as Beta for Azeroth. (A fun bug I had was that, since my dh never finished the 2nd half of the WoT quests, I’d keep hearing Saurfang yell “FOR THE HORDE!!!” each time I’d go there to kill Ivus). So, whatever happened to the story likely matches up with other parts of the game too.
I think the state of gameplay does affect the story in a very broad sense of what content gets developed and such, but it doesn’t completely absolve the story team of their screwups. As an example, it does explain why there was no Barrens Warfront, and why Baine’s story likely got cut; it does not, however, explain why he couldn’t show up in Org for 8.2.5 (something I think they should have done with him if they want people taking his character seriously).
(You could also throw in Blizcon for why the 8.2.5 war campaign end got thrown under the bus. They couldn’t rely on 8.3 alone to carry Blizcon, so they had to release the SL trailer; unfortunately, this meant ending the war campaign early, since the trailer would absolutely ruin it, since Sylvanas is very clearly alive in it.)
Whenever I describe BfA to anyone, I describe it as if someone made lists of all the positives and negatives of legion and submitted the wrong list to development.
…
BfA’s in a very weird place for me though. This was the first expansion where I simply didn’t bother with things like lvling all my alts or maxing out my professions on them. For the first time in years, I also largely abandoned mount, pet, and toy collecting. I very nearly quit after my first guild imploded due to BfA issues and attrition, and am only in it today due to an old friend reaching out to me (but this required a server xfer, so now my actual main isn’t even on the server as my original main - this char - anymore). Obviously, the story did nothing to help any of this, and I’ve simply let things like the war campaign go unfinished, as well as simply not watching some of the later cinematics. Ultimately, too much of BfA felt like an exercise of pushing limits of how much low effort content can they push, and how much of my time / gold can they waste before I start altering my habits.
SL is very much do or die for me, and it’s not looking great, based on how BfA went. I’m not impressed with class changes or the mechanical side of covenants (if they couldn’t balance classes, specs, legion legendaries, azerite, or corruption, why would the suddenly be able to balance covenants), and I’m really struggling to find any sort of mental investment or hooks with the proposed story. It’s truly amazing how a single expansion can utterly tank one’s opinions and expectations of a franchise they’ve enjoyed for so long, isn’t it?
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It’s truly amazing how a single expansion can utterly tank one’s opinions and expectations of a franchise they’ve enjoyed for so long, isn’t it?
I felt the same way after Cataclysm… and WoD. The difference is WoD was so bad I haven’t played retail since.
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At this point it’d be refreshing if they had an expansion where the premise was everyone going home after the latest one, settling in for a year or two (there’s an argument to be had for a longer time skip, but at this point they’ve fairly dug in on the year-or-two precedent), only for a previously unknown threat to slam the Alliance and Horde in the face, forcing a retaliation.
I’m not talking about some completely exotic threat either. Something temporal and mortal whose sudden appearance doesn’t have to upset the cosmology by ramming some new paradigm of how the universe works down our throats. Like an undiscovered continent invading, or some mortal races on another world capitalizing on the Legion’s disarray to engage in some of their own interplanetary conquest.
Then one of the starting and continuing premises throughout questing could be built around the player finding out who this enemy is and what they want. Make the mystery of it part of the hook. Make us wonder and want to learn why this outside agency has suddenly decided to ruin everyone’s day rather than lay out the broad outline of the baddies’ intent from the start. It could be interesting to have something crash down on us that baffles and perplexes the lore characters instead of being yet another case of a returning ancient evil that everyone important already roughly knows about from the history books.
Seeding ideas ahead of time is nice, but frankly it makes the universe seem pathetically small when every new threat is swiftly shown to be a closely related tangent or outright follow-up plan to a prior threat we already stopped. It’d be nice to be blindsided for once. Not in a universe-breaking “none of the rules apply” way, but in a “this is a surprise because we weren’t tripping over hints about it all over the prior expansion’s final patch” way.
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