I think we’ve all seen the way WoW has found its way into the mainstream lately so let’s ask the tough question of what can we do to fix this plot?
In my opinion, it is actually simpler than you would think: we decentralize the plot. It is clear that the development process has lost its spirit through the years of corporate oversight and a fear of pushing buttons. It is also clear that WoW has expansions worth of assets and plot locations that are completely irrelevant to the modern player.
To kill two birds with one stone, the development team should be divided by location of most interest and those that push neutered plotlines trimmed like fat. What this would instantly create is teams with much more agility and internal cohesiveness both to each other and the location of WoW they would develop.
From this point, teams are then allowed to produce whatever content they wish with little to no direct oversight. New plots, new rewards, new forms of content, and experiments constantly. As things change, teams share their best ideas to continue to innovate the central ideas of WoW.
Maintaining a central plot is not what MMOs were ever built from; it is a concept that non-gamer middlemen within the company that answer to their stock portfolio have the brain capacity and oxygen supply to get their head around. WoW needs serious change if it’s going to survive, let alone thrive, in the big year, 2025.
I really hope that this recent media outcry has been a “come to Jesus” moment for the people that make our beloved game. I really think a design overhaul like this could be the key as there are some serious story locations that I’d love to see developed further. WoW is a rich and dense resource that brings me physical pain knowing it’s going to waste.
Ignore the people who throw a fit when there are women, people of color, or anything but cishet white men in the human kingdoms.
There is no step 2. The story is not worse than it was in WoW’s “golden age” it’s just that people throw a fit over literally the exact same story beat if it is a woman instead of a man.
That’s a fair point and I’m not against diversity within the game. I’m really trying to look towards a future where both can coexist, because the game is really big enough for everyone if you ask me. There can be epic “golden age” questlines and comforting and emotional material all because WoW has made itself one of the biggest games as far as content and locations. I think the problem is when there is exactly one plot line and its attempting to appease everyone.
I’ll paste what I wrote in another thread that i didn’t realize was a troll thread here, while also adding that I haven’t caught up with current xpac’s story and just scratched the first few quests of it:
I just came back and played through some of BFA, all of shadowlands, and like 75% of dragonflight (I did the end and the black dragon story and enjoyed them.)
I hated the war plot of BFA. It felt so forced and over the top- we just got done fighting the evil god of the universe. I feel like by that point, when Sylvanas tried to burn teldrassil, Saurfang should have just immediately challenged her and things should have gone wild.
After that? Idk. I just feel like Shadowlands needs to be deleted, and the war plot needs to be thrown out the window. We should never have touched the after life, we shouldn’t have gone BIGGER with conflicts and stayed internal. There’s plenty of traumatizing stuff on Azeroth, we’d even be able to bruise our precious prince again lol.
BFA could have been the Horde and the Alliance trying to tentatively talk with one another, trying to bridge old wounds but struggling because of how much bad blood there is between the factions, and then these two foreign nations come over and are like “OLD GODS HELP” and then we pull the Magni telling us that we need to help Azeroth heal her wounds trigger.
We could have had a lot of incidents where we tried to do things to work together but there’s a 3rd and 4th party within the horde/alliance who are rebellious against the idea of partnering with the enemy despite the threats on the world.
Frankly, if you ask me, they should just run popularity polls for characters and surveys on plot arcs to decide which characters to drop and which to invest in and which plot threads to drop/develop.
It’s the objective way to fix this.
IMHO, in matters of taste, the customer is always right.
I think you’re really onto something here with community polls the only thing I would add is it could be for character development, locational development, and system changes. All of which are needed to address the issues currently within the game.
There is a problem with polls, though, that we need to keep in mind: brigading. Certain communities can easily be whipped up into voting a certain way- or if the vote doesn’t go their way they’ll throw a massive fit about it.
Less mysterious world ending villains with 4 D chess plans and more small adventure type campaigns. I don’t think the wow writers are familiar with jumping the shark.
I don’t think there’s anything they can do at this point. They’d need to retcon a lot.
I think the game would just need a complete reset after Final Titan, and start back at warcraft 1…and let Metzen kind of be the helm of that entire team
You can’t… I dont even need to read this. The writing for Midnight and Beyond is going on right now, Midnight writing is already finalized in some spots because that is how gaming companies work.
Thinking story & assets can be changed with a moments notice is an incredible novice look at something complicated
I don’t know if it can truly be fixed so long as whatever people or forces at blizzard which down this road pressed it there in power persist.
There’s inconsistencies with organizations and their general behavior, historic revisionism, characters that behave counter to how you would expect given their history, and moments which smack, at least to me, of painfully modern concerns.
The best advice I could give would amount to like two things:
Read up on the history of the setting, take notes, get invested.
Concern yourself with writing a good story, rather than owning the chuds / oids / ists / untouchables du jour.