"I Feel Lied To," Post-BfA Version

[Kynladoria-maladath]

@Rasaric-thrall

Despite releasing 2 years earlier the Legion cinematic has 16 million less views. The narrative sold to us in the BfA cinematic is obviously what the playerbase wants the narrative of WoW to be.

Youtube views do not correlate to player count 1=1. How many of those views are from multiple viewings by the same person? There’s no way to know for sure.

BFA’s massive bleeding of subs shows that the faction war narrative does not necessarily save WoW.

You can make all sorts of conclusions out of specious data points. One could say that because WoW’s peak subscribers were during WOTLK that the faction war narrative that wasn’t really present as front and center, that the players don’t like the faction war narrative.

[Cursewords-tichondrius (Cursewords)]

@Rasaric-thrall

The BfA cinematic has 29 million views and was widely regarded in a positive light. The faction war concept is incredibly popular becuse it’s what Warcraft is. Horrible writers ruining the narrative doesnt mean the concept is hated.

I agree with your over all point - that horrible writers are to blame, not the Faction conflict.

But I don’t think the You Tube video count matters for anything other than maybe some ad money for Blizz and You Tube.

Maybe the BfA cinematic is just better. That doesn’t mean anything about the expansions themselves. Like a movie that has a good trailer but disappoints when seen in full.

Also, the BfA trailer was one version that gave both Factions screen time. Wasn’t the Legion cinematic split in two, with a Horde and Alliance version? That might change the numbers.

[Anuella-cenarion-circle]

@Rasaric-thrall

The universal hatred of the Shadowlands and DF narrative just further proves that the faction war is necessary. They had to bring Metzen back because of how bad things got.

… and yet, Metzen’s three working expansion concepts are another neutral adventure, cross-faction elf unification with a Light vs Void cosmic focus, and the (assuredly faction-irrelevant) return of the titans…

[Alynsa-wyrmrest-accord]

@Rasaric-thrall

Legion cinematic: 13 million views
BfA cinematic: 29 million views

@Rasaric-thrall

The narrative sold to us in the BfA cinematic is obviously what the playerbase wants the narrative of WoW to be.

I dunno about this conclusion.

Personally, I have never liked the faction war stuff. And yet that BfA cinematic?

It’s freaking awesome. Sylvanas is god-tier, Anduin is… There, Genn looks great, Saurfang looks great, so on and so forth.

The Legion cinematic? Varian narrates a letter, the ships crash, “for Azeroth!!” Meh.

Shadowlands’ cinematic has 14m views. Do more people prefer a narrative where Sylvanas breaks crowns over fighting demons? WoD’s cinematic beats all these with 36m views. MoP has 23m and Cataclysm has 25m, so clearly more players wanted to just kill brown orcs than to fight the other faction or giant dragons.

TBC has only 7m, Vanilla had only 5m, and both had more subscribers than cinematic views, unlike the others. We could extrapolate a lot of things from this.

Or… WoD just had a banger cinematic. BfA just had a banger cinematic. Two of the best, even if both expansions aren’t too well thought of (though people are weirdly putting on their nostalgia glasses on for WoD).

I wouldn’t put any connection between cinematics and what narrative players want, because too often cinematics have little to do with the actual narrative.

[Thadeus-caelestrasz]

I’ve only read some comics, but I know of his works and that Ennis is an edgelord’s edgelord. All the characters in his original stories are edgelords, an edgelord’s punching bag or both. And he does it all without the excuse of hardship in life.