To be fair to Blizzard, they had no idea the game was going to last more than three or four years. Since they were apparently scratching their heads about a storyline after Wrath, I don’t think they seriously considered the need for consistency up to that point.
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True but i would counterpoint that these inconsistency issues all occured post wrath
Wrath was probably the last expansion with a story that was well-written start to finish. That’s not to say everything since then has been garbage, exactly, but I don’t recall anyone being dissatisfied with it.
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I think WotLK benefited heavily from the fact that it was the last major storyline from WC3 to be wrapped up. Illidan and Outland may not have been handled well but they were handled, so Arthas’ ending was the final tie to WC3.
The tech upgrades along the way didn’t hurt, either.
The biggest complaint about Wrath, if I recall, was that Trial of the Crusader had such a weird justification (“We’re trying to determine champions for the final push against the Lich King; we wouldn’t want to send just anyone who might get killed and resurrected. Let’s hold a to-the-death tournament in his backyard!”) and characters behaving somewhat weirdly (Tirion sanctions a fight - to the death - between the Alliance and Horde, and then scolds everyone for participating immediately afterward.)
Which, compared to the bad writing from later expansions, made WoW look like Shakespeare.
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You kill Argent Crusade soldiers in the dungeon version.
Trial of the Crusader also gave us Paletress, though… which I think more than makes up for the bad parts.
Trial and the dungeon definitely smelt of “oh boy ICC needs another couple months to stew.” The boss mechanics weren’t terrible difficult or new, bosses were generally just scaled-up versions of monsters we’d seen before, etc.
I don’t think they were BAD additions, but they definitely felt like they were cobbled together in a rush.
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If Blizz made the effort to just drop a lore codex explaining the zone, maybe even write it from the perspective of a Bronze dragon being like, hey so there’s some timey wimey magic problems right now so you have to go into the past and do Garrosh things and w/e. Would immediately improve the whole dang problem.
It doesn’t even have to be a codex, could just be a quest prompt that starts when you enter a zone and Chromie or some sh!t is like hey here’s some quest text no one reads lol
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“Hiya! It’s good to see you again… or for the first time? I’m not sure.
Listen, there’s some serious temporal interference going on in your area! Events from the past are repeating themselves! I don’t know what’ll happen if things don’t play out the way they’re supposed to. Think you can make sure everything goes the way it should?”
There, Blizzard. Copy and paste that in a pop up quest for Chromie. Done. Took me 30 seconds. You’re welcome.
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Ive been saying since cata have Chromie as the first person you see after character creation, give her a few lines about odd timey stuff and the adventurer needing to experience what came before or some such nonsense.
Its really not hard to put even an ounce of thought into making the timeline contain even a single grain of logic.
The problem is that Blizzard is lazy.
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Willfully lazy, mind.
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And they went out of their way to promise more and better product.
Then they turn around do less and worse than Sqenix.
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Hell you dont even need to physically put Chromie in game. At level one and whenever an expansion transition triggers (58, 78, 90, 100) have a quest pop up from chromie explaining weird time stuff and let that be the breadcrumb to the next expansion.
This really isnt rocket science and that something so wimple hasnt been implemented shows just how little Blizzard actually cares about the setting.
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Best typo
/10char
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See, on one hand its a slight compulsion I have to correct typos on my posts.
On the other hand its a great typo ![:smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smile.png?v=6" ":smile:")
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I used to be. But these days, nothing really shocks me.
That was legitimately jarring when I first saw it. “Every soldier is needed!” “Oh, dang, should we not have killed those guys?” “No, that’s fine.”
The Argent Tournament was definitely a real quirk in the story, but it still gave us good content.
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I can shock you.
Go on.
10chars./
We had excellent times. You are missed, Fides.
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