Jumping the Shark

(This got really long-winded. TLDR version is at the bottom.)
I know I’m not normally a basketful of positivity, but compared to previous expacs in WoW’s history… this one feels really, really tacked on. Like, it just feels that the story writers are going out of their way to make up something ‘new and exciting’ that has little to do with our own universe in order to generate some sort of hype for something ‘new and exciting’.

The main issue with that being, of course, the dozens or so plot holes that are left behind in Azeroth. And no, this isn’t the first time this has happened, and will likely not be the last in WoW’s lifetime.

If you’re not understanding what I mean here, then allow me to break it down for you: WoW is suffering. I don’t really need to go into why, but two of the biggest issues are how the storyline is just an absolute mess and of course, how out of touch the devs are with the game’s playerbase.

I feel, that in a moment like this, it would do them well to stand back for a moment, take a breather, and try to tie up any loose ends with the story before moving on to the next big huge storyline. The best time to do this would have actually been this expansion, but instead they decided to push the all-out-war narrative right after the largest-scale invasion of the planet ever, and then to pile on top of THAT, they just now hit us with Shadowlands- which is requiring us to go to a new realm not of our own in order to stop yet another big bad from destroying everything as we know it.

And is this a bad thing? Certainly not, I feel that WoW could eventually reach a point where all of its known lore and locales have been fully explored and mapped out. The reason why this is a bad thing now, is because the storyline- as stated before, is a complete wreck. The world in-lore is a mess physically and narratively. And good storytelling would dictate that you at least make an effort to tie up loose ends before venturing into the unknown.

Unfortunately, that is not happening. Or at the very least, we are not privy to details of it being attempted. Instead, we are being thrust into an entirely new world(s)in order to chase down the white rabbit (Sylvanas) in order to satisfy some sort of contrived plot that’s apparently been in the making for years now.

So I guess now it’s finally time to bring up the state of WoW. Currently, its subbed base is low enough to a point that they won’t dare report on it anymore. The classes themselves have been dumbed down to a point where many are just flat-out broken and irrelevant when compared to other classes that perform a similar role. Faction imbalance, normally negligible due to its small effect on the community, has been tipped decisively towards the Horde, and it seems like there are currently no plans to try and balance it out. No new playable races or classes have been announced for this expansion, which is now the second in a row to not feature either of those two (This has never happened before).

And of course, the storyline as it is sucks really bad.

But instead of going back and trying to fix things, to me it feels like they are instead trying to hit us with “new and exciting!” things to try and pull people back in. Sylvanas fighting and defeating the Lich King. A whole new, unexplored realm separate from Azeroth. And of course, these covenants and whatnot that provide the new “Expansion Gimmick” introduced in WoD. And… it just feels like too much. The game right now is in need of dire fixing on so many ends, not only the story. Instead of hunkering down and focusing on doing that, we are just getting a new coat of paint splashed over the peeling paint, cracked drywall and mildew stains left behind by previous expansions.

Anyways, this rant way longer than expected and I don’t expect anyone to read all of it, so I’ll go ahead and make a TL;DR version. But if you did take time to read it, thanks. I don’t play anymore but I still do have an attachment to this game obviously, and I wish it would just… be better. That’s all.

TL;DR: WoW really sucks right now, and instead of going back and fixing it, it feels to me like they’re just piling on “new and interesting” things to distract us from the massive amounts of problems and issues the game currently faces.

In terms of story, I truly believe we are at the point where the definition of what jumping the shark really hits hard: “that (the) writers have exhausted their focus; that the (game) has strayed irretrievably from an older and better formula; (and/or) that the series as a whole is declining in quality.”

It’s not going to get any better from this point on, folks.

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The shark was jumped back when WoD came out. We’ve just been ‘enjoying’ the after effects of that for the last two expansions.

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At this point it just feels like they are trying to make the story as dissatisfying as possible.

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WoW’s writing has always been contrived, silly and dumb. They’ve tried to get into heavier themes before and - I mean did anyone here read War Crimes? Because Trial of Orcmann is as screamingly stupid as it sounds.

That’s why BFA rubbed so many people the wrong way. It wasn’t just dumb, it was offensively dumb. One moment it’s trying to wax poetic about the horrors of war but then you do some quests that are all “Woo horrors of war!”. I can’t exactly meditate on how this human soldier had a family, hopes and dreams when I just obliterated him with a Mag’Har doom wheel. And am on my way to go crush and burn 24 other thinking, feeling people.

I mean hell they blow up Teldrassil and the Undercity - two zones that people have actual emotional investment in since they fell in love with them 15 years ago as children- and then move on. We zip over to Tusk Wakanda or Thicc Albion and while the war campaign is in the background and briefly hogs the spotlight - we’ve been doing Old God stuff 75% of the time. The Undercity literally never comes up once ever again - outside some lines of dialogue from Forsaken refugees huddling around campfires for warmth for, some reason, that you fly by while idling in Orgrimmar.

I’m looking forward to Shadowlands as it’s back to formula. There’s a big bad. Red and blue must put aside differences to go kill big bad. We’ve seen how the current story team handles moral grayness so let’s keep this REAL simple till their contracts expire.

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Lol’d. But yeah, the story stinks and I’m sick to death of faction conflict narrative being forced, yet doomed to go nowhere. The next time the Horde is written to march on the Alliance, we just need to be conquered for it already. At least then it’ll be over.

I much prefer when the faction conflict is kept as a B plot that applies to certain zones or parts of zones.

Keep it in mind I think if you really wanted to you could write All Quiet On The Westfall Front. But you can’t do a narrative about the horrors of war if one playable side has to be unambiguous villains and oh, you also want a fun game where the players who skip the story can have fun.

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The thing is, I don’t even mind being the damn villain anymore. It’s not what I originally signed up for way back when, but Blizzard keeps writing it. So fine. I will be the villain, like I have been since Cata. But you have to stop making the Horde fracture itself for it.

And give the winners a clear win at the end, even if it’s not your favorite faction. Because no, I don’t feel like the Horde truly lost BFA. We certainly didn’t win, but we did so much damage before we tuckered ourselves out that I find it absurd that any member of the Alliance feels like they won instead.

If we’re gonna do this again, then I better see a Stormwind garrison built into the Valley of Honor the next time we don’t finish what we started. At least that could open up a storyline about eventually expelling the Alliance from what is unambiguously Horde territory for once.

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That’s the inherent insanity of doing any sort of war storyline in this game. By design everything between the Horde and Alliance must reach return to a relative status quo.

So there’s never going to be a total victiry for either side. Keep it in the background as a cold war with flashpoints to justify PVP.

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Agreed, but tell the writers that.:weary:

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it feels to me like they’re just piling on “new and interesting” things to distract us from the massive amounts of problems and issues the game currently faces.

I think what the game has run into with BFA (although in my opinion it hit this point years ago) is that the expansion model no longer feels sustainable or appropriate for the game.

What I mean by this is the standard “new continent with 10 (or 5) additional levels!” With each new continent the old ones have languished and decayed to the point of irreverence, and never reflect the changes wrought by the story. Imagine if each expansion also had a mini revamp to several old leveling zones to reflect a constantly changing world.
Like a new Hellfire Peninsula where a joint Ally/Horde force is based at Hellfire Citadel, and they fight Fel Orc insurgents/demons who maintain a limited supply of Magtheridon’s blood and have overrun HH and Thrallmar. Just a random example.

Perhaps the reason that the trend has never changed is because of Cata, which was perhaps simply too massive of an overhaul to expect it to be done again.

However for many it’s only recently that we seem to have hit critical mass with the lack of real change to reflect the story. Most prior expansions were careful to be self contained so that it made sense if nothing changes outside the new continent, but as Blizz tries to expand the scope with BFA’s global conflicts, the cracks start to show.

BFA tried to have a lot of world altering events (Teldrassil, Battle of Darkshore, Lordaeron, etc) and if you remember the original reveal trailer, it showed the continents being swallowed in red and blue respectively, but in game this isn’t reflected at all. It’s a disconnect where we are told many things, but very rarely shown them. And this gives us so, so many loose threads (NE new home, Forsaken new home, status of Darkshore, list goes on).

So in short BFA strayed too far out of self containment, or Blizz was too lazy/unprepared to properly implement the change necessary for what was supposed to be a large global event for it to be satisfying.

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TL:DR didnt watch the deep dive for shadowlands

also the main player base doesnt care about the story lol

This to me is the most annoying part of BfA story… besides the night elf stuff, anyway. Zandalar and Kul Tiras have amazing stories, have so much thought and care put into their zones, so many little secrets and so much potential for lore… and less than a year into the expansion we leave them behind for the sake of Azshara’s arc, which should have been its own expansion.

The War Campaign is so tacked on to the leveling experience it’s insane, and the writing quality difference is jarring. Even the weakest of the Kul Tiras zones, Stormsong, is above par for Blizzard writing, and the lore is fantastic. But now they’re all going to be brushed over and never returned to again, and that’s infuriating to me.

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Honestly though the Nuking the Fridge moment for me was the end of Legion.

Space Satan puts a sword that by all rights should have it’s own post code directly into the damn planet and you’re telling me that has less of an ecological effect than a big scaley boi having a temper tantrum?

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I have so little enthusiasm for the Shadowlands, might be time to take a break from WoW for me. The story leading up to it hasn’t been all that interesting and been retconned so much that I can’t get invested. A character having ulterior motives is one thing, but having their motives never hinted or changed to keep it ‘surprising’ just makes me no care.

Maybe I’ll take this time by letting the Shadowlands plot get resolved in the background where the rest of the Sylvanas’ plans are by not playing.

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I haven’t been into the franchise from the beginning, but from what I’ve seen, it’s just like most any genre franchise- they’re just adding and making stuff up as they go along. WoW changed a lot of stuff from WC3, which changed a lot of stuff from WC2, which changed a lot from WC1. And every expansion has more or less just been piling stuff on top of it.

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This. WoD was when I finally realized that the writing team didn’t care about story cohesion or logical progression. After the events of MoP the factions were in desperate need of rebuilding, especially the Horde. Instead we…went into the past of an alternate universe version of another planet. Because Blizz thought it would be metal to go back to the orc homeworld and see all the old Horde leaders.

I remember making a post on the previous version of the Story Forum of how it broke my heart to learn that I cared about WoW’s story more than WoW’s writers did. I still enjoy playing the game, and I enjoy aspects of the story (world building for my own RP mostly) but I’ve never been as invested as I used to be.

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WoW expansions have been hit or miss for the past four or five.

Cataclysm: Eh. had it’s ups n downs
MoP: Pretty good.
WoD: A dive.
Legion: Good.
BfA: Another dive.

I wouldn’t call it jumping the shark but it’s not exactly something worth bragging over either.

What will Shadowlands be? I’m not sure. The biggest issue with BfA was it’s war story was a repeat of what they did in Pandaria with Sylvanas essentially turning into Garrosh clone. Just as Garrosh fled to alternate world with important lore characters from the past (Draenor) after he escaped.

Now we have Sylvanas escaping to alternate world full of important lore characters from the past. We’ll see if they follow through by killing her off in some fasion or another within the first patch of the storyline and whether major lore villain who was previously dead will make a comeback as well.

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Now that I’ve seen hell (BFA), I’m content to stay in purgatory (Shadowlands: we’ve run out of ideas awhile ago, we’re just winging it now edition.).

I would rather have inoffensive crap than dumbfounding crap.

Shadowlands is looking to fix a lot of problems. They know things are screwed up.

Now, how WELL they fix them is another matter, but they KNOW there are problems they need to address.

That’s an opinion, and I disagree.

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The burden of proof is on them.

I, like many fans of the series, have this strong understanding that what we came here for isn’t there anymore. But, if we stay around long enough, we’ll get something that satisfies us again and wash away the regret over getting hooked on the WoW needle.

The Star Wars series is hard to be a fan of since the original charm of it has all but waned but right now they’re enjoying something good like the Mandalorian after a sea of crap.

That’s us. We’re in a sea of crap, but we’re waiting for our Mandalorian to happen by so that we can enjoy ourselves again.

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