If the Shadowlands things pans out I’ll be disappointed. If THIS pans out? I’ll dig it.
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Do want. I wonder what the term Scarlet has to do with it though.
All I’m willing to speculate strongly is that we WILL get an announcement at Blizzcon.
I think this Blizzcon will hold a lot of announcements for both WoW and Diablo. I keep hearing rumblings that Blizzard is making a surprisingly strong effort to salvage both franchises. BfA and Immortal have injured both greatly, and the only reliable “leaks” I’ve heard are simply that we WILL have announcements at Blizzcon. Including 8.3, 9.0, and Diablo 4. The last of which is apparently far enough along that Blizz employees have played its first build.
As much as I’d love for them to go all out in an attempt to win people back, Blizzard comes off as so dense and arrogant I have a hard time picturing them admitting that something needs salvaging.
A good way to look at it is that Blizzard is essentially the government of a large nation at this point.
They’ll never admit they did wrong, they’ll just panic, throw out better quality content for a few years and then get complacent again.
No, they never will. Certain actions will make it obvious they’re scrambling to save themselves, but they’ll never come out with a “We messed up”.
That 4chan one sounds pretty okay. Sounds like an opportunity for reworking old zones. It directly affects my character unlike any of the other stuff so I like that, too.
I would really like if they moved away from the character focused storytelling. I don’t want to see any big characters do big things any longer. I want to see how the cultures and societies react to whatever Apocalypse of the year is happening. I want to see differences and situational biases played out and shown between members of the same clan/tribe/fiefdom/elvenpyramidscheme just because of their experience. The expansions always seem to start off closer to this but then it gets completely switched to playing out a terrible fantasy soap opera.
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I’d also be all for NPCs doing more minor things, with more NPCs shown. Like Baine gets one quest chain in a zone, so we know what he’s up to in that patch, and so on. I’d prefer everyone get a LITTLE attention then 2 people get all of it.
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WoW’s writing is some of the weakest in the industry (this is saying a lot). They are 100 percent capable of writing something as ludicrous as Shadowlands. THEY WROTE WOD. They wrote BFA. Come on.
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I think the last few expansions were good about fleshing out the new factions with which we’re interacting in the beginning, but fleshing out the current state of pre-existing races/cultures has been far from ideal. Horde got to have some of that fleshing out in Mists, I’ll concede, but meh
I actually, unironically, low-key enjoyed WoD and didn’t think the writing around it was that bad until the end when all the ill-received gameplay just kind of became too much and they tried to slap a quick “And then everyone lived happily ever after” on it.
It wrapped up Garrosh pretty nicely, getting to see the Draenei before they were just “Those mates from the Exodar” was fun, the main storylines were cool and I liked how they actually had Grommash’s own people start to defect when he couldn’t actually deliver on any of his promises. They made some weird decisions towards the end (“is this the Archimonde we killed before or… how does that work and why can’t the Legion just SkyNET Azeroth to try again by side-stepping in time if they’re never actually taken care of or… what”) and the ending itself (“HEY EVERYONE WHO I HURT, WE DEFEATED THE THING I MADE AND LET OUT OF MY CONTROL, WE ARE FREEE!” ‘Old Friend’ Grom) but until then I thought it was going kind of well.
My nitpick side was mostly just that it really started to hammer home that our power levels are an illusion because basic orc grunts from an alternate timeline are kicking our asses, something they doubled down on by making us have trouble with murlocs and quillboar all over again in Legion and BfA, and also just the fact I liked my Garrison more than actually interacting with people since there weren’t really any dailies to head out and do.
If they released some kind of optional mode where when you go into an expansion level range you revert to how the game was then pre-buffs/nerfs/changes I’d go back and do MoP and WoD again. They also kind of represented when I started to mature and didn’t throw as much time at the game though so that was mostly a long series of me sprinting to catch up and then going “Wait, WHY am I doing this though?”
They don’t need to restore the time exclusive elements, like maybe let me work on the legendary items without actually getting them, or the titles. But my wife also didn’t play between Wrath and Legion and had a lot of “Wait, what?” moments when I was trying to explain The Story Thus Far and it’d be a lot of fun to get to slow down and play it the way it was.
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Im in the same boat really. My issue with WoDs story is the same as I had for GoT, in that I didnt have a problem with where it ended up so much as it wasnt earned.
WoD feels like a giant chunk of the middle story was sliced out (given what we know I’d say its likely) thus we go from Grom “kill everyone” Hellscream to Grom “Draenor is Free” Hellscream out of literally nowhere with literally no effort made to actually justify the change.
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Yeah most of WoD’s plot issues were lack of actual plot. What was there was decent, but it wasn’t much.
Yeah. Like they acknowledged they had more planned but damn (Shattrath raid was one of them, I think?) but then just “Okay everyone out, here’s Legion, we’re starting our professional redemption arc early.”
For all my quibbles and qualms with BfA I hope we don’t have another “lessons learned” where they go “Yeah, we meant to do X, Y, Z, A, C, and 3 elements as well that would have tied things together but that’ll just be in Chronicle 5”, I’d rather watch the whole sordid thing unfold in one go rather than be forced to speculate.
It’s like I said in another thread (I think it was another thread), there were comments made that the Alliance who fired on Thrall and the Goblins in early Cata were working for the Twilight’s Hammer but it’s never repeated, never referenced, and so it’s just one of the “SEE? ALLIANCE BAD. WANT WAR INSTEAD SAVE AZEROTH” moments that can’t really be disproved instead until Chronicle 4 plops out.
I’m still a little amazed at how little we saw of Grom. All that bizarre time travel stuff to get this “”"“fan favorite”""" character back, and he appears like three times in the entire expansion. He probably got more lines in the mag’har recruitment scenario than he did in all of WoD.
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Honestly, the titular “Warlords” in general. I feel like only Blackhand got the recognition and effort befitting the hype, the others all died as trash tier bosses (Kargath, Killrogg) or didn’t do anything but exist in story beats (Durotan, Grom himself). Even the “aspirant” Warlords of the Thunderlord and the Burning Blade just kinda poofed as questline tie-ups (I can’t remember any others at the moment but I’m sure there was another one or two).
Actually I take that back, one thing Alliance “got” in WoD over the Horde experience was definitely that Ner’zhul felt like a threat between all the sacrifices and summons, and then fleeing to his lair where you knew he was gonna continue to be a Big Problem if he wasn’t dealt with.
So, two outta six?
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I suspect we were going to see a lot more of Grom but financials likely puahed them to cut WoD short
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Gul’dan was represented in a pretty interesting way. But yeah, while some degree of context was added to the others (we know more about Kargath than we did in BC, for example) there wasn’t much representation - certainly nowhere near the amount we were hyped up to expect.
There was alao the problem that they were presented as this giant imminent serious threat (the mission to Draenor was referred to as a Suicide Mission).
Then we got there and roflstomped all over the Iron Horde.
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You know, it’s funny but I don’t view Gul’dan as one of the Warlords. He got the video, sure, but without leading the Shadowmoon Clan like in the Main Universe I kind of just mentally stuffed him into the role of deuteragonist-turned-main-antagonist.
[Edit] To go back to the spirit of leak season, the splash page for 8.2.5 was just mined and includes the “thrilling conclusion” to the War Campaign with Sylvanas and Anduin featured:
h ttps://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2019/september/patch825new.jpg
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