To each their own? Been playing since WotLK and played WC1 WC2 and WC3 before it. Still love DF. Leaked subgraphs aren’t going to change my mind. 
Have I gotten the “Warcraft vibe” wrong all these years? Don’t care. I love DF.
I don’t get why people love a lot of things. People love what they love. I love DF.
Well, you are probably in the minority. One thing I learned about modern gamers, is they will eat just about any garbage AAA studios put out these days.
DF is the most milk toast expansion Blizzard has put out to date. Everything about is just mediocre. The zones, the story, the art style for this expansion all just mediocre.
Modern… gamer? I played Pong when it was current but have a nice day I guess?
I guess?
Just out of curiosity, what would you consider an example of games with better stories?
Not really disagreeing from a general point, many modern games are rather… lackluster at best, but there’s still the odd gem out there.
Though it should be said that WoW’s usually so far down the list for expectations that a modicum of competence can come across as impressive in isolation. Not living up to expectations is usually a better indication of audience displeasure, and WoW’s been down in the dumps narratively for so long that comparing to other games doesn’t matter so much anymore.
Yup.
After Shadowlands seeped into your every pour, with Dragonflight they felt as a detox they would create an expansion with functionally zero tension. But that’s not Warcraft.
Final Fantasy Tactics has an amazing storyline.
To simplify/compare to an analog, you’ve got this Horde vs Alliance type conflict raging in the background while the player character has to stop a demon conspiracy… this type of story could translate pretty well into an mmo except that Blizzard don’t have the sauce anymore.
Imagine if BFA had been a war between Genn and Sylvanas, two war mongering leaders, while we had to acknowledge we had friends and comrades on the other side and were torn between our duty to our faction and our brotherhood with those on the other side.
Imagine if instead of gleefully going to war, the Nightborne had to reflect on going to war with those who had just helped liberate them.
Imagine if instead of “DAE Sylvanas tricked us”, what if ultimately both sides just got tired of the fighting.
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Of course, the reality is Blizzard mostly wants to cater to mindless Star Wars style adventuring fun. Going to war has to be fun. Shadowlands seemed to prove that people can’t handle when war is depressing.
And while I’m on the topic of Disney IPs… the Infinity War era was probably the peak of Marvel. Yes Infinity War was a fun movie but also it kind of hit us in the gut to see Thanos win. We were all rooting to see the boys get back together and take it back and win.
Blizzard does not have the guts to deliver a punch to players they’ll feel in a way that they’ve earned.
Yes they’re killing off Khadgar but it feels unearned and honestly just kind of lame. I don’t respect Blizzard for doing that, it feels cheap. I would say the closest they’ve come is killing off Varian and Voljin at the Broken Shore. In fact, I would say Legion was our Infinity War and just like Marvel Blizzard has no idea where to go from there. Blizzard peaked and now they don’t know what to do.
WOW was very popular in China well before MoP.
Mop has so much flavoring not to mention their food makes me hungry every time I look at their tables.
Balder’s Gate 3, Divinity 1 and 2. ESO and Lotro both have amazing stories.
WoW was never that stellar, but the older expansions still had some soul. The last 2 expansions have been generic crap. The people working on the game right now have zero passion and don’t understand the IP at all.
SL story is way better than DF story!
I agree. I didn’t care much for MoP’s story when it was current, but going through it again in Remix, it’s a way better experience than DF. I guess the bar is getting lower and lower as time goes on lol.
Dragonflight was always going to be filler, story-wise, doing little more than setting up whatever came after it. Mists had a defined start point, and a defined ending point, which set up the expansion they’d already planned to go after it. Dragonflight was basically a reset button. So of course story-wise DF is going to come a distant second to MoP.
An old classic which is always vaunted for its story, but I’ve yet to get around to.
Though some interesting factoids since you brought up Tactics:
The lead behind FFXIV takes inspiration from FFT’s writer/lead (though more from the Tactics Orge games), and what’s remains of the FFT team is on FFXIV.
He brought in the FFT lead to help with the raid storyline that was a big homage to it (and FFXII), and its follow-up in Bozja which was inspired by an old draft that never made it into a game.
SL had anything to do with the war? Outside of the very clumsy set-up that was BfA? SL was dreary and depressing, yes… but outside of old character cameos, barely seems relevant to war at all.
Though I would agree WoW tries to go the generic “fun spectacle” rather than somber tones and nuance. They’ve cultivated a particular audience, and their attempts to go outside of pandering them are either met with backlash for dumb reasons (MoP being meme’d as “Kung Fu Panda”) or just annoying everyone as the attempt falls flat with those who wanted more.
Out of those, I’ve only played BG3… and it’s an interesting case.
The central storyline is… okay, serviceable. You really need to be doing a Dark Urge run to get the most out of it.
Where it really shines is the characters and execution, which are both stellar. The character arcs are much more interesting than the central storyline, though they all do tie into it quite well.
In retrospect, WoW would likely benefit from that type of story structure rather than a strong core story. They have trouble delivering stuff long term, but smaller self-contained arcs which all contribute to the simple objective of central story seems much more manageable.
Mop was always my favorite storytelling this game ever did outside of Legion Class Halls.
The Maw is a war torn hellscape reminiscent of a bombed out battlefield. It’s “the frontline” and yes it’s the worst place to be and you need to be rotated out periodically not to just lose yourself. But rationing and the dread of the frontline moving closer to home (the Maw expanding and threatening to consume the other realms), the dwindling population and just general malaise and hopelessness/ gloom… it was very clearly a wartime portrayal in my mind at least.
Shadowlands introduces the concept of true death, that someone can die in WoW and actually be gone for good. No lollipops just beyond the rainbow… you’re just gone for good, that’s it. Warcraft War was sort of make-believe, a rotating door of champions coming back or getting to live in the halls of Valhalla. Shadowlands tore down the fantasy - you’re little more than a pile of dust if you die in SL.
Hellscape? Yes, definitely. Miserable place to be, even for players.
Battlefield? No, I don’t see it. It looks like a colossal torture chamber to me.
When I want to think of a wartorn battlefield, my mind goes to the Xenoblade Chronicles series which has quite a few of them. XC3 is a very war-heavy narrative with multiple battlefields, ruins, and you even find fallen corpses of other soldiers all over the world.
But probably the most memorable is Morytha in XC2… but even starting to explain that is a massive spoiler. But to keep it simple, after a mostly steam-power and early industrial era for 75% of the game, you arrive in an ancient “land of the dead”.
It’s a bombed-out modern city. Everyone, both heroes and villains, is horrified at the sheer scale of the devastation.
The Maw doesn’t even compare.
Technically true… if not for the fact that WoW’s already large number of retcons (just… the Jailer being “the man behind the man” for everything else) has long since broken the willing suspension of disbelief.
I have my doubts that it will stick, long-term.
Garrosh is a great villain, especially in comparison to WoW’s recent big bads. the overarching theme of Pandaria being a near-pristine peaceful land getting thrown into chaos from the arrival of the Horde and the Alliance is also compelling I think.
DF’s story isn’t as good but honestly I prefer its sense of boring to the nonsense in Shadowlands.
It’s amazing how much a player can focus on a good story when a horrible power progression system is not blocking it.
I would be interested to see what people would think of a WOD remix with the lost raids attached.
Shadowlands had some pretty good stories, IMO. I think the Jailer was just really badly done and it soured a lot of the lore before it by giving him credit for things that didn’t really need to be expanded further upon.
But the first time I played through the SL story, I thought it was amazing. I thought the quest experience was stellar the first go. But it wasn’t replayable like others for me.
But I really liked the stories of the individual covenants. I really enjoyed everything about Sire Denathrius. I thought the feral Vengeful story was decent. I really liked the concept of the Drust… until Zovaal got directly involved, then it sucked.