Hey man,
Thank you so much for all this and I hope your voice and ours is finally heard because many of us are at our breaking point.
I did my best to sum up all my issues and feelings into as small as post as I could. I am sure there might be some rewording that is necessary so its more palatable for the developers to see but after almost 16 years of wow and consuming this story… this is as nice as I can put it.
I used Night Elves in particular as my example but this logic can be applied to any other race or plot that Blizzard writing team is currently tackling.
It got pretty long and I apologize for that.
Another problem about these books is the “unreliable narrator” perspective.
They try to use this as an explanation as to why we are getting conflicting information… I am sorry but this is simply unacceptable.
You can have characters in a book that are unreliable narrators who can cause conflict and drama in the story… but making an entire book based off of an unreliable narrator is a waste of my time and money.
Why should I spend my hard earned money on something that turns out to be misleading information or filler content I will never see in the game?
If I read a whole book about how “Night Elves conquered all of Ashenvale” and when we get an update in the game its the same old thing before this great victory? This touches on an issue that I will bring up later.
But essentially, if you are putting out a book then make sure you show it in game and treat it as actual canon truth. I have been playing wow since 2004. I still have Rise of the Horde and War of the Ancients books but I stopped buying these books because of so many inconsistencies. It just wasn’t worth the money and my time anymore.
I also wanted to tackle another issue regarding books.
There are some writers who do very poor world building. For example, describing the travel time between one continent to the next as a trip that only took a week to accomplish on windblown ship! Or they describe towns as exactly as they are in game.
Like 1 inn and 3 houses. That isn’t a town! it isn’t even in a hamlet.
In the game due to technical reasons a coastal town in Auberdine looks like this:
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/56/45/4d/56454d1ba56cf8171ded833952efe322.jpg
But maybe in the book we can describe its true size… or is wow really a miniature sized world?
Perhaps Auberdine in reality looks like something like this:
https://twitter.com/TheArtWarcraft/status/1325876157871316998/photo/1
Afterall why not? You are writing a book! You are not bound by game engine limitations!
I have a lot of things to say about this but I will try to keep it short and to the point.
We can write a whole book about how out of touch Blizzard is… maybe they are not but that is how the writers and developers come across when they finally give an interview to share their thoughts.
I will only speak on behalf of the Alliance. When Blizzard says in an interview that they needed Teldrassil to give a reason for the Alliance to fight the Horde do they not realize how much of bad blood since MoP Alliance players have been bottling up?
Gilneas, Hillsbrad, southshore, Ashenvale, Stonetalon… Frigging Theramore! We have been wanting to spank the Horde for their misdeeds for years! Teldrassil was NOT necessary.
And to top it off since Teldrassil we have had little crumbs over the years. That do not satisfy the big ball of disappointment that Teldrassil caused. And when a developper tells us Tides of Vengeance was Tyrande’s revenge in BFA it just blows our collective minds from a fan perspective.
Yes yes there are interviews and hints about the story not being over, and more is coming but look. Its been how many years since Teldrassil? Has there been any vengeance? No. Now we are moving towards Renewal and we have seemingly skipped over justice.
I understand game development limits and the story is not over but come on. Its been YEARS. Look if this were a TV show… like Arcane! I know that within 1 month I will have the entire story told to me. So any plot teasing and resolution I only have to wait a week for.
But years? By that point all I have is frustration or I just don’t care anymore.
If Blizzard wants to satisfy players AND still tell us stories that take years to resolve then you need to have a big satisfactory content to partially resolve it so we can wait and see for the next piece.
For example The Horde burned Teldrassil and in Tides of Vengeance Tyrande killed a few mobs, we lost some Night Elves to being raised by forsaken for very hard to believe reasons and they lost a Valkyr (that has now come back)
The only explanations at the time we had for all these things were NPCs telling us “I can’t explain why I joined the Horde but later” and “This was a huge loss for the Forsaken and Sylvanas”
Does this really satisfy anyone? Why didn’t we see a big cinematic… it could have been in-game! and we could see some awesome fight animations of Tyrande killing the Valkyr, Nathanos AND stopping the raising of these Night Elf undead.
Because in the end… Nathanos surviving until Shadowlands wasn’t really that necessary. He was completely replaceable by another character. The raised Night Elves were also completely unnecessary! So why put Night Elf fans through such unsatisfactory content if you didn’t have to?
If the argument is “we didn’t have the money/resources” then thats not good enough. We had enough money to make all those cinematics for Saurfang… so why not the prime victims? They need something too.
And this goes to the drip feed content that the Night Elves have been getting. The Night Warrior doesn’t really accomplish much compared to all the hype she got from Blizzard. Her greatest accomplishment seems to be she survived a fight against Sylvanas before that ended in failure as well.
It honestly feels like we are playing World of SylvanasCraft. Its not a nice feeling and it is pushing people away.
My final thought in all this would be… if you are not prepared to adequately take care of the consequences of the story elements you introduce then don’t do it. Yeah burning of Teldrassil was a big moment but the fallout and the continued unresolved issues was definitely NOT worth it.
For example, we are now being told by Sylvanas and Horde characters in the books that the Horde is unforgivable. There is justice coming. There are consequences we must face.
Alright all that sounds great but is Blizzard prepared to show it? If the Horde is so unforgivable, why are the Horde druids back in Cenarion Circle and Hyjal in the book? Why does it seem nothing has changed? How could these words not be interpreted any other way other than lip service to acknowledge an issue but never resolve it?
How could we possibly think its alright for the entire Horde be complicit in burning kids alive but in the next patch everyone is back together again in whatever neutral organization we need to join to fight the next big bad like nothing happened?
In my opinion this situation is the perfect time to introduce the Horde’s own version of Cenarion Circle… or at least make some real changes to explain all this hostility and bad blood between the factions… Or honestly find a real way to have the Horde answer for these crimes so we can move past it.
We are exactly where we were back in MoP except a hundred times worse and it doesn’t seem like the writing team cares at all. Even when they say otherwise in the character dialogue or interviews…
They have to SHOW it. IN THE GAME! Not in some book that gets obselete in one patch. But real game changes that does not negatively impact players.
If Blizzard wants to keep wow around… its time they start spending real money in finally making some real game world changes.