“Hey what did you think of The Last Jedi?”
“Didn’t care for it, really.”
“Well how would you have written it?”
“Not exactly my job, was it?”
“Just as I thought, more fake outrage 2020. I don’t believe you really disliked it at all. I bet you loved it!”
That’s you. That’s how you sound.
Yeah it’s bad. They just copied pieces of fantasy films wholesale, tossed it all together, and then ran off.
At this point you can’t just blame Activision. Blizzard’s leadership is clearly fine with phoning it in.
F
lol at this thread.
i am the biggest fangirl of them all and i thought it was awful. just sayin’.
The fact people can praise any of the writing or presentation here is absolutely baffling. Even Dragon Soul was better. How about you don’t finally introduce your main expansion villain in the same patch he gets killed in? How about not ending it with a big anime beam? How about doing more than running circles around him while fighting an add and killing tentacles? How about literally ANYTHING other than what we got? Ny’alotha should have been a zone at the very least. We needed at least two patches of N’zoth corrupting everything openly. He was more threatening in Cataclysm for Christ’s sake, and we didn’t even know his name until Dragon Soul. Then poof, laser and he’s gone. Nothing else. At least Antorus ended with a complete zone change, removal of Argus from the sky, and a cool dramatic cutscene.
we went from legions ending cinematic to this one. they spent so much more money on soyfang being SAD than they did at the most important cut scene this expansion. gg.
I’m not sure this is fair.
I have seen plenty of suggestions such as that there should have been a tie in to shadowlands, there should have been reactions or dialogue between major lore characters who were present to give closure, there should have been flashes to major lore characters in other parts of the world watching the corruption lift to show how vast it was and how our success impacted others, there should have been some sort of hint towards whats going on with sylvannas and nathanos as that story is still hopping… maybe we see them or maybe we just see people discussing them… there also should have been something at least said if not done about the giant sword STILL sticking out of poor Azeroth… need I go on?
Expansion ending cinematics up until now have always shown how every exit is but an entrance to somewhere else. We always get a taste or at least a hint at what’s next and we certainly got to see not just what happened but how the lore characters feel about it. This is important. Without character progression a story is absolutely nothing.
So my question is: Is there going to be an extra cinematic after N’Zoth’s defeat in mythic? I thought I read awhile ago that there was a data mined video but it was encrypted so no one could get the files? Just an actual question.
This is a decent suggestion… but with one MAJOR problem.
Fixing it requires rewriting huge chunks of WoW’s storyline from the ground up.
Pacing is definitely a major issue with the whole N’zoth storyline, as it is so blatantly obvious that it was rushed… pretty much resulting in an ending that isn’t just underwhelming and disappointing, but borderline plagiarizing off of the LotR conclusion. That last cinematic crossed the line from mere “homage” and “inspiration”, imitating the source material so eerily closely that it raises questions.
Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent more time and money on the lawyers to double-check it didn’t just barely go over the line for copyright infringement.
Now then, I don’t quite have the time to go over EVERYTHING that would need to be changed to satisfy me for how BfA played out (the problems are too extensive to limit the corrections to JUST the latest patch).
But what I can do is offer a comparison.
Here’s the combination of the laser and “finale” cutscenes from Ny’alotha:
Even in the context of JUST this cutscene… they should have ended it with the laser cutscene and have N’zoth explode. Just have the player character being convenient thrown by the portal to the Chamber of the Heart. That’s it, and we have a better ending for LESS effort; there was no need to see Ny’alotha crumbling and being engulfed by the light in a cinematic.
But here’s the counterpoint – Shadowbringers
A 50+ minute compilation of the ending cutscenes from FFXIV’s latest expansion… but arguably necessary to giving what happens some context. It has three sections:
… might seem over-the-top in comparison, but there is a LOT of storyline to digest in that game. Heck, I have to wonder if I’m actually leaving too much information out to provide sufficient context to what’s going on.
But if you want to focus EXCLUSIVELY on the post-final-boss cutscene… I conveniently found that one as well:
… hoping that spoiler tag above is enough, because that snapshot from the second video is actually a pretty big spoiler all by itself.
Either way, I think they actually did a better job of the “kill final boss with super laser” than with what WoW did with N’zoth. The follow-up is also considerably better, letting a tragic villain get a chance to essentially say “goodbye” is far more poignant than an underwhelming “location is crumbles and is engulfed by light” cinematic.
Back to WoW… the issue here is that regardless of how much anyone tries to deny it, FFXIV is one of the main competitors to WoW in the MMORPG genre. Not the only one, but easily one of the more prominent challengers.
There is no shortage of players who play both games concurrently… and those who do are going to come into this game expecting something better than the ending of BfA, which is lousy even by WoW’s standards.
It’s difficult to look at one game without drawing SOME comparison to the other… and when it comes to the storytelling in BfA, WoW is downright abyssmal compared for anyone who has played through Shadowbringers.
It’s arguably not fair to compare WoW to a franchise which is known for its storytelling… but BfA actually started out feeling like they actually could pull off something half-decent. How badly it turned out isn’t just a slap in the face, it’s practically a betrayal of the promises that was shown beforehand.
Depends on how you look at “the story.” Do you mean as a single game narrative since 2004? Do you mean per expansion? I tend to view it as “per expansion” because those are like the individual books in a series. Imagine if Harry Potter used the entirety of Chamber of Secrets to set up Prisoner of Azkaban. Instead of telling its own story, it is just preparing us for the story that comes later. Which is all BfA managed to do in setting up Shadowlands.
Wrath told its own story, then led in to Cata at the end with Ruby Sanctum. MoP told it’s own story and then led into WoD with War Crimes. Legion told its own story and led in to BfA with Azerite.
It is obvious now that BfA was designed as the foundation for Shadowlands from the start. Vol’jin quest that went nowhere. Bwonsamdi’s mysterious and terrifying “boss” who we learned nothing about. Sylvanas striking tons of off-screen deals with shadowy death figures and completely betraying everybody for unknown reasons. Even N’zoth has nothing directly to do with Shadowlands. Death and the Void are different realms in Warcraft.
No expansion has undercut its own themes like BfA has for the sake of setting up the next chapter, and that is the root cause of why people dislike the narrative so strongly.
If the cut-scene waa going to have the player character in it, it had to be in-game and not pre-rendered. What else should they have done, had a couple million people submit screenshots of their main for the art department to spend the rest of 5 lifetimes animating them??
Aside from that, this is episodic storytelling. This isn’t The Wire or Breaking Bad. Everything that happens is there to lead into what happens next. Anyone looking for a grand, sensical story arc in this game needs to be on medication.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FwgwvHzLWjk/maxresdefault.jpg
Sounds familiar.
as always a legend in your own mind…
Of course, and all of BFA was the setup, the ending is the punchline.
And why shouldn’t I?
Can you give me any evidence that speaks to the contrary? Do you have insider information that proves that Blizzard Entertainment is taking marching orders from Activision?
Time in the Shadowlands probably moves differently than time in the mortal world.
One of three things are going to happen:
We come out of the Shadowlands and the entire world is revamped and new, setting the stage for what is the new era of World of Warcraft.
We come out of the Shadowlands and the entire world is a void hell, and N’Zoth (or part of him) didn’t actually die.
Now that the barrier between the Shadowlands and the mortal world has been lifted, enemy forces that were likely not able to pierce that veil or enter that realm (Old Gods, Burning Legion, etc…) start creeping their way into the Shadowlands and start doing some weird things to it.
I think “2” is the most likely. The stories have foreshadowed for awhile now that Azeroth is dying, and the only thing really stopping that from happening are the champions. Take the champions away, and you’re setting the stage for anything and everything to go wrong.
We need to stop giving the devs a pass on bad decisions by blaming Activision. It’s like blaming the devil for someone’s bad behavior.
Queue the ‘Is this an out of season April Fools joke’ guy from the Diablo Immortal Blizcon…
Imagine wasting your time arguing with corporate bootli- I mean, MVPs.