Wacraft, while being a good enough RPG series on it’s own, always rose about the rest due to compelling story and plot. Yes retcons were done between each game but they were in service of progressing the story and the story still remained good. With BC completely changing the Eredar origins (and the Devs needing to be reminded of the contradiction by fans) things started to get worse and after WotLK they just got flat out sloppy.
Neptulon’s status was never resolved and he just reappeared in Legion. This was also the start of the scrapping previewed content
*Pandaria was beautiful but they originally offer the Pandas as an Apil Fool’s “absurd we-would-never-do-that” joke addition so cost them a lot when they were actually added
Garrosh was captured but not killed at the end of MoP, this would begin a long chain of bosses not really dying so they would be used in future stories.
Warlords of Draenor and alternate timelines takes a gigantic leap of logic especially since we killed Archiomone there but he died in our reality too. Meaning Demons transcend reality, but Archimonde was born a mortal on Argus. Massive chunks of content for WoD was scrapped and the expansion ended after a patch and a half with no acknowledgment of it’s abysmal failures.
With Legion we were told Illidan meant to be the savior of Azeroth even though in BC some other Naaru (pinnacles of light and goodness) sent us off to kill him because he was bad.
*Legion is also when Chris Metzen left as the head of lore/story and was replaced by a film exec from Sony with no experience with video games
BfA started with the Horde burning Teldrasil, unprovoked and based on the in-game cut-scene, on whim by Sylvanas to spite one random stubborn Night Elf. Despite the Nightborne having just been saved by the combined Alliance/Horde spearheaded by Tyrande and Lor’themar, the Nightborne stay loyal to Sylvanas. Likewise Baine keeps the Tauren with Sylvanas despite his freindships with Jaina/Anduin and having previously overthrown Garrosh for warmongering. The same for the Trolls staying with Sylvanas.
Shadowlands literally re-wrote the cosmic rules of WoW. Three books were sold by Blizzard. Three books they printed and sold as the definitive cosmology. Some things were changed even within these books by the time all were released. Now we are told “nope” because those books were written from the perspective of creations of the titans so here’s some new stuff. But the titans come from world souls and are born and the books cover topics from beforehand.
I have not played FF’s mmo, probably never will, but I have played their RPG’s and I love the stories they build. It’s not a shock that FF is the mmo that is knocking WoW the hardest right now.
I wish we hadn’t gone off of Azeroth at this point. Like… the outlands worked really well but it felt like an extension of the land we already knew. Shadowlands is just way out there. And I’m not even sure if it’s the way the story is told or what the story consists of that is bad because EVERYTHING is an annoying mustache twirling mystery now.
The character development is not where it used to be. It’s very slow story telling with one mystery after the next and every time BOOM plot twist this happened whoaaaaa … oh Nvmd we won’t know what will actually happen for another 6months. Just a small preview of something that will lead us to the next mystery (aka 3 minutes of cinematics!)
Just so slow and like you said, have to change things to make it work on top of it.
WoW story was never like … super original or amazing imo. But the individual characters and their stories… it was better than we have now.
Illidan story was the worst part of legion for me. But the game play overcame the story, and the zone stories were good. They had a guy that enslaved outland, killed his own mages, and was at the well implosion now barking out orders to us. We aren’t that foolish.
Azshara having the Tidestone in BfA for no reason that is ever explained. It’s supposed to be keeping the seal in the Tomb of Sageras so shouldn’t we have to deal with that being open?
Mal’Ganis’s escape at the end of 9.1 not being explained either, him just saying “I escaped” and “see you soon”.
*The. Giant. Sword. In. Silithus.
Generally agreed on the whole thing, especially that whole Eredar lore thing that I’ll never forgive Metzen for forgetting…
But this point here. Ftom memory, wasn’t that april fools joke actually about Pandaren Express? The ingame food ordering business? Because Pandaren themselves were made caconical long before WoW, and I’m not referring to the reskinned black and white furbolg easter egg, either. Chen Stormstout was in Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne, and even when Vanilla WoW launched they retained his canonical status by having his kegs throughout the Barrens and references to his involvement with the whole Daelin Proudmoore debacle.
Probably one of their best choices to implement the face. Love their racial
Give it a shot just to expand your mmorpg selections. It’s free until a certain level I believe. If you can manage to get past ARR levels you’ll enjoy yourself, but other than that. Get ready for new mmorpg titles on the way in this era. Hopefully WoW can still contend if they do smart choices and that’s extremely wishful thinking.
Warcraft is a gameplay > lore type of game. It’s not ESO or FF14 where you can tell that they spend a lot of effort in ensuring lore consistency and character development (and even then, they do make some flaws).
WoW’s fanbase tends to do the heavy-lifting in terms of the lore. Be it through theories, lore videos, and getting into flame wars. I’d say the advantage that WoW has over it’s competitors is that the story is easier to follow (even if Danuser tries to pretend it’s complicated storytelling). While in FF14 their villains have quite a bit of layers and actually get’s you thinking into their motivations and how far off some people get manipulated (even on the ‘good’ side).
