I think with everything being slower in the older versions of the game, we just remember it more.
The story and story telling in War Within is head and shoulders above Classic. But Classic’s focus was on the world and making the player feel like a small but increasingly important part of it. Which… honestly is a feeling I miss. It wasn’t great storytelling though, it was a difference in game design intent.
WoW writing isn’t very great in general. As a general rule I stand by the idea that the WoW Team can’t write for crap.
BUT that mostly applies to the grander overarching storylines. It still has some strong moments, particularly with side quests (someone already mentioned the Earthen shut down process thing, as far as TWW goes).
I fully agree with the first comment. People remember some of the earlier side stuff (Pamela, Mistmantle, Ladimore, etc) because the game back then WAS the leveling (see: questing) journey. You weren’t rushing through to spam dungeons at 60 or whatever. You were just playing the game. So you cared more about the stops along the way.
At some point players’ focused shifted HARD into endgame. It became the norm to click through everything as fast as possible and speedrun to level cap to play endgame content. Addons to auto-accept quests, auto-turn in, auto-skip dialogue and cutscenes. Later on to route them to the fastest path to cap & hide talking heads.
People don’t care anymore. Obviously there will always be some percentage that takes their time and reads through everything. But the average player doesn’t seem to play that way anymore, so of course the actually good stories are going to get rushed through and forgotten, if they even get seen at all.
The amount of gaslighting in this thread is wild lol.
This is why Blizzard gets away with the ‘quality’ they put out. Y’all fall head over heels to defend it.
Which team are we talking about? There’s been like three or four complete overhauls over the past 20 years.
Because they’re not hiring writers.
True. He could have launched lightening to detonate the barrels. Or have someone shooting magic at them. Alleria was there. She is a ranger and for all intent and purposes have hunter abilities. She could had shot an exploding arrow at those barrels.
Also, nowadays it’s quite reasonable to suspect AI. Then they don’t even need to pass it off to an intern.
That said I think it’s a bit unfair that we use interns as short hand for “giving someone clueless a job to do instead of hiring a professional.” My friend is a very good and passionate amateur writer, and were he an intern at ActiBlizz I’m confident he could put together a better story than what we’ve been getting.
My biggest issue is that with the slop they throw out (ai or not), they have certain things with just enough boxes checked that people will defend bad writing and attack anyone critical of it. I still scream about how much they stole an interesting story from Faerin. When I point it out, I’m attacked by people who will cry varying ‘ist’ claims on me when it couldn’t be farther from the truth.
She’s missing an arm, she’s in an area ravaged by nightmare creatures, she wields the light. Why the heck weren’t we given a change from an armor bound paladin to instead a quick paced fencer that uses the light to increase her speed literally rushing through creatures to separate her from the rest of every single other paladin? Why does she have the personality of a basic disney princess and not of one who is crumbling at the corners trying to keep it together for those around her? Why was her arm lost in an airship accident and not literally in front of us where we watch her grab a weapon from the lost limb to keep fighting? They robbed her of anything interesting, they robbed her of depth, and they robbed her of being memorable.
Yeah, no. I’ve played WoW since 2004 and the story has always been deep as a puddle and the writing was always bad. You were more invested because you were younger and because it was new. And that’s it.
Praising any version of WoW for the writing is like saying McDonald’s makes good burgers. I like eating there every now and then. But what they are making can barely be called a burger. Just as WoW’s writing can barely be called a story.
I have issues with the writing in modern day but I legitimately think the writing is a lot better than it used to be. Especially since the Cata to WoD days.
To be fair here in Australia their burgers are great. My friend, who’s been to the US, confirmed for me that US McDonald’s is pig slop by comparison (and even without comparison).
… do you have any idea how mustache twirling Lich King was in game? Or Deathwing even in his trailer?
Like bruh, this game ALWAYS had edgy cringe villains. Hell, Illidan is literally all edge with his “You are not prepared” schtick
Every major “bad guy” of WoW has been like this.
even back in Cata people were pulling rooms of mobs. Hell, I did it all the time with classes that had aoe. I never single-pulled if my class let me.
That is not a good thing. The one GLARING flaw is how long it takes to get back to your body. No one “paid more attention” or “tried harder”. It was “well great, now my time is being wasted because of bs lag”
I think this has quite a bit to do with it, too.
I also wish we they hadn’t gone end of the world, extinction level type bosses and tropes. It really makes seeing your character getting chunked by seagulls and trash mobs at the beginning of an expansion completely unbelievable.
It’s poor story writing that completely clashes with what you do in-game, and doesn’t help immersion in the slightest.
Nah. It’s more than that. It’s the world itself and how long it took to clear content. When the world is substantially more vast relative to the player and the lore is substantially less filled out and explained, people latch onto the stories and make connections them far easier.
Vanilla questlines were almost always preceeded by a long journey just to get to the NPC, which serves as a natural build up in tension when coming to a new area.
In modern wow, you blow through everything so fast there’s no time to get attatched to a random quest giver. Only characters who stick around for an entire expansion leave a mark nowadays.
Oh, and there’s really no denying that vanilla through wrath had a tone that was substantially less cartoony overall. Sure, there were a few questlines with characters like Linken or Chromie that are exceptions, but in modern expansions, half the characters are voiced and sound outright cartoonish.
Seriously, how many of the Earthen characters DON’T sound like a joke? The council members and… yeah.
Adding to this, mundain tasks in vanilla had serious reasons for doing them. So even if you were collecting seven bear asses, it was to feed a town on the frontier of your race’s territory or some other reasonable explanation. Half the quests nowadays read like busywork even when you read the quest text.
You’re right. It’s not even a wide video game problem.
It’s a perspective problem.
The only new sin WoW is guilty of in writing is escalation, and it’s demanded by the medium.
Is it? I don’t think the players really demand escalation. Dragonflight certainly wasn’t an escalation of what WoW players have faced before. And my issues with Dragonflight weren’t that it wasn’t a world ending threat, its that the writing was “Pixar from wish.”
And TWW is still stuck in that tonal quagmire.
Modern Gaming’s biggest issue when it comes to writing is that half of everything feels like a mediocre 2010s webcomic in terms of writing. When you recognize the style, you realize its EVERYWHERE. I’m willing to bet most game writers out of the west nowadays had a crappy webcomic at some point just because of how ubiquitous the tropes are nowadays.
Yes. The players aren’t the medium.
This is a progressive RPG, the player (the perspective of the story) is constantly improving in power.
Because the people that want to make games aren’t the ones that can write the same type of stories. The people who wrote all the ones you mentioned grew up in a different world than writers today.
Nowadays every story needs to be all dark gritty where no one is “good” but everyone is morally grey. It’s just how the environment is now 
Look at other studios, like Playstation for example. Almost all their narratives now tend to have the same tone. 12 years ago, you were playing as a sack creature fighting against an evil vacuum cleaner that was sucking up all creativity and imagination. Modern audiences aren’t going to like that, and children are more interested in games like fortnite
Not really. That was true maybe from vanilla through wrath. But after that power feels at best constant but, being honest, is mostly just a treadmill where we grind loot to keep feeling as strong as we did during the end of Wrath. Legion might have been the strongest point for the player character, canonically, but that was only due to artifacts. Everything after that has been back to the treadmill.
And that’s not even getting into the level squish and chromie time that makes it to where our level number doesn’t mean anything and new characters might not have even participated in the old wars.
This is how I feel when people defend the writing of vanilla, tbc, wotlk, etc.