Now I’m not usually the type to go all crazy about the design choices of the game be that gameplay or story or whatever, however, wow. Just astonishingly bad writing has really ruined things for me. This idea that Sylvanas had to be “dealt” with going back as far as WotLK torpedoed a great character with a unique backstory and unique story possibilities. Instead we get the fallen hero crap that you’ve done a million times. Awful, just awful. We don’t get Warcraft Lore anymore. Now we get spaceships and planet stabbing dust clouds. Now we get musical Warchief’s because the two factions must attend couples therapy. Now we garbage. The decision makers in matters of lore need to be removed from power and given desks in the unfinished basement until they finally quit to go work on the bad TV shows they are getting inspiration from.
This gonna be good!
Unpopular opinion here.
BFA has better writing than previous expansions (WOD, TBC, etc).
WCIII’s story is cliche and mediocre at best.
Sue me.
Havent you ever watched He-man?
They have the factions reversed. Petty squabbling is a human trait, not something the warcraft 3 horde are about.
What an outrageous accusation! I’ll have you know there is nothing petty about my squabbling.
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Call me an insane optimist, but they are likely done with “musical Warchiefs”, especially since it was because Thrall left the position, and now he will likely be the one to become Warchief again.
Meanwhile, are you ready for Alliance backstabbing and racialist politics?!
It’s very unlikely that will happen.
Finding out her afterlife is utterly hellish, entering a pact with beings of undeath to come back and stay “alive”, and doing all she can to avoid dying again isn’t unique enough for you?
Just because her story has taken her on a different path, out of the role of a faction leader doesn’t mean it’s done. Leaders move around and change sometimes. Fandral became a raid boss. Bolvar stood down when Varian came back. Varian died. Thrall let to hang out with the earthen ring. Garrosh Garroshed all over the place. Magni turned to diamond and dwarves got a council. A story progressing doesn’t mean a story is over.
Apparently people are only happy if a Faction leader sits in their city and does absolutely nothing.
Good writing am I right?
Oh, I hope so. I absolutely, desperately, emphatically hope for conflict within the Alliance. Please let the Horde be the side-kick to the Alliance story for the next three expansions!
The problem is it is mostly based on still having these two fake faction thing going on in the game.
It sounds a lot worse when you phrase it like that.
While the Alliance rips each other apart, and we just get to sit back and say “I told you so!” about all of those Alliance players constantly demanding “interesting” Faction politics? That would be lovely.
I like the current direction of the writing. As they’re taking the lore further into Chronicles lore.
Sure, having everything being mysterious and unknown can be cool, but id rather have a name and face to the things i’m dealing with. Chronicles did that.
I think a lot of the problem is the two faction system. You look at other games that don’t have two factions and they don’t have the problems with story that WoW does. Because they are allowed to focus on one cohesive narrative.
Having to write the story from two different angles and always having to have some sort of conflict between the two factions really limits what sort of story you can tell. In FF14 or GW2 for example you are a singular hero that works with a group of NPCs to defeat the villain so they can focus on telling that story.
You just can’t do that with WoW. In WoW they have to tell two different stories told from two wildly different perspectives and include a bunch of stuff that really doesn’t have anything to do with the story they are trying to tell. And on top of that they have to ballance the two stories in such a way that one side doesn’t feel like they are getting a story that is poorer quantity than the other side and it all just leads to a flustercluck of bad restrictions and poor choices.
This is one of the reasons putting the factions in the background so they are no longer a driving point of the game can only help the game. Look at Legion. They did just that, they basically took the factions out of the story and they were able to tell one overall narrative and it worked.
Going forward they could greatly improve their ability to tell stories if they removed the factions from the main focus of the game. Let us as players and adventurers join together to beat the big bad. Keep the factions to small background stories that are just fun fluff that doesn’t affect the main storyline the same way the class order hall stories had no real effect on the overall Legion story.
While strong writing has never really been Blizz’ strong suit… they’ve generally been competent enough to figure out a halfway decent and entertaining plot.
Keep in mind, it’s often a “BIG DUMB PLOT!” built around saving the world from a supernatural existential threat… but an entertaining big dumb plot just the same.
But lately, things have just really gone off into the deep end and just gotten plain bad. Almost as if all the writing competence went into the emotional aspects of Saurfang’s largely out-of-game character arc (looking back at the actual events, not counting the character moments, it doesn’t do that great)… while everything else decided to go off a cliff.
I can see the point there with the difficulty of managing multiple story arcs… but they managed halfway competent plots for this long, why did they suddenly go this far off into the deep end?
Either that and/or all the attempts at foreshadowing some crazy, secret and complicated plot have just ended up being a giant stinking pile of refuse. Good at building up the hype leading up to something… but terrible on the actual delivery of what they were leading up to.
Nevertheless, there’s no excuse for things to be THIS bad.
That and there’s an unusual trend for the SIDE stories to be significantly stronger and better than the central plotline(s) of the game for some reason.
… oh, and bringing FFXIV into the discussion?
Yeah, that game just makes the weakest of BfA’s plot all the more obvious.
It’s a worse version of MoP’s rebellion story, almost beat for beat.
That’s some serious troll bait right there.
It’s also, sadly, true. TBC, WoD, and Cataclysm, still had worse writing than BfA.