Simply. Terrible. Writing

Community General Discussion
42

THIS!

Seriously one of my biggest pet peeves in all the fandoms out there – fans complaining about the “objectively bad writing” (never mind that you can’t provide objectively that a story is being told “badly”), and basically ripping apart the writers for daring to break the status quo.

Look, people, just because you didn’t like the story does. not. make it “bad writing.”

I don’t care if you make threads about how you dislike the expansion’s direction. That’s fair, and your opinion! What bothers me is the endless threads of “BFA is objectively bad writing!”

Your enjoyment of the story =/= ‘good/bad’ writing.

1 Like
43

Ok feel better now?

Oh and retail sucks.

44

I would have agreed if MoP hadn’t happened before. It’s almost the same thing, even after people not liking an evil warchief that much.

45

The Zandalar (Bwon’Samdi and Talanji) and Kul’Tiran (Jaina and the Drust) storytelling was so on point. We had so many interesting and unique class order hall quest lines last expansion, not to mention Suramar which was well-told despite the time-gating.

I don’t know why or how they managed to bungle up the faction war narrative, or why they decided instead of doing a faction war they wanted to do MoP again, beat by literal beat copied over and over again. Inquiring minds want to know, and I fear we never will.

7 Likes
46

Yeah, there’s been some genuinely entertaining subplots, side-plots and the like in BFA.

The problem isn’t so much the writing being bad (again, WarCraft never set a high bar for itself in the first place), but the main plot being this poorly paced mess.

Waiting months between highly telegraphed ‘twists’ just isn’t all that compelling. I’d rather go do Drustvar again.

3 Likes
47

Writing can be judged as bad by applying established literary benchmarks. Things like characters being developed fully and uniquely. Things like not plagiarizing others work (you know, like, not making this the 2nd expansion where a Warchief is made into some outrageous villian simply to prop up a war conflict between two long warring states and having the Horde start a rebellion and enlisting the opposition of said war to overthrow said Warchief who is defending a fortified Orgrimmar with a contingent of loyalists). Things like useful foreshadowing that isn’t painfully easy to predict major plot points eons in advance.

5 Likes
48

Lol. I’ll admit, I was making a generalized statement in my original post.

But here’s the thing: while your post is a very excellent example of how to properly analyze a piece of writing (very nicely done, by the way), the majority of fans don’t do this.

And even then, I still disagree with a few of your statements. For one, I don’t think Sylvanas was made into “some outrageous villain;” I definitely think Sylvanas still has an yet-to-be-revealed motivation (of whatever thing she’s serving currently).

Furthermore, I disagree with your statement that the writing was done to “simply… prop up a war conflict.” War was going to happen regardless; Greymane attacked the Forsaken (to get to Sylvanas) in Legion, and the SI:7 agents attacked the goblin miners in Silithus. We can go on and on. So even if we removed Sylvanas and her mysterious master from the formula, we were still going to get a war over Azeroth and her blood (azerite).

But this is a great example of how subjective writing can be! The thing is, I don’t mind YOUR criticism because it’s well-thought out. :slight_smile:

49

What I’ve really disliked is the drip feed of the story and plot. Nothing ever gets fully told. It’s drip, drip, drip, it’s never been clear who we really should be fighting or who the big baddie is.

I want to play WoW and have the game experience be about my character. BfA makes me feel like some lackey for a group of dysfunctional NPC’s. Stop it Blizzard. This isn’t GoT!

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50

AU Azeroth was never in the cards. From what they had said at the Blizzcon reveal and the map they’d shown, the plan was for a raid to liberate Shattrath, bringing the Legion into the plot as a larger factor, ending with a fight against Grom in Hellfire Citadel. Farahlon would have somehow been involved, and Kargath(after losing his other hand to us in the raid) and Cho’gall would have managed to escape from Highmaul as part of a side story.

Medivh’s silhouette appeared in the background of an early version of a cutscene with Gul’dan, but we don’t know if that was just going to be an easter egg or just someone in the Legion screwing with Khadgar and potentially leading to how Gul’dan got to MU Azeroth.

51

Honestly I think this is where BfA in particular went wrong. Like you said they had varying degrees of success with the big dumb plots but for some reason they tried to bring more complexity to the story this time. And that just doesn’t work in a game like WoW for many reasons.

My best guess is because they brought in a novelist to direct the story. I don’t have the hate a lot of people here seem to have for Christie Golden, I think she is a descent pulp fantasy fiction writer. But at the same time novels and episodic long term video games are mediums that are just too different and I don’t think her skills translate that well from one to the other.

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52

Oh wow! An unpopular opinion I actually agree wi-

…crap.

We were so close…

53

the thing is, the point of the lore is to give us raid bosses.

everything else is secondary to that…

and personally i play the game to explore interesting new worlds and also do mythic dungeons so…story is pretty irrelevant to me.

not to say that it totally doesn’t matter…but pretty much only to the extent i get interesting new landmasses or dungeons from it

54

Um, no… The lore is the foundation of constructing everything in the game, the functional design is blueprint by which everything is created by the developers.

One of the major issues here is that the original game was designed by someone who knew how to involve players in an interactive story requiring participation (Metzen). He was replaced by writers who are hired that only know linear story path to script, this is where the tone of the game changed.

I doubt that Activision/Blizzard will re-engage that kind of Epic story that began this game because it came from a fertile mind with a lot of love and labor. Anyone who has ever successfully or even unsuccessfully, created a mythos and universe for a long standing AD&D game knows this.

It is not like writing a story, when you are the only person imagining the world and what happens next. In the end, it makes me appreciate the original cast all that much more and the future looks more dismal all the time… all good things do come to an end.

2 Likes
55

WoD had dumb premise writing, but it was presented well up until a point and the characters had growth and did somewhat sensible things within the context of the expansion itself. Legion was full of nonsensical retcons and a big dumb villain, but most of it was consistent, and again, most every character did sensible things that had an aim.

BFA has absolutely no redeeming qualities. Every situation is contrived as hell, every character has a white-knuckle grip on an idiot ball and/or they’re utterly character assassinated to drag around a non-plot about a rehashed conflict;

Saurfang goes from a proven veteran of war to a mopey suicidal honorless hack because he can’t be bothered to kill the leader of the Elves that have been slaughtering his kin in Ashenvale for 15 years.

Sylvanas goes from a scheming, cunning, and manipulative political game maker to a big dumb idiot that screams and shouts and whines and acts entirely on impulse, then bounces out entirely to be the servant of some new big dumb idiot we know nothing about.

Jaina is presented as a “Warbringer” who has all the motivation anyone would ever need to rip the Horde a new one, but then spends an entire questline fretting and crying and hallucinating over her dead dad. Then she becomes Lord Admiral because why the hell not, it’s not as if she committed Regicide or anything. She then goes on to pillage and raze a lightly-horde affiliated capital in a totally sucker punch move, only to inexplicably feel utterly stricken with grief about it moments afterwards because “I’d be just like Sylvanas” or some other contrived garbage reason. After this the writers completely forget that she has any beef with the Horde, or that she suffered a psychotic break, and turn her into a stripped down WC3 that hugs it out with Thrall and his band of idiots that decide to stage a rebellion against the newly minted “Moron Sylvanas”.

Tyrande gains a power because… Well even the plot doesn’t demand it, since her doing so goes no where and accomplishes nothing anyway. On top of that she would’ve logically done this ten-thousand years ago, or last expansion, or during Cata, or about five times in WC3. Then again she’s constantly written as a complete moron, so maybe this instance is totally in-character.

Nathanos goes from a pragmatic and doggedly solid Ranger General to a middle-man that has no character outside of doing literally everything Sylvanas wants, while also being utterly infatuated with her for no apparent reason other than to be.

And it goes on and on and on. BFA is, from start to finish, the most horridly written piece of fiction I’ve participated in within a Video Game.

5 Likes
56

While this thread should absolutely be in the story boards, I will meet you here in saying that stagnation is better than undesirable progression.

I would take 11 years of nothing than a (profanity)show of a story that demolishes everything that makes the narrative subject what it is.

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57

Whose more disturbed? The people defending this writing or the people expecting more out of a cartoony mmo?

58

i don’t really agree with that sentiment at all.

mmos are in general i think gameplay first games not story first games.

when i think of story centric games i think of singleplayer, offline games for the most part.

for example, if wow is a story centric game, why does so much of what you do revolve around replaying increasingly difficult dungeons and raids (ie going from heroic to mythic etc).

also what’s the point of the open world and repetition of quests and mob killing?

story might be the most important to you personally, but i don’t think it is the most defining characteristic of wow and mmos.

mmos are mostly about 3 things: loot, open worlds, and dungeon crawling, as well as some sort of combat system that varies based on the mmo.

and especially because wow is the most competitive, esports centric type mmo, the game mechanics and loot elements are even more emphasized.

so it’s not that story doesn’t matter, it’s just not what defines wow of the genre for the most part.

you could probably make a better case for ff14 being a story centric game than wow if anything, but that game is pretty different in a lot of ways and even then i wouldn’t say that is entirely true. it’s still really about the world and raids first and foremost

59

Explain why.

They were known exactly for these things previous to WoW.

60

not really, they have always been the pc centric esports and loot centric rpg developer.

yeah starcraft, diablo, and warcraft all had interesting stories. but that doesn’t mean they weren’t kind of over the top and ridiculous.

warcraft writing has always been goofy, starcraft was a bit more serious but neither of those games was first and foremost about the story.

the real point of two of those series was online pvp and the other was basically a loot grinder…first and foremost.

61

Well, this is a casual forum and you may think whatever you like. I’m not about to attempt to throughly explain the development process. Perhaps you might decide to investigate what it takes make a computer game other than playing it.