Because despite me being a long time WOW fan. I am still a bit miffed at all the hate the current story is getting at the moment.
And I don’t know whether it is truly bad writing or just people upset that their favorite thing in the story like a character or a faction are now the bad guys.
Everything went downhill after Cata.
Cata was kind of 50-50 but they really dropped the ball with the Alliance stuff.
The entire leveling experience one big meme on EK while Kalimdor was just depressing.
I don’t mind Garrosh being a warmongrer as long as we hit back as well as we got. But for some reason we never did so it just kept building up and up and now we have BFA with no end in sight.
Objectively? That the story is trying to push peace after a genocide. It’s ridiculous to believe it’s even possible for the factions to bury the hatchet(unless it’s in each others backs) now.
Edit: oh I thought we were talking about this expansion, don’t mind me.
The thing with Cata is that they cut so much content, some of which were actually crucial story elements.
Like for example the quest line in Stormwind with Anduin? That was meant to conclude with you discovering that Benedictus is a Twilight’s Hammer Cultist. And Varian ousts him.
Thats why it kind of went downhill after that.
I really like MoP initially. Really liked its asian culture and references. The land looked absolutely stunning.
Dreanor was cool to. Save Draenei from crazy orcs. Cool concepts… its just the execution and the baggage from previous expansions kills me.
TBC as that was the point the story wasn’t about miscellaneous adventures in the Warcraft universe and more about stopping big evil bad guys, even if said bad guys (looking at you Kael and Illidan) have to suffer massive derailing and asspulls to justify killing them.
I feel like the story has been told out of order, with Legion and BfA in the wrong spots. The flow of tension would have worked far better with us coming together in MoP, only to have friction arise in WoD over the…whatever maguffin we were fighting over in Ashran. Finally, the tension builds until BfA is all out war, only to have the Legion attack and the class halls take over due to the factions being ineffectual and more worried about fighting each other than saving the planet.
The way they’ve structured the story, instead of having an organic ebb and flow of tension, we have the proverbial record scratch.
De-powering the Dragons is when the game lost “it” for me. I know it seems minor but that’s the turning point for me.
Cataclysm, I think, was the turning point of when things started becoming a rollercoaster in quality.
I didn’t particularly care for the cosmic ‘travel to Argus’ angle of Legion, or eliminating the ROOT OF ALL EVIL, but most of Legion wasn’t so bad, if you ignore that the big bad was AU Gul’dan.
I have a lot of bones to pick with BFA, though. The list is massive.
There’s also this really disjointed story if you play as a new character. Nothing makes a lick of sense. You’re swapping Warchiefs, NPCs who’re dead come back, then die, go back to death again… it’s really confusing. There’s a lot of narrative changing they have to do the quests and NPCs to make it a coherent story.
There were some real inconsistencies that make TBC kind of weird, though.
Cataclysm is definitely where the Story started goin’ down hill for me.
i would say cata because that is where the it became more about faction war garbage.
Characters like jaina and thrall became inconsistent,we had random attacks everywhere in an attempt to make it ambigous. so “both sides feel justified”.
thrall went full green jesus mode, and left garrosh in charge despite everyone telling how bad idea that was when many other charactes could have become that neutral figure that we needed.
the start of jaina flip flops between writters who didn’t know what the hell to do with her.
and then the entire plot was about faction war where they needed characters to act out of character.
the death of cairne in a book, magni going in coma. and a confusing mess of storylines all over the place.
ever since we have faction war involved the plot becomes 10 times more stupid. if you want an example:broken shore and dalaran neutrality.
Then we have the culminattion of everything wrong with the story:Teldrassil.
making the horde the villains AGAIN creating even more desire for revenge for alliance players AGAIN.
the lordaeron fiasco, the random attack in dazarlazor and multiple plot holes (hello, derek turned into ash) and random plot points.
Anyone knows how the hell ashvane ended up with azshara?
or how she even got the tidestone?
is such a confused mess without much explanation.
There are some good elements and bad elements in the story.
The bad parts tend to be rehashed from earlier expacs. And overusing old tropes found in pretty much every fantasy story. There is also biased among the writers when it comes to certain characters.
But there is also some excellent (albeit not at all unexpected) story elements, that do make for a good time.
Mostly it’s a matter of perspective depending on the person and how they relate to it.
There’s not exactly a set point where it went “wrong.” There have been good points, and bad points. To name a few of the latter:
I could name more, but I’m tired.
When the writers of BFA decided that their homework was too hard, and asked the writers of MoP if they could copy theirs.
When the rule of cool became the default rather than an addition to the story.
Night Elves having their story destroyed and their fanbase made to feel like crap so that Humans could have an excuse to be the ultimate good guy in the world and always morally just by saving their purple damsels in distress. The current expansion kicked off with Kaldorei Genocide so Humans could have an excuse to go retake Lordaeron.
I want to say right after MoP, with WoD, but like Grandblade said the quality of the story has gone up and down a great many of times.
Like in BC for example, in which a cohesive story was practically non-existent at the time, resulted in wasting many potentially great characters like Kael’thas, Zul’jin, Vashj, Kargath, Illidan, and many others.
Then in Wrath, the story really kicked into gear with events like Wrathgate and following battle for Undercity, the budding characters of Garrosh and Varian, and especially the titular villain himself, Arthas.
Then in Cataclysm, the quality of the story had a noticeable drop as most in here has clearly pointed out.
Then in MoP, it came right back up.
Ever since MoP, however, the quality of the writing has been steadily decreasing with WoD, Legion, and particularly with BfA. Hence why post-MoP is my answer, due to the consistent drop in quality after that expansion.
After the Lich King was dealt with, the WoW storyline was at a crossroad of what to do next. Up until that point, WoW was a continuation of the story that was setup in Warcraft 3.
The Old Gods became heavily integrated into the story, where as before they were mostly backdoor lore and somewhat of an ancient mystery. Now many plots points have been rewritten to where the Old Gods and Void Lords were a fundamental elemental to the Warcraft Universe. Once that happened, everything needed to connected somehow and things began to repeat.
WoW turned into more of a check list of what to do next than a rich and cohesive story being unfolded. The Legion had to be dealt with, each Old God killed, the need to keep the faction tension going somehow.
MoP was a bit of an anomaly since it almost had nothing to do with the main “Warcraft” themes, aside from the faction tension that served as a catalyst which almost could be completely ignored.
Honestly? Started in Vanilla when the nelves even picked a side, the Horde got the Forsaken (who acted like Scourge lite), and Thrall allowed a demon into the Horde (Varimathras). From there things kind of just snowballed into continually poor decisions.
Every time I read something like this it makes my heart hurt.