Way back in BC when they decided to loot pinata Lady Vashj, Prince Kael’thas, and Illidan.
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If they could give Illidan his body back and make him a good boi all along, i see no reason why the DHs couldn’t have stumbled into a twisting nether prison where the real Kael’thas (beard to the floor and in rags) was locked in and reveal the BC kael was a dreadlord or whatever the call.
As for Vashj… idk. The Ebon Blade can always give old characters the dk makeover, worked for sally. In fact, if it was up to me i’d just ressed Anduin Lothar, Aegwynn, Cordana, and a few more.
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It went wrong the moment that made Garrosh WoW-Hitler.
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There are things very bad structurally in WoW and in how fiction is produced in highly advanced financial imperialist market driven economies bro. That’s where this stuff went wrong.
It is designed to keep their shareholders happy and to present ideas which are favorable to the hegemonic ideologies bro. So it’s streamlined and its written by revolving door crews of peeps. You’re never going to be able to rebel with your dollar or nothing like that either cause a million of you are already hooked enough to keep it profitable aside from the fact you got nowhere else to go. You were hooked when you were of developmental age. You are also swamped with advertisement to stimulate continued demand for something you have nostalgia/pleasant memories with. The only departments that ever really excel is the art because I mean the products gotta at least look shiny for us suckers.
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I don’t think you can really apply that broad of a statement since the story has really been up and down.
Vanilla didn’t really have a unifying story.
BC was a mess because they didn’t think WoW would last that long and threw every big name NPC into it.
Wrath was mostly good I think. Though they didn’t really take many risks either. Other than Ulduar it was very straightforward. Imo a lot of the reason Wrath’s story is so fondly remembered is I think that was the last xpac where everyone basically went in blind. And especially with the stunning new cinematics.
The niche of players viewing these forums are no longer the players that will stumble upon a major event and be awed by it. We would be going “well that was going to happen” and be awed by the visuals of it but ya it was seen coming.
And I think Wrath was the last one to do it.
Cata had lots of story issues. I believe there’s been a couple well documented ones like the attack on Dalaran being non-canon and Garrosh in Stonetalon. (Which to me personifies Orcish honor). Then there were other plot hole issues like how the Nefferset Tol’vir imprisoned Siamat and it was never mentioned anywhere. The Ozumat capturing Neptulon was 1. Horribly presented (how many even know that happened?) and 2. Never resolved in Cata.
MoP I think flowed well. After getting past the Jack Black jokes the story went pretty well. Criticisms toward how Garrosh acted but that’s about it.
WoD was a disaster with a whole bunch of story cut.
Legion was pretty good. Don’t think there were many complaints there. Ended the Burning Legion more fully than any other enemy and opened up new possibilities with the naaru.
Now in BfA, my personal belief is that this xpac was solely to be about Zandalar and Kul Tiras with the Old Gods as the enemy. But someone at Blizz had them add the faction war in just because it sells. (And boy did it sell). It’s the only explanation I can have for it when it’s theme only really lasted 1 patch and now it seems completely gone back to what they really wanted. It’s been beaten to death why the faction war is a disaster of a primary plot line so I’ll just leave it at that.
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Wrath was the end of the main WC3 stories. The game could have ended there.
As for BFA, things went wrong when they decided to have Teldrassil attacked before UC. This made Horde 100% villains, and Alliance 100% victims. Neither team wants that.
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While I did toy with such an idea during Legion, I personally think the best option now would be Sanylan Kael’thas, who has a story of having to live with what he did while seeking a modicum of redemption helping the soldiers that followed him to Northrend and were lost find their way in the world, while dealing with their curse.
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I’m going to agree with all those who are citing Cata as the downfall. In fact it was after Cata that I left the game for YEARS! Mind you I was playing constantly up until that point. Something was just off.
Also everything Grandblade says especially
I could quote all of it but we all know he’s right anyway.
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There’s no one place they screwed the story. It sucked in Cata (and was utterly unrewarding for the Alliance), was awesome in MoP, the story was neat in WoD until they just… stopped working on it and skipped three story arcs, was really cool in Legion (but utterly unrewarding for the Horde), and now sucks in BFA.
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Cata was certainly where the story started to suffer, not to mention game play suffering due to the simplification of the game.
MOP was pretty good, they just really mis handled 5.3 alliance side and 5.4 was a poor ending with no real story development about what happen at the end of the war.
Legion was good, the focus on Class halls was a nice change all though I can appreciate not Ideal for some horde players. The story was nice with some war elements but without dragging the whole story down. Similar to how it was handled in Wrath. The Conclusion was a bit hamfisted and I do feel the Horde could have used Saurfang in a few scenarios to make them feel more invested.
BFA however is just a boring retelling of MOP with a few names changed, they are pushing the narrative to be far to political with the writers ignoring player base and feed us this terrible msg about how war is bad. The faction zones were good however stormsong seemed rushed and unpolished.
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So I have a little horde bias as horde is my main faction but ill try to tackle this from a very fair viewpoint.
So first off, I think this story went wrong right from the git go in bfa having the horde burn the tree.
This brings massive problems for both sides. First, you have many horde players rping themselves out of the situation. Thats bad. That means you over did it. Ask a horde player and they will say either character wasent at the war of thornes and just heard about it or their character was at the back doing something else.
Now for the alliance side, you are left with the problem of how do you exactly give them satisfaction in this story? Seems like many of the allys here wont be truly satisfied short of enslaveing the entire horde. Which cant really happen since this is a 2 faction game.
Now again form the horde side, how can you possibly offer the horde enough ‘redemption’? Thats not the kind of event you can just ‘forget’ about and will taint the horde for years to come.
Also on the horde side, our like only dynamic character, syl is prolly getting the axe this expansion. She went from prolly one of the best written characters in this game to prolly one of the worst. So then the horde only really has static and boring characters left. It may take years to rebuild our narrative. Also feels bad that yet again the alliance will prolly have to step in and help the horde.
Think of it like your arch rival having to come in and help you get your stuff together, all while wagging their finger at you telling you if it happen again ima beat u up.
From the alliance side, this was the perfect oppertunity for them to finally maybe have some conflict within their leadership and blizzard took a hard pass on it.
Just my thoughts.
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I’ve been following the story for a long time (WC3 is where I started) and while I agree with the thread that Cata made a lot of bizarre lore/story-telling choices (kill off Cairne in a book, Thrall messiah etc.), and WoD introduced some absurd elements.
But BfA is really where the story has gone completely off the rails in my opinion. Why are we introducing Wrathion and the Dragon Flights when we haven’t even addressed Bwon-samdi? Talanji’s revenge? The Night Elves revenge (for real this time?) The 15 other unresolved plot points at this time? Wasn’t this a faction pride expansion?
Too many unresolved plot points that take months to get from point A to point A-and-a-half and they’ve tried to shift the story to being more character drama focused, which is fine and dandy and makes for great cinematics, but they’ve chosen to only include a handful of characters (like Jaina who is now overexposed) and it’s just become an incomprehensible mess. Not even WoD was that bad.
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The one thing I don’t get about saying “it started to go down in cata” is that implies BC didn’t ruin characters for a lot of people and was mostly nonsensical.
Personally I view Wrath as the xpac that a coherent, long ranging, story became very important
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I am curious what, if anything, will be revealed after BfA of what went wrong in the story development.
We have a vague idea that in Cata they just had massive writing team issues. In WoD we know there was cut content. (Legion had some but wasn’t relevant in the end).
What about BfA? What happened? The biggest indication something went wrong imo was how they scurried to add in a Sylvanas loyalist option once they saw the fan reaction.
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I would love to get any insight into the dojo, I wish they would do a lore Q&A (an actual Q&A this time). Obviously one of the biggest factors has to be that this is the first full expansion without any input from Chris Metzen. But there has to be more going on. The writing is literally chaotic at this point. Do they think they’re doing a good job?
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World of Warcraft’s story is strongest as per it’s name… when the story is about the World. That is not to say that the story needs to be about the entire world, but instead about the various small stories that weave into the greater narrative about the world. It is one reason why Vanilla was so charming, and why certain parts of the game continue to be high points for people.
The nature of the medium of a story goes a long way to dictating how best to tell a story. A MMO is a very specific type of medium that brings with it a few key elements that really shape how much a story can, or can’t affect us.
The story is often weakest when the stakes are ‘the fate of the world’ because we as players know that the world is not going to be destroyed. There is no risk to a world ending threat because it can do nothing to us. It is no more dangerous than pointing a regular gun at superman it is something that often -has- to happen as part of the narrative, but at no point does it do anything than offer a set piece for the rest of the narrative to play out.
However, when the story focuses on much smaller risks that are distinct from the player character, then real emotional impact can be had. The player may be immune to narrative harm, but characters such as Runas, Riko, and the fate of a small human fishing village are not. These characters can have emotional arcs because we as the audience are ever uncertain to their fate. They could be saved by our heroics, or just as well not be. A town with no flight path and friendly NPCs is often in far greater danger than the world ever will be in as far as we are concerned.
This however stops being the case for certain ‘major’ npcs who we have some expectation that them dying will not be done outside of a major event, or cutscene. You can’t make me worry if Anduin is in trouble, because I know he’s not going to die in some level mid-point in level 90 questing.
The story is worst then when it deviates from stories we can invest in to stories that we can reasonably determine the outcome of ahead of time. Watching Anduin walk around Pandaria isn’t exciting because we know he is safe. However a previously-unknown dwarf is more exciting because we don’t know what will happen to them.
[Edit: And I think WoW classic proves this point nicely]
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Another part of the cataclysm issue was they had underestimated how long it would take to update the old world.
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The rumor I’ve heard, and it is just a rumor so take it with a tuck load of salt, is BfA is essentially two expansion concepts smashed together. One where we finally meet and deal with N’zoth and the naga and another that’s the faction war expansion. With Kul Tiras, Zandalar and plenty of flag waving. So I guess they decided that the naga couldn’t hold an expansion mostly on their own (snake fatigue?) and the faction war was a good enough reason to get us to the new zones in the first place.
But even then there’s a really weird… cheapness to all the faction related content. The war campaigns don’t really feature any mind-blowing cinematics, the voice acting drops in and out at weird times, and the conclusions are indecisive at best and pointless at worst. The Horde spends months getting a macguffin, Alliance steals the macguffin, macguffin is destroyed during the intro to BoD. Hurray?
The only other faction war related content is the warfronts, the other team in island expeditions and I guess the faction incursions. All of which are “bolt on” pieces of content which certainly doesn’t help the war feel all that more present and engaging.
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idk i kinda think the story is more interesting than ever now.
The old god stuff has always been rad as hell and they’re clearly working to keep it consistent and set the framework for future events to avoid more retcons in the future. I mean have you seen that big ol’ cosmic forces map? I can think of a bunch of shows that went on way too long that really would have benefited from some long-term structural story planning like that. It’s great!
Edit: I mean okay yes WoD was real real bad but the expansions immediately before and after were like the best ones ever. It wasn’t a permanent derailing, they got it back on track.
I dont think there is any single point but WoD pushed us into overdrive with terrible story.
Legion also had major issues. The order halls were neat but they took too much of the main story. We should have had a faction story driving the major plot with the order halls being side stories.
So many races have massive grudges with the Legion and only the Draenei got any proper closure.
Where was the Orc story? I know we just finished WoD but the death of Kil’jaeden should have been heavily involved with Orcs. Would it have killed blizz to throw Saurfang and a few dozen Korkron on the Broken Shore or have him helping Illidan and Velen fight Kil’jaeden in Tomb of Sargeras? Where is the vengeance for Vol’jin we were promised? The Horde did nothing after that.
As for BFA the story died the moment they lied about the tree. We were told Sylvanas had good reasons for war and that the tree would by a big mystery. They lied so we could get yet another civil war story to fracture the Horde which destroyed all the good will and faction pride the announcement cinematic had built.
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