So I’ve said before that the whole Saurfang thing was a classic example of discrediting a character to make another character look better by comparison.
That’s not very good writing. You don’t just make an established character bad or impotent if you need a character to look cool or good you make THAT character look cool or good and if you need another character to do that, you use one that actually makes sense or make a new one entirely.
Why are professionally paid writers so bad at this? Does Blizzard hire from Fanfiction(.net) and Quizzilla? What is going on?
The part where an honorable character stabbed someone in the back on “accident” disobeyed direct orders and when he had a problem with a leader he didn’t do anything smart about it internally instead he let himself be captured by the enemy where he can’t influence her or the Horde.
Saurfang from Wrath would have kicked Saurfang from BFAs behind from Northrend to Pandaria and back again.
The system of faction vs. faction (and those factions having several subgroups within them whose fans are all primarily interested in their own interests) makes it difficult to write a story without one of those factions or subgroups being portrayed as the bad guys. If they went the third option and just made every enemy a third party (the Legion, the Old Gods, whatever) people would still complain that the faction identity lines are getting blurred. The franchise is also old, really. There’s only so much stuff you can do within the guidelines of such rigid lore and faction identity before you run out of ideas and have to start thinking outside the very limited box. Then again, who knows if they foresaw Warcraft as a franchise lasting such a lengthy amount of time when they first created these systems.
tl;dr Blizz kinda worked themselves into a corner here.
The story seems more like it’s being written for people who never left their teenage emo years behind. Either that or being written BY those same people.
Blizzard’s “professional” writers are the ones working on licensed merchandise.
The actual game’s stories, characters and quests are, and have always been, written by systems developers and code monkeys, and any resemblance to bland recycled filler is entirely intentional.
The faction wars have, in my personal opinion, seemed to serve more as a stepping stone towards ‘larger’ threats.
The Old God writing, Titans, demons- nearly everything else has been the step ‘up.’ Faction conflict seems more like a hamfisted way of getting us there, for the real meat of the story.
Mind you, this is my personal opinion. All the side quests, everything about Azshara, N’Zoth- I’ve loved all the writing this expansion except for the faction war. Because it just seems so… Uncared for. Like it doesn’t really matter, because end of the day? As long as this is an MMO, neither side is really going to ‘win.’
We’re just going to keep resetting and grabbing the idiot button every expansion until it ends.
I should add: he saw himself as friendzoned pretty much up until his “YOU CHOSE RIGHT” message to Tyrande at the end of Legion, I’m using the term ironically.
I really don’t understand the constant hate about the BfA story. It’s pretty typical by Blizzard story standards. The Warcraft games don’t have a much higher quality of storytelling than BfA. And the WoW story has been progressing at a much faster pace since Legion.
It looks like people are expecting to be emotionally captivated by a WoW story, but that’s just not something Blizzard does. It would take hours of cutscenes throughout the game to build the characters enough for that to work, and Blizzard doesn’t seem to like having long cutscenes in their games.