oh look another OP that isn’t anything other than “hurrrrrr youtube”
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Why are you so salty all the time?
I mean I can tell you the story is a refried turd without youtube.
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Cataclysm is the perfect example of Good Schlock.
Time Traveling after Murozond with Nozdormu’s help. Deathwing being summoned from the dark below like a balrog, cultists sweeping the entire planet.
It’s cheesy. But I love it.
Shadowlands just feels entirely unrelated, and it has generated exactly Zero Hype.
(Addendum: I actually liked when the runecarver was revealed to be the primus. That was cool)
Still waiting for a rundown on why specifically the writing is bad. I mean, I’m probably inclined to agree, but I’m not watching someone’s video to get the salient points that are being discussed in this instance.
Yeah, it’s like cosmic Marvel, without Squirrel Girl being a part of it to make it palatable (I like the “city-level” superhero things.). I remember hearing about Shadowlands through a leak or something and going, “Uhh, really? I thought dead people just went to some dumping ground like D&D’s Neutral Evil plane. Well, no, that little eredar girl went to the Light. And Ysera became a Dragonheart reference!”. Then, umm, I also remember watching the cinematic and going, “This is weird… oh, **** that’s disgusting. Hey, why did she do that? Jeez, girlfriend needs therapy.”. Now, I’m just like,“Oh, WoW’s at it again. CARRY ON, DEAR FRIEND. Carry on.”.
Here’s the main issues, I’m going to avoid mentioning the problems inherent to a story about visiting the afterlife, since IMO that’s separate from the problems core to the story:
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The Jailer is a massive dead-weight on the story. He’s completely lacking in personality, and his goals were obfuscated by the writers for the entire expansion only to be revealed that he just wants to rule the universe. Now, a simple villain can work (and WoW has historically made those work pretty well), but they need a certain charisma/personality to them that makes then fun to watch and engage with. Oddly enough, another Shadowlands villain, Denathrius, got this right, and is fairly well-liked by the community as far as I’m aware. It doesn’t help that the writers tried to prop him up by tying him to previous story arcs, which also has the side effect of cheapening those stories. I know calling him boring is beating a dead horse, but that’s really the core issue here: bland design, empty motivations, a super generic voice (when you can actually understand what he’s saying) with the same filter every other wow villain has, boring plan, there’s just nothing going for him, and he’s the most important figure in the story at this point and that’s a huge issue, since he drags everyone else down with him. Speaking of…
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Everyone, player character included, have become completely braindead to make The Jailer look threatening. We literally take a sigil directly into the chamber of his most important prisoner. I’m sure you could make a 2 hour long video of every time a character does some extremely stupid for the sake of the plot at this point.
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Sylvanas is a giant black hole of contrivances, contradictions, and writer favoritism. Okay, so her whole thing is that she values free will above all else, and sees the cycle of life and death as the ultimate violation of that free will, so she wants to remake the system. But for some reason, she’s allying herself with some named THE JAILER, who rules a realm of eternal torment, and whose main aesthetic is CHAINS AND CAGES. Then she’s somehow surprised when THE JAILER reveals that he wants to JAIL everyone, but she’s also supposed to be this genius plotter who was steering us towards the Shadowlands for the past 3 expansions. There’s also the fact the she is irredeemably, genocidally evil, yet we’re still supposed to see her as sympathetic, and the whole “I will never serve” scene as the start of a redemption arc for a character who deserves to be immediately executed after giving us the information we need.
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Literally anything involving Night Elves since the start of BFA. It’s all bad, but I’m sure someone more invested in the Alliance side of things could give you a more in depth explanation. Like, where the hell is Malfurion? That’s your wife, dude, gonna interact with her story at all? Why does no one other than Tyrande seem to care that a genocide just happened?
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The relegation of major plot points and stories to novels which most people won’t read or even know about.
Those last two aren’t Shadowlands specific, but play into a lot of its problems. There’s a lot more I haven’t mentioned here, but IMO these are the biggest issue, especially the stuff about The Jailer and Sylvanas.
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I feel like the men of the story are just kind of being cut out to take a back seat to the women. Like where is thrall’s dad? Why is only his mom there? Why can’t we have both?
Even on one of the loading screens where it has three bad guys and three good guys. The entire good side is women and the entire bad side is men. It’s just a loading screen, but thats weird, right? Anyone else think this is all a little weird?
and I am not against women taking important rolls. I like the women of the story. Jaina is cool, Draka is cool, even Sylvannas I have ties to going back to my teenage years so I like her despite her god awful writing. I just can’t help but feel like there is some sort of subliminal message that men are bad and need to be written out of the story, and women are super cool. I feel that way when I watch a lot of media. Men are always these intolerable, often malevolent, idiots, and the women are these all-knowing, oddly insecure, super heroes who get to scold the men.
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Yeah, I’d say that I generally agree with most of this. The dumb-ification of characters for the sake of Warcraft’s story is unfortunately nothing new, way too many plots over time have relied on misunderstandings and “secrets” that would have taken exactly one person saying one sentence to clarify things. In trying to go for big surprise cinematic (Marvel-style) “gotcha” moments they’ve left the motivations of characters like Sylvanas and the Jailer completely unexplored, which just makes them look stupid and oblivious.
Whoever is writing the plot is writing it backwards, from the top down, having a set of events that they want to have happen and then shoehorning sockpuppet NPCs into saying the lines that they want to hear instead of having a plot that is organically built up from the personalities, histories and motivations of the characters, but I’ve had a lot to say about that previously.
The only part that I’d generally disagree with is that it’s weird that the other races aren’t specifically incensed about the burning of Teldrassil. In the history of the Warcraft universe, just about every race has had a devastating event. Their leaders are all generally busy harboring their own grievances and agendas, and the rank and file are like, “Oh wow, you guys had your capital burned, that’s rough. Super tragic. Have you heard of the Path of Glory? Yeah, nasty stuff. Welcome to the Depopulation Event Club.”
I’d say that it’s maybe one of the only realistic bits about the plot, that Tyrande would feel responsible for her people to the point that she made her whole life about vengeance for a while but that it’s just kind of a Tuesday for everyone else.
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You do literally nothing but shill for Blizz lmao. I’ve seen you in 2 or 3 threads now. HARDCORE shilling for them.
Patch lasts 7-8 months? Np
Awful communication with the player base? Oh well, no one is perfect 
Actually the worst lore since basically ever? It isn’t for everyone, the lore is good!
You’re actually, legitimately, truly, pathetic
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This I agree with, but the motivation thing is what bugs me the most. We have no insight into what set him down this path other than some vague line about the pattern being flawed or something. They are saving the reveal (if there even is one) for too long. They should have been giving us breadcrumbs along the way to keep us interested. Why haven’t the eternal ones filled us in on what really went down since they were the ones who were responsible for what happened.
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