Okay, so I’m finally ready to express some of my thoughts on the storytelling in WoW for the past few years, but before I begin I want to bring out some disclaimers!
- Spoilers for the Shadowlands campaign!
- This is a giant wall of text, I’ve added TL;DRs at the end of each segment for those that can’t stand that :>
- These are just my opinions and not objective truths, I might not be able to represent everyone’s views so I encourage everyone to share their own!
- I might use some language that can be considered a little hostile, but in no way do I really want to make the impression that I hate the writers, I respect them and their craft despite my criticism.
- I’m not going to be able to touch on every story beat in WoW, so I will not be critiquing every single detail of the story. I will pull some examples, though.
With that out of the way, let’s begin!
The storytelling in Shadowlands is pretty bad, and the story in Warcraft has been in a relatively bad state for a long time. It has been particularly rough in the last two expansions with Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands both culminating into big, giant disappointments that has had many fans infuriated with both the story, the lore, and the characters involved. Personally, I’m more disappointed and I mostly feel apathy over anger at the story itself, because I have basically been trained to not expect too much over the years. Even when expecting very little, I still end up feeling pretty disappointed.
Edit: changed from “the story in Shadowlands is bad” to “the storytelling in Shadowlands is bad”. More of a correction than anything.
But why exactly is the story in WoW so bad, and is it actually fair to call it bad? It is easy to look at parts of it and point to them as proof of it being bad, but these are really just smaller pieces of a larger puzzle. Often we can also spot the bad parts, but inaccurately describe why they are bad, and sometimes we criticise the story in bad faith by assuming the worst and not giving the writing a chance to begin with. I’ve been guilty of this myself, on numerous occasions. I wanted to try to come at this from a fresh angle, so I went back to replay some of the old content and rewatched some old cinematics - all so I can be as constructive as I can be now that I have this platform here on the council, and hope that my voice, and thus the voice of everyone else who are displeased with the story, will be heard and taken into account.
Edit: added the question, “is it fair to call the story bad?” because I do praise the story further down in the article. See conclusion for more info.
I want to divide my criticism of the story into three parts, looking at the technical aspect, the setting of the story, and the actual text of the story. I’ll give some examples of good and bad implementations of each of them and try to explain what I think the problems are, and perhaps also how they can be fixed.
The Technical Aspect
This is perhaps the part that I don’t see discussed as much as the other two points, even though I think it is perhaps one of the most important ones. When I talk about the technical aspect of storytelling in this regard, I am mostly talking about how the story is being told, and whether or not it is told well through these means. This includes everything from cinematics, to quest text, to in-game dialogue, to environmental storytelling, and also touches on the technical aspects of writing, such as structure, pacing, et cetera.
First off, I wanted to talk about pacing - because it’s been a bit all over the place in Shadowlands and I think it has really wrecked large chunks of the story. Where better to begin than the start of the Shadowlands expansion with the leveling experience, which I think is perhaps the best paced story in all of WoW. It is incredibly efficient with its time and it does not make the players waste any of it on their journey towards level 60. Each of the zones are introduced, we get to know the characters relevant to the zones, and we have a clear goal going through the end of the zone during which we are rewarded with cutscenes and cinematics that feel organic and exciting. The standout moment for me was entering Maldraxxus, a zone that I was dreading to explore because it hadn’t given me a good first impression, where we are dropped into the arena in the middle of a raging battle that we had to escape from. What a glorious introduction that was, I was absolutely stunned by how well it was put together. My excitement for Shadowlands grew with every zone, culminating in the cinematic where Renathal gets walloped by Daddy Denathrius, a cinematic that really just left me wanting for more.
It’s a shame that’s where most of my excitement then came to a screeching halt, because the pacing of the rest of Shadowlands went straight to hell, or I suppose in this case, the Maw.
The timegating of the rest of the story is, in of itself, not the worst part about the rest of the campaign that followed in 9.0, the Korthia campaign in 9.1, and the Zereth Mortis campaign. I think spreading the story out over a few weeks can be good - it just wasn’t very good in Shadowlands, because the weekly campaign stories were really short. Some weeks you were only involved in the new campaign chapter for half an hour or less, and at most, you spent maybe two hours that entire week doing story content. It took longer to grind the renown to be able to unlock the story chapters in 9.0, and when the only reward for that entire week is thirty minutes of not-quite-as-stellar quests (put a pin in that) you really start to feel a little bitter about the crumbs you get. The Korthia campaign was probably the best paced campaign of all the endgame campaigns, the pacing during the story beats themselves were pretty good - but then having to wait a week to continue it really ruined a lot of it for me. The absolute worst of the worst here was the Torghast campaign (that has since been removed??), and oh you better believe I’m going to rip that to shreds later on.
Let’s revisit that pin and talk about the quests, and how most of them are… okay, and some of them are really bad at conveying the story. Again, I want to point to the leveling campaign as an example of storytelling through quests done right. We are actively engaged in the story and we still get some solid gameplay throughout the entire campaign, whether that is learning about Bastion’s culture or being hunted by Denathrius’ minions, and this is all great! But when we start to look at the other campaigns down the line, there is a noticeable drop in quality.
The worst offender, by far, is the removed Torghast campaign, where we got a weekly quest to do Torghast that rewarded us with… a little bit of voiceover, a cutscene, and a cinematic, all of which were completely removed from all of the gameplay we were engaged in - actually running Torghast. This is completely unacceptable! The players need to engage with the story actively, not be drip-fed bits and pieces here and there as rewards for doing content that has nothing to do with the story itself! The other campaigns are also somewhat guilty of doing this, giving us a lot of important exposition through voicelines at the end of a quest, all explaining what needs to be done next. This is basically the entirety of Bolvar’s role in Shadowlands, he does not make any actions and he just stands there, talking, and it really sucks the momentum out of the story to ruin the pacing, and it feels really bad to players who want to engage with the story, because we don’t actually get to engage with anything - we are instead treated as the audience to a movie that we have no say in.
The over-reliance on cutscenes and cinematics in WoW has made this worse. I think cutscenes and cinematics have their place, don’t get me wrong, and I also think they are really well made from a technical point of view - no one is doubting the technical proficiency of the cinematics team. Heck, we’re even getting microexpressions and animations that are so well made that I sometimes forget the rest of WoW is pretty janky and old in comparison! The problem with the cinematics (besides the actual subject matter) is that this is where almost all the important story beats happen… and the constant need to keep the story secret before it can be experienced really hurts the actual story this way. By this, I mean that the cinematics are usually encrypted during the datamining process, so that there won’t be any spoilers for the actual story - which is good, we don’t want spoilers - but every other storytelling device is fully datamined by the time the patch is out: quests, voicelines, maps, environments, et cetera. This means that the story is almost fully spoiled every PTR cycle when everything is being datamined, the only exceptions being the cinematics… and that becomes the only place to put the important revelations. This means that all the story content outside of the cinematics is often rendered toothless and bland, the goal of all the other storytelling tools is not to tell the story and give you the answers, it is to funnel you towards the next cinematic. This was particularly bad in Shadowlands, which felt like a clip show that you had to unlock progressively by killing 30 devourers, collecting 10 pears, or finding the macguffin.
Finally, I wanted to touch on the topic of production - because it just might be the secret villain behind all the story woes in WoW, moreso even than the Jailer. Making videogames is hard, and making them in a timely fashion in a live game is even harder. Many of us suspect that Shadowlands had a chapter cut from it, despite reassurances we have been given that it was always meant to be a “three act story”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true - it certainly feels like it, structurally speaking. Production problems is also likely the reason a lot of the questlines are short and unfulfilling, and why we don’t get enough content in order to actually explore the stories properly, and also force rewrites that might change the story and/or add lots of exposition dumps instead of giving us the cut content. Whether or not production problems is to blame for much of the issues outlined here, they’re not an excuse for everything within the story, so let’s continue on in the next section.
TL;DR:
- The pacing of the Shadowlands story is great in the leveling experience, but becomes a slow slog in the end because of timegating and lacking content.
- Quests need to be integrated properly into the story instead of simply leading to the next cinematic.
- Let us experience the story first-hand, let us actively engage with the story instead of sitting down to watch a movie.
- Production issues might be responsible for some of the bad story, but not exclusively, and ought to be rectified.
The Setting
In my opinion, the biggest problem of Shadowlands’ story, and also BFA’s, is scope. They both feel crammed to the brim with content that feels like it should have taken place over the duration of two separate expansions. When the scope of the story is too big, everything within the story suffers, because none of it is given enough screen time.
BFA’s war campaign had the most limp ending in the history of WoW, worse even than the Jailer’s ending in my personal opinion. We had a global war going on, we had mustered an entire army that was marching on Orgrimmar to confront Sylvanas, and the campaign ends with… a mak’gora that is ultimately only won because Sylvanas lost her cool for one second. That was all it took for everyone to change their mind about the entire war. I’m not going to call this a plot hole, because I don’t think the problem is that it doesn’t make sense in of itself… the problem is, the war campaign had been so neglected because we had to follow the story of Azshara, of N’zoth, of Mechagon, that when the time for the reckoning finally was at hand, it felt like it came completely out of the blue.
The revolution that rose up against Garrosh was built up over several patches, with the spark being lit when Vol’jin was almost assassinated and Garrosh getting increasingly reckless with his tactics and desire to weaponise the sha, followed by an entire patch where we helped Vol’jin form the revolution while Garrosh started destroying the Barrens to fuel the Horde, and culminating in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. This storyline took an entire year to build up and pay off, and that worked really well. BFA’s war campaign? Well, it did technically take an entire expansion to pay off, but most of the war campaign is completely divorced from the attack on Orgrimmar - in fact, we only know about the attack on Orgrimmar because there was a cinematic introduced at the start of 8.3 that told us it was going to happen! How can we be expected to get invested in a story when it is this rushed, when it comes out of almost nowhere, with no buildup to pay off?
The problem of scope manifests sort of differently in Shadowlands, because the story is much too big for its own britches. Here we have the entire realm of the afterlives of all mortals in the entire universe, and we are limited to (initially) five small zones, each with a cast of characters smaller than the recurring cast of Kul Tiras - and because the story is set on such a massive, cosmic scale, we don’t even get to explore these characters well enough. The best meme example is, of course, Baine, who gets to sit in Oribos for an entire year before he finally gets to say Sylvanas probably shouldn’t get to wake up in a cinematic. But let’s also look at Pelagos, one of the characters I think was the most well-written for the duration of the expansion. From the very start of the leveling campaign, we get to know him and we follow him around on his journey towards ascension, and in the Kyrian campaign we get even closer with him as we’re soulbound with him and we help him fight his inner demons. We actually spend a lot of time with this character, and that is great! I think having him become the next Arbiter comes a little bit out of the blue, but that is less of an issue with Pelagos than the fact that the idea of making a new Arbiter comes out of nowhere - we actually only find out that we can do that in the campaign chapter where we actually do it…
Almost all of the characters we meet, we only get to goof around with for a very short amount of time, and thus we never really get to know them. This is particularly bad when you consider that a big story element of Shadowlands, soulbinding, was meant to let us become very intimately close with the characters we are soulbinding with - and I barely know any of them. We never get a chance to sit down and actually get to know them. How are we supposed to form bonds with them if we aren’t even allowed to try?
This also goes for much of the lore, and the rest of the setting: it feels very empty when we aren’t allowed to explore it fully, because it doesn’t have enough screen time. This is the afterlife of all mortals in the universe, and almost everyone we meet are either natives to the Shadowlands, from Azeroth, or from a strange world that we… can’t possibly get to know more about in any way. But even if most of them are from Azeroth, it somehow feels really removed from Azeroth, and we don’t even get to explore the concept of Azeroth’s afterlife fully. Most of the characters we meet are cameos and easter eggs of seemingly random characters we have met over the years, and the few who are getting a bigger spotlight don’t actually get much of anything to do, with the exception of Uther. Alexandros Mograine had one questline, some random dialogue lines about his past and his relationship with his son, and that is more or less it. I understand that we don’t have the time to explore every character in the infinitely vast Shadowlands fully, but then, why would you set the story in the infinitely vast Shadowlands in the first place? There is no way that this entire concept can be given the space it needs if it is limited to one single expansion, the setting and lore of the Shadowlands becomes wide as an ocean, but no deeper than the thickness of a sheet of paper - not even the depth of a puddle.
Another part of the setting that I’ve grown to loathe is the constant need to tie everything together with past expansions and content through retcons and ‘reframing’ old stories - which is still retconning even if someone would try to argue against it. The Jailer was transformed into a relevant threat because he’s the one that’s been behind everything that’s ever happened before. He’s responsible for turning Sargeras mad and thus forming the Burning Legion. He’s the one behind creating Frostmourne and the Lich King. The dreadlords weren’t working for the Legion all this time, they were actually the Jailer’s minions. This is such a weak attempt of making him relevant, particularly because this has become all that he is. We know more about the things the Jailer is supposedly behind than we do about the Jailer! It wouldn’t even be hard to make the Jailer feel threatening without making his crimes retroactively relevant to us, because he wants to destroy our planet and rule the universe, isn’t that reason enough to fight him? Did we really need to sully the legacy of Warcraft by making this boring character be responsible for it all?
An important part of the setting that I think ruins the storytelling in WoW is the constant dangling of a mystery box in front of us. I like mysteries in lore that are open to speculation, but I do not like it when that mystery is the key narrative in the storyline. The mysteries of the Titans and the Old Gods were compelling exactly because they weren’t the main focus of the story, they were mysteries that we started to be able to piece together over time thanks to little nuggets of information mined from the actual ongoing stories, they were never the main focus. Ulduar and the Throne of Thunder are my favorite examples of the Titan mystery being slowly unraveled without detracting from the ongoing story. The main threat and indeed the focus of the story of Northrend was always the Scourge and the Lich King, Yogg-Saron and Ulduar was a B plot and an exciting adventure we could distract ourselves with in preparation for the storming of Icecrown. The Thunder King was the real threat in the Throne of Thunder, a despotic emperor that sought to subjugate Pandaria under his rule, the Titanic origins of the mogu and Ra-den was a mystery we got to unravel alongside the war against this very real threat.
Meanwhile, in the Shadowlands, we’re fighting against the Jailer, who wants to use the machinery of the First Ones to accomplish some unknown goal that we still don’t really fully grasp, even now that he has been defeated. We only got his origin story cinematic after we actually defeated him, after spending an entire expansion fighting him! We barely know this guy, and he’s the big villain that’s behind everything, and for what reason has he really been orchestrating everything? It’s a mystery that we’ll have to figure out in the future! That is so incredibly frustrating. It’s made even worse when the big mystery of the First Ones is added on top of it, because it recontextualises everything in Warcraft and we are not even starting to scratch the surface of who the First Ones are, what the Purpose is, and indeed why they’re trying to do anything at all. It’s a rethread of the Titan mystery, but instead of being a similar mystery that lets us learn more about the Shadowlands specifically, it’s the mystery behind all other mysteries that retroactively make all those other mysteries a lot less interesting. I like the idea that the Shadowlands was constructed by some intelligent force, but why does this force have to be the same one that is behind everything else as well - and how is the mystery of the ones behind everything in the entire universe so much more shallow than the mystery of the Titans? Granted, it’s a little unfair to criticise the mystery of the First Ones just yet, as this is just the first glance we actually get on them, and we have been promised much more in the future… but this would have been a lot more satisfying if it wasn’t part of the core mystery driving the narrative of the Shadowlands forward.
TL;DR:
- The scope of the narrative and lore in WoW is too big, making it impossible to explore the story, lore and characters in a satisfying manner, because there isn’t enough screen time for them to blossom.
- Mysteries in WoW are fine, but only in moderation. We should have a clear goal of what we want to do, who we are fighting, and why we are fighting them.
The Text
Let’s talk about Sylvanas, Anduin, Jaina, Thrall and the rest of the ‘planeteers’ as Taliesin calls them. I like these characters, for the most part, at least I used to like them. I’ve never been a huge fan of Sylvanas and I’ve certainly soured on her character because of the way things have been going the past few expansions… Anduin is one of the characters I’ve been rooting for the most ever since Mists of Pandaria, and I think his arc of learning how to not live in his father’s shadow is an excellent story to explore. But I have to ask… why is WoW’s story all about these characters? Sure, they are important lore figures that I think are worth exploring, but why do their personal journeys, their personal character development, take precedence over every other story in WoW? I don’t remember who said it, but WoW’s story really feels like a soap opera that occasionally lets us fight dragons.
I liked the way Saurfang’s story was explored during BFA. It was technically part of the main narrative, but it was mostly unrelated to everything we were doing in-game. We were mostly treated to some great cinematics that, frankly, didn’t really take place in-game, and that was brilliant. When Saurfang went to recruit Thrall for the cause, he didn’t drag us with him to fight the forsaken assassins Sylvanas sent after them, because it would have made no sense for us to tag along with him. This is how you want to tell personal stories about important lore characters, you tell the stories where they make sense, and you don’t shoehorn them into the rest of the narrative… like they did with Sylvanas, and to an extent, Anduin.
It feels really weird when the main story in Shadowlands isn’t really about the Jailer or the conflict he brings, it’s about Sylvanas and Anduin suffering through trauma and difficulties, and growing as characters with their own neat little arcs to tie up. I find it almost insulting how Sylvanas’ story in particular has taken so much space in the narrative that it was impossible for us not to engage with the story without her involvement. When we rescue Anduin in the raid, of all characters, Sylvanas gets to have half the cinematic to herself as she muses on about her past with Arthas - while Uther and Jaina just stand by, looking at the remnant of their old friend turned enemy disappearing into the ether, while Anduin lies there, kneeling, barely conscious after having broken free from the domination magic. Is this the right time for Sylvanas to have some closure? In the middle of a raid, when we have just freed Anduin from the Jailer’s grasp? This is a terrible place to continue her story.
Edit: removed the part that said the story in the cinematic wasn’t well done in the first place.
There are all sorts of weird story choices throughout Shadowlands, and some of them are more annoying than others. Here’s a couple of examples.
- After the Jailer wins the battle in Sanctum of Domination and teleports to Zereth Mortis, we then figure out that the Primus could’ve just made new keys to the place all along, it wasn’t even that hard to do, because he could do it all behind the scenes while we awaited the next patch.
- The sigils also sort of came out of nowhere in 9.1, there weren’t any real indications that these existed in 9.0 and suddenly the Jailer has a new mission to collect the infinity stones so he can snap half of life away in the universe-- sorry, wrong story about collecting macguffins.
- It is established that mortals can now travel freely to the Shadowlands - at least to Oribos - but apparently no one thought it was a good idea to check on the planeteers or send reinforcements into the Shadowlands. Baine sits in Oribos for a year while everyone in Thunder Bluff are worried about him…
- Bolvar doesn’t really do anything except say how dangerous everything is. He doesn’t really make any meaningful actions, because every time something needs to be done, he sends us, the players, out to do it. He is a former Lich King, now demoted to quest giver.
- Maldraxxus is ruled by a master strategist that planned for his capture aeons ago by making a sword hidden inside of a stone that could then be used as a key to open a door to-- okay, this gets out of hand really quickly. This story is weird. Maldraxxus is all about being the Shadowlands’ military, and instead of working on strategy, warfare, espionage and so on, the main story in Maldraxxus is… ‘collect the macguffins’.
- Kel’thuzad, one of the most iconic and important characters in WoW, is completely wasted in Shadowlands. In 9.0 you only actually know that he’s there if you do the Venthyr and Necrolord campaigns, and then in 9.1 the only thing he does is yell that he’s summoned a champion of Torghast every two hours, and then we kill him, permanently, in the raid.
I can go on and on about the things I didn’t like, but this post is already long enough. There’s a long list of nitpicks I could make too.
TL;DR: some story choices weren’t particularly strong, and much of it was weighed down and overshadowed by the story of Sylvanas and the planeteers.
Edit: Changed the wording, calling the story choices “weird and weak” felt a little rude.
Conclusion and Suggestions
I’m going to say something that might sound like it contradicts every complaint I’ve laid out about the story in Shadowlands: I don’t think the story and lore itself is necessarily that bad. I think the story of the Jailer could have been really interesting, if we actually got to explore it and it wasn’t mired with retcons - sorry, “reframing”. I think the idea of the First Ones creating a machinery of death that is fundamentally unfair is really interesting, and the idea of exploring the cosmology more is also very interesting to me - but we never really got to grapple with the philosophical questions of the machinery of death, and the cosmic lore became so diluted in order to fit into the tight schedule. I even think Sylvanas’ arc is pretty interesting and I’d love to be able to explore that, but this was not the right time, place or even way to do it. I wanted to love Shadowlands, but I was ultimately let down by the story and the lore, for many different reasons as I’ve tried to outline here. I don’t think it’s possible to save the Shadowlands story right now, it will forever remain a stain on Warcraft’s legacy - but thankfully, it is something I think we can happily move on from in the future. I wouldn’t mind revisiting it in the future, but it better damn well have a good story then.
My message to the writers (and the devs) mostly boils down to this: don’t be overambitious when telling your story. Your story might be great on paper, it might be amazing the way you’re talking about it with one another in the writing room - but if it can’t be told in a satisfying way in-game, even a good story will end up as a disappointment. Give the story all the time it needs to be told, and if you can’t fit that into an expansion, try telling a smaller story that is more satisfying. The campaigns need to be longer, more detailed and with less downtime in between. If the story doesn’t fit into the gameplay that well, make cinematics, books, comics and so on, and tell these stories there. There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like the direction you’re taking the story (I’m not a fan of all the choices made), but that’s okay, as long as the story you’re telling is told in a satisfying manner. And please, please, be open about problems that have been encountered during the writing and production of the game. Players are going to be a lot more forgiving if you take criticism and speak honestly about the process.
Did I miss anything, am I right or wrong, and what are your favourite and least favourite parts of the story of WoW? I’m very interested in hearing everyone’s opinions about this!
Edit 3: Removed edit 1 and 2! You can find the links I was talking about here and here. I’ll try to add more as I come across them, I don’t really roam the forums very often so it is unlikely that I’ll catch them if they aren’t linked to me.