Take Kul Tiras. They show where the army is stationed. They show where the fleet is build. They show where the ruling family lives. We know their unique religion. We see normal people on the streets of Boralus and there are smaller settlements all over the island.
Can’t compare to Zandalari in any way because they retreated to Zuldazar and abandoned Nazmir and Vol’dun.
Yeah, for most of the expansions, we’re constantly dunking on the Trolls:
So far, Dragonflight has gone the way of WOD and Legion where the trolls get largely ignored and honestly? I’m kind of thankful. If having your civilization constantly raided and destroyed by a bunch of murder hobos is “world-building”… I think I’ll pass.
Preach it my man.
Humans and elves got everything. Trolls and Orcs got nothing. That is the facts. Check your privilige.
Gonna try to give my take on this to the best of my ability.
I’ll do one better: This is a patch that revolves around the legacy of Deathwing, both through the Black Dragonflight’s taking of Aberus, Sarkareth’s falling to his creators leftover machinations, and Fyrakk taking a corruptive power that was made by Deathwing onto himself.
Why do we need to focus on a side race at all? It would be more tonally consistent (and likely more interesting) to just focus on working with a unified force of Black Dragonflight troops and Dracthyr forces.
I wouldn’t say “sketchy” so much as I would say “nonexistent”. For all we learn about the way Loamm works, the Niffen themselves have so little actual lore that their WoWpedia page literally consists of TWO SENTENCES.
That said, admittedly, Blizz gets some level of pass on not explaining their origins heavily, as a general rule of the Warcraft Universe is that if there’s a race heavily based off of an animal, there is like a 90% chance that they were just the spawn of some Wild God.
Honestly, my problem is more the story hub part; why would you focus the Renown grind and the patch hub around the group with the least amount of story in the entire expansion? Literally even a small quest like the Tuskarr had with the Ottuks in their renown would have been something, but as it stands, Troggs have more lore relevance.
Like I mentioned before, unless you make a race of hyper-edgy characters that reek of late 2000’s OC edge, you make them Med’an powerful, or you just make them suddenly the focus, I can easily handwave any new race of animal-themed creatures as something made by some offscreen Wild God and it checks.
Depends on context. If we are the strangers in a place, like a new hidden land, I don’t think you are required to tie it to something we already know if you can justify why it isn’t connected.
Shadowlands failed at this, not because it threw us into a land of new creatures and expected us to care, but because it:
A. Threw us into normal-sized questing zones and expected us to digest an expansion’s worth of culture and lore before repeating this process 3 more times.
B. Expected us to get attached to like 6-7 character that all look roughly the exact same in each zone, with no overlap in zone appearances, and that you will only ever see again until 9.1 and 9.2 unless you do every Covenant Campaign.
C. Make it so that there is no effective point in learning these characters and locations, as they are only going to affect this expansion.
For reference, I play a warrior as my main, and when I think of my “class fantasy”, just some quick things that come to mind are
Meanwhile, with Legion, apparently Blizzard’s understanding of Warrior class fantasy is Vrykul. That’s it.
Doesn’t help that half of the interesting NPCs who showed up in the Warrior Order Hall before launch got axed, leaving me surrounded by mostly metal Vrykul.
And as if I wasn’t Vrykul’d out already, keep in mind that this is added onto: 2 Vrykul themed dungeons, 1 Vrykul themed zone, and 1 Vrykul themed raid.
Not exactly excited for more “class fantasy” if it means that everything is just going to laser-focus onto one specific race again.
To be fair, the Alliance and Horde only cared enough to send researchers. Pretty sure the only reason the Kirin Tor are here is because Kadghar was directly asked for help from Kalec.
With urgency like that from the factions, I am not surprised that groups like the Uncrowned, the Council of the Black Harvest, or the Valajar are preoccupied with other things.
Because the player characters is likely not only canonically friends with the Aspects on a personal level, but also have a significant personal history of working with the Dragonflights (AQ in Classic, CoT in TBC, Wyrmrest in WotLK, all of Cata, Wrathion in MoP, and Emerald Nightmare in Legion).
While you personally may not care and you may headcanon your character as being not invested in their dilemmas or even directly knowing the Aspects, it is clear that Blizzard writes the story with some level of consideration for these hypothetical “canon players”.
This is something that at LEAST goes back to WotLK, with an example being that the recruiter in Valiance Keep in Borean Tundra lets you skip the line for recruitment because he recognizes your exploits in Outland.
If you’re gonna expect people to understand you, you have to define these terms. What do YOU call Warcraft? I’d say Cata is very Warcraft, but I’d also say that Pandaria not only had the best story yet and that it fit the universe despite being unconventional.
If you recall, the broader strokes of Cata’s story were incoherent and MoP was heavily criticized for not being Warcraft-enough.
These words literally mean nothing, it can either be good story that fits the canon of the universe, or it botches some part of that goal.
Again, what does this literally even mean? Are you arguing that the story perpetually spins the wheels of 2010-era WoW because anything else is unfaithful to “Metzen’s Vision”.
You have to clearly define things, but up to this point you have just said you liked Class Fantasy, didn’t like Niffen, and thought Dragonflight was lacking.
Jumping from that to saying that new ideas are bad and everything needs to be more Warcraft and more Metzen not only ends up being something that means something completely different to 15 different people, but also makes this entire section of the post read as nonsense.
I’m a fan of WoW’s story as well, but you’re deluding yourself if you think that player count drops are a result of the story. Do you know how many players I have seen that don’t even bother to read quest text or even npc dialogue?
We all know that the past two expansions had struggling stories, but your average player likely quit due to things such as:
The fact that I could easily go on should make it clear that the reasons these expansions failed was not a sole result of (or likely even substantially affected) by these expansion’s below average storytelling.
I respect the guy a ton, but you seemingly forget that even under his guidance and direction that the story has floundered at times.
Metzen is great, don’t get me wrong, but he is FAR from perfect.
It evolved, even under Metzen, we strayed further away from what you’re saying and closer to now. Remember that MoP was when he was still here and it is about as far as you can get from your standard WC3 vibes.
“Rainbow dragons hugging and talking about feelings”, seriously? Right, got it, totally remember that part of Waking Shores where everybody gave Raszageth a big friendly hug and then we all had a kids-movie dance scene as pop music played and the credits rolled? Truly the Warcraft moment of all time.
Tell me, why wouldn’t Chromie want to save Nozdormu and why wouldn’t he feel anything from this?
Can you tell me why Alexstrasza wouldn’t want to help Nozdormu and be there for him in his darkest hour?
Or can you tell me why the Green Dragonflight wouldn’t still be grappling with the loss of their leader who led them for thousands of years?
Would you rather that be saved exclusively for side content and for everyone to just get angry and punch their issues away?
If you said that this expansion lacks stakes or consequence, I’d agree with you, but this is just an exaggerated complaint about Blizzard making the immortal race of dragons more emotionally mature.
There’s nothing wrong with the broader strokes of how its being written, and if you forgot, you mentioned that Metzen came back on board before launch. That means that he would likely have contributed or at least overseen patches 10.1 and 10.1.5, along with upcoming patches and the next expansion.
Tl;dr - When it comes to the Niffen being a nothing-race, yeah, you are 100% right. I also agree that more emphasis should be placed on tying up loose ends. Lastly, while I agree DF is missing something, I could not disagree more with your conclusions: I think it needs more narrative cohesion, consequences, and stakes; whereas, you seemingly dislike emotion and characters acting rationally?
I’m pretty sure that Med’an was more Micky Neilson’s lovechild. The guy did make a vow of making Med’an awesome before he departed from Blizzard.
Trolls are ruined now and haven’t got any good quality world building apart of being killed off in raids and dungeons. Blizzard owes the Horde much and it is time we take to the streets and demand a change by force.
Ah, that’s my bad.
I do still still stand by that being something made when he was at the helm of directing the lore, though; that said, I always heard and assumed that Med’an was a result of Blizz wanting to make WoW more comic-y (with Varian’s bout as Lo’Gosh being another example of this).
Also double checking another of my points, turns out Med’an being Thrall’s replacement was a fan theory that was deconfirmed by Metzen. Apparently, Med’an was meant for something else, but that Blizz pulled back on it after fan reception was in the drain.
tbf you were told to do so by the Zandalari. Since the Drakkari were killing their own Gods and taking that power for themselves.
Yeah, I remember now. Maybe “backstab” wasn’t the right word to use. What’s it called when you attack an army from behind while they’re fighting a wholly different army? Ambush? Surprise Attack? Whatever. The point I’m trying to make is that almost every time we interact with the Trolls, we’re destroying their civilizations because Blizzard decided that Trolls needed to be the bad guys.
I’m hoping that when the Darkspear finally get their Heritage Armor, the quest involves Talanji and Rok’han uniting all Troll tribes under one banner and we finally get Forest and Frost Trolls as customization options.
Which they only did because they were losing the fight against the undead. Zandalari were badly written back then. They didn’t even try to aid the Drakkari in their struggle and in refusing to do so share the responsibility of the last great troll empire falling.
I think it has less to do with Zandalari being poorly written back then, and more to do with Blizzard defaulting to “trolls as enemies” time and again.
Ice Trolls were a thing since WC3. They need to exist in Northrend. Blizzard’s best idea for them was to make their nation into yet another troll raid.
Nonsense writing.
Not only back then. As of “Exploring Northrend” the Zandalari are still in Zul’Drak and still do nothing to help the Drakkari 
Drakkari are cool I almost like them as much as the Amani. There is alot potential with all troll tribes Blizzard just needs to stop using them as dungeon fodder all the time. Justice for the Frost king!
Pretty sure the start of the expansion was too far along to change by that point. I think they’d already released the shot of Sylvanas looking at the burning tree. Plus, according to Christie Golden, the “Warbringers” shorts were in progress when she joined the team over a year before BfA was released.
Nobody’s perfect. But I’d still take Metzen, with all his faults, at the helm and keeping things consistent over what we ended up with instead.
I get the feeling the writers flip-flopped over the years about whether to make them friends or enemies.
The Drakkari storyline is what got me interested in trolls and led to the creation of this character.
Same for me. My first ever Troll character was a Troll Hunter that I chose the lightest blue I could and RP’d as a surviving worshipper of Mam’toth.
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Dont read, dont care. SL>ALL.
What about the retcons? Can’t talk about WoW’s storytelling without addressing the lack of consistency. Nearly everything has been retconned at some point (the Eredar and Draenei retcon even happened under Metzen’s watch). While some changes were the result of turning and RTS into an MMO, problems happen when writers don’t cross-reference past lore and staff quality declines.
If we’re talking WoW devs, I think Afrasiabi is responsible for injecting such bleakness and nihilism into the setting. While it’s existed in past expansions, it went into overdrive during WoD, Legion and BfA, the three expansions where he was in the director’s chair (though the nihilism in Legion was mostly hidden under class fantasy and a mountain of Member Berries. Mostly), with “gems” like;
Shadowlands was the culmination of that and the tying up of those loose ends (Side note; he might even still have some supporters among devs, as I’ve been hit with the banhammer in the past after criticizing him even after he left, so watch this space)
Shadowlands was cool, actually. Best transmogs, best mounts, some really cool zones (The Maw, Revendreth, Maldraxxus) and a nice minigame (9.2.5 Torghast). But what about the Jailer plot, you ask? It’s not bleak at all. It’s actually quite uplifting. Everyone was happy in the Shadowlands until HE showed up, then we defeated him and fixed the system. We also defeat Sylvanas who has a heel/face turn and also admits that the Shadowlands never really had a problem until she began rebelling against it. It’s a nice, cozy conservative’s fantasy.
Dragonflight, on the other hand, might look cutesy on the surface, but its main theme is that we might actually be in the wrong. Our very creators might actually be evil colonizers who forced their Order magic on innocent protodrakes. We have to defeat them anyway, because reasons. This seems much more bleak than Shadowlands.
Attempted shoehorning of politics aside (“conservative’s fantasy”?), you’ve got a point about Revendreth and Maldraxxus. The Maw was dull and desolate, but it’s fitting that the setting’s equivalent of Hell would be an off-putting place.
Humanity was an accidental co-creation of the Titans and the Void - Titan constructs hit with the Curse of Flesh to make them susceptible to Void corruption. And the Void aren’t innocent either, trying to literally stick their tentacles into everything to turn it into an angsty teenager’s dream.