Meh, that’s a bit rose tinted. A lot of his stuff was also pretty god awful. From the Gary Stu Green jeebus of Cata to that dumpster fire that was WoD. Even after leaving bliz, all the stuff he put out for table top was absolute garbage.
Pretty sure Metzens original outline for WOD was Necromancy raising the fallen warchiefs, not an alternate timeline but yeah messing around with the timeline often has bad consequences. The setup for WOD was pretty good before they started cutting content and wedging in too many characters (the legion).
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"because they fear other players abusing the storytelling mechanics. " ?
this is an opinion.
you’re entitled to your opinions. I am not sure how you arrived at this false conclusion but you can believe what you wish.
To me it is the character bloat. Instead of using existing iconic characters, they introduced new single-use characters. Toddy is a good example of this. And there were many more in DF which made me stopped to wonder wouldn’t it be better if this character had been that character instead. Not for nostalgia per se, but for familiarity and continuity.
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Thank you for sharing your opinion.
too many boundaries to make this a good story now imo…i just accept it for what it is
From a lore perspective, I hope that riot’s MMO takes their universe more serious than blizz does with WoW. I think they have some of the best imaginations on that project, and it has a strong foundation (like WoW), which is what makes it promising
But there is usually some sort of plan in place so they have at least a vague idea of where it’s supposed to go.
Based on the wild pivots or the things they just throw together in PTR, Blizzard doesn’t appear to have one in place for WoW.
“Not really. Improvisation is a thing, even in story telling. Cliffhangers work that way a LOT.”
I don’t know who that is a quote from, but from my understanding a cliffhanger only works when you know there is a payoff.
Blizzard will write a cliffhanger. Shelf it for 5 years. Forget it was there. Journey to Narnia and fight the White Witch, then stumble back into the office pick it up and try to half-a something.
Or like I said they could do the aforementioned Teldrassil Disaster, where they come up with a big shocking moment, then have zero real idea on how to follow it up and they just keep throwing stuff at the wall until everyone has had enough of it.
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I already gave up hope that WoW will ever have some kind of meaningful, coherent and decent storytelling again. That went all down the drain when Cataclysm came and broke ongoing narrative. You started with Cata in Azeroth, continued in BC and Wrath which didn’t make any sense at all and then went back to Cata and from there the story somehow continued to MoP etc…
Now for new players there’s no coherent storytelling at all. They don’t get to know the world, no important characters or the conflicts are introduced in an engaging and interesting way… it’s a mess. Why would a new player care about the world? When they start an Alliance character, they just get thrown into some plot they know nothing about.
“You’re the champion now. There’s the Horde and for some reason you fight them sometimes. Oh, and there’s dragons and necromancers and stuff, just… fight them, whatever. Now go to the big sword that’s stuck in the ground for whatever reason and do more war against the Horde - for whatever reason. Oh, this elf chick did some evil stuff, go to the lands of the dead and save it from… whatever.”.
There’s no background, no worldbuilding, no proper introductions. Just some basic concepts a new player rushes through without any meaning.
Even for more experienced players the storytelling in SL was a catastrophe filled with unlogic situations and plotholes that didn’t do anything for worldbuilding. One simple example: In a cinematic we’re introduced to Ardenweald and it’s established as this tragic place of nature spirits, that’s extremely devoid of anima and therefore some spirits have to be sacrificed already, the place is dying. And then we get to Ardenweald in the game - the tone of the place is totally off and one of the first things we see is how the denizens hold several funny theatre scenes that they make out of anima. Anima they don’t have and actually need for the slumbering spirits. And it’s not even acknowledged at all that this is a problem, it’s just inconsequential storytelling.
9.1 campaign was material for tons of memes because nothing made any sense at all. (“Yeah, let’s bring the last sigil to the Jailer’s place. That’s the best plan we have!”).
And even now in DF things make much more sense, but I don’t feel hooked at all. 90% of the stuff that’s happening there are meaningless sidequests that are immediately forgotten after doing them and the main campaign is so slow and lacks a bit of impact in my opinion. We’re here now because of some boring copy-paste cultists (again! the third or fourth time in WoW!), some dangerous dragon lady appeared and we instantly killed her. It’s quite shallow.
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“I have written cliffhangers, and I only set in stone the beginning, the plot, and the ending. The rest is made up as I go along. A LOT of improvising.”
Ok now I’m not sure of the context lol. Are you quoting someone?
“I am quoting the voices in my head. I hope you don’t have a problem with us Broken.”
Riiiiight. Moving on…
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“So, just because I am not totally sane, you prefer to stop talking to me. Right. I get you now.”
“I thought it was actually getting to be an interesting conversation.”
Love this series. I love the one when the quest givers jsut snaps and makes a questor listen no skipping story.
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No the problem is the younger generation of players cant read between lines & need everything explained to them.
Theres no mysterty to WoW story telling: all us murder hobos have to survive.
Which they may want to look at. The wow killers out there to come aren’t MMO’s potentially. Its Single player.
do you like the thrill of /roll with crafting? ARPG waves and says I got what you need here. some go 10 years its same story in seaon 9.
Okay…wow has rehashed we cannot kill this villain, lets imprison them. put them on timeouts for 10K+ years…see if they get better and they shockingly don’t rehabilitate.
I forsee wow 11.0…the same things.
Do you like story/lore…well many hands go up SP side.
Look we are maybe doing 3 games from this goes one publisher. we can’t mess up lore that bad. or you won’t really care in part 3 lol. See borderlands. 3 sold well with less than great story and some annoying char voice acting. but most go there to kill things for loot to make numbers get bigger.
others…hop around. see fallout universe. what happesn in the last game, stays in the last game. They pick new regions per installment . A new tale. the “lore” ending on prior is only a data slate entry. who won? find the right data terminal lol.
The only eternal x-overs are the brotherhood of steel. and even there they are nice. if one does not like the BOS, well shoot em. good loot drops there. and you accept in fallout n+1 none of this matters. and its fine, just means more BOS to shoot. never a bad thing really.
Btw,linearity relates to mathematical relationships. Just say ‘linear storytelling’ if you want to be actually understood. I know, who made me the grammar god. I dunno, but whoever it was, take it back.
And yet, one of the big things that people love about Final Fantasy 14 is how detailed and wordy their quest givers are. Yet for WoW we apparently don’t like it?
Come on now, we have cleaned up poop, collected zhevra hooves (and why you only get one off a 4 footed animal has never been explained to my satisfaction), followed some idiot quest NPC on very slow ‘follow me somewhere’ quests and collected buckets of water to throw on fires that keep on respawning and we keep doing because we know no better. Mundane is part of the game and has been since like Day 1.
This is not a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, nor is it an award winning Broadway play. Its a fantasy game full of cliche, two dimensional characters and about as deep as a wading pool. A bit like Star Wars in fact. Funny how successful those movies were and how long they’ve been going for. Sometimes shallow and two-dimensional doesn’t matter if you feel you are getting your 75c a day worth of entertainment.