When Chris Metzen came back into the fold, he mentioned his surprise with how the story of warcraft is now a lot more democratized, that is, many creative hands shape it to be the way it is. At first glance, this might sound like a good thing - more people offering their input should improve the quality, right? Right?
Full disclosure: I’m not one of the people who hate the game (and keep playing for some reason). I like WoW, and I don’t have as many problems with the current story as your average forum dweller. However, it is clear to me some things have changed under the hood and I’d be remiss not to discuss the issues that might come out of it in the long run.
I believe most of us know that Danuser’s leadership was controversial, with many questionable narrative decisions. Naturally, the problem didn’t start there, but it’s a valid example of how things used to go: the head of story controlled every aspect of the narrative (or at least held too much power). This system resulted in the poor performance of BFA and Shadowlands, as recent examples. Add to that the infamous lawsuit and the bad press Blizzard got around that time.
With that in mind, stands to reason that if you want to solve the problem quickly before your stocks get Teldrassil’d, you must reconfigure how the story is crafted (you need to fix every team of course but I’m focusing on the narrative team here). So now we have -ahem- a council making the story, so to say, because everything is discussed and democratized (I’m going out on a limb here and assuming they vote/discuss some story aspects and character moments to reach an agreement). That’s great! You successfully made sure there will no longer be a Danuser to hijack the narrative and write whatever nonsense they please.
But there is a problem that stems from this change that I haven’t seen adressed by the current story criticism. People focus on culture war buzzwords and ragebait (par for the course these days, I guess), but not on this fundamental aspect of the storycrafting: it’s a collective effort.
The bad side of the story being discussed by multiple people with equal-ish decison powers between them, is that we get an effect that reminds me of what Downs described in his Economic Theory of Democracy while discussing voter preference distribuition. The different visions the decision-makers have for the story clash and to get to a consensus they need to moderate their takes so it gets support from their peers. This is, in my mind, the cause of the “defanging” effect many people are complaining about - that WoW’s story feels more sanitized and bland than it used to.
That brings us to the question I don’t have the answer for: what is better? An auteur dictating a narrative according to their vision - wich can be good or can be Shadowlands - or a group effort that, in order to agree on something that pleases the majority of the team, strip the story of a single vision and might be percieved as bland?
You can’t please wow players - we’ll always find something to complain about (often happens when we get what we asked for and then realize we don’t want it actually) - but what would you do to fix this? Personally I don’t think there is a perfect solution. There is a fair bit of tradeoff however you want to go about this and if it means we don’t get another Jailer I’ll gladly eat up a less gritty story.
But, please, can we go back to pre-rendered cinematics (the normal ones not the cgi ones)? I know in-game cutscenes are cheaper but the abundance of cinematics in BFA was so nice I wish we kept that an evergreen tradition.