Hello, using the opportunity that I still have some time left, I decided to ask one last question to you all.
Seeing the Hearthstone expansion trailer made me feel ‘homesick’ and I was more interested in doing simple adventuring in the open world instead of going to some different otherwordly planes meeting entities that are meant to be stronger and stronger than the previous one but who will fall into obscurity after expansion ends.
So I wanted to ask if you feel the same way? Would you prefer stories that are much more down to earth, where we have simple conflicts over resources/ territories/ influence/ religion/ IP/ whatever… than what we have now?
I feel incredibly demotivated that each - expansion - we have world-ending threats. We continue to dive into these new bizarre planes that quickly become irrelevant. Not to mention the game is forcing Anduin to be the main protagonist of the Franchise which is even more off-putting.
Now, going to other places isn’t a bad thing, neither liking Anduin or Baine is a bad thing, people are entitled to their opinions. But hear me out - when you log into this game and create your character - is it because you want to be an agent of the race you picked, or you’re just ‘the hero’ that will work with everyone and is above petty tribalism?
Extra elaboration:
I know that some people are pro- neutrality, and want to stay away from conflict. But conflict not always means full-blown war. There can be conflict within the faction regarding religion for example, there can be a conflict of interests and conflict about certain practices. But to be perfectly blunt, if I rolled a character and invested my time into it, I want to see the race I’m playing having visible story progression. That from point A it naturally leads to point B. It doesn’t have to be anything big, for example, if we take WoD and we saw Darkspear Shadowhunters interacting with Arrakoa outcasts who are known from potent shadow magic that has a protective purpose - in case if we won’t interact with Arrakoa anymore, they could be referenced in some text speech or by Troll NPCs trying to mimic their arts and say what they learned from the Outcasts. Or where we go to Highmountain and Baine could ask for an audience with Mayla as two leaders of tauren tribes in the same way Thrall did in TBC. Remember that Gilnean village in Val’Sharah and how it impacted Worgen narrative? Me neither.
Minor stuff but it at least gives some racial agency, if we go to a new region it’s great to see how it is influencing the lore of playable races and usually, it’s just a matter of flavor text/ just one quest at least. Because I have a hard time believing that they sat on their behinds while PC did all the work and imo details like that really matter if you want to immerse yourself into the world. And I care less and less about new no-name entities (and I don’t care how high they’re on the power ladder, they’re just not important to me, it’s another “monster of the week” kind of antagonist ).
And this problem extends to “franchise protagonists” which is imo very stupid idea for an MMORPG game where you have lots of factions to pick from and where each should have equal importance.
Sylvanas and Anduin are the biggest examples of how it hurts the story of entire factions if everyone has to bend backward just so they could have their way.
Maybe it would be better if we returned to basics and craft entertaining stories out of simple stuff? Where there is room for everyone to grow?
For now really Barrens > Shadowlands for me. But maybe it’s just me while other players want to be World champions and felt that they earned recognition after all this time playing the game (which is also valid and fair).
