I don’t think Metzen deserves such a compliment. He was, after all, behind the stupid attempt at anime humor in the post-Deathbringer Saurfang scene in ICC on Alliance side. Also, he was still around when the entirety of the Westfall questline devolved into the CSI Miami sunglasses thing (which got old after the first time it was done). So Metzen is bad, just in a different way.
This said, I do have to give credit where it is due: the original Stalvan questline was something. The Redridge questline in Cataclysm wasn’t bad, despite dripping with Rambo references. The Theldurin questline in the badlands was also surprisingly funny because of how absurd it is.
If there’s 1 good thing about the writing this expansion, is that danuser’s has no scapegoat this time. All of the garbage decisions can be entirely atributed to him (late bfa and sl was also him, but blizz suddenly “leaked” that afrosalami was behind those).
Is really a headscratcher why he didnt got the boot yet.
Chromie has always been written like this. That being said, I get your point. There are other NPCs in Dragonflight with similar, cringe inducing dialogue. There is a video on Youtube titled “millennial writing in games” or something of the sort and it goes through multiple examples in current games that have similar badly written dialogue.
Edit: Just as a clarification I am right in the age between zoomer and millennial so I have to listen to people around me talk like this all the time. I’m just as guilty of it, using “like” and other words as filler. To be fair, I don’t think I could write the dialogue for WoW NPCs any better than Blizzard’s current team.
See. This take. This is crazy take. The idea that pre-cata quests told you where to go, more frequently than current ones. Insane.
Old quests were hit or miss. Sure, it MIGHT say “go speak to oldmate in this building at this location” or it might (as well) have said “Do a thing. Good luck”. Since wrath, you’ve had questhelper built in. If you can’t figure out questing beyond that point maybe, JUST MAYBE, it’s not the writing’s fault. Maybe, just MAYBE, you should evaluate yourself.
I liked when Baine finally found his Totems and went all DOOM bull, but the reasoning is so… stupid. Throughout his entire life, people have betrayed him, killed his family, and killed his people. Every decision has blown up in his face.
But its some character from WC3 that willingly marches into Centaur territory that triggers almost twenty years of pent-up aggression?
This comment tells me you don’t read the current quests at all. They literally include zero directions. If they didn’t literally put a big arrow telling you where to go you’d never find it.
Then the actual quality is terrible. They don’t even pretend to be writing from an authentic fantasy perspective anymore. Now it’s literally “hey you seem strong buddy yeehaw I know your busy on Facebook but go get me a toilet plunger so I can fix this here toilet yeeeehawww”
Versus “Adventurer, I’m glad you’ve made it. we’ve been under siege day and night by the Darkmoon Trolls. They’ve inflicted great losses on our forces and taken most of our supplies and the situation is dire. Can I count on you to recover these supplies and prevent mass desertion and starvation? You’ll find their camp just to the northwest, across the Silver river.” Etc
And that was a basic quest
You had the epic chains such as defias, morbent fel, mor’ladim, hidden enemies, Stalvan… the human heritage armor quest was better than any quest they’ve made since like WoD
I don’t know what “hidden enemies” means, but given the other ones are generally quests people grouped up for in vanilla, it feels to me that you are remembering them more fondly for difficulty - numerical difficulty, specifically. Mob hit hard, mage oom, tank squishy - rather than for the quest text. Sure the story’s behind them might be interesting, but the quest text? Usually trash.
" From what my scouts tell me, Mor’Ladim wanders throughout Duskwood, following a strange and meandering path through the cemetery. We buried him out past the house on the hill, you know where that is?
There isn’t anything I can do to help you, but I wish you good luck."
And that, that is why we don’t read quest text. That is why we look at for the arrow or the highlighted area.
Compared to Dragonflight…
“To the northeast, there are a system of otter burrows along the bank. Some of the otters there are blessed by the river to grow to magnificent sizes. I will not have you hunting these blessings out of respect. Instead you will bring them back here, alive, so that we may treat them with the reverence they deserve.”
Where? Northeast. What? Otters. Large ones, possibly? How? Bring them back alive, so given that I’ve played WoW before… I’m assuming right click on them or use an item on them. Don’t even need to log in to the game or anything…
It feels like they’re trying to go back to “Adventurers” than these high stakes all the time thing.
I’m so tired of high stakes so this is pretty welcomed. So a more “lighter” expansion isn’t too bad.
They can do the basic adventurer/exploration vibe and stories without turning it into a hugbox, which is the direction DF looks like it’s going in some places.
Yeah they’re pressing on the fact of coming together with the factions and a lot of these new things are from the “younger” crowd. I skim through some of the text and it’s kinda eh. Once they removed Garrosh cursin’ at Sylvanus it was downhill from there lol.
Chromie dialogue has been fine for silly side quest type stuff. When they try to involve Chromie in parts of the story where they are going for a more serious tone it starts to feel a little too ridiculous.
