The Writing in War Within and Midnight is Paper Thin

Community General Discussion
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When I saw the cinematic for the War Within I was so excited, we were going to spend the entire expansion with Anduin and Thrall and see how Anduin grows into a man and king or succumbs to his past while also finally diving into the sword and radiant song. What happened??? Anduin whined a lot and acted weak instead of showing any of the confidence and strength he had as a priest and death knight. That entire cinematic got pushed aside and none of the expansion had ANYTHING to do with the cinematic. SICK WRITING. LETS DO NERUBIAN POLITICSSSSS. As far as Xal and Alleria and Khadgar, there was Dalaran and then Alleria breaking Khadgar out of the heart. GG next. Nothing happens the rest of the expansion. Undermine was so pointless, manaforge omega was pointless. Cool new big bad that we are going to destroy yayyyy.

Remember Arthas constantly popping up in Wrath? He felt like a THREAT. Like we were invading HIS lands. Legion was filled to the brim with awesome writing and stories while also knowing the world is at stake because THE LEGION IS HERE! Dragonflight had brilliant contained stories that all worked back to the aspects, and the post launch stories were GREAT. They tackled the main characters and moved them ALL forward. Each cinematic we got was awesome and I looked forward to each one. Epic. War Within and Midnight? NOTHING HAPPENS! LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS! The Midnight cinematic is fine, easily the weakest ever. It gets addressed in the beginning of the expansion, but it’s weak because the story is weak.

Xal has NO PRESENCE! I don’t care when she’s around because she’ll never fight, she is always baiting us on and just buying time for The Last Titan where Iridikron will finally hopefully do something? What about Tyr? WHERE IS JAINA? Nope let’s introduce a whole bunch of new races and characters absolutely no one cares about instead of giving us the Warcraft 3 characters that literally keep the story afloat. There’s no urgency to the story it’s just so… blah. Let’s have you do nothing for 12-15 hours until you finally get to voidstorm where something will finally happen. I’m finishing up Zul’Aman and Eversong is great but this whole lightbloom thing… bleh, Twilight’s Blade is what ALL 10 LEVELS should be about. There’s no meat on any bones these last two expansions. The Last Titan is going to have to be the craziest jam packed all meat story that ties up everything and creates any form of stakes.

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I would ask if TWW and Mid were written by children but Axe Cop was literally written by a five year old and is much better than the writing now so I don’t want to give the WoW writers that much credit.

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Yeah, one could almost sue for false advertising regarding the intro cinematic. We saw Thrall. We saw Anduin. We saw them looking at a damned big sword stuck in the planet in a very contemplative way.

And…cricket…

Did we see them working together on anything connected to…anything…in that cinematic? If we did, it has been scrubbed from my memory bank, or it was so minimal and non-impactful that I just flounced over it to the next quest.

I mean, were there two separate companies working on the game then - the one that made the cinematic appear to be part of the story ahead and those working on the story ahead?

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Was Thrall even in TWW after the intro quest line? They made it seem like the expansion was going to be an Anduin and Thrall bromance to last the ages..instead we got..ya..

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He felt like a Scooby Doo villain.

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What does Xalatath feel like?

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You’ve set the bar pretty high if you feel that about Arthas in Wrath.

To a new player as I was back then, the whole story and lore and actions of Arthas were involving and emotive. WoW’s writing will never win any Pulitzer Prizes but then, when have games ever been different. It was still one of the main aspects that hooked me into the game at that point.

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She’s more of a standard end/late game villain. She shows up, causes trouble, then poofs away.

Not really. He never did anything. We’d stop some Scourge scheme, he’d pop in, snark a bit, and leave through a fake painting.

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Well actually no. Compared to Turalyon who doesn’t have the courage to face his emotions, Anduin is taking them head on. And when combat starts, he stands in, has your back and fights like a Paladin.

General of the Army Eisenhower didn’t fight either. Most military leaders don’t. As for other characters like Tyr, Jaina, etc. it would be a terrible idea to have them all in each expansion.

This is an elf expansion. Too many characters don’t add anything and make it more difficult to tell a story.

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They went to Gadgetzan and gambled all their life savings and walked out wearing nothing :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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My biggest gripe is how once again power of friendship and family just solves everything and everyone moved on from conflicts that have gone on for literal decades. Like several genocides were just forgiven in the same quest chain in very short order with paper thing logic given.

ON TOP OF THAT we spent an entire expansion for the aspects to get their powers back and become protectors of Azeroth again, for them to…just sit on the Valdrakken tower and not do anything to protect from a world ending cosmic threat……what was the point then?

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Or maybe to that big casino planted in the middle of Azshara that, apart from a minimal few quests, was never used for anything. Just like the Goblin island there and its huge gun.

Sometimes…Blizzard is just weird.

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Didn’t Alex also spout something about being Azeroth’s protectors once more in the DF cinematic?

So where are they now, at a time when Azeroth needs serious protection? Where are the flights up in the sky to do battle with the Void? Why do these story elements get put in, actually vocalized and then just…disappear??

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This is what happens when a company that’s announces they’re on stolen land every show takes over your company. Hollow marketing tactics and bad writing for the lowest common denominator who will defend your product no matter what.

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I say we should just stop developing the trash story and focus the salary of the writers on more fun gamemodes.

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No? He’d pop up occasionally and ramble about something and then disappear.

WoW’s writing was always propped up by WC3’s writing. Arthas’ entire story and persona were built up by WC3. In Wrath he barely did anything.

They never did proper justice to a lot of WC3 characters like Illidan and Kael’thas. Even Tyrande, Malfurion, and Jaina were done pretty poorly despite the amount of screen time they got over the years.

Then when they ran out of WC3 writing to piggyback on it just got further off the rails.

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Thats it! That’s what I am feeling from the story too, couldn’t put my finger on it. The characters are telling me there’s urgency but I just don’t feel it. I feel like whatever lets just get this done already... :yawning_face: We don’t ever face Foot Lady. She just taunts whatsherface and leaves. And the fact we, as the Champion of Azeroth who fought gods and has seen it all, got suckered by this is just insulting. :confused:

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Nah even a bad story can have good writing. The story AND writers are just straight terrible.

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The writing for both The War Within and Midnight just have this feeling of “booking on the fly” when it comes to the stories that are told. There are so many plot threads that have been abandoned because there were complaints online.

As pointed out by the OP, there was a setup between Thrall and Anduin about Anduin needing to find his place after the control of The Jailer… It was dropped in favor of making Anduin’s redemption arc all about Faerin Lothar. We had Xal’atath introduced as the big bad of The War Within, only to have her drop out, return as the big bad of Midnight, and be dropped again. This time, instead of taking down the big bad as we should have in The War Within, we instead got this long-winded story about all the Elves getting together, messing up their 132457289175th well of some kind, only to do it all over again because “Elves strong together”.

After seeing the ending to March of Quel’Delas, I’m left with the feeling that we just got what should have been the ending to The War Within, the happy “power of friendship” ending that modern writers feel that has to be THE ONLY ENDING TO EVERYTHING!

So, where are we going next? More Troll BS! But we’ll keep using Silvermoon, a place where most are not wanted, a place that now has no reason to be involved, because we need a central hub.

I’ve forgotten the last time that I felt like we, as the “Champion of Azeroth,” actually made an impact on the world around us… It might have been at the end of Mists of Pandaria when we defeated Garrosh. Ever since then, we have just been along for the ride. Modern stories happen around the player, but don’t really involve the player. This has become a lot more noticeable in Shadowlands, Dragonflight, The War Within, and now, Midnight. We no longer impact the world around us; we just stand in the crowd (as seen in the ending to March of Quel’Delas), watching as other characters enact change in the world.

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I wouldn’t say that. Stuff happens indeed. But it’s all over the place and extremely rushed.
TWW at first made the impression that we would dive deeper into Azeroth’s secrets, explore the deep caverns of the core of the world and its different denizens and find out more about “The Sword”. The groundwork for the World Soul Saga.
Directly at the start of the expansion everything of that was briefly touched, we did some war with the spider people. And then we immediately jumped into a Goblin city helping with a revolution and then went to space. Okay.

And in Midnight it’s even worse. Everything that’s happened so far should’ve been a story for different patches. Before the first mini patch happened, a few weeks into the expansion, we witnessed the void invasion in Quel’thalas, explored the origins of Azeroth, gained the Amani as allies, completed some character arcs, quelled the Voidstorm, fought back the invasion, witnessed the destruction of the Sunwell, united the elves, cleansed the Sunwell and got spoilers for future Shadowlands content.
Uniting the elf tribes and in the process reflecting on old conflicts and animosities could’ve been content for another patch - and it should’ve been. There’s just no real weight or impact behind it, it just quickly happens like it could’ve been done via an e-mail. Every theme becomes extremely shallow if you try to cram so many major plot points into a few hours of gameplay.
And as a result many characters also get incredibly underutilized. I certainly didn’t need to see Sylvanas make a cameo as the Ranger-General that Silvermoon needed, when someone like Halduron didn’t get any spotlight in the story.

There would’ve been so many interesting possibilities for the purification of the Dawnwell, but it seems like the writers were brainstorming for 5 minutes and just went with the easiest first draft they created between lunch breaks. According to the old RPG books (which aren’t canon, I know), some of those valuable items we saw were necessary for purifying the Sunwell - but also the lives of 300 elves.
Imagine what an interesting, morally challenging and tragic banger of a questline this could have been. Collecting powerful artifacts and items and trying to recruit volunteers, ready to give their lives for younger generations and the future of Quel’thalas. This could’ve been another story patch where we carefully set up the ritual.
Instead a few elven leaders just said “yeah sure, let’s do it, whatever” and we threw a piece of metal, a fruit, some invaluable shinies and a sprinkle of light into the well and everyone just moved on. Uninspired and bland.

That’s another big issue, yes. I know, people around here often get a bit annoyed if this gets brought up, but FFXIV (and also games like Star Wars) do it perfectly. The player is the protagonist. You are the Warrior of Light who does most of the stuff. Sure, there’s also a main cast of NPCs - their own problems and side stories get explored along the way and they’re there to support, advise and save you. But in the end you are always what keeps the plot going you’re the center of big story moments.
In WoW it often feels like the ‘Champion’ could stay at home or in a bar and the story would still happen. The focus is on other characters and you’re just standing by, doing some side tasks and watching Windrunner-TV, silently witnessing arguments of other characters or watch how others save the day. In my head canon my character often wonders “how tf did I even get here and why does nobody listen to me?”.

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