Like Blizz, I’m sorry, but with “unreliable narrator” being your new favorite buzzword anytime you have inconsistencies in your lore, it doesn’t show that you’re clever and writing from different perspectives. It shows that you just didn’t remember or didn’t care about previous parts of the lore that conflict with whatever you want to add in, and you’re too cowardly to just admit that you forgot.
If you forgot about something previously in the lore (which seems like it could be avoided if that “lore historian” you were supposedly hiring for was actually doing their job), just admit it! Myself and a lot of other people would just respect you more if you just straight up admitted “Yeah we didn’t think about that.” Admit you made mistakes, that you didn’t account for everything. Warcraft has near 30 years of lore, some stuff is gonna be forgotten. Hell, Metzen DID forget things multiple times, do we remember the Draenei backstory retcon? Sure, the change actually did help the lore and made it more interesting, but when it happened Metzen made a post saying “Straight up I forgot, my bad, guys.”
The alternative to this is to stop just changing things for the sake of it and just stick to what the lore is. You can shine a new light on it, sure, but just changing things for the sake of it i.e the Grimoire of the Shadowlands completely de-canonizing Chronicle? Ridiculous. Hell, Chronicle wasn’t perfect but it was a step in the right direction; solidifying certain parts of the lore and definitively saying “This happened this way. Period.” It showed that there was actual care put into defining the history of the world and not just a wishy-washy leaving it open to interpretation because you’re too scared to commit to anything.
tl;dr: Either put a better effort into solidifying your lore without using “unreliable narrator” as a crutch or just admit that you forget stuff. Stop being cowards.
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I do not actually think they forget stuff as much as we might think (or perhaps hope?) they do. The younger generation of developers just want to put their own spin on what the old guard made, and are not adverse to wholesale rewriting stuff to go with what they think is cool. Very different priorities in what they think is important are involved compared to the outlook of Metzen’s original crew. You can see the same thing with the art style. It has shifted notably from what Samwise would of done, to match a shift in what younger artist teams see as cool.
That and, well… They have flat out said they will intentionally ignore things sometimes if rule of cool dictates such.
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I try not to assign to malice what could be assigned to incompetence. I’m sure at least some people have some sort of contempt for Metzen’s lore (which is weird since a lot of it is foundational to what makes Warcraft unique) but I do think a lot of it comes down to forgetting.
Also, I would be more alright with rule of cool overwriting stuff occasionally if it was… actually cool. But lately, that really hasn’t been the case.
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Oh I would not say there is necessarily malice. It is more the original team all left and/or retired over time and now there is no one to reign in the present developers. I suspect there may be a bit of an echo chamber problem, which is part of what Metzen is likely there to reduce, given his prime task to make sure things they make from now on actually feel “warcraft-y”
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True, though I remember hearing that Metzen really did need to fight for things like the Night Elves being more savage “take no crap” types and the Orcs being more nuanced beyond “kill maim burn” so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some folks who really just want to undo some stuff he did. But don’t quote me on that because I’m not 100% certain.
That said, with him being back I REALLY do hope that he can bring back the proper feeling of Warcraft. And (maybe) keep things a little bit more coherent.
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Hear, hear. I’ve been much less interested in the lore ever since they decided to reframe Chronicles as just, like, the Titans’ opinion, man. Biased or limited narratives are interesting as a supplement to objective lore about a fictional world, but for me at least, they don’t replace it.
(Yes, it’s true that we only get biased and/or limited narratives about the real world, but this isn’t the real world. It’s fiction.)
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If nothing is true and everything can change on a whim, there is no reason to get invested in the story at all. Why bother when it will be a completely different story tomorrow?
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You must hate comic books.
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I generally agree, in the context of the unreliable narrator being a retcon.
If you set out from the beginning with the clear insistence that the narrator is obviously unreliable, then it’s fine. G.R.R.M. does this with all of the ASOIAF world-lore books and it’s great. The limited, naive perspective of a western historian who can only guess at what’s going on outside of his limited area of expertise reads really well.
Wow has done this too! The lore-wall in the Warrior class hall during legion that’s filled with obvious Odynic propaganda is great. The Battle of Dazar’alor’s cross-faction bits where you hear a biased retelling of events from a traumatized soldier is great.
Stating something as if it were objective truth and then later going back and insisting that you secretly meant for it to be subjective is a completely different thing.
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It’s annoying when comic books discard all kind of consistency as well, and I would have similar criticisms towards a comic book that decided to discard any sense of canon too, as well as any form of serialized story.
I understand you often like to play the role of the contrarian - which is not inherently a bad thing - but it is unhelpful to deflect with non-sequiturs like this when people are trying to voice their legitimate grievances. A refusal to adhere to any kind of canon for the sake of writing what they want later is well worth criticizing. “You must hate comic books” is not a useful statement in regards to the topic at hand.
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Canon is at best an overrated concept. It simply wasn’t a thing on shows like the original Star Trek. And it’s definitely not a thing in comic book adaptation. There have been several different Batman animated series each following the other with absolutely no continuity between them, but I enjoyed them all. Every artist every production team puts it’s own spin on the material. Blizzard isn’t any different.
Continuity is not even found in real life as reliable narrators of history are generally not a thing.
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I can understand from a practical level why they would want to take a point of perspective and unreliable narration. I honestly feel a publicly available lore book that is presented as a 100% infallible text book was a mistake for a live service game like WoW. A living game needs room to breath and adapt to different people managing it and changing community tastes. There should certainly be an internal lore wiki that has capital t Truth listed in it so they can riff of it and keep consistent, but it should not be a publicly accessible thing.
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Were this not a game that had two decades of lore prior to it, much of which people have gotten attached to, you would have a point. Since it IS that, however, none of the things you have listed matter at all. When they suddenly decide all this time in that any of it can be decanonized on a whim, any new lore they make is told in a way that they can decanonize that later if they want to, and they do all this under the pretense that it was planned?
No, I’m sorry. I’m not gonna pretend that is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with bending canon, or even altering it where it suits things from time to time. However, canon itself is not an inherently bad thing, as it’s proof that you actually sat down and wrote something for people to look at and enjoy.
If you suddenly decide that none of it is exempt from non-existence based on the whims of the writers, there is zero reason to get invested in your story anymore. The writers will not commit to anything, therefore the viewers have no obligation to commit to it either.
Also Warcraft is not real life - it is a fictional word where we as the viewers have full access to the events as they occurred, because they are fictional events written for us to view. I’m completely unsure why you’re citing real world unreliable narrators, because that is not at all applicable to fiction. I cannot be everywhere at once in real life, I can be everywhere at once in a fictional story, because the world starts and stops at the media meant to be observed surrounding it.
If I read a Song of Ice and Fire, I do not expect them to go “actually George R.R. Martin was lying the whole time, none of this story actually happened in-universe.” That would be insanity, and it’s not far off from what Blizzard is choosing to do now.
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I do not think they mean to say things did not happen. I can’t think a spot where they outright have done that. What they have done is suggest that things might be more complicated than they seemed… Which is somewhat the issue. People do not often like complicated. They do not traditionally generally come to WoW for a story with layers of gray. They come to it to kill unequivocally evil things in a heroic power fantasy and watch larger than life heroes do badass stuff. Its historically more a comic book than a novel in its presentation and execution. The modern team wants to make it more of a novel, with a lot of nuance and emotional depth, and for folks that came into the game with very different expectations its a bit of a rug pull.
I don’t agree really. Given that this is the same team that made the nuanced Horde a comical bunch of bad guys for the glorious Alliance to fight in BFA, and offered up the most skewed form of an afterlife narrative, where no characters acted naturally and the antagonist had no characterization outside of retroactively assigning past events to him?
I don’t believe for a second these writers want to do something more complex, or if they do, they are trying and failing. The reason so many people are upset is BECAUSE they refuse to make things nuanced - it’s either time to fight, or it’s time to kiss and make up. Everyone is a hivemind, and outliers are treated as psychopaths.
They are choosing to forego canon because adhering to the old means they’d have to maintain nuance from before, and that’s not something they’re interested in doing.
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let me reframe that. They are interested in nuance in topics that interest them as storytellers. A lot of that isn’t the same things that Warcraft fans find particularly interesting. Dragonflight has had fairly solid story, and had emotional nuance in the points they were focusing… but it is has been continually lambasted for being very dull and…well… not heroic. They are plainly uninterested in focusing on the core horde and alliance.
If I had a nickle for every time I have heard “World of Feelingscraft” in reference to Dragonflight I would be quite wealthy by now.
Yeah, that’s really the thing. They always talk about how they’re really satisfied, or something isn’t the story they wanna tell, or how they wanna stand by an unpopular decision.
They’re not making World of Warcraft for the people who play it. They’re making World of Warcraft for themselves, and quite frankly, it’s a far worse version of the game than people would actually like to play. But given that Afrasiabi did not take his “no negativity in the dojo” mentality with him when they gave him the boot, they will never recognize this - this interview is proof of that.
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grimoire didn’t completely de-canon anything. In fact Grimoire directly says it is from an unreliable narrator. Also this trope isn’t something new to blizzard. Both the lore sections in the WC1 and WC2 manuals are written by in-universe characters (Anduin Lothar and Garona for WC1, Agewynn and Gul’dan for WC2).
Although I do agree that Blizzard changing Chronicles from an objective view to a subjective view was stupid and shouldn’t have happened.
There is also the Burdens of Shaohao. We have two different versions of the legend. The in-game scrolls and the videos narrated by Jim Cummings as Lorewalker Cho. Hell the Lords of War were also narrated by an in-game character (Marard), so certain events may not have happened for the covered Warlords as he is drawing on memory.
I always laugh at these people because most of the time they would praise WC3’s story. Even though that game was about dropping old hatreds and uniting against a common enemy. And the expansion has a campaign where the guy who wants to hang onto those old hatreds gets killed BECAUSE he refused to let go.
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I also find weird that people think dragons talking about their feelings is bad.
Like, some of it felt cheesy, lile the infinite dragonflight part, but at the same time, seeing the struggles of the blue flight or how alexstrasza is dealing with the incarnates has been a good thing for me, maybe my view is different since i got all the content in the last month instead of alongside the year, the expansion also has no shortage of really good villains that you just want to defeat badly.
It is rather dull… Games like Elder Scrolls and whatnot use it well, their game is packed with an overwhelming amount of lore each game (most of the time) to support conflicting ideas and force the player to make a decision.
But, in WOW, the biggest decision we had to make was whether to trust an Emo Lady or not.
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