Between the endless wars, genocide tree burning, and now the fact that everyone who currently dies, whether good or evil, all go to hell/maw…thats some Grimdark setting there.
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Pfft.
Then why aren’t hero leaders being knocked off like flies?
Grimdark is more about tone than events.
Most certainly the WoW universe is a terrible place to live with constant horrors and god awful fates for those who live in it.
But it goes about it like a Comic Book. It’s vibrant, heroic and full of legitmently good people. WoW more resembles things like Marvel Comics than the codifiers of grimdark like Warhammer or Bloodborne.
You could argue WoW is grimdark… but you could probably argue most fantasy literature is one way or another.
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Warcraft is aping what it thinks Grimdark is like. It doesn’t come one to established Grimdark universes.
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laughs in Warhammer 40k
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Azeroth has always been a tonal garbage fire.
Tell me is BFA a war drama waxing poetic about man’s inhumanity to man?
Or is it a silly game where I can hop in a Orc hamster ball of doom and run over dozens of Alliance soldiers with the sort moral detachment usually reserved for GTA?
It tries to be both and comes off as schizophrenic.
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Is it still a garbage fire if you like it?
I don’t like BfA for…a lot of reasons. But I don’t feel like the weird juxtapositioning of tone is main reason for that. In fact, I liked a lot of the tonal diversity in older expansions. It didn’t bother me, for example, to shift between dealing with King Mrgl Mrgl in the Borean Tundra to fighting tortured undead abominations in Nax or ICC.
I feel like the problem with BfA is less “the tone is too dark / goofy,” and more “the story is handled badly, so the different tones don’t gel like they did in better conceived stories.”
On the topic of the thread: Azeroth has always had “dark” elements (though I hesitate to call it grimdark). Like, in WC3, Arthas’s whole shtick is is about decadence. Even in the heroic thread about fighting the Legion, the Legion itself is a vast, unknowable force that has conquered most of reality, and our only hope isn’t to defeat them but to stop them from getting to Azeroth at all. But…the game still has very much that lighter, more heroic tone throughout.
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Wrath didn’t try to sell a war is hell narrative. It was a righteous crusade against Arthas. Murlocs and other stories were side plots.
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Yeah, but that’s not primarily a tone issue; that’s a theming issue. “War is Hell” is a terrible theme for the main thread of a game where the player has fun fighting a war.
I guess I’m saying there’s no reason both dark and fun stories can fit comfortably in Azeroth. It’s just that BfA’s particular mixture doesn’t gel for reasons more complicated / specific than “the tone isn’t consistent.”
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Right here, lord Inquisitor. Here’s the heretic. Emperor protects.
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Grimdark:
Now, if we could get this kind of tone for WoW it’d be an entirely different game.
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My annoyance is when the story tries to chastise the player for stuff the game made fun.
I really enjoyed the War of Thorns. It was probably some of the best WPvP content the game had. I was constantly getting into brawls with Alliance players over the WQ objectives and having fun. I enjoyed speculating with players on both sides how Teldrassil might burn.
Nobody saw the genocide story twist coming and I recall it instantly killing the mood. Sorry I thought we were having some fun war games here I didn’t think it’d jump to depictions of unarmed civilains dying in agony.
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shrug It’s not really any edgier than WotLK.
Call me when we feed 10,000 mages to Azeroth a day to keep the worldsoul alive while spending billions of Horde and Alliance soldiers’ lives every day and considering them acceptable losses.
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I mean I’d argue it is because we see people being brutally tortured to death in Brennedam.
Like some i kinda think works in wow’s tone, like the Mage Polymorphing guys into fish on land, thats an evil yet silly villain, but to put him next to a Troll making sport by impaling fleeing mothers to walls with his javelin and missiles being launched into orphanages is…
Well it leads to these types of tonal problems. You can’t combine the depressing tones of All is Quiet on the Western Front and the Absurdist Comedy of Team Fortress Two.
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Grimdark is about floors, not ceilings. It’s about looking around seeing nothing but bad, all the way up and all the way down. Any good is ultimately revealed to be false, or else quickly eliminated. It isn’t really about how bad the worst stuff is.
The Warcraft universe has a lot of bad, gross things, but it also has plenty of fun and levity, and is home to at least a few prosperous and peaceful places. 40k, the oft-cited standard for Grimdark, pretty much goes out of its way to demonstrate that even where things are good, it’s only so because of immense pain, suffering, and darkness, inflicted on someone else to sustain it. Warcraft has goodness borne of heroism and perseverance, which is different.
And even then, 40k has changed a lot over the years and is much more varied in tone than it used to be. There are more than a few selfless heroes who would be home in a lot of standard good-guy fantasy and sci-fi. Some of the races that were characterized as almost comically evil like the Necrons have become much more, uh, grey, to use an often abused term.
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They seem to design World PvP as separate from the story. In a recently interview, Ion talked about how the want to evolve on War Mode, with one idea to make areas free-for-alls rather than faction vs. faction, or, if possible, Covenant vs. Covenant - but Ion also specifically notes that this wouldn’t actually be canon, since the Covenants aren’t actually enemies, so it would just be done so people could have gameplay fun without relation to the lore.
That certainly wasn’t the case in BFA.
The War of Thorns was great because it was all this WPvP attached to an ongoing and frequently updated story.
Man those were good times. With the introduction of the net gun flying became bearable in WPvP. And with the ongoing story I was seeing such a spike in RPPVP. With the general excitement of a new expansion mixed with all these changes people were really excited. I was so pumped for BFA, man.
I especially loved how all the quests let you, the player decide how brutal the war was going to be. I wanted to give a gold star to Blizz when I realized Nelf soldiers possessed by highborne spirits wouldn’t attack you after freeing them. They’d give you a nod, run off and despawn if you let them. But sometimes you’d have to kill X number of them and the banshees. It gave incentive to be cruel and let you decide how dirty you were going to make this.
And then the Burning happened and everything zoomed downhill, and just sorta continued at to.
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Eh, even in Nazjatar the World PvP quest didn’t actually make much sense after the Horde and Alliance teamed up to take on Azshara.
I would contend that from a lore and RP standpoint, having a situation where the “Alliance” and “Horde” are officially teamed up, but their forces on the ground experience a different reality in which there’s skirmishing and even heavy fighting at times, is WoW at its best.
The Cold War with hotspots of conflict has always been WoW’s best setting and I wish they’d let the story inhabit it more.
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