I’d play that MMO.
I mean that’s kinda true. Speaking as someone who has written video games before I cannot begin to tell you how many times I had an interesting story in mind that got shot down by the Money People. Unless the writer is also in a directorial role (extremely rare) they really don’t have much power over where the story goes. Their job is just to convey the story as well as they can.
But WoW also has NEVER been gritty or dark. It has stakes but gritty and dark? Nah. It’s always been popcorn movie grade fantasy nonsense. If you want darker themes in your MMORPG this isn’t the game for you. Final Fantasy XIV is the game for you. I know here on the WoW forums we think of that as the shiny game with cat girls but trust me that game goes places WoW would never, ever go.
Even its fantasy nonsense moments are darker. The main villain of FF14 has done some messed up things I doubt WoW would ever want to go into. Even if it is all pure fantastical nonsense.
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It has been plenty gritty and dark. I’ve noted earlier instances of this. As have others in the thread.
I mean there’s been death. It hasn’t always been handled with much narrative weight though.
Maybe I don’t know what gritty dark fantasy is. I never felt that WoW was that…
The only time I can remember thinking," Well this took a dark turn" was a quest where we return a dead man’s memento to his wife in Eastvale Logging camp I think. The lady is devastated, the ending text implies she commits suicide at the news. The reward was a hat or something crazy like that.
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You must not be aware of some of the darker side quests available in TWW.
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Ohhh no we lost old wow where… uh huh… oh… we beat up random units from WC3 and animals, most of the plot is ‘i wasn’t evil it was someone more evil corrupting me’, and the scariest most darkest thing is a few people who were drowned.
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The siege of Dal and that one quest with the Arathi elf mage in Hallowfall are the only ones that stand out to me. What other quests are you referring?
The over-reliance on the “I was good but got corrupted/driven insane/went mad on my own due to thing” trope in this game got flat out hilarious for a while there.
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Look up the quest involving an undead lost in a spider’s nest.
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It’s actually kind of funny, because I’ve noticed a LOT of trends in WoW’s narrative that paint it more as a lame “dark & edgy” storyline more than anything.
- The lives of (most) NPCs in general are valued quite cheaply and they will be killed off en masse without anyone batting an eye.
- If a new and often likeable character is introduced, chances are they will die in a “heroic sacrifice” before the zone is over. Seriously, there are SO MANY heroic sacrifices that it’s lost all meaning.
- Most villains are mustache-twirlingly evil and/or insane while reveling in their evil deeds.
WoW’s narrative was never great, but the attempts at being “dark & edgy” to come across as more mature quickly fall flat. People figured that out in the 90s (if not earlier), what’s needed to have more mature storytelling is depth & nuance which WoW fails to deliver.
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Ah, yeah. That one was kinda dark too. Though I found it abit humorous.
I felt so bad for that guy 
I’d argue that Dragonflight, due to its narratives and writing, was 1:1 Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
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Nah, there have always been questlines that step into the territory, but it has never been 100% constant grit. Even back then, I remember my first Alliance character doing Wrathgate/Undercity and then, about 90 minutes later, doing a quest to force themselves to poop out some seeds they ate, complete with a 15 second scene of an outhouse nearly exploding.
Even with Shadowlands it was like “You’re in LITERAL HELL! ALL SUFFERING IS HERE! Eternal damnation! Misery! Don’t forget to say hi to the funny tea-drinking vampire and his lil buddies :)”
Point is WoW’s always been a mixed bag in regards to theming.
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That single instance was a breath of fresh air, and his demise was so sudden and jarring that, at first, was hilarious, and then after realizing exactly how it went down, it became pretty eerie.
The only experience in this entire expansion worth some weight in gold.
You are talking about side stories or the campaign? DF had a narrative that could have gone pretty dark but Blizzard kept it PG, not even Teen, with the writing.
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I’ll never stop being amused by people who were 10 when WoW came out and thought it was edgy.
Oh ho ho, what would mom think if she saw that the game that I’m playing a quest where I gather poop in it and then put it in a bomb and kill people, what a naughty scamp I am! Angry man one is yelling at angry man two with tusks and the lady in charge of the rotting dead people is wearing a bikini top, we really live in a society!
The game has been silly and only midlevel serious since day one, dipping toes into humor and pathos in equal measure but never really going for “edgy”. For people who want to force people to “build their own graves with the bones of their enemies” the Diablo franchise is right there, but that game has never been Warcraft.
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Didn’t they remove that after the prepatch?
Next time on “World of Warcraft: Friendship is Magic” - The aspects combine mechanically to form the Go-tron Super Ultra Mega Alpha Aspect of Friendship to defeat big bad #3958. however, things do not go according to plan and Big Bad #3958 somehow gains dark powers that do absolutely nothing of note. After not doing a thing themselves and relying on adventurers to do their jobs for them, The Aspects claim victory without acknowledging or rewarding the adventurers for literally saving their hides. Thus everyone lived happily ever after when the aspects realised that friendship is magic.
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