Unless this gets ported over to the Community Council Forums (which I support btw, plagiarize this), I doubt blizzard will read this. With that being said, what do all of you think should be Blizzard’s takeaway from this expansion?
5 Likes
I mean, the thing about Shadowlands is that it’s just the latest by-product of what’s been happening for years now, in that the bedrock (ok maybe a sturdy sand bed) of pre-established lore was tossed out for what worked at the time or was cool. It’s just much, much more overt this time, but the lessons to learn have been around since WoD.
In many ways, the narrative of Shadowlands is hamstrung by BfA, and what was lacking there. It all carries over, and that in turn exacerbates the issues when the expansion is on even less stable ground.
If we’re going by lessons purely from Shadowlands, however, there are a few big ones that should have been obviously seen from the start.
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Uprooting one of the core elements of your lore for the sake of a shiny new setting does not work because it breaks the main setting. Shadowlands breaks the lore of the afterlife and stomps all over Spiritualism and Shamanism. It retcons the origins of the Spirit Healers less than three years after their origin was explained. There is zero effort to link it to prior lore, it just exists.
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Faction leaders should not be main characters, but nor should players. Leaders of factions should be shown leading those factions. When we see them out in the wild it should be a moment of ‘oooh, it’s going down now’, not ‘oh, them again, yay…’. Poor little Andy Wrynn has to go back to being king after seeing the very fabric of reality, of his religion, and of the afterlife, stripped away to be bared before his barely twenty years old eyes.
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Power ups with major sacrifice involved need to have some form of payoff attached to that sacrifice or it’s entirely meaningless.
29 Likes
Lower the scales, reconnect with the identity of their game, stop relying on champions and importants characters, assure the continuity between expansions and stop making plotlines/races/content obsolete once their expansion is over, and most of all, give us playable Ogres.
13 Likes
I think one of the most important thing is:
Make the story of your game, known and established within said game.
No one should have to read this comic, this short story, this novel, this hidden in-game book, etc… just to know the basic premise of what is going on.
22 Likes
…I like you.
I hope what they learn is that the story is st it’s best and we’re most invested with smaller, relatable stakes that play out in front of us. There’s not nearly as much kvetching about the zone stories as the overall one, and frankly they could have given us some decent raids. Give me a few characters to interact with and let me doodle around the area. I don’t need the sky to be on fire to want to protect the friendly happy owl people.
3 Likes
Give the big bad who is behind everything more buildup than what Zovaal got.
12 Likes
Yes. A thousand times yes.
And actually SHOW it rather than TELL it.
I mean is it so hard to expect? We go months without a single update and what we do get storywise is consumed in 20 minutes at best. They can do better.
4 Likes
This may well be true for the entire franchise going forward. Certain major aspects of the game’s lore, including an entire player faction and most of its cast, will never recover from their abysmal showing in MoP 2.
11 Likes
“Naw. All will be explained in a book. So that’s an extra $30 on top of your subscription to actually know what’s going on in the game. Oh, and we delayed the book by 3 months. That’s not a problem is it? Oops, 6 months. Er, 9 months.”
Just don’t try to make them behind literally EVERYTHING. Merely behind the events of the expansion is enough. Heck, Garrosh wasn’t behind everything in MoP for example.
Probably a massive understatement, at least if the story were in any way logical. As in, the entirely of the game’s narrative moving forward, not merely Shadowlands, is hamstrung. EDIT: Well, no, not exactly- it’s just the Faction Conflict specifically that’s ruined forever, new conflicts with new enemies should mostly be okay.
7 Likes
I love reading books about 12 year old content.
I still can’t believe that crap was written by their LORE. EFFING. MASTER.
good god.
I feel so bad for the artist behind the book’s illustrations that this buffoon scribbled on.
3 Likes
Please don’t add another big bad who was behind everything.
8 Likes
Dont drain the “well” of villains so quickly. BfA should have focused itself more on just the faction war, Aszhara or N’zoth. Not all three at the same time! I never understood why they spent 3 expansions worth of lore on just BfA. If they spaced that out better it would have given them the time to properly forshadow the Jailer/the Shadowlands instead of suddenly pulling him from nowhere.
10 Likes
They should learn to stop with the big set piece faction wars that start with big massive destruction. They have proven twice over that they can’t write or resolve these in a way that is satisfactory for players of both factions.
If we must do more faction conflict, then make it Cold War/Shadow War rather than open hot war.
11 Likes
The Thunder King was criminally under utilized and killed off way too quickly.
6 Likes
Yeah, it might actually have been nice if he had gotten the Danathrius treatment and was imprisoned/allowed to comeback later.
5 Likes
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Organic storytelling is important. Nothing about Zovaal is organic. His creation was clearly intended by the new writers to make the history of Warcraft their own, and it didn’t need to be this way.
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Don’t withhold the motivation of your antagonists. Reveal it shortly after they are revealed as antagonists. We’re past the one year mark, and we still don’t really know why Sylvanas allied with Zovaal, we still don’t really know why Zovaal feels the only solution to his problems is to rewrite all of reality. And these are thing we really should know if you want us to have any investment in the story at all.
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Stories in cosmic locales should not feel like we’re walking around in Azerothian zones. The four main Shadowlands zones all feel exactly like other places on Azeroth. There are places actually on Azeroth that feel more cosmic than these zones.
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On the other hand, removing players from the world they’re familiar with and invested in is always a bad choice. You’ve spent seventeen years investing us in Azeroth. Use that.
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Be appropriate with your employees. If you aren’t, it’ll come out later. And later might be a time when you’ve released a poor expansion. And a poor expansion with a major controversy releasing publically is just very bad publicity.
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Accept responsibility for your errors. Apologizing for your mistakes and admitting when you’ve done wrong goes a long way with people when those apologies and admissions don’t have to be dragged out of you.
20 Likes
I would add to this that if Blizzard wants to create a character that is behind some key events, set it up beforehand and give it time to breathe. They did this with N’zoth so why didn’t they do it with Zovaal?
10 Likes
This has been one of my biggest issues of WoW with the last few expansions (because thats when i started feeling it the most). We are these GODLY main characters who magically save the day, or have some other npc go “hey its my turn to save the day” and magically show up for the finishing blow that you worked for.
I like just being a generic adventurer thats helping make things better. I want to work towards the success and be the one who makes it happen. I dont want to get 99% of the way there and then this random npc saves it. Now if we work hard with that npc all the way through the story AND the fight/event then thats a great “hell yeah [NPC] you finish them off, you can do it!” kinda like when i die in a raid and just watch my group finish it off.
I also would enjoy purely helping NPCs who are making a differences, like we ourselves are helping some, but they are the ones who a really making things happen and thats how it is the whole way through. No main character effect, or suddenly you have jumped in and finish their massive war within a day, but just a simple case where you’re helping their thing just like everyone else.
Hopefully any of that made sense, and I also find it funny I had that much to go off from just “nor should players”
1 Like
It is also really funny how they were going to paint him as a guy who has never known defeat. Until people pointed out that is false according to his own backstory. That they wrote.
They have since removed that from the lore blurb in his adventure guide entry. Zovaal is basically the textbook example of an antagonistic mary sue.
6 Likes
This x1000. For Sylvanas it’s even worse, because her motivations for allying with Zovaal extend back to her actions in BfA. So it’s been over THREE YEARS that we haven’t known one of the primary antagonists motives. So long that we’ve now moved into her redemption story, lol. I doubt we’re going to get much more than what we already have for Sylvanas. Same with Zovaal. Whoever it is on the story team that is positively obsessed with “mystery!” as a story hook needs to be sat down and talked to.
Also, if you want to make an interesting villain, you need to do more than just give them a deep, echoing voice, throw in some retcons involving other villains, and call it a day.
8 Likes