If you start off an expansion by telling us that billions of souls are going to your game’s version of hell, please let us free them, and don’t pretend it never happened.
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Blizzard needs to remember that this is World of Warcraft and make the game accordingly. Much of Shadowlands doesn’t feel like WoW and that’s kind of a problem. People I know IRL who played WoW quit during this expansion because it didn’t feel like WoW to them. It felt like some blandly generic fantasy setting. The setting of a game is important to its foundation.
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This has been a long standing issue.
I fully understand that books will be able to provide more detail than what’s realistically feasible to include in the game.
However, too often it’s not about there being greater detail in the novels. Things occur in the novels that outright aren’t shown at all in the games.
Leaving those not reading the books, which is perfectly understandable, in a position where they’re outright missing pieces of relevant lore.
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Isn’t one of their most important guys in Blizz a specialist in trans-media (if that’s the right terms?). That is, just spreading the story out through as many different media forms as possible, forcing you to buy them all to understand it all? Not in making a good stories, just chopping it up and spreading it out. Can’t recall their actual name right now.
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I hadn’t heard anything about that specifically.
It would be a shame if that were the case, though not entirely unsurprising.
I understand wanting to make money, they’re obviously a company at the end of the day and making a profit is what they’re meant to do.
At the same time, I think portraying a coherent and engaging story is a way to make profit.
Yes Danuser is specifically a very experienced person designing a narrative around trans media. He is here to expand new cashflow streams from new lore products.
He talked about it on a panel of a game.
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Occasionally a ‘big reveal’ aught to reveal something, not add to the confusion.
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That the most deranged and outspoken Night Elf fans will always make themselves sore over something - so making stuff to cater to them is a fool’s errand.
They have full blown cinematics, they win the Warfront, they seem to have at least one zone dedicated to them in most Expansions…
Maybe pay attention to the long suffering Forsaken Playerbase.
The Forsaken fanbase has been there, and is there. Why ignore them, when they have stuck it out, and still hang on? Blizzard is taking advantage of the people who are fans of a morally ambiguous Playable Race, and making them shoulder the burdens of the lore.
I hope Blizzard learns to differentiate between fans who will never be satisfied, and fans that honestly wish to improve the Franchise.
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A vital aspect to world building is knowing when not to do something. Shadowlands’ lore flopped because there was so little curation that all consistency in the universe was drained. The audience will struggle to feel engaged with this. Why speculate or feel any suspense in the story if fundamental laws will be altered for the sole purpose of explaining one plot element?
We have lore and ties to use with the afterlife but it got tossed out for this “machine of death” buzzphrase concept where “everyone has their place” and gets Harry Potter sorted into covenants to evoke the tribalist “I belong to X group” mentality in the audience.
You could cut the Shadowlands continent and ideas out of the game and paste it into Star Wars and it would make about as much sense there than here. The idea isn’t bad. I quite like Revendreth and its devotion to being the bad guy, looking evil and draining sin out of villains forcefully, but with the earnest intent of saving them. Yet it’s simply a waste of the valuable WoW lore real estate. Put that idea in your back pocket and use it in another universe, possibly one built up around that lore.
If there’s nothing to do for a Shadowlands expansion without it, then consider that you shouldn’t do a Shadowlands expansion in the first place.
Similarly, apply this to the narrative. I don’t think there’s a winning scenario in which a faction war is kicked off by the burning of Teldrassil. It has caused vast damage to the community. One group will always have that double assist with Warchief genocide hanging over their heads. It’s so big, so horrible, and so inescapable for the Horde that many discussions about factions devolve into people being accused of supporting genocide.
The only outcome where this works would be if the Horde turned on Sylvanas immediately as it happened, as a sign of character growth from the Garrosh situation. She "ENOUGH"s everyone and runs off like in 8.2.5, then the rest of the expansion is about the Horde trying desperately to survive and negotiate peace with a vindictive faction who can’t trust them after two major populations have been destroyed at their hands. But really, even that would just be a patch job to something that grossly complicates the narrative in unsavory ways.
Same with Sylvanas. They made her do as many evil things as she can just to shock us with a redemption and now it’s very difficult for many people to swallow. They should have simply not made her do cartoonishly evil things.
Also, lay off on the god bloat. The more there are the less mystique and power they have around them. At which point they just shouldn’t even be gods. Or at least treated like I should grovel before them.
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Keep lore consistent; stop retconning old lore to fit new lore.
Are you serious? There are Forsaken fans - and Sylvanas fans - just as toxic as the most toxic Night Elf fans.
For one, even if you still want to sympathize with Saurfang, there’s the glaring fact that, despite the entire War of Thorns being explicitly called a genocide of the Night Elves, most of BfA’s story was about how sad it made Saurfang to be complicit in genocide again - to the point of giving him multiple high-quality full CGI cinematics about it - rather than about the actual victims of it.
Saurfang got the high-qualify full CGI cinematic in Stormwind dungeon with Anduin, meeting Thrall on his farm and his duel with Sylvanas. Did any Night Elf characters get high-quality full CGI cinematics? Have they ever? Even the Forsaken got more, with Sylvanas’ banner bearer in the Saurfang vs Sylvanas cinematic.
We have Sylvanas being two steps ahead of everyone throughout BfA, meanwhile Nathanos plot armors his way out of a fight against Malfurion and Tyrande - after Tyrande had received a power boost from Elune herself. I wonder what parts of this comment you’re going to cherry-pick, CW.
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into getting beheaded.
If you want plot armor, you have Jaina. Small wonder you deleted your mention of her in your now edited post.
Well, as you perpetually edit and alter your posts, I will see what remains.
You had a whole rant about Jaina… but even you thought better of it, in the context of plot armor. So you deleted it.
You do a good enough job of cherry picking your own posts for me.
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Complaining about me editing my posts? Pot, meet kettle.
Even you know that I still said far more than that in the unedited version… which you left out because it undermines, if not refutes, your claims.
I removed the mention of Jaina because Sylvanas didn’t get the better of her; she still got the drop on Anduin, Genn and Alleria. Regardless of my comments edits, you’re still cherry-picking.
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Or they may conclude that it’s cheaper to blow up two things than one: affected groups will hate each other, find a thousand reasons not to repair the other side, after which they can say “we listen to the opinion of the forum.”
For many years Blizzard treated the story as secondary to gameplay concerns, for good reason. I think Shadowlands is the first time I’ve seen a large-scale community-wide revolt against the story. I think that’s interesting. I think it’s interesting that the community council forum has no story focused feedback thread even though it is almost the number one topic being discussed by the community everywhere. Very interesting.
I don’t know what Blizzard should learn from this except that maybe the status quo isn’t working.
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They may have already come to that conclusion.
Blizzard : “We read the Forum. Everyone hates Night Elf whine babies and wants to burn them to WoWHell, and everyone wants to blow the Forsaken out of Lordaeron like fleeing cockroaches” = the BfA Intro
Cosmological development is meaningless if it feels as though the people of Azeroth are not represented, nor have a real stake in the conflicts we spend most of our time fighting.
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I’m hoping that they are more careful with Retcons going forward. A Retcon should be used to bridge a gap in the story, or help something flow better.
Shadowlands as a whole is basically a Retcon of everything we knew about Warcraft. Even with all the issues I had with BfA I could still follow threads back to previous moments in the Warcraft universe. With Shadowlands they basically cut every thread from its original plot point and tied it to the new thread of the Jailer.
Maybe this wouldn’t have been an issue if the Shadowlands were more familiar and the Jailer a more engaging villain, but neither of those are true. Which brings me to another point. They need to keep the setting familiar in someway, shape or form.
For example, the Light is a major Religion among many races of Azeroth. In the Shandowlands it’s a hostile and invasionary force that’s touched upon but never explored. We know the Trolls have a specific afterlife they go to, it’s down graded to a side dungeon. We WATCH Elune pull Ysera into her realm, and somehow she ends up in the realm of her sister? The Orcs and Tauren have deep ties to their ancestors and there is zero mention of this. These are also all forces in the cosmos that we have interacted with. There is belief in them because they are tangible. There is a reason to follow the Light, there is a reason to worship Bwonsamdi, there is a reason to revere Elune and there is a reason to honor the Ancestors.
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Heaps of good stuff has already been said that I won’t really attempt to add to, with one exception.
Out of story and gameplay, the latter needs to not be terrible. I’m not saying that story doesn’t matter, of course - but in my experience, people absolutely pile in on a terrible story if the gameplay is also terrible, as if that’s the next target. I can’t think of a time when one has explicitly shone and the other has been awful; as far as expansions go, they start off well and will both go down with each other (if at all).
If I had to pick one lesson from each that someone hasn’t said yet, hmm. Storywise I’d say: stop introducing characters that you write to be big hits. Few people care about many main, centrepiece characters in SL (off the top of my head, the Jailer and Aggra): this is the result of, I’d say, their few positive takeaways from BFA. Zekhan and Bwonsamdi were hugely popular fan favourites that the devs didn’t really think that much about, and both characters’ involvement skyrocketed as a result of said popularity.
Gameplay-wise I’d say: abandon your vision if players don’t like it (i.e. listen to player feedback). This also applies to the story.
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I definitely think both are important, it’s a yin/yang relationship.
If the story is awful it doesn’t matter if the gameplay is not, because the context surrounding the gameplay is not engaging. Similarly if the gameplay is awful it doesn’t matter if the story is not, because the mechanics being used to experience that story are not enjoyable.
Of course there will always be exceptions, games that are based almost solely around having an engaging story where the actual mechanics are secondary and don’t matter nearly as much. Just as there are games that are based almost solely on the gameplay itself and have little to no story because the story doesn’t really matter.
The things is that WoW has never been either of those styles of games and instead walks the line between as most games do. Meaning that both the story and gameplay are important aspects.
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The retcons predate Shadowlands. At the character level, they had to retcon Illidan’s story twice to make him even look heroic. And Sylvanas has had even more retcons. Another one is events, such as how originally, Varian started the faction war during Cataclysm, but it was now Garrosh’s doing according to Chronicle.
There’s so many. Supposedly the Blood Elves were going to be wiped out by Garithos’ forces, and they all followed Kael’Thas into Outland, but in World of Warcraft , there are a lot of them left in Azeroth, even more than in Outland.
Then there’s how many retcons there were to what it takes to permanently kill demons. As well-received as the plot device of Argus’ world soul was, that was a retcon introduced in Legion. Then we have retcons into the nature of the cosmic forces; retconning the Shadowlands, the nature of the Light, the reliability of the Titans…
These are the tip of the iceberg. The problem is Blizzard is writing stories for scenes instead of scenes for a story, when they’re not rewriting the lore either to protect the writers’ favorite characters from negative consequences or try out something new in gameplay.
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