Does anyone else think the writing was much better when Metzen and the old devs were in charge of the story. Shadowlands doesn’t feel like Warcraft.
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After WC3. There are bits and pieces of good writing in each expansion
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I mean mists was pretty good i am a new player and heard great things on story. I played Warcraft 3 and story was amazing. But when i go through new content it doesn’t feel like Warcraft anymore.
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I mean we still have poop quests. So its always been iffy?
Its technically a game available for kids so its not like we are gonna red wedding it up here
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Blizzards quality of writing has always been pretty much the same. You just had lower expectations when you were younger. Replay WC3. The dialog is crap.
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What’s that expression:. 10,000 monkeys with a keyboard
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Looking over it, it seems BfA as the writing team had less direction over the story. Could have my wires crossed but there was still mentioned how Shadowlands had even less which split the zones into different stories wrapped into covenants.
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Blizzard’s writing didn’t go south.
They are just very good at writing specific types of stories that are not all that compatible with MMO’s. Self contained stories is something Blizzard is fantastic at. Still fantastic at.
WC1-3 are all, despite pulling on some details from the setting, pretty self-contained.
That falls apart with MMO’s, where each expansion is chained one after another, and it got worse when they started using NPC’s and heroes as major vectors for the story, starting right around WotlK.
And while WotlK was a fantastic expansion, it begins to show the first seeds of what we see now in long form story telling. See the Argent Tournament for an example
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Definitely WoD. Just an unsalvageable story that had no business being a thing in the first place. Every expansion after has been varying levels of bad, empty plots with unsatisfying conclusions
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It went south when it became cold in the north. Expect a shift, soon.
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Honestly? Blizzard’s writing for WoW has never been good, but I think it really started in Burning Crusade.
What they did to Illidan, Lady Vashj, and Kael’thas (twice) in that expansion was criminal. I don’t recall where I read it, but I believe the main issue there was because they didn’t expect another expansion past either TBC or Wrath so they just threw out big name villains. That could be false, but it definitely feels like it.
Wrath’s story picked up, though in fairness there Arthas’ story was set up correctly in Warcraft III so Blizzard didn’t have to do much to make it just work. Everything with Ulduar was really cool, however, though I can’t say I’m fond of Naxxramas getting a comeback even if it made sense narratively for Kel’thuzad to want to return to his master.
Cataclysm was bad. Deathwing was supposed to be some monumental threat that everyone was in trouble with him being on the loose (I actually liked that he could kill people at random in some zones). But that final raid is one of the worst we’ve ever gotten, from being the shortest to just…Spine being annoying. And I don’t get tentacle-Deathwing at the end, that just felt really dumb.
Mists of Pandaria was actually fairly good, I like how it had more of an expansion-long narrative with pay off. I enjoyed a newer story, it felt fresh. And it was the last time the faction conflict made sense or was even good.
Warlords of Draenor to now, the story has been really bad. There are good moments; I really enjoyed all of Suramar, especially towards the end of it. And I’ve always found the questing specific zones to be very good. But the over-arching narratives of each expansion since Warlords of Draenor has gone down very sharply in quality. I think a part of me can directly attribute it to them trying to stretch a single character’s story over the span of four expansions, which essentially means eight years before we even discover what she was up to. And while I can appreciate some foreshadowing (the Old God/Ilgynoth’s/the Puzzle Box), ultimately the “payoff” of waiting eight years for closure does not feel good.
Whatever happens after Shadowlands, I sincerely hope they do not try to stretch a character’s story over four expansions again.
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After Legion/Beginning of BFA
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I might offer it was handled better by the writing team.
I would say the story was terrible since November 2004.
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It’s probably never been completely good in my opinion, but if I had to pick a spot on the timeline I guess cata was when it started to feel really gross.
Maybe all the way back in BC though, once I saw both factions.
Soon as I learned of Quest Helper I stopped reading 
Ah yes, travel to the past, to prevent the past from invading the future, but don’t worry because this past wont effect us, unless it invades us. Orcs where not actually a weak race (even though that was the whole point in drinking the blood, so they could become almost like super mutants), no they just needed to believe in themselves, even if orcs used to be a peaceful shamanistic culture which only became bloodcrazed when they drank the blood, nope, they had it in them all along. Don’t pay any heed to how the orcs acted in the internment camps when the demon blood started to burn out PAY NO HEED TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! Feed Cuts
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I’ve noticed it and mentioned it a few times. I know they hired a story writer to take over so maybe that has something to do with it. If you make a story for a book or with a book in mind and apply it to a game or movie it’s no where as near as good. A book gives you much more information for background. In game or a movie you get zero background unless it is written in and usually is not.
I think that might have something to do with it. Maybe in the past Blizzard put the info out there in game and now it is leaning towards, read the book. I don’t know the why but I have noticed a big difference.
No. Metzen and the old devs came up with “Alliance as Captain America on steroids” because they were too lazy to put effort into making the Alliance as interesting as they found the Horde.
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I think after WOTLK it started going downhill.
A lot of people will say WOD was the bad part, and it was taken big picture, but each zone story was actually really well done. It’s the AU timey-wimey stuff that messed it all up.
Following your rag-tag group of rebels as they slowly build up an army of disenfranchised orcs to fight against the Iron Horde war machine was good. If they did this without the whole convoluted timeline thing it would have been great.
Also… no act two, it all got scrapped. Act 1 to Act 3 without Act 2 or 4. That’s a lot of skipped material.
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