Buckle up, this is a long post. I originally posted this on r/warcraftlore earlier this year but I decided to bring it here:
The core gameplay loop of World of Warcraft is murdering people and robbing their corpses. Nearly everything else you do is to either boost your murder and corpse-robbing efficiency or to obtain cosmetics so you can look cooler while murdering and corpse-robbing.
I want to establish this fact before I go any further since it is the crux of my point.
Now I’ll cut to the chase since it’s probably already really obvious where I’m going with this. The standard of morality in World of Warcraft has shifted so far that it has completely shredded any sense of immersion the game once had.
I’ve brought this up casually before and a lot of people just like to dismiss me, saying the conflict between morality and gameplay is just regular ludonarrative dissonance. But I disagree because I know for a fact it wasn’t always this way.
I first really started thinking about this when I read a post on r/wow saying the writing started falling apart the moment when we stopped putting heads on spikes.
That stuck with me for months because it reminded me that back in the day Alliance and Horde alike loved to take heads as trophies and bringing back the severed head of an NPC was the default method of proving you killed them so you could claim your reward. Nowadays the Horde seems to mostly avoid taking grisly trophies on-screen and settles for just implying it by putting skulls all over their cosmetic armor. Meanwhile, the idea of the Alliance wanting to decorate the ramparts with orc heads like they did in Warcraft 2, is unthinkable these days.
And it’s not just the severed heads, nearly all of the brutality on Azeroth that used to contextualize your actions as a player character has been quietly scrubbed away leaving you looking comically bloodthirsty for a “hero”.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I actually prefer superhero morality “killing is bad” narratives in my media and tend to dismiss edgy anti-hero bloodbaths as juvenile power fantasy. But WoW wasn’t just an edgefest, the brutality and bloodthirst of Azeroth’s inhabitants was the engine of the narrative. The people living on Azeroth got their complexity by having to confront this brutal default state of the world and then respond to it.
During the WC3 and Early WoW era “honor” and “morality” was less concerned with whether killing was right or wrong and instead concerned itself with “who” you killed. The Orcs didn’t regret waging war on the humans in the First and Second Wars, they remembered that part fondly, what they regretted was targeting civilians to spread terror and sate their demonic bloodlust.
Fighting was an inevitable fact of life for all of the races on Azeroth and it showed in-game. Every single culture on Azeroth put emphasis on warrior prowess and had armed guards patrolling just about everywhere. Even people like the Tauren who are generally considered peaceful, still honored its dedicated warriors and learning how to fight and kill your enemies were part of the Rites of the Earthmother that Tauren youth had to pass which made up your early questing experience as a Tauren player.
These brutal warrior cultures permeating Azeroth gave context to the killing and looting you did as a player. Back then it made sense for violence and corpse defiling to be every questgiver’s default solution to every single problem because they were reflecting their cultural mindset. Every race was in on it. Even the snooty hyper-sophisticated Blood Elves weren’t above sending you to make a necklace of Troll ears for them.
It’s hard to pinpoint when the morality shift really began because WoW has kind of always had a bit of an identity crisis from the word go since Reign of Chaos ended with everyone being friends and singing Kumbaya over the ashes of Archimonde’s smoldering corpse, implying hugs and kisses to be the ideal endgame for Azeroth. It ended up taking a considerable amount of effort from the writing team to walk that back. A [bonus campaign in WC3, a full-length novel, and a fully rendered cinematic trailer to be precise.)
So moral standards have always had a bit of ebb and flow to them in WoW since the lore’s consistency was already being held together with scotch tape and hopeful wishes even before Steve Danuser smashed it with a sledgehammer.
But if you had to point to something I think it would be that infamous interview where then Creative Director Chris Metzen declared that the Alliance would enter “Lawful Good Overdrive” in Mists of Pandaria. Which was received negatively almost universally by both Horde and Alliance fans alike and would go on to be called “Lawful Stupid Overdrive” by the lore community because of how the Alliance leadership ended up constantly acting outside of their own interests to maintain their new spontaneously adopted sense of morality.
Aside from just being bad writing it also made the Alliance’s attitude seem inconsistent with their past. The Night Elf players felt this pinch the hardest since their racial identity up until this point had always been the anomalies who rejected the civilized facade that the rest of the Alliance was trying to maintain and instead fashioned themselves as nocturnal, savage, nature dwellers who preferred to kill from the shadows rather than fight face-to-face. But now they had to line up, wear armor and basically become purple humans because dressing in leaves and animal skins to kill enemies who can’t see you didn’t line up with Metzen’s vision for a heroic “Lawful Good” Alliance.
But the Night Elves were just the most egregious case. Throughout Mists of Pandaria, the Alliance felt like it was losing its narrative teeth and as a result quickly started to look like they were just taking a backseat to the Horde’s story because as I said at the start of this, World of Warcraft is a game where the only thing you can really do is murder people. If the Alliance can’t go around murdering people whenever they like then they literally can’t have plot relevance because to have plot relevance you have to appear in gameplay and as I hope I’ve established by now: Without murder, there is no game to play.
This I would say is when the cracks began to start showing but it gets MUCH worse later on.
Warlords of Draenor and Legion were a one-two punch of cartoonishly evil enemies that required no effort to justify drawing your weapons and going to town on them. I don’t think there was ever a single moment where we were asked if we were truly in the right for bashing in a demon’s face so hard that he began coughing up his own trachea, nor was there any need for one, because they were DEMONS and demons are jerks. So good times all around for that brief point in time.
But then Battle for Azeroth rears its ugly head and brings us a war that protagonists will be fighting on both sides of and the festering infected wound that was the now absent Chris Metzen’s “Lawful Good Overdrive” would be ripped open in front of us in all of its pussy glory.
I speak no hyperbole when I say that Battle for Azeroth has been living rent-free in my head every single day for the past 4 years. Not a single night has gone by where I didn’t lay awake in my bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering how anyone over the age of 12 can write a story THAT poorly. Like I genuinely buy into that one theory that Alex Afrasiabi deliberately sabotaged BfA because he knew he was going to get nailed by that sexual harassment investigation and wanted to take the game down with him. Because I just cannot fathom the idea that human beings actually got in a room together, looked at the plot outline for Battle for Azeroth, and thought “Yeah, people won’t absolutely hate every moment of this.”
It’s hard to talk about everything wrong with Battle for Azeroth because it wasn’t just a bunch of mistakes you could neatly identify and list. All of the bad writing, missteps, and inconsistency all congealed in such a way that you can never talk about one bad aspect of it without also talking about all of the other terrible writing decisions that were compounding together and amplifying the mess. So I’m just going to pick two things and pray I can get across what was wrong with them without having to explain every other reason BfA was hot garbage and why Narrative Director Steve Danuser should have been forced to disembowel himself live on-stage at BlizzCon as an apology for his incompetence.
The first was the narrative trying to guilt-trip you for playing the game. Spec-Ops: The Line got away with this because it was meant to be a condemnation of the jingoistic culture of military FPS games plaguing the video game industry. WoW doesn’t have that excuse.
Over and over throughout Battle for Azeroth you’d be fighting the war and killing the enemy faction to do your daily quests and get your rewards when suddenly you’d be forced to do a story quest where some insipid milquetoast hypocritical piece of crap like Anduin, Baine or Saurfang would drag you along and force you to listen to them monologue about how this war is wrong and we should feel bad for fighting it. The game is literally forcing you to fight the war then turns around and tells you to feel bad for doing exactly what they made you do. If I’m not supposed to want to fight this war, then why is it the only way to progress?
And this is the quintessential reason why your morality and gameplay needs to synchronize. Because otherwise, you get nonsense like this. Back to my point at the very beginning, World of Warcraft is a game built around the mechanics of killing people and taking their stuff. If you start telling us that killing people and taking their stuff is bad then you have officially undermined the entire game.
The Alliance players still trapped in the legacy of Chris Metzen’s “Lawful Good Overdrive” definitely felt this too because one of the constant complaints of Alliance fans was how they felt like they were being forced to be purely reactionary and never got to ever take initiative unless it happened off-screen. They were right too because by this point the “Lawful Good Overdrive” had reached its natural and blindingly obvious conclusion. You have to kill people to win a war, but according to this “Lawful Good” doctrine, if you kill people then you’re bad. Meaning that they’ve created a paradox where winning literally makes you a bad person.
This second thing I wanted to talk about is more of a symptom than a cause but I think was one of the most egregious narrative missteps: Introducing the word “genocide” into the Warcraft lexicon at the end of the Elegy short story in reference to the Burning of Teldrassil. I remember feeling my stomach lurch a little when I read that story the first time but at the time I wasn’t sure exactly why. I don’t think this was the first time “genocide” had been said in-universe but before this, you would almost never hear fan discussion using the word “genocide”. These days it’s being used so often in lore discussion that it has completely lost its meaning which is problematic for reasons both logical and ethical.
Here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition of “genocide”:
gen·o·cide
noun
“the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
By this definition you’d have an easier time listing all the things that a player does that isn’t genocide.
Nearly half the quests in the game are essentially a soldier or some other government official saying some variation of this:
“Hey you adventurer, go to that Murloc village and kill some of them for me. ‘Which ones?’ I don’t care, just kill 15 of those stinky fish-people then come back and I’ll give some silver and a pair of magic pants.”
And with the heavy implication that you’re not the only adventurer they’re asking to do this, this is effectively state-sponsored genocide. Oftentimes there will be some justification saying that whatever mongrel race you’re being sent there to slaughter this time has been “acting aggressively” towards whatever settlement gave you the quest. But it’s not like you knew or cared which of the Furbolgs you killed were part of the raiding parties and which ones are just the stay-at-home dads defending their children from the crazy adventurer who busted into their village swinging a two-handed axe like a lunatic. And sometimes they won’t even bother with a justification and literally say you need to clear them out because they’re in the way of your faction’s war machine.
This wasn’t problematic in the past when Azeroth was characterized as a brutal world where fighting and killing were just part of life. But now that “genocide” has been officially acknowledged as a concept in-universe. That makes the player character and by extension both factions guilty of at least a few-hundred counts of it.
There was a minor social media incident during the beta testing for the Dragonflight expansion that I’m glad happened because it perfectly encapsulates all the problems I’ve discussed in this post. There is a minor WoW Twitter influencer who goes by Portergauge and he encountered a questline that he found off-putting because it called for the player to kill a bunch of gnolls. This earned him a bit of mockery because it was such a weird thing to get hung up on. After all, anyone who has played World of Warcraft for longer than a year has almost certainly killed a few hundred thousand gnolls and other mongrels.
But I see Portergauge as a victim of the shifting moral standards I’ve spent all this time talking about. People like him are trying to work with the narrative and embrace the new higher moral standard the story has set for itself. But it is literally impossible for World of Warcraft to meet that standard and still function as a game.
EDIT: People keep asking for a TL;DR so here you go:
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From WC2 to all the way through WotLK. The races of both Alliance and Horde had a violent brutality to their respective cultures that reflected the violent world they lived in. Which often manifested as displaying the severed heads of their foes or other macabre displays. This was also reflected in the gameplay where the solution to every problem for the people of Azeroth was violence.
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The current tone of the narrative has since shifted away from violent pragmatism to actually condemning gratuitous violence which makes the gameplay where you are still told to solve every problem with violence contradictory to the narrative. They try to guilt trip us for killing people while simultaneously telling us to keep killing people. These pacifistic ideals, while nice, don’t fit in a game like this.
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Introducing the word “genocide” to lore discussion was stupid because almost everything you do in this game is by definition genocide. How many dozens if not hundreds of times have you gone into a Murloc/Furbolg/Quilboar village and indiscriminately killed everyone living there?
