Says Bolvar, at the start of Shadowlands. Meanwhile…
- Goes to the Maw
- Clicks Hearthstone
What’s the secret weapon to escaping this inescapable depth of hopeless and despair for which all souls are damned? Oh yeah, that cheap little rock handed to every level 1 when they’re born.
I know this is pedantic but I wish the story writing was a bit more… aware… of the context it’s in. The Torghast quests where I’m going around rescuing Horde/Alliance leaders who just can’t “figure it out” is amusing, too.
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You’ve identified a very valid issue with the expansion, but you’ve gone the wrong way about approaching it. From your post, I take it you’d prefer if you were locked into only playing Shadowlands content when you begin the introductory quests? Please let me know if this is in fact not what you believe, because I’d be worried if it is.
Welcome to the Story Forums.
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While Blizzard could lock us inside the Maw / Torghast, it would not be a pleasant experience for the masses. Which is why I think there was some kind of trade off here: We can freely “escape” the maw at will using a variety of tools but we lose access to our mounts. It’s a tit for tat kind of deal.
Because otherwise all work and no mounts or way out of the maw would make us all dull, and possibly cost Blizzard subs.
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WoD was like this too - and I really don’t understand why Blizzard does this except to try to make their conflict seem more important than it really is.
If the struggle was compelling, it wouldn’t feel so insecure as to inject reasons to force us to participate in it.
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It is called suspension of disbelief. The reason we are able to leave using hearthstone is purely a gameplay thing. Heck, lorewise Hearthstone are rare objects very few people have access to.
It injects those reasons to set the tone for the expansion. In the case of our Draenor/Maw escapades it forces us to experience (at least a tiny bit) of how it would feel if we were cut off from the world and had to survive at least until we get far enough questwise to open our inevitable portal back home.
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I raise your suspension of disbelief with ludonarrative dissonance.
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And I posit most people dont care enough about either. More importantly Blizzard focus on what is “fun” and that story incositencies will always have to be second to the need for it.
Heck, if you look at any popular video game there is a good chance someone has already made a video on the various incositencies one needs to tolerate in the name of gameplay(there is an entire series of them about pokemon if your looking for recomendations).
If Blizzard is focusing on what’s “fun”, then they’re doing a terrible job and should see their management team fired.
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“Fun” is literally a very subjective concept and their entire playerbase have different and normally opposing definitions of it.
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oh wow a plot won’t arbitrarily restrict you from doing something
how dare they
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Wrong. Scott Rigby mapped out the elements for why we play video games, and you ignore them at your peril.
The Heartstone isn’t canon.
It is canon. At least in so much as hearthstones do exist. It is just that it a very rare thing and I doubt it actually works in the Maw.
Thus far Blizzard has kept WoW going and at this point WoW will probably last for at least decade more at the minimum.
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Blizzard has been coasting along on brand equity, bleeding subs all the while. I would not consider Blizzard to be the poster child for good video game management - otherwise Activision wouldn’t have seen the need to restructure them in 2019, and bring in a fixer team in 2021.
Most of that restructuring was on the customer service side more then the development side. Blizzard has always had long gestation period for new games(see OW2 and Diablo 4).
As for WoW in particular, it is a game that is almost two decades old and generally it still manages to draw people in during the beggining of an expansion. Retention wise it will probably slowly lag because at the end lf the day WoW remains WoW and continues to use dungeons/raids/questing as their main method of player engagement.
And WoW is increasingly failing to cut it. I have little doubt, given that subscriptions doubled when Classic was released, that retail could do it on its own.
Eeeeh, I don’t think you’re wrong, but what I feel differs about this instead of something like “bowling over a bunch of gnomes while being told War is Hell” is that I feel the hearthstone example is a game concession to prevent players from becoming softlocked. It’s a gameplay solution for a gameplay problem and I think people just need to squint their eyes and pretend not to see the puppet strings for this one.
It reminds me of the time a couple of guildmates logged out in Naxxramas the night before the WotLK prepatch came out just to see what would happen. If I recall correctly, they actually were whisked away to the Northrend version where they would immediately DC on every login attempt because nobody was flagged to be allowed there yet. I think they had to put in GM tickets to be moved back to Kalimdor.
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I agree with OP, but for a different reason. No sooner do we arrive on Oribos than a bunch of secondary characters pop in from Azeroth. Then more come later. Then more again. The whole “cut off from Azeroth” aspect of the story only lasted for the Maw intro. It was immediately negated right after. Same thing happened in WoD, where as soon as we escaped Tanaan, Khadgar opened a portal back to Azeroth and an army came through to start building your garrison and provide supplies.
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I definitely agree with this. I understand that the world will be full of Azerothian players, but NPCs do not have to be so abundant.
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The narrative literally involved us opening portals that allow people from Azeroth to enter alt-Draenor. This is where the people building our Garrison came from, this is where Stormshield came from.
There was no ludonarrative dissonance here, just a narrative you don’t like and a term you learned from a video you saw a few days ago that you’re itching to pull out.
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