A good story doesn't have to have the cliche "bad guy," to catch the attention of an avid reader.
A cliche is only cliche if the audience finds it cliche. That is to say, cliche is subjective(and it has always been.)
A villain or what have you is simply an efficient way to provide conflict for the protagonist(s) to overcome. It also opens new avenues of storytelling because a thinking, sentient villain is far more sympathetic than something entirely unrelatable. It all depends on what point the author is trying to get across, and what kind of story they are trying to tell. Because of this, many stories do, in fact, require a villainous figure depending on the perspective of the protagonist.
Vanilla WoW included such stories, but it had no overarching plot to it. It was like that of a virtual Silmarilion; a collection of smaller stories and adventures for the sake of building the world, but lacking a singular driving plot or protagonist. In vanilla there was no singular villain, but neither was there a singular protagonist. The player characters were simply along for the ride.
10/28/2018 01:39 PMPosted by
Lahgtah
A good story doesn't have to have the cliche "bad guy," to catch the attention of an avid reader.
A cliche is only cliche if the audience finds it cliche. That is to say, cliche is subjective(and it has always been.)
A villain or what have you is simply an efficient way to provide conflict for the protagonist(s) to overcome. It also opens new avenues of storytelling because a thinking, sentient villain is far more sympathetic than something entirely unrelatable. It all depends on what point the author is trying to get across, and what kind of story they are trying to tell. Because of this, many stories do, in fact, require a villainous figure depending on the perspective of the protagonist.
Vanilla WoW included such stories, but it had no overarching plot to it. It was like that of a virtual Silmarilion; a collection of smaller stories and adventures for the sake of building the world, but lacking a singular driving plot or protagonist. In vanilla there was no singular villain, but neither was there a singular protagonist. The player characters were simply along for the ride.
Exactly. Thank you.
Now this is not to say that makes it a bad game, just that when you are looking at lore or story of the expansions it is the weakest.
I mean I love smash bros and thats story I think was kid plays with his toys by making them fight eachother.
I always thought it was kind of funny after playing through to Wrath's endgame that there was a tauren in Stonetalon that thought an Earthen awakening in the valley was one of the worst things that could happen. Apparently, he thought it could destroy half(?) the continent, but after stomping and befriending so many, I never could see them as a threat.
Unpopular opinion: All of them.
Although specific characters and chunks of it are fun. The warcraft story as a whole has never been good.
Didn't expect to hear from another.
"Which !@#$ sandwich tastes worst?"
It's not too bad, as pulp fantasy goes. But that's a really, REALLY low bar...
10/28/2018 12:03 PMPosted by
Kelzar
Vanilla, horde and alliance are fighting again after banding together to beat archimonde for reasons... also DI are trying to summon ragnaros and are fighting black dragons so we should kill them so they dont kill eachother?
BC, Illidan has invaded through the dark portal and we need to take the fight to him by killing his leaders before we take him out.
WotlK, the LK has sent a scourge invasion so we need to end his threat to keep peace.
Cata, deathwing has destroyed the world pillar when escaping the earth plane causing a massive disruption to the world and causing the elemental lords to rise up, we need to restore balance to the world and stop deathwing.
MoP, recovering from the cataclysm both factions are trying to rebuild and have started fighting over resources when a new continent is discovered which is rich in resources, so a massive land grab begins only to discover that war on this land causes the beaten old god to awaken and corrupt the land. Horde leader is corrupted and we fight to depose him and bring him to justice.
WoD, bronze dragon breaks hellscream out of prison so he can take him back to the height of power of the orc horde and using various timelines of horde to create an infinite orcish horde to fight the infinite legion of demons, is betrayed by hellscream who just wants to make orcs great again cause he is a racist as established last expaction. We are attacked by this new horde and must defend ourselves as well as try to bring hellscream to justice after his escape.
Legion, old timeline guldan escapes and does guldan things in trying to bring back the legion since the give him power, manages to find Illidans demon soul which he plans to revive as an avatar of sargeras. We must band together to stop another legion invasion, eventually we take the fight to argus to end the threat of the legion once and for all.
BfA, Sylvanas has instigated war against the alliance(reasons still unclear). Both factions are looking for new allies to replenish there ranks from the war with the legion so they can win this new war(story still mostly unfinished so really hard to judge at this time)
So while some of them have story elements that people might not like every expansion other than vanilla had an overarching story except vanilla.
Extremely helpful breakdown, thanks.
Also, WoD, wtf? I played that expansion and i knew NONE of that. Always thought we just broke into their world Willy Nilly and they were busy fighting. All i remember was snow orcs, rest is a blur.
Its funny how they !@#$ on illiden in BC making him just a crazy villain whose actions didn't make a lot of sense then they make him out to have been super woke the whole time and hes the savior of the universe. I love illiden from the rts but wtf.
BC was probably the worst until WoD. Legion might have even one-upped it depending on how you feel about Illidan and artifact weapons.
As far as lore goes, Legion was really, really bad, and BfA isn't looking to be much better. Not that a faction war over Azerite isn't believable, but the way Blizzard wrote it in, and the fact that Saurfang is the only Hordie unwilling to put up with Sylvanas' bull!@#$ - even after Garrosh - is complete and utter nonsense.
They've written themselves into a situation where either Sylvanas wins and she kills everybody on the planet, or the Horde loses yet the Alliance just walks away leaving the Horde intact and without the Horde reforming any of its proto-Fascist ways, such as swearing fealty to the Warchief alone, or all the "Blood and thunder", "War is what makes nations great" bull%^-*.
Because we know Blizzard will never write any reforms into the Horde. Even Thrall was like, "Let's atone for our past by using the same social structure as the Old Horde, using the same symbols as the Old Horde, and naming our capital after the mastermind of some of the Old Horde's worst atrocities."
Warlords of Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey.
Every expansion that had the theme 'the fate of the world' as the main focus.
I actually had some good fun in MoP killing people on that island. But God, the panda idea was soooo stupid. To me, that was when WoW really changed. I know larger gameplay aspects were changed before then, but something about dumb cartoony kung fu panda BS killed how I saw the game. Before that, it at least had a more serious tone, there were real horrors... whether it was undead, demons, cultists, etc... then it jumps to pandaland...
Quantity of Lore:
Most of it does not appear within the game, assuming one only played the game and did not go outside of it for the lore, the worst Lore would have to be WoD as so much of that expansion was cut, it left huge holes in what plot there was within the game.
Quality of Lore:
This is subjective, personally I found that after TBC there was too much effort on the part of the writers to hold my hand, which was not as stimulating as previous expansions
Post Expansion game lore:
After they cut the legendary cape questline out of it the worst post expansion lore would have to surely belong to MoP
WoD - time travel is almost always stupid as a plot device; and they took it way too far. Made a complete mess of everything.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. WoD was literally Blizzard running out of ideas and re-hasing old lore. The worst lore in a WoW expansion for sure.
BFA. it is consistantly the worst on all fronts. The Faction Conflict is nonsense, The Old God hinting is obnoxiously obvious, and its destroying characters and even entire races constructively and literally. There is nothing they could do this expac to save it.
Theyâve made some funny lore decisions in every expac.
But WoD was a trainwreck. Everything made no sense. One Legion in all universes. The concept of alternate universes itself along with time travel.
It punched so many holes in the lore of the Warcraft universe that it will never recover from.
Easily BFA. Knew it was gonna be a trainwreck the second it was revealed that the faction conflict was going to be front and center. Easy way to polarize your playerbase even more than they already were.
I've never cared too much about the lore, I know a little bit just from playing, but that's about it. The expansion theme I liked the least was MoP, felt more like world of hippycraft. Gotta kill the bad mood demons man! Channel your inner chi. What really made me mad though -- idk if this is true at all, but supposedly MoP was supposed to be Japanese themed, but they went with Chinese and I guarentee you it's because of Blizzard having a large Chinese base and virtually no Japanese base and China hates Japan which they likely feared they'd lose their Chinese playerbase. Would've enjoyed a Japanese theme much more, but even then it's so bizarre to go from dragons, aliens and demons, zombies, dragons, CURVE BALL you're not playing an Asian themed western MMO.
Catalcysm I thought was cool theme wise, the breaking of the world didn't bother me much it was just crap gameplay.
10/28/2018 12:03 PMPosted by
Kelzar
Vanilla, horde and alliance are fighting again after banding together to beat archimonde for reasons... also DI are trying to summon ragnaros and are fighting black dragons so we should kill them so they dont kill eachother?
What an oversimplification skipping out on the best bits of vanilla lore
Warchief Rend has re-organised a rival horde known as the Dark Horde inside blackrock mountain and Allied with Nefarian (who is experimenting on various dragonflights, splicing genes together to create a chromatic dragonflight), seeks to overthrow warchief Thrall and prove which is the real horde.
As to why we go after ragnaros... a fully powered elemental lord is bad news so its a pre-emptive strike "too soon Executus..." also he has neat loot.
Leaving BRM and the tolkienesque climaitc mountain/tower battle we move on to the troll menace who have resurrected the blood god Hakkar which is also pretty bad news.
Just when all that is sorted an ancient enemy below the sands of silithus stirs... and when you have a world ending threat there is only one NPC you can call on to spearhead that, Suarfang the Might of Kalimdor, alliance/horde all cower before the cleave.
Finally you look towards the plaguelands, you got Tirion and Tealan, the scarlet crusade, battle for darrowshire (pamela redpath), zombie invasions and a floating citadel, naxxarams.
Vanilla wow was all about the world not about a central narrative, thats would made it better. It wasnt quite sandbox but you got to go out and find the narratives threads and piece it together yourself (which left room for interpretation in some cases).