10/28/2018 10:07 PMPosted by
Kilda
They’ve 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.
The initial idea for WOD was ubersauce... a necromancer who manages to resurrect all the great warchiefs of the past.
Even WOD as flimsy as the premise was could have been great if they managed to get all the content in and not chop out the middle act.
That said I think wow is overdue for a big reset. Expand alliance/horde to be idealistic differences and not racial ones. Horde believing in right of might, forging your own destiny and valuing freedom. Alliance believing in a class based society right of inheritance, indentured servitude (slavery) and protocols which are foreign to the horde.
10/28/2018 12:26 PMPosted by
Ciphon
For the Loreheads... they hated everything BC did and everything afterwards
For those here for gameplay that dont care for the lore: Cata. And MAYBE the tail end of WoTLK.
This was true for me 100% until WoD. I swore if they released an expansion as bad as Cata again I'd quit. MoP gave me some hope, then Blizzard said "hold my beer" and somehow managed to not only make an expansion as bad as Cataclysm, they one upped it with WoD. That was the nail in the coffin. Since then I've played about a couple days worth of Legion and like an hour of BFA.
bfa, I was cringing throughout the whole time before unsubbing. World of feminism.
Kael'thas' fate is still the absolute worst, most left-field lore move they've ever made.
I love Burning Crusade game-wise, but I actually agree that in terms of actual lore, when they added the Isle of Quel'danis and, oh, surprise, Kael'thas isn't dead, so this time make sure he's dead was the worst. It even opened up the future Legion twist of oh, surprise, Illidan isn't dead, so this time he's the special prophesied HEEWO!
Burning Crusade also gave us the windchimes, who suddenly took over so much of every story and look where that led us in Legion. They're such the Mary Sue of perfect Light beings, who are only flawed where they flip and become perfect evil beings. Just UGH x 10.
So even though I loved Burning Crusades, it really was the beginning of treating lore like something both expendable and way more important than the world itself.
Beyond Wrath, it's all just a blur of trash.
Cataclysm.
If they have to bribe you with an achievement to go outside and be killed by the main antagonist, they have a problem.
everything after lich king
This is the correct answer.
In a weird way, BfA lore feels like a more logical progression from Vanilla; a more natural continuation of what should have remained the core tension in WoW i.e. Alliance vs Horde conflict.
Imagine if Bliz had kept Vanilla larger game designs in place and had simply extended it with new terroritories to quest and fight in in Zuldazar and Kul Tiras.
10/29/2018 02:09 AMPosted by
Wyn
In a weird way, BfA lore feels like a more logical progression from Vanilla; a more natural continuation of what should have remained the core tension in WoW i.e. Alliance vs Horde conflict.
Imagine if Bliz had kept Vanilla larger game designs in place and had simply extended it with new terroritories to quest and fight in in Zuldazar and Kul Tiras.
But... outside of battlegrounds, Vanilla had barely anything to do with Alliance versus Horde. The whole faction conflict thing didn't really become a central focus of WoW until Wrathgate.
And with how often the factions have had to work together to overcome world-ending threats - which culminates in the factions being melded together in class order halls in "Legion" (except not, because reasons) - the faction conflict makes very little sense now, except for Sylvanas wanting to kill everybody... except most of the Horde leaders wouldn't back that at all, much like they wouldn't back Garrosh.
10/29/2018 02:50 AMPosted by
Kiyrin
But... outside of battlegrounds, Vanilla had barely anything to do with Alliance versus Horde.
i take it you don't read quest text than?
They've all had their faults.
A lot of people dislike TBC because for some weird reason they assumed Kael'thas and Illidan were good guys in Warcraft 3, so they blamed bad writing on making them villains in TBC. I wonder have these people even played the blood elf campaign of TFT? When, you know, Illidan and friends literally swear fealty to Kil'jaeden at the end? Which, of course, is not to say that TBC didn't have legitimately negative things, like the whole Draenei-Eredar retcon, and having strong science fiction aesthetics, that sort of stuff.
That being said, I personally dislike WotLK the most. Most of the things I despise about Blizzard writing today started in WotLK. Antagonists being a prominent part of the storyline and showing up in every tenth quest. Faction leaders and other personalities having constant in-game cinematics and dialogue about their own interpersonal relationships. Dungeons being pseudo-cinematic experiences. Mary Sues like Tirion taking up the spotlight (I liked him in vanilla, mind you. Just like I liked Nathanos in vanilla.) and other characters acting grossly out of character, like Jaina being a pathetic crybaby. Way too many silly and juvenile things in the game - which is not to say Blizzard was always super serious before, in vanilla you had Link, Mario and Luigi in Un'goro, in TBC you had poop quests, etc. but they've gone a bit too far with it in WotLK. Compare the atmosphere of, say, Naxx (a raid originally made in vanilla), and ICC. What were the funny moments in Naxx, killing Kel'thuzad's cat? Eh, fine I guess. No big deal. Meanwhile in ICC you had an entire wing devoted to a dumb Futurama reference and those goofy flesh golem monstrosities acting like children. Not to mention cringy voice acting through the entire raid, crying Jaina and the godawful there must always be a Lich King ending.
Ever since WotLK, WoW felt more like a Marvel movie than a Warcraft game.
Expansions after WotLK only continued with the negative trends WotLK started. More Mary Sues, more epic Reddit quips, more in-game cinematics of faction leaders acting like children, more bad guys showing up every ten seconds, entire zones being pop culture references, more NPCs fellating our character as the badass superhero, etc. At this point I would probably prefer if they just removed story from the game altogether. Just give us new zones to do kill X mobs quests in and dungeons and raids to kill baddies for loot. No dialogue, quest text, or cinematics, please.
Though if I had to single out one post-WotLK expansion as the second worst, I would probably go with Legion. Not that writing in Legion was particularly worse than in other expansions (I quite liked Suramar, for one.), but I consider it the second worst because of the missed potential. Obviously there were expansions before that that had a lot of cut content, but let's be fair, who really gives a damn about content cut from meme expansions like WoD? WoD was a self-contained story so it doesn't really matter if most of it was cut. But Legion deal with integral parts of the Warcraft storyline since Warcraft 3, and it dealt with them horribly.
In a single expansion, we've gone from defending Azeroth from the next major Legion invasion, to counter-attacking, conquering Argus, and defeating Sargeras himself once and for all. Argus deserved to be an expansion pack of its own. We go to Draenor twice but Argus, homeworld of the Burning Legion, is basically Timeless Isle 3.0? Army of Light? What we all used to think was going to be a huge intergalactic force compromised of thousands of different races from all over the universe who united and fought Legion across a million worlds to hold back the tide turned out to be a bunch of Draenei on a single spaceship. Talk about a disappointment.
10/29/2018 03:00 AMPosted by
Ganèlon
10/29/2018 02:50 AMPosted by
Kiyrin
But... outside of battlegrounds, Vanilla had barely anything to do with Alliance versus Horde.
i take it you don't read quest text than?
Depends on what quests.
In the Horde Onyxia quest chain, your character asks Thrall if it would be better off if Onyxia is allowed to destroy the Alliance from within. Thrall says no, and tells you that the Horde is at peace for once. A wounded Alliance would become chaotic, which threatens the Horde. The whole point of the Horde killing Onyxia was to avoid conflict with the Alliance.
In Durotar, a low-level Horde quest tells the player to kill some Kul Tirans who took back one of their keeps because they violated a pact between Thrall and Jaina. The questgiver even mentions "These humans know no respect for diplomacy." Why even mention diplomacy at all? If they were at war, retaking their old keep would be expected behavior.
A low level quest in Stormwind for the Alliance has the player deliver a supply note to a tailor. She remarks that she's "heard nothing of open war." If the Horde and the Alliance were at each other's throats, the common people, who'd be recruited from or supplying the war effort, would be aware of it.
I'm not going to say this is conclusive evidence, I'm just bringing up that the situation was more complex than "Horde vs. Alliance" in vanilla. Multiple forces were at work to maintain peace while others were sowing the seeds of conflict between the factions. People might think they were at war because of marketing or game mechanics, but that's an oversimplification.
There are few inconsistencies, though. The human intro cinematic literally states "the armies of Stormwind have been called away to fight the savage Horde on distant battlefields", and there's an entire storyline about how human lands are now undefended as they all try to seek aid from one another - when the paladin in charge of defense of Westfall sends letters for aid to Redridge and Duskwood only to find that they too are on their own.
But yeah, when Thrall finds out Alliance is being secretly controlled by Onyxia who is trying to destroy it from within, he says something like "That explains why Alliance armies have been acting so puzzling lately.", so it could be that Alliance forces have been mobilized for war, but I guess we killed Onyxia before she could actually make them start the war. Though I guess it would have been nice to run into those armies and those distant would-be battlefields at some point.
I think we can reasonably chalk it up to different developers writing different pieces of these stories. It'd explain the inconsistencies. They probably couldn't prod Chris Metzen for every little detail when writing each line.
Heck, I was just reading the WoW Diary written by a developer, and in there it describes that Metzen only provided guidance and broad strokes in terms of lore. The rest of the team got to fill in details as they saw fit.
The lore is lost, it became completely absurd.
The best expansions to me regarding storytelling, however, are Vanilla and MoP. Wrath is a much lower third.
I'm shocked there's not more for MOP.
Gameplay aside let's take a look:
We built an entire expansion out of fanboi material that capitalized on every single Asian/Buddhist stereotype we could find PLUS pandas.
Everything after that was pretty awful, too. Time travel, everyone being a super hero, and a giant sword stabbing a planet. I mean, I know it's a game. An asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs.
A gigantic sword stabbed all the way to the earth's core killed a few bugs in silithus. Okay.
Being completely honest here: TBC.
It had to retcon the Eredar, Draenei, and Sargeras right out of the gate. First warning sign.
It introduced intergalactic spaceships and other sci-fi stuff. Second warning sign.
Many prominent Warcraft 3 characters became raid bosses for no reason. Third and ultimate warning sign.
Kael'thas' fate is still the absolute worst, most left-field lore move they've ever made. It never made sense for the character whatsoever. Same goes for Illidan.
Naaru were a big mistake to introduce. Blood Elves on Horde never really felt right. Draenei always felt like an after thought.
Also started the horrible trend of making iconic Alliance characters neutral quest-givers, while killing off iconic Horde characters (which continues to this day).
TBC was probably the most fun to play, but I agree it had the worst lore.
A good story doesn't have to have the cliche "bad guy," to catch the attention of an avid reader
this is what i loved about mop, it started to head back towards, you are an adventurer in a strange new land but people didn't like not having a big bad so they shoehorn the big bad as horde with Garrosh
BFA hands down - the main storyline makes no sense at all. It's supposed to be battle for Azeroth - not Jaina's personal shame story /wrists.
Worst lore: Wod (time travel to kill our ancestors is stupid. "Hey grandpa! *cuts him down for 3 apexi crystals")
Worst story: Mop (one word.. pandas)