We see in things like Lord of the rings a lot of expansive and in depth and yet grounded lore.
In oldhammer, we -had- that. ( i wouldn’t say we do anymore as WH Fanasty is mostly dead outside of 2 games)
My point is in both of these IPs we had clear boundaries and some what grounded lore. Multiple deities and religions, folk lore, politics.
Yet in WoW, we have no politics, there isn’t folk lore with in the game it self, We don’t know how the justice system works, taxes, labor, religion. We know some races have deities but humanity doesn’t and it’s just left at that and even then we don’t know what extent peoples are religious.
The more i think about it the more it seems WoW is a really happy go lucky world with benevolent leaders, free people and no religion. This is really the writing of an American West coaster and you can tell.
I would have loved for more expansions to be involved in doing more ground level work with regular ol’ grunts and peons.
When the current writers do low level stories that don’t revolve around heroic personalities, the faction war, or cosmic events, they do a pretty decent job!
It’s the faction/cosmic war crap that sucks all the air out of the room.
As a LOTR lover, i am currently haft way trough the silmarillion, i don’t want it for a RPG mmo like WoW. The story is so unfair and bias that only a few race would end up enjoying it. It also get really cliche/ cheesy from time to time that i don’t see people enjoying it after waiting for that said story for month or year for that said patch.
Remember that not every story work for a rpg mmo with more than 20 different race which your playerbase already affiliated with and expect to have at least the same ‘‘good’’ content than other race.
Was this the kind of thing the Warcraft IP ever cared about, ever, beyond a superficial level? Like, how much depth did we really get on the political systems of Arthas-era Lordaeron?
I didn’t like BfA and I’ve barely followed SL, but this seems more to be complaining about the genre than the quality.
I’m trying to imagine how a politics-themed dungeon would work.
Maybe you start off by AoEing down rolls of legal red tape and keep a dedicated DPSer applying offensive pressure to the filibuster podium so the raid leader can unlock the mythical axe known as the Tiebreaker to go all Gordion Knot on the objections to the latest trade agreement.
Not to mention that why LoTR did give many detail about some people religion/ politic, is was really specific on some group but left out many clan with barely any mention. As i said, LoTR lore is really unfair and mainly focus on some chosen group of people.
WC lore did something like this with human and night elf lore in WC3 and look where it lead… Every other race are unhappy to not have the same lore and night elf player are unhappy to not have that same unfair focus.
It was unusual in the WC1 and 2 eras in that it was a strategy game that had some measure of emphasis on logistics but was still relatively accessible, in an era when PC strategy games were either board games or games you needed a BA at minimum in order to comprehend and relatively simple RPG mechanics in an era where PC RPG’s were usually derived from the relatively complex pen and paper variety.
But aside from that, no they didn’t. In fact, we got basically no information at all about the daily lives of smaller people until the MMO. In that sense, Warcraft has always been very basic in terms of fantasy worldbuilding. What carries it is its presentation, and in that sense, nothing has changed from WC3 to Shadowlands.
What’s changed the most is the extent to which players care about relatively minor details in the Warcraft universe and that’s entirely because of WoW’s popularity, and one of the reasons that WoW became the phenomenon that it did (among numerous reasons, including plain old luck) is because Azeroth was basically a giant playground that people could imprint themselves onto, and what people assumed or inferred was generally considered good enough to carry the setting so long as new things kept happening in the world.
Ironically, I think that one of the reasons that people claim that WoW’s writing has declined is because we’re actually getting relatively more details on the setting, but that inevitably leads to conflict with players who had imprinted something else onto the world. It’s why there are certain topics that are literally never going to be agreed upon no matter how much detail Blizzard gives us or how skilled their writers are.
Blizzard could conjure the spirit of Mark Twain and have him write a Warcraft novel and it would still be rejected by a portion of the playerbase, because at a certain point we don’t really want facts, we want things to be clear enough to give direction but vague enough that we can imagine whatever details we want.
Isn’t that what we have with the current narrative team and their favourites?
Ok, so for the starting point, imagine the final raid of the Shadowlands, wherever is that Sepulcher. The Jailer needs an item of the 1st Ones… but the brokers instead of just giving it away decide to start an auction. So getting to the final “boss” would be like rooms with events in BRD, maybe some rep grind, and in the end, the auction scene with Elune, and the Jailer, and all of that stylized as
Early on in the RTS or early Days of WoW broad strokes work, but we’ve been in WoW this long and they had ample opportunity over this long a time to develop said lore, even if they did it in a manner similar to Elder Scrolls where a lot of the cultural and background is just presented in, in universe books.
It also doesn’t help that many people dislike WoW using a Dragon Ball formula of the new big bad being a one up on the last one and we keep going cosmic scale with vaguely defined stakes.
When I mentioned “some people are not busy” I had Jeff Grubb in mind. He was archaelogist afaia, although only wrote The Last Guardian for Warcraft. Lore of Karazhan / Medivh seems to work out rather well given the community reception. He also wrote one of most liked story lines for Guild Wars (Abaddon one, local god there)
There are other writers, not sure how interesting a discussion about them would be.
Well why we do have it to some point with human potential, it is no where need LoTR lever. As i said, i am still only haft way though the Silmarillion as i started it last sunday, but here is a little summary.
God only wished to created 2 race. The perfect immortal elf and the flawed mortal human who got their own motivation of going forward. Dwarf wasn’t supposed to happen as it technically isn’t god that created them, he only give them live, and was nearly ditch by nearly all valar ( the being just under god) and even by their own creator who didn’t do much for them. All other race wasn’t suppose to happen and nearly every evil race have the same origin: God creation corrupt by melkor, valar creation corrupt by Melkor or just creation of melkor. There isn’t many lore for you if you aren’t a elf or a dwaft.
In fact, at the end of the third age ( the end of the book/movie), with all elf living for the west, Arda, the world, have two principal land. The west which is only valar, maia, elf and those who carried ring of power. The middle earth is now nearly 100% human land with a few exception ( the shire with hobbit).
The book and the lore is mostly just elf and human with dwarf have like two page for them in the entire book…
As fanatical devotee of the Warhammer lores (more 40k than Old though I still love them both equally), Warhammer works because of its theme. Grim dark.
Everyone and everything in their lore is capable of being a jerk. Even more so when you consider there are beings like Nagash around, seeking to kill everything by any means necessary to become a god of death or Archaon just looking to burn down the world to cinders just so the Dark Gods would have nothing to salivate over anymore.
There are many greater than life beings in the Old World but thanks to vast armies, sporadic magics and a very plainly evil Chaotic force seeking to turn the world inside out a balance of sorts is achieved until GW got bored and decide it was time for an Endtimes to reduce it to atoms.
40k is much vaster. Huge as its story takes place over the span of an entire galaxy inhabited by aliens, mutants, heretics or worse.
Warcraft is too small. Too tribal. We’ve been stuck in a war between Alliance and Horde for decades and neither side is getting nowhere realistically as the possibility of bring the war to a satisfying or gory conclusion is a terrifying prospect for Blizzard as they’d have no idea as to what direction to go in next.
I am not familiar with Warhammer. People talk about it here all the time, but I have no reference on it, and don’t care too. Never seemed interesting enough. I only got into Warcraft lore because it was attached to fun video games.
LotR, though, is pretty immersive and well explained as well as contained. We have a good idea of what Tolkien was aiming for as far as how the World was created, the sinking of Numenor, the Noldor warring against Morgoth, the forging of the rings, the fates of most of the LotR characters, and even the return of ancient heroes in the final battles in the distant future. And the LotR MMO is officially non canon - so they aren’t even pretending the story is alive and changing due to unfolding events we can play through.
Warcraft is trying to literally find new dimensions for us to explore. We have been up, down, and sideways through time and space. We are in the Afterlife now. They don’t have a canon story separate from their MMO.
Honestly, I’ve always seen WoW more like a comic book series than anything else.
I grew up reading my dad’s massive (like, as in ten thousand issues) comic book collection from the 60s through mid 90s (both Marvel and DC).
Comic book writers are constantly forced to invent entirely new lore on pre-existing canon… and often, they’d end up reconning the arcing canon of their titles.
Amongst examples that comes to the mind immediately: The “Inferno” event (Marvel), the Infinite Crises (DC), and “Who’s Donna Troy?” (DC).
Sometimes the writers pull it off. Sometimes they don’t. But either way, I always read the “Letters to the Editor” at the end of these issues — despite being 30 to 60 years old — because they’re an interesting window into the fandoms of the time.
And you know what?
A lot of the complaints I read in these letters… echo the complaints I read here on the forums.
Point is, some people just do not like the creation of brand-new lore from scratch. They just don’t like it.
But with me? Since I literally grew up on this stuff, it honestly doesn’t bother me. In fact, I would say that my top two favorite expansions, lore-wise, are MoP and SL due to the addition of brand-new lore.
But I acknowledge that it’s a point of view not widely shared.
Interesting point but one question.
Don’t these comic books go through constant new reinvented issues and multi-verse relaunches?
Its not like a comicbook series that was going on for hundreds of issues and each time it would re-write something. They just issue a new comicbooks with a new rewrite.
The problem is the story in this game is presented as a novel but this novel keeps getting updated or it invalidates what we read earlier. Its not like we can go back to the previous comic book issue and have that interpretation. That is closed to us.
