Okay, now I know you’re a dev in disguise.
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Oh no.
https://media1.tenor.com/images/d67151530537ae616694684b72ea3a5d/tenor.gif?itemid=7625864
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Actually, I would argue that apathy is far worse than hate. With hate, at least you still have some level of attachment to the story and care for what happened or happens next. Apathy means you just don’t care anymore.
The worst thing that can happen with a fanbase (story, sports, etc) is apathy.
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Better for whom, though? For the devs? For the players? For the shareholders?
Bro, look in the mirror.
Also, read an actual book. Watch an actual movie by a legitimate film director.
Watch a Scorcese, a Kubrick, a Hitchcock, an Akira Kurosawa, a Studio Ghibli film, anything just so you know what the difference is.
Their team is profoundly amateur at writing, so decides to amp it up by repeatedly sticking their fingers in the eyes of the fanbase by trying to rile them up with punctuated calamities and outrages.
Most of us watched the intro cinematic to Shadowlands where Anduin got yoinked and literally laughed out loud. If you were doing anything other than laughing out loud, I’m actually not sure what to tell you. You’re not in on the joke.
It was legitimately funny. Like a Benny Hill routine. In fact, play it with the “Benny Hill Theme” in the background and you’ll see what I’m trying to describe. And I don’t think it was intentional comedy. That was just bad writing and bad directing.
I hate what they’ve done with the characters and setting from Warcraft III.
There’s a difference.
I hated what they did to the Diablo universe with Diablo III, that doesn’t mean Diablo III was good.
It feels like they’re ruining my guilty pleasures from childhood.
11 Likes
the old man yells at cloud thing was hilarious.
This is much it, and i disagree hate is better than apathy in this case, not this kind of hate.
Such as
BtS Sylvanas: Why did Vol’jin make me warchief!? I prefer to be in the shadows not in the spotlight!
BFA & Shadowlands Sylvanas: Becoming Warchief was all part of the plan. That stupid troll (Vol’jin) got tricked that easily by Mueh’zala? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Time to burn down a tree for Zovaal!
And BtS was meant to be the lead into BFA. How the hell did blizzard screw that up?
It is really unfounded through when you quote one of the lead story writers saying it?
That was what the general public in the Horde thought it was. Occupy Darnasses and the ocean around it to cut off Alliance supply lines of Azerite. But nope, Sylvanas burned down a tree to give the Jailer about 1k souls even though he has like trillions of them already from other worlds.
I started laughing at the N’zoth death cinematic. Carbots version of it is 100% accurate as well. Same with his parody of the shadowlands intro cinematic.
7 Likes
And part of the reason why is Blizzard hiding Zovaals true motives from us. Like what did he do that the other Eternal Ones (including Daddy D) locked him up? Why does he feel like that was an unjust thing to do? What did Zovaal do to convince Daddy D to betray his fellow Eternal ones? We don’t know any of those answers because blizzard wants to put in a “subvert expectations!!!” moment and a very bad one at that.
At least with Thanos we know what he wants from the get go and it is further explained with his monologue with Doctor Strange. Get all the stones to wipe away half of all life because if left unchecked, life will destroy itself, as it did on Titan. His fellow Titans called him a madman and now they are all dead. Thanos has convinced himself that he was right all along and has put that belief to the test, such as with Gamora’s homeworld. Further supporting his quest. He even praises and comforts those who were willing to make the hardest choices as he had to. Such as when he says “I like you” to Peter Quill after Peter shot Gamora and when he tries to relate to Wanda after seeing her kill Vision (I’m convinced that Thanos allowed Wanda to follow through with it just to see if she could do it. He had the timestone, so he could just reverse time anyway. Which is what he did). Thanos was caught slightly offguard when Loki said to kill Thor at the start of the movie. He was not expecting that outcome considering that Thor and Loki must’ve made up following the events in New York.
Endgame further adds to this by showing that Thanos is really just a narcissist with a messiah complex. He expected the universe to praise him as a hero for ending all suffering caused by overpopulation. However the universe still sees him as a monster and some people are trying to reverse his victory. So what does he do? Attempts to wipe it all away, kill everything and start anew. He wants to become God, not a god, but THE GOD.
But do we have anything like that for Zovaal? Nope. All we got is a generic cookie cutter “I am the big bad of everything” villain. At least Sargeras had clear motives (after blizzard did enough retcons) as he was afraid of the Void and their true power if allowed to corrupt a Titan World Soul.
5 Likes
Honestly thus far I’ve enjoyed the SL content. That’s kind of why I feel there aren’t too many posts about it. Everything’s basically fine.
I’ve gushed about Maldraxxus and Revendreth and so far am liking stuff in Ardenweald. Bastions the only weak link for me but I can’t really muster much more than a “Meh”.
It’s also difficult to really make threads about. This being a new setting with mostly new characters- I don’t feel like I can speculate on much. Plus there’s 4 separate storylines. WoW’s pretty much my only recreational time sink these days and I’ve only finished two Covenant campaigns.
BFA started by nuking two cities many players had over a decade of emotional attachment to. It was like they shattered a favorite childhood toy then stared at us like we were supposed to clap. That’s obviously going to conjure some frothy correspondence.
More so than “Haha, the goo’s named Kevin and he has a party hat” or “Yep those owl dudes sure can play a flute” is going to at any rate.
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I’ve thought long about the diminishing strength of the story in WoW, and I don’t think I can really point to any particular place in time fairly.
Vanilla was mostly about the Eastern Kingdoms, though there’s a lot of charm in what exists regardless.
TBC is basically Vanilla, but if you tacked on sloppy stories about the Illidari acting out of character. It’s got some pretty neat stuff though.
Wrath arguably did the least harm and delivered a lot of what people wanted, but it also started the focus on Varian, which would act as a big drain on the Alliance narrative for the next decade.
Cataclysm did a lot wrong, but it also was arguably the peak in storytelling for some of the smaller zones. Which, I should probably back up to explain. You know those little minor NPCs who randomly deliver a short, but very meaningful, dialogue about their personal motives? Cataclysm had more of those NPCs than any other expansion. That’s good world building. Cataclysm had flaws too, but we all already know them well, I just want to say it’s more mixed than outright negative. /opinion
Mists of Pandaria had great world building too (the Mogu might be one of the better villains in the franchise, in my opinion), but it also marked the sharp decline of Alliance story telling by having the Alliance narrative focus around the same handful of characters: Varian, Jaina, and Anduin. From this point forward, these three NPCs would become the Alliance story. Eventually, Genn would join as a foil for Jaina/Anduin, and Tyrande would occasionally do stuff too.
WoD was when the writing really started to focus around specific moments and NPC theatre story telling, rather than the world itself… although WoD was such a mess that maybe we should just skip it.
For a lot of players, Legion was fun, but something they couldn’t connect with.
BfA promised to be a return to stories your characters could connect with! But then it was a widespread war story told as a soap opera, while also being a story about trolls and WC2 humans, and then Whispers of the Old Gods: A Hearthstone Expansion: World of Warcraft Edition. Some parts certainly weren’t without charm, I enjoyed both parts to 8.2 personally, but it wasn’t what it promised to be, and many players felt like they never got what they subscribed for.
For many players, Shadowlands promised nothing and delivered little. It’s not the decline of WoW, but it’s also far from the redemption many are waiting for.
I tried out SW:TOR for fun the other day. Met a nice person who gave me a free mount. We started talking. Turns out, they had played since TBC, and SL was the first expansion they didn’t sub for. They’re waiting for WoW to stop being a soap opera.
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Yep its the generic “I am bad guy! I must destroy the justice league Rawwww!!”
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was more thinking about what they can do currently they cant suddenly introduce smaller characters and follow them, I mean there is barely anything that is relatable about wows character.
Honestly I’m digging the new characters. I would party with the Mad Duke any day, and Plague Deviser Merelith is such a sweetheart.
It’s actually the old characters I’m kinda meh on. Kael and Kel were done well, I thought. But no one else really does much for me. And honestly I just want to skip the Slyvanas and Anduin cutscenes. Just ring me up when we’re fighting them in a raid.
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Yeah but those characters (merileth and mad guy) are tied to the shadowlands. and should logically speaking stay there. with the exception of merileth because he is part of the necrolords etc. but he shouldnt become a “permanent” story character so to speak.
But yes thte sylvanas/anduin saga is so lame and just boring.
This really is the issue, when you boil things down.
Teldrassil was hollow, entirely. The only character who got development was Saurfang, and it wasn’t even the development he needed.
No attention was paid to the pre-existing Kaldorei characters, no attention was paid to the pre-existing Horde characters, and absolutely nothing of value came of the WoT except for the vomit inducing storyline set up for the Terror of Darkshore stuff, which is it’s own separate rant.
The problem is that Blizzard wants to have these HUGE moments (Teldrassil, the Wrath Gate, the Broken Shore, etc etc) and yet they fail, every single time, to follow through on meaningful, impactful moments that are tied to it.
In a story, you don’t kill off a main character at the very end because you should want the characters/reader to have time to react. Blizzard hasn’t learned this: they only go boom > boom > boom > boom. One big thing to the next, and they don’t take the time to develop the narrative in a meaningful way in the between.
e.g. Teldrassil & the Horde.
Instead of immediately going to Zandalar and entirely ignoring Teldrassil, there was a really fantastic opportunity to show the reactions of the various Horde leaders/cultures, and plant the seeds of discontent/or support in an exciting way. We got zip. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
They literally just waited in silence.
No meaningful reaction whatsoever, and so any opportunity for the Horde to grow and develop (in whatever direction it would have gone) is completely wasted. As a result, all the weight is thrown onto the shoulders of Saurfang, who was a problematic element in his own right. Putting the hopes of the entire story on the shoulders of a very small handful of characters leads to:
- character fatigue (people are sick of x character).
- flip-flopping/development retcons (Jaina flip flops between hating and loving the Horde again in BFA).
- a lack of coherency and believability (people think it’s just not a compelling story because of how far out on a limb it goes).
Until Blizzard can wrap its head around the basic fundamentals of nuanced story telling, they’re not going anywhere fast with the story. They need to slow the hell down and really work with the elements they have at their disposal. I get that “game play is #1”, but if we’re going to just throw the story in the bin, we may as well just be shuffling numbers around on a spreadsheet.
At the end of the day, games without a strong narrative are just artsy mathematics.
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I do not believe that any amount of reaction would have made Teldrassil into a good story for the Horde. Which is not a defense of how they completely ignored it, mind you.
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South park provides better stories across all seasons than WoW does.
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Go to the boat and get some Azerite, you pleb! What, there aren’t any Dark Rangers in your ranks? SCOFF You’ll HAVE TO DO
Mopey mope
Gonna die, this story sucks, get me out of this game plz
Alright fine, I’ll go do the damn raid
Saurfang was a perfect encapsulation of Horde player character
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Because the story narrative cohesiveness is bad? Throwing a random twist in by changing a person’s personality isn’t creative or clever, it lacks natural fluidity characteristic of character growth…and thus comes off as insincere and baseless. And the plot holes, lots of plot holes.
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To me, the last main character death they did that work was Varian. He had completed his character arc and we can see how Anduin would handle the pressure of King plus his father’s legacy. Which was handled well in Legion. Where he went around Stormwind and even his own people were not certain about his leadership skills. Especially during a war against the Legion. Unlike a certain troll they killed off because Danuser wanted his waifu to be in the spotlight. Only to bring him back due to popular demand. With blizzard flip flopping on whether or not Sylvanas wanted to be Warchief as “all part of the plan” or not (as seen via her internal monologue in BtS).
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