Small indie dev team. /s
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I can agree with this. Lord of the Clans was awesome, but basically all of the major story beats were set in stone before she even got involved, so she just had to flesh out the skeleton of the story (which she did very well).
Anybody that had the slightest handle on the storyline either retired or were pushed out by “big-corp” who are looking solely to milk it for every penny its worth before moving on to the next IP…
Just another Monday for them.
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Just my two cents, but the main reason is not being able to see the forest for the trees.
In all honesty, what is the main, driving force for us in this game world anymore, and does it make sense? The only connective thing, it seems, is to “save Azeroth.” Not the planet per se, but the Titan. Everything seems to want it. However, the goal’s meaning seems to have gotten lost, or made confusing, in the details. It’s especially bad now that we’ve seen the afterlife, which for all intents and purposes should be on a more important and grander scale, yet our goal is seemingly still very much rooted in mortal reality.
The story has been compounding on itself so much that it could really use a nice big anchor to regain focus.
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The answer is rather simple.
Passion for the story and gaming is gone.
The decisions are now a numbers game, made by people that don’t care about the game. They only care about the earnings from it and WoW’s systems works for them. That’s how I see it.
Her Arthas book was terrible.
In fact I’m not sure if boundaries are helping her. Rise of the Horde was good. But most others after it… I don’t like her style and many people especially women seem to be insecure, simply confused and or insane when Golden is writing them.
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My main complaint about Golden’s novels is that she makes the world feel small by using the in-game scale. Azeroth is a planet, not a moon or a dwarf planet like pluto. It shouldn’t take a few hours to travel from the top of Kalimdor to the bottom on boats. It should take weeks or months.
But long travel times doesn’t create the element of suspense. It is not really suspenseful if a character has to travel a month or two to back to their home on a boat to defend it from an invasion.
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That’s also true.
She wrote the Alliance fleet only needed 4 days to sail from Stormwind to Theramore. To sail to another continent!
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Meanwhile, if I recall correctly, Theramore itself was like… six buildings. Like the whole thing.
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Imo, for me at least, the reason the story is so bad is because its so morally bankrupt. I mean, genocide is apparently redeemable, Violating people into undeath in a way that is creepily analogous to rape is perfectly fine, and repeatedly attempting to wipe out the existence of various races is just a turn the other cheek moment?
It’d be a bit better if it was at least like warhammer where every side/faction did heinous stuff but instead its always coming from the same actor who then is allowed to somehow waffle between being good and bad depending on the day of the week. Yet at the same time, when we have other factions that do the same thing (compare turning someone into a demon or brainwashing them to raising someone into undeath) they have to be wiped out immediately and completely no questions asked?
It just gives me such a headache any time I try to come up with any reasonable answers that it just doesn’t end up being worth it.
In short, either turn warcraft into warhammer where everyone does evil crap and there is no true ‘good’ guy or turn all of our heroes into actual good guys.
But as it is right now, when i’m playing alliance I’m angry because we can’t strike back at the ‘villains’ that are the horde. And when I’m playing the horde I’m angry because we get to be villains but don’t actually have to face many if any of the issues that villains end up facing. (I mean heck, do you know how awesome it would have felt if the entire world turned against the horde after Teldrassil? Sure, we’d have been villains, But dam it would have been great going down fighting every faction in the world, then at the end you could still do the same old expansion conclusion we got in BFA. Only difference is alliance would have reveled in getting actual justice and horde could have reveled in being actual villains for a bit instead of the weird in between we keep getting.
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I feel like that would only have worked if the only reason you were interested in playing horde was to be the villain. Which is probably becoming increasingly likely for anybody rerolling to it nowadays, sadly. (Outside of social pressure for group content)
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Honestly this is the sort of sloppy worldbuilding that kills stories for me. I got into this game to experience a WORLD. I understand it has to be scaled down for gameplay reasons, but I expect the story to treat it like an actual world. At this point, the scale of Azeroth makes absolutely no sense even for a fantasy setting
For real, how do they get such a basic things wrong?
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Comparatively transatlantic crossings averaged between 10-14 days until the widescale implementation of steam engines.
More or less. From Garrosh on etc. I bet we won’t ever hear about Rastakhans dead again, nor get justice for it though. The current devs are terrible at world building.
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Old writers who wanted to make a fun story about metal as hell knights fighting against metal as hell orcs left. In their place care bear fresh out of college liberal arts students came to insert their identity politics. Literally what ruined the story.
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And this children is how you don’t criticize a story 
Seriously complaining about Politics is media is insanely stupid. Most media is political and is made better, because like it or not people insert their political belief in their work.
Games like Bioshock and Metal Gear are intensly political (and fairly left as well) yet whenever you hear someone complain about “Politics” its always about LGBT representation or saying something like “genocide is bad”.
As for Metal, Metal storytelling in WoW sucks. Warcraft 2’s story sucked, almost every time they tried to be “Metal” in the faction conflict it’s sucked. The “Neo-Liberal Agenda” in wow is mandated by the fact there needs to be two factions anyway.
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This is materially incorrect.
If it were true, then all the races based on non-white/nonwestern peoples would be centered and narratively developed.
Instead we have Baine sitting in Oribos for almost a full year, doing nothing for two patches, and Bwonsamdi cut from the story of Shadowlands after his dungeon (which non-Night Fae were never lead to)
It’s a cute narrative you tell yourself that isn’t reflected in reality.
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Cope. Lothar’s alliance was the best iteration of the alliance. Conversely unapologetic savage horde was the best horde. The story was plenty more fun than anything nu-wow writers are delivering.
And I don’t think straw hands are very capable of typing up stories regardless.
So you’ve been mad for 18 years
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No. I’ve been mad since Varian died.