There is no such community. It’s like a venn diagram, where there are players with different abilities, and interests forming bubbles that sometimes overlap other bubbles, all forming sub-communities.
People don’t quit because the story makes no sense. They can put up with a lot of that as long as the game is fun for them to play. And the game isn’t fun because Blizzard doesn’t value a player metric like “fun”, that is difficult to quantify. So they go with “player engagement”, which is defined as “a 43 minute play session”. Play for 43 minutes, even if you’re so far from having fun that you’re telling your friends not to buy the game, and your play session gets reported on the investor report.
And that is a good thing, because irl isn’t all about do ABCD for all things, forever and ever, amen. It’s a breadcrumb that can nudge you one place, and then you get to pick and choose where you go next.
No, you are talking about the minority of angry people in the forums who in turn are a minority of the 100 thousand or so playing this game.
Together that minority within a minority forms an “echo chamber” of angry people telling each other what they want to hear and they convince each other that they speak for “the players”.
What’s it though? The story was told in patches exactly the same way it is today. We got supplemental stories through new areas like queldanas pre daily quests. that has sort of been replaced by renown gated quests.
If it ever felt story driven, that’s because it was riding on the coat tails of the story established in warcraft especially warctlraft 3. Everyone except for malganis Has been wrapped up or killed with the exception of maybe azshara.
It doesn’t feel story driven because now we aren’t riding on those coat tails. We still have the story told in patches with months and months between any new plotpoints with no older game to prop it up
Too long didn’t read, it’s the same crap without old games making it look more interesting than it is.
I am definitely hoping for a return to character-driven stories instead of the plot being driven by specific showy scenes that they want to have and just plopping whatever characters they need into the narrative wherever without foreshadowing, development or justification.
Say what you want about Emo Thrall and his angst and hubris dominating entire expansions at times, Metzen gets how to tell a story and what makes it interesting. His stories are story-shaped instead of being a coatrack to toss cutscenes onto.
Thrall was loved by many, until he started thinking and feeling. I don’t worry about losing them because they don’t want a story with any depth or nuance.
What story are you talking about? Because the quality of wow storytelling has always been on par with a laugh track and tbh “big monster we pulled from rts game says raar” was most of the first 3 xpacs. Then when they had to come up with newer ideas there was a convoluted mess of a stupid story in cata, an alternate reality mess in wod and then pandas which was the best of those three.
No, nobody at blizzard really knows how to tell a compelling or entirely coherent story, and metzen was never any better. If there was never an announcement or credit to him and he wrote the entire next xpac himself you would never know the difference.
Meh… I don’t actually expect to see many changes. A lot of the story was bad under Metzen to begin with. Especially with Thrall being the savior of everything. Maybe he learned something from developing a TTRPG and will carry that over but no one should just accept things will be better.
But I guess if people want Thrall to run in and save the day continually, it will be better.
Honestly, the biggest thing I really don’t like about the current stuff is that a lot of characters keep reading the script like they’re doing a movie trailer instead of having a conversation.
Also, the gnolls reappearing just to be brushed to the side again, despite their leader very clearly escaping, but maybe they’ll follow that up in the next expansion.
So far the clear best thing Metzen’s elevation has caused is a temporary respite from the “too many buttons” and "oh noes no pirates in 11 means no future’ troll threads.
I never said it was high art. But at least the stories were, as I said, generally story-shaped and character-driven rather than being a series of cutscenes that weren’t connected by any kind of plot or character development.
WoW’s other writers tell the game’s story like they’re writing fanfic for a video game. Metzen’s stories felt like narratives with stakes that were more compelling and emotionally affecting than “oh boy, another Big Bad that was secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes all along but actually was trying to save reality from itself…again” because they were driven by the actions of the characters, and the actions of the characters were driven by their personalities, motivations and histories rather than backwards, and having their actions determined by what the plot needed them to do. Sure, it was a simple story told in broad, at times overdramatic strokes, but there’s a reason that the earlier Marvel movies were so well-regarded too - not because they were especially complex or unique, but because the basic hero’s journey is a story that people relate to when it’s fairly competently told.
Danauser’s attempts to scuttle all of the interesting characters from the past and start again was particularly eyeroll-worthy, they were doing in the things that made the game’s overall plot interesting in the first place. Overall, you’re not going to find James Joyce in an MMO, but for the writing in an MMO, Metzen’s was better.
I’ve noticed that for a while, like they will talk slowly and with exhaserbated or prolonged pauses between each word or syllable. The diction is great, 10/10 pronouncing the words clearly with stage presence, but yea does not feel like an actual conversation.
I’ve mostly gotten used to it and passed it off as just another one of the quirks that solidify WoW as its own unique medium.
I think the worst part is Alextrasza, she feels way too passive like Anduin.
I know she’s the life binder, mother figure of the Dragons but you know what? I want to see her rip apart someones throat out in a violent display of blood and just raw freaking power.
I really liked Cata…WoD. I didn’t really like Apexis farm…I thought it was too exaggerated. I think that today we also have a fairer pvp system than back then (although I can’t really remember the system back then but I don’t think it was similar to the current one, perhaps).
But I agree that, apart from the Apexis system, WoD’s leveling was phenomenal… it’s a shame the feeling of lack of content after some period of the expansion, but it wasn’t that bad of an expansion… it was just necessary more content and a lighter farm system.
