I don’t think that World of Warcraft, (or really MMOs in general) are a good vehicle for stories where character motivations are long-withheld from the audience. There’s a lot of examples, but the one most chiefly on my mind is Sylvanas. We still don’t have explicitly clear information on what her deal with Helya is- a story piece that is very nearly five years old. To say nothing of Teldrassil, Undercity, the whole of the war in BFA, her relationship with the Jailer, etc.
I appreciate what the devs are going for. They want big moments, mystery, and shocking revelations in this high fantasy world. That’s completely understandable, and an overarching story isn’t something I think anyone can turn their nose up at when you’ve got this world and cosmology to flesh out.
But… The storytelling of an MMO really doesn’t feel like a good vehicle for that. The gaps between story updates are long. It’s not like a TV show where you’re getting a new episode every week.
When there’s, at minimum, months - and more commonly years- between seeing a character do something and understanding why they did it, excitement and intrigue about a story morphs into fatigue, or even frustration. It is asking a lot of your audience to expect them to stay invested in the things that are happening, when there isn’t a reasonable timeframe for them to understand why they’re happening.
I guess what I’m trying to say is; I hope, in the future, Blizzard will try to find other ways to add intrigue to the world without making characters that are so hard to read for so long.
Well said. There’s also the trouble that WoW is a live game with no clear end point with a lot of projects going on simultaneously. Plenty of features get cut because they ran out of time or it play tested poorly or it otherwise wasn’t working out.
This also applies to story beats and makes the narrative completely incoherent. This isn’t new either, just look at Cata Gilneas and Silverpine. That was to be the setting for an EBG that fell apart and it couldn’t be more obvious because both the Worgen and Forsaken storylines end very abruptly.
And the Worgen one ends with the Forsaken about to Blight nuke the place, and the Forsaken one ends with the Worgen retreating back into Gilneas and even launching attacks from there later during the Hillsbrad storyline.
These aren’t different sides of the same story, they’re fundamentally different events that do not fit together.
And this sort of problem has only gotten worse with time. Look at Azerite. We know now that was just an excuse Sylvanas needed to launch the 4th War. But we see it’s devastating military applications first hand many times. And a true rogue’s gallery are desperately trying to seize it in the expeditions.
So there’s a bunch of enchanted yellow cake uranium all over the place, caused by a sword the length of Staten Island sticking out of the planet, and neither of those things gets even sort of addressed by the time we’ve moved on.
This is a completely untenable approach to storytelling. It’s like playing with a DM suffering from Alzheimers.
Why not? Video games can tell good stories? They can. Can those games have a co-op? They can. So, the problem is scale? Trying to tie gameplay features to exact structure of the story arcs? Who knows. IMO a question of translation and having people to tell the game story via the video game tools.
Another thing that’s true of Blizzard is that while a single author or team of authors often drives the overall vision for a story, no one person owns or controls the final product. It’s a highly collaborative process that brings together a talented, diverse group of people across different disciplines who are all passionate about creating polished, high-quality experiences and delivering for our players.
So, who knows how many directions her character had.
Good for you.
If there would be no examples, I’d agree. But not only there are co-op video games with good story, but even some mmos (The Old Republic, FF14, some chapters of Guild Wars 1&2, the Secret World)
Episodic approach is also possible. We had patches like building a coliseum in WotLK and long set up for Ahn’Qiraj. Both seems to take advantage of the long wait and add story meaning to the waiting period.
That’s a choice of the devs to tell the stories that way, not a necessity.
Blizz avoids finishing stories and is bad with the narrative structure of anything other than short stories told within 1 patch. But it’s about them mostly.
Does not mean IMO they can’t stick to their strengths and make mostly short stories, episodic stuff, etc.
It’s the problem of the execution though. There are bad stories not just in mmos.
The story feels like crap because it’s a Pivot post Legion to a larger Cosmology but they’ve since Pivoted the Pivot so we are basically just spinning at this point.
MMO stories are capable of being good.
The current captain (Bottegoni) and navigator (Danuser) just both come from experiences that are bad for WoW (Pixar movies and EverQuest respectively)
WoW is not a movie and WoW cannot be reduced to good faction bad faction. The more they try to force movie logic and moral binary to WoW the more miserable players will be.
I think it doesn’t help that, among other things, one thing going against BFA was what felt like an abrupt story shift in what the expansion was supposed to be about. The playerbase was led into it under the premise of a faction war where Sylvanas’s C-plot-at-best stuff was suddenly upgraded to A-plot focus but kept infuriatingly vague, and the old god stuff felt like BFA’s B-plot instead. Then your main course disappears with a “To Be Continued” and you’re left trying to fill up on the appetizers.
It seems like the same sort of interruption that WoD had, where you’re expecting Grom to be the final boss before the Legion T-bones the story halfway through. And to a lesser extent, TBC where a lot of people genuinely, yet mistakenly thought the Sunwell was a filler raid because not many people seemed to know / care about the comics.
I think the far (FAR) bigger problem is just when the lead writer doesn’t respect the visions of the people who cam before.
For a good story, a new lead writer should always try and continue what their predecessor laid out, even if it’s not their first preference. If you try and do your own thing and throw the work of others in the trash, you get messes like Rise of Skywalker.
Danuser is unhappy with the work of his predecessors, and thus tries to rewrite everything. Don’t do that. If you want to tell your story, make your own game.
In fairness, the comics in general were one of the biggest misteps in the history of Warcraft. Re-introducing Varian in the comics is a legendarily bad move, and 99% of the players were like “who is this unbathed, foaming-at-the-mouth rabid Dragonball character that Stormwind just let waltz into the throneroom?”
No, the problem isn’t scale at all, I think you’ve misunderstood what I tried to say. I said, specifically, that stories which leave character motivations in question for a long time don’t work well in an MMO, because with the inherently significant gap in time between updates, questions can be left unanswered for too long.
This. More specifically, I think that patch stories end in cliffhangers too often. The occasional cliffhanger is fine, but they lose their impact when used too frequently. We don’t get enough time to let the story breathe and recover before the next pressing issue escalates things again, and those moments of things being less tense are needed in order to give contrast to the cliffhanger moments.
The news about Ions comments on “we got no feedback for torghast being bad thus it became bad” “Covid caused us to make terrible decisions.” etc is tiresome but very very unsurprising.
Usually it would come as a shocker to me or like an unforseen wound etc. not much of a shock but more of a back stab i think.
But this time i didnt feel anything.
I suppose my bar cant get any lower?
honestly If blizzard were planning the next holocaust and it got out in the open i wouldnt feel a thing. I mean I would not resub or give them money but those are actions.
Please dont report me for naming the holocaust.
I mean when you take ions comments in addition to the later stuff here about how “blizzard devs are vile toxic individuals as well”
I honestly dont get how any individual can feel hope for the devs. Hell I sometimes wish that Ion could be fired. but Ultimately it wont fix a damn thing. as the developer team is rotten to the core literally.
I know I am sounding very depressed but… I really felt the need to get this out there.
Just focus on the content. Assumptions about what I like or not are not necessary. Nor useful since I frequently struggle to clearly explain what / why I think, especially in english. I do not personally pursue people, neither here, nor on other platforms. Just adding comments if something I spot triggers a thought in my head. That’s about it.
Perhaps if he could be “limited” to just making encounters a-la Ulduar for the game, his would would be more successful.
IMO it’s rather telling that the game that is perceived the best among blizzard games currently is not made by blizzard. Technically D2 remaster is marketed as “blizzard”, but that team was not “blizzard” last year.
This is something of a tangent, but I really don’t understand how he managed to fall up from raid designer to game director when his talents seem very one-note.