Wow isn’t dead! Have you seen how many servers this game has?
The interconnected servers made to not feel the world empty? or the private servers? 
Seriously now, no, is not dead, but is far from what it was.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t at least one server that’s never seen a player. Unlikely but still probable.
WoW should become emo like Tobey McGuire in spiderman.
I think Blizzard wants us to view the story as a whole and not just xpac to xpac. So we are coming out of a dark place with Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands and more into the theme of going home and dealing with the sins of the past. It feels calm because if poor story telling imo. Dragon Flights theme is pretty good but Blizzard glossed over the parts that would have given a darker theme to it. We really should see why the primals have this rage. If it makes the aspects look bad then they just look bad. Nothing and no one is 100% good.
Quests were we go back in time and take part of corrupting their eggs. Trying to get them to follow the order of the titians. Where we imprison them for not wanting to be controlled. I am still a bit salty that I did not get to be the “night warrior” and kill enemies while in a rage. It is not that I want WoW darker but that I want to see the contrast more in game instead of just reading it in quest text.
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I’ve been playing this game for 16 years at this point, and been played Warcraft as a franchise for almost 30. I’m not seeing this tonal shift you guys are.
I can’t help but feel you’re not really paying attention to anything in the game and are just getting your opinions from streamers who also don’t pay attention to anything going on in the game.
WoW has never been a dark game. Ever. It has always had playskool graphics intended to run on any PC and to have a specific artstyle anyone could like with cartoony characters and cartoony saturday morning cartoon plots. WoW has had some dark moments, sure, but so has this expansion.
Like, did you guys just not pay attention to the Djaradin who are chopping up and flaying sentient dragons for meat and bones? Did you not pay attention to the Decay worshiping Gnolls doing the same thing to the Tuskarr? You people don’t even pay attention to anything in the game, how would you know if it’s dark or not?
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I didnt comment on the quality of the expansion’s writing. I dont think it was great either.
But it hasnt been sunshine and rainbows. I know that because I quit early on and just returned, so I experienced it all at once.
People are convinced the story is something it’s not. It’s cheesy quite often, but it hasnt been “happy”. If anything it’s been consistently gloomy. Need high points more often.
The Blues was nice. I liked that one. The Dream was good too. I had a hard time caring about Dracthyr though.
These were the stories of WoD.
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Nobody should pay any attention to what youtubers or streamers say. They’ll change their opinion at a moment’s notice and sell their grandmother down the river if they think it will get them a quick buck.
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I think whats really unfortunate is that the content is there to make it interesting. The dragons did some wild things in the past. They have been stripped of their personalities completely and are just being used as representatives of pure good, I guess since the light is about to be shown as not pure good?
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In the recent books Alexstraza is described has having a fear of Tyr and the Titans. Her actions in going team titan and forcing the ordering upon eggs was out of fear of what Tyr and the Titans would do to her and the others if she didn’t.
But this fear is never explored in the game, in fact they go out of their way to pretend it never happened, and as if Tyr is a great ol friend she missed dearly.
The writers and the developers are not on the same wave length and DF story has suffered because of it.
There wasn’t that much doom and gloom in Vanilla WoW, it was basically just like Dragonflight
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If anything, I hope War Within is a darker expansion. I’m not trying to say everything should be all gloom and doom, no, but I don’t think we need to dumb the story down into lines like “there is only darkness and pain” not even joking by that line, it’s literally in the damn raid.
Exactly. Plague Tale Requiem did this perfectly just as an example, and it made a bigger impact.
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I know folks got burned out on kill x creatures but I find it much more enjoyable than click on x items which seem to be more regular.
… WoW is a T rated game… it can’t get too dark as it’d violate the rating it was given. What you’re really asking is you want WoW to become an M rated game so we can have blood and gore and bodies on pikes, forsaken eating children and dark stuff like that yeah? You’re not getting that kinda thing in a T rated game…
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This is very true but i’m not sure that the current writing team (who doesn’t seem to be able to write a male character that is alpha or power hungry or has self centered motivations, all males wallow in their feelings all the time) is up to the task. They are stuck in being the anti-fanboy anti-dark anti-realistic world where everyone plays nice and things happen because “it was about coming together, as a family”. Combat stops for long periods of time so that we can have ridiculous exposition to make the bad guy…REALLY BAD. It all just falls flat, very flat and with almost no meaning in it’s ridiculousness.
But hey they can celebrate inclusiveness at every corner of the writing team and in the game itself, one of the incarnates just flipped without almost ANY exposition or explanation but “burn tree bad”. I mean seriously if you need more time to make a story and have it feel like a story instead of disjointed parts of some greater whole than take the time to get it right, there is NO WAY folks at Blizzard didn’t notice how this whole thing came off vs. what they have very successfully done in the past.
I am enjoying the hell out of DF and am ready for TWW but i’m not here for the story much anymore because it’s been so much meh for so long from the Jailer being absolutely one of the WORST villains ever in the history of entertainment to all this touchy feely stuff the writing team seems stuck in that is so far from reality it is laughable. The voice actors generally are excellent and the art team hits it out of the park at every turn but the writing has gone WAY down hill from Legion until now, it’s all very uneven and not up to par with the Blizzard of old. But hey that’s kind of what they were going for and now they have it and the playerbase is not happy about it. Fortunately for Blizzard the game itself is still on solid ground and they have time to build a better story and improve things.
Yeah, it’s T-rated, but it’s coming off more as an E ten-up game. We’re getting Nintendo writing here; even FF’s games have more mature writing. They’re all T except for Strangers of Paradise and FFXVI. I don’t think anyone is asking for all doom and gloom and just pure bloodshed here, but I think people are asking for a more mature and possibly darker game. In an ideal world, I’d like a game as dark as, oh, I don’t know, GOW, Diablo, and Plague Tale all combined. Of course, they’re all rated M. I wouldn’t mind wow being rated M, but I know many would. But ultimately, many players, including myself, want a more impactful and mature story. In WOW, I am not a lore person at all, not so ever, but I want to be, but I can’t.
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We primarily see the story through the art, campaigns, raids, and cinematics. Because the medium of the game is progression-based for most, the storyline often takes second fiddle to gameplay and as a result things may seem rushed or two dimensional to the average player.
This is the problem with the open-world playstyle as opposed to a regular single or multiplayer game. There is literally so much to do that there isn’t a very compelling overarching story-based progression, and most people are just trying to hit some sort of goal based on numbers.
The only effective way for Blizzard to efficiently is salvage the story would be execution. By execution, I mean pacing and the proper building of drama.
Remember, when WOTLK, MOP, and Legion were live, the complaints over the storyline were consistent and vocal. Those 3 expansions are considered the best in WoW’s history.
We have to accept that the story is simply a backdrop for our own personal progression as players, and not the other way around. It’s optional depth for those who truly want to see it, and as a result the story as a whole seems shallow when seen from a wider vantage point.
TDLR; the medium of WoW as a game does not particularly promote an engaging story - because engagement requires time, and the option of how that time is spent is mostly done by players wanting to increase Ilvl, M+ score, and PVP rating.
This is half true because on the other hand you have other MMORPGs with better management of their narrative, it is clearly possible, the problem is that WoW has remained stagnant in some aspects over time.
Consider that at the time WoW was the first to introduce the quest system in an MMO where before leveling was pure and simple grinding, today questing is the standard and many MMOs have managed to turn it into a great tool for narrative, but not WoW.
On the other hand, WoW has managed to improve game systems from other franchises, but today it is stuck even in that.
If the Raid, M+, PvP and the responsiveness of the game are excellent but the last one is something they developed a long time ago in the game code, and the other 3 are game modes that do not require a world, they could be played like you play LoL in a waiting menu.
The world used to be a source of grinding, a semi-discarded game mode nowadays, but with the introduction of the quests that WoW did at the time, it was used to fill that gap and some games have even exploited it more, now the world normally exists to give life to the setting, but WoW with its throne on high at some point stopped looking at other games and what works for them, and it could work for them, that has a name, it’s called arrogance and stagnation.
Luckily, TWW seems to be wanting to correct the situation and revalue the world, which with the current standard should imply an improvement in the narrative.
I generally prefer the darker style and aesthetic, especially in MMOs. That is why I liked Shadowlands so much.
But every once in a while, it is nice to have a break from that, and I think that’s what Dragonflight accomplished.
I have never seen it said yet, but it is overwhelmingly clear to me that Dragonflight is based on or at least highly influenced by a Netflix series by the name of Dragon Prince.
If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend you watch it. It is a fun show, and at times it feels more Warcraft than, well, Warcraft itself.
And the reason for this, is that the creators of said show are huge Warcraft fans and it definitely shows. It captures such a magical and colorful range of the RPG vibe, almost slightly leaning towards anime but surpassing it, in my opinion, as sort of the Western answer to it.
I remember when I first watched the show, way back in 2019, I thought to myself, “Yup…… they’re definitely making a dragon expansion once somebody sees this show”
And I’m glad they did because Dragonflight the entire time has felt largely like it is placed in that world—or one that took a page from it.
I wouldn’t want the darker aesthetic here—not now, it wouldn’t work here. Save it for the next expac.
What they did, they did well. And credit has to be given where it is due. There’s a time and place for everything. Sometimes it’s only light. Sometimes it’s light and dark. And sometimes it’s even only dark.
See you in The War Within