Worldbuilding: Orc Farms Over Old Gods

Lore Story Forum
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Since unsubbing from WoW a month ago (with the sub officially expiring half a month ago) I’ve been playing ESO and, well, it’s been fun. But I’m not here to shill for ESO (not shilling too much anyway, but really, more people should play it now that’s it’s improved over the years) but to put out an idea for Blizzard to engage its “tried and true” development on, atleast a concept they once partook in; take something good from another game and polish it to perfection. Now what does ESO do good at? Storytelling, but more specifically, world building.

Blizzard’s Already Good at Worldbuilding Though!

Now this is curious concept, WoW’s playerbase generally confirms that WoW itself excels at worldbuilding over classic nuanced storytelling involving characters, character growth, (faction) conflict, etc. and this is all true, even amongst other Blizzard titles such as StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch. However Blizzard’s brand of worldbuilding is specifically lore, or more specifically ‘fantastical lore’, what do I mean by this?

By fantastical lore, I specifically mean stories written to explain fantastical or way-out-there background narrative such as the Sundering, Titans, creation mythos, ancient timelines, Old Gods, etc. This isn’t the end-all-be-all concept of worldbuilding though. Blizzard’s really good at creating fantastical lore, even without Chris Metzen, but what they fail/lack is the other, just-as-important, concept of worldbuilding, the mundane.

What to Take and Polish

Mundane worldbuilding, kind of a dumb/weird term but it gets the point across. To put simply, during my time with ESO I’ve been enjoying it immensely due to its worldbuilding, but specifically its mastery of balancing both fantastical worldbuilding and mundane worldbuilding. Those familiar with the TES series know that the franchise has a wealth of fantastical lore, but at the same time they would know that TES series excels at depicting the narratives and stories of the much simpler concepts, a storytelling proficiency that is not lost in ESO in the least.

ESO excels in bringing stories of a relatable down-to-earth level regarding the politics of noble houses, the intricacies of racial culture and respective struggles, the dichotomy even of racial cultural tensions, how a life of a bandit works, the life/struggle of a peasant/farmer/refugee, etc. All of these concepts are ‘mundane’ relative to say dragons or demons/daedra invading the world, or in WoW’s example space demons and spaceships, but it’s just as important for competent immersive storytelling in an MMO. And what’s more, is that WoW used to excel at this as well.

Of course, I bring up Vanilla WoW. But think about it, vanilla WoW didn’t have world-ending threats that took control of the entire narrative. Horde players experienced the simple narrative on making a home in the Barrens dealing will quillboar and Mankrik’s wife. On the other side of the ocean we had Forsaken deal with pushing out the living out of their own home. For the Alliance, players experienced the Defias causing havoc in Elwynn, troggs harassing Gnomes and Dwarves, and cleaning up Teldrassil plus Ashenvale in a post-war setting.

In modern WoW we are so focused on world-ending threats repeated year after year that the focus on Azeroth is lost. We are overpowered comic book characters; the marketing of WoW prior to Vanilla WoW’s release was “see what it’s like to be in the shoes of the soldier from the RTS games”, well we haven’t been in those soldier shoes for a long time.

Additionally, mundane worldbuilding isn’t completely lost in modern WoW either, we’ve examples of the societal/cultural stories of Zandalar and Kul Tiras respectively in BfA, and, go figure, these two narratives, devoid of the greater faction war, is one of the few (if only) things WoW’s playerbase can rally behind to claim as actually good.

Conclusion

I make this thread because currently I’m experiencing the Thieves Guild questline in ESO atm which deals with, well, stealing crap and the consequences of such. It involves my character sneaking around, lying, dungeon delving, and crashing weddings. Fairly mundane relative to space demons right? But funny enough, while I enjoy beating up space demons, I’m enjoying it so much more and will always always always prefer experiencing the life of a thief in a “Thieves Guild” to hopping on a spaceship with Khadgar and friends.

And what’s amazing about this concept is that this concept of mundane worldbuidling need not overtake fantastical worldbuilding either. You can have both; you can have the simple story/struggle of a farmer and the out-of-this-world story of a demonic space invasion at the same time. We used to have this in WoW, and it’s something I believe Blizzard needs to reacquire.

With the recent datamined stuff focusing on Old Gods instead of faction war, don’t get me wrong, this is a vast potential improvement regarding WoW’s narrative, but it’s still a flawed one. Learning more about Old Gods, Titans, the Void, ancient history, is always great but what makes these concepts great is the mystery behind it. If we keep learning we slowly lose the mystery, and this heavy focus into such concepts will completely shatter said mystery lest Blizzard makes up another new bad; the Void Lords is still a ‘wtf’ thing for me to this day over the Burning Legion. Instead of this breakneck pace of narrative to “unravel all the mystery”, why not slow it down by revealing more about the world of Azeroth?

Let’s learn more about Old Gods while at the same time look back to the world fantasy we started in. What it’s like to be in the shoes of a grunt/footman, how Stormwind works with only two farms in Elwynn, how the heck can’t orcs live comfortably near the Southfury River, how blood elf houses/magister culture works, what is the space-faring scavenger aspect of draenei and how it operates, etc.

TL;DR, We need to experience more of orc farms rather than more Old Gods.

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This is a fundamental problem in WoW, largely due to blizzard not wanting to work on older content. Most commonly their stanch refusal to build up the horde outside of Garrosh’s overnight build up into a “superpower.”

One of the common red vs. blue arguements deals with the horde rarely losing anything significant compared to the alliance losing cities to kick off a expansion. The alliance has a similar problem like you mentioned with the stormwind living off of two farms, but it’s no where near as bad as it is for the horde. Outside of cataclysm, the horde has not made any significant infrastructure build ups. Most settlements are still bare-bones military outposts, and are often the only horde presence in the zone. We all know the horde is long past the “scrappy underdog” phase that it started off with in WoW.

Similarly, a lot of the alliance suffers from the current narrative not matching what we see in game. Apparently the entire alliance is reliant on stormwind for everything short of breathing, but we see nothing explaining why, or why no other nation is bothering to fix this problem. Nor do we see the affect of Westfall eating mud kicking up a rural vs city mentality.

A lot of it is brought up in Mr. B tongues video about fallout’s setting snarls.

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Yo I BEEN saying this. I said we need a expansion that focuses solely on revisiting the old world and helping it out; seeing how the average people are doing again in the old zones( but not like the cataclysm non sense where the whole world is just destroyed and made to look ugly). So like you said, helping Orcs build up some type of farms and stuff again. Maybe gangs have popped up in regions that have been ignored due to Faction War and the Legion invasion, lots of stuff needs rebuilding… Every time I say this though some dude ends up telling me no one would play it because the game is WARcraft not PEACEcraft and then I am pwned back to Sen’jin.

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Agree. One. Hundred. Percent.

I’m so sick and tired of Blizzard trying to outdo themselves with world/galaxy/cosmos/universe ending threats.

In the end it doesn’t matter if they’re Old Gods, Titans or Demons, they’re always one dimensional loot piñatas whose only purpose is to feed our desire for gear and cosmetics. They’re tear-inducingly boring.

Yet despite their ‘power’ and ‘might’ we always have a plethora of resources to fight them with. We can fund endless wars and field endless armies without consequence.
Indeed the only time consequence was shown was in Westfall and that was brushed under the rug after we wiped out the defias. AGAIN.

The toll our wars take on the day-to-day lives of the citizenship is rarely shown beyond the immediate ‘Oh no, there’s an army invading our town! Stop them!’.
We never see any form of protest, nation-wide poverty or social issues stemming from these Wars and it makes them feel meaningless.

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Those people are idiots. There still will be conflict, just smaller ones that dont involve fighting the other faction or some hellish army.

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I mean, what’s even left after we take down the Old Ones and the Void Lords? We fight the planet itself?

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I mean, heck. One of my favorite questlines was about Runas. Just an average Nightborne in the thick of the whole situation. The Nightborne Rebellion in general had a lot of good stuff for that. Overall I agree, it is just tough given what has been done already. Can feel like tonal whiplash at times.

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Also, FF14 is an interesting alternative to the horribly low quality slot machine that is BFA.

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And they also tackle the more “mundane” side of world building really well. Especially in the class quests for the crafting and gathering jobs.

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I tried getting into SAO.

The characters all look similar, there is just this bland and same-y atmosphere.
I find the class lore uninteresting and what’s worse is the quest design just can’t match up to WoW.

You can’t play it like you would skyrim either.
I was constantly trying to find things to do in ESO and try to feel some connection to my character.

I just could not. All my toons look the same, walk the same, sound the same and so on.

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I’ve been away for a bit. You can post on the forums without a sub now?

This is honestly one of the things I find tiring with MMOs, especially here and in Star Trek Online. One of the things I loved about Mists of Pandaria and STO’s very brief peace New Dawn was the fact the respective worlds got a bit of a break from the relentless series of apocalypses.

Edit: Also can someone explain why quotes seem to break half the time I use them?

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That’s fine, ESO is far from perfect and I wouldnt call it a WoW replacement either. But it does things objectively better that modern WoW atm that I wish/insist Blizzard uses and polishes for WoW’s own benefit. Taking and polishing things from other games and making it into their own is what Blizzard does.

As for quest design, I’ll have to disagree. The gameplay rewards may lack in ESO but the quests themselves are far more engaging that WoW’s atm.

But yeah this thread is not entirely based on ESO shilling, its primarily putting out a storytelling improvement to make WoW better.

Apparently. People say it’s a bug. I’m here as long as I can be.

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It’s in line with Blizzard’s new standard of quality.

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That was one of the things I actually enjoyed in BfA. As an herbalist, the quests involved learning all about what the various herbs meant to the Zandalari. It was fun to do them.

And this is one of the reasons why I got so sick of post-Endor EU Star Wars. Every threat had to be bigger than the last and only the movie heroes could rescue the galaxy once again. That’s why I enjoyed the Old Republic stuff much more than most of the schlock that came out post -Endor.

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Wow can’t go back to that narrative because we fought with some big guys and the narrative has the player as some kind of elite mercenary that in some side quest helps people doing some minor stuff.

Also doesn’t help the game was tailored to be more like a raid/boss simulator like lots of DnD campaigns, Dark Souls or lots of rpg games. ESO in another hand is more like skyrim where the player is just playing Sims with sword and sorcery

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It’s a common issue in writing, the notion a massive threat is better then a smaller more engaged one. A Million is a statistic is a saying after all.

That is partially why i find Thanos so… boring in the comics. He is super powerful yes, but most often he lacks the connections to feel like a main villain. Being a big scary threat means nothing if they dont engage the heroes in a meaningful way.

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I remember when I was a kid I loved the X-Wing novels precisely because it wasn’t Han, Luke and Leia. It was an almost entirely original cast doing their own thing in the galaxy. I wish we could do more of that in WoW, rather than have the superhero faction leaders be involved in everything.

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This is a misconception, both “epic” narratives and mundane worldbuilding can co-exist with each other. Again, I point to ESO in this regard. In the base Vanilla WoW you went from nobody to still being an nobody who took down a dragon, the most powerful lich at the time, an elemental lord, and an Old God, but you were still a nobody. In ESO you start off a soulless nobody and end off a a nobody (but with a soul) who just took down the equivalent of Kil’jaeden (a Daedric Prince in TES). But you’re still a nobody.

The screenshot above encapsulates my point so well. I wouldn’t call ESO’s storytelling perfect as it still written like a single-player narrative (like WoW is doing atm), but it’s still handled better than WoW’s in that even in the most epic of narratives it still manages to push the player down and go “you’re still just an adventurer.”

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I would also like to chime in that I think revisiting the Old World could make for the foundations of -amazing- Progression systems that will help motivate players, and propel a community.

I am going to take an example from a D&D campaign I’ve been running. To skip over a lot of details, the players are now really high level (14 - 17 range) and they’ve had to travel to a Desert far from where they have started. They have high ranking positions within this city, and are working with one of the main houses of it. The players, in addition to regular progression, are also being given a resource representing, in effect, man-hours of their servants, retainers, and allies which they can then spend on improving the various aspects of the city. (Like founding an Adventurer’s guild, a Thieves guild, their own coliseum, farms, etc) The players have jumped into this wholeheartedly, and are working on ever expanding various niches of the city that they individually care about (Rogue is focused on making the Thieves guild amazing, etc)

…There’s also something about a Old God awakening and wanting to destroy the world, but it is only important to the players in-so-much that they would lose all their progress in the city if that happens.

Bringing this back around to WoW, the situation is not so dissimilar. The next expansion could focus entirely on rebuilding, expanding, and improving existing territory within each faction. Different areas could be opened up or added and players could work on gaining various resources to dump into these cities. However, the resources are hard to get, or in dangerous places, which necessitates the players going out and doing quests, dungeons, etc to obtaining the needed resources.

Legion showed that WoW is not hesitant on adding a system that is the core of an expansion (Artifact Power) that gets ‘removed’ at the end of said expansion, even for people doing it later. So instead of making that mechanic feel punishing, they could re-work it to feel rewarding instead. Basically, make the various towns not self-sufficient at the start. For example, there are food shortages, and the Crossroads can not feed itself. The first set of dungeons released all then can reward exotic food and seeds from them. Timing this out with the content release schedule, if players contribute to the Crossroads, etc with the stuff from those dungeons, then by the time the next patch comes around the towns are now self-sufficient on food. Adding more helps a bit, but it is no longer in danger due to shortage. Then continue this pattern as you grow upwards, and by the end of the expansion the players will have built up these places from basically shanty-towns into respectable towns and villages.

Put interesting NPCs in those places, have them give interesting benefits, and players will be motivated to help. (For example, Once Crossroads is self-sufficient, every X food after creates a Feast that last for an entire weekend that anybody can go to and get a 3-hour long food buff, for example.

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I mean the trope of vagabond hero/ronin would fit pretty well in WoW since that open any possibilities for people who doesn’t want to be celebrity and just want to smash criters/people and get gold while the diva group get the attention they want but like I said all of this is well above of the writers narrative which since WoD chosed to make the PC into a hero.

I think the best example of the trope that I am talking about would be Saitama from One Punch Man, Geralt in some paths of the witcher 3 or MoB from Mob psycho are the best examples I can think right now