they actually talked about an in world library or codex of lore materials, and while the story team would really like to it would be a lot of work across multiple teams, from UI art to back end coding, and due to that it was deemed unfeasible.
Yeah. I listened to that interview. And Iâll be bold and say itâs just sad excuses. The Elder Scrolls games, multiplayer or not, where in development hell as well, and still the games are filled with mini novels and almanachs and what not. Blizzard just doesnât prioritize it, or isnât very efficient with it.
What we need is a concerete source of lore that wonât get retconned.
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I think itâs more likely they donât want to do it because than they would have zero excuses on why they retconned the lore when itâs easily accessible in game.
They simply donât want to be beholden to keep the narrative coherent.
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And that is one of their biggest mistakes.
By avoiding narrative coherency, they cheapen the narrative itself. Why get invested when a beloved part of lore could be changed on a writerâs whim? Why fight for a side when the reason you supported them could be removed from the story or altered? Why care what happens to a character when a retcon could mean they didnât deserve a good thing/deserved a bad thing?
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Exactly. It sure explains why after BfA and SL, me and so many others mentally checked out with the story and find it really hard to care too deeply.
Itâs why nowadays, I enjoy talking about the parts of the lore I still love. But youâre right, itâs really hard to care anymore when your favorite lore might get changed on a whim for Rule of Cool
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This can be really frustrating, especially if narratives deemed âheadcanonâ suddenly appear in lore books and interviews. Or when things that were once the cornerstone of a story are deemed headcanon. The âBlood Elves, as a race, were addicted to fel magicâ-narrative is a particularly striking example. Because if you listen to Metzenâs old interview, it was a focal point of the story, the reason why they got shunned by the Alliance, the reason why their âracial psychologyâ changed and why High Elves split away from them. Then it got almost retconned in TBC, and suddenly reappears in Christie Goldenâs Eastern Kingdom guide.
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The WoW community council recently met with the narrative team (Steve Danuser, Anne Stickney, and Terran Gregory). Wowhead summarized their thoughts on a journal by saying:
âThe narrative team loves the idea of a journal that players can collect and fill with all the lore notes, books, and pages found throughout the world, but it would take a lot of time and effort from a lot of different departments - narrative, art, UI, and more. Itâs one of those things that may be difficult to understand from the outside, but it would be a big undertaking. That said, Dragonflight didnât set out to update the UI, it just so happened to align with a time in which they had the time not only to do it, but to do it right.â
More from that over at wowhead (article from 27 Dec).
I believe that there should be a profusion of in-game lore cyclopedias, all of them naturally influenced by the bias of the authors. A troll cyclopedia might reference the troll origins of Night Elves while a Kalâdorei version might hotly deny such origins.
Thatâs a lot more organic than a single Word of God tome.
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Thatâs what Chronicle was supposed to be and then they went ahead and tossed it aside anyway.
Blizzard doesnât care.
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This is a really good idea and a great addition. It can even serve as an in-game tool for writers or other devs themselves since the history of WoW is so vast.
Specially if they are really intend (its still in discussion apparently at that time) to go forward into adding a Story focus side quest for does who are interested in story like they mention in one of the interviews of DF.
Not that they need it, Iâm sure they have their own âToolsâ to look back at game NPC and quest Dialog, etc⌠better than any Goggle or Wiki Search, even though it might not be as pretty as the books or web with the drawings or pictures. (I imagine of course, not that I can confirm if this is true or not lol) 
Also wow writers just need to stop retconning everything in big ways that completely change the lore originally, and yes I am using retcon here as a pejorative because they donât recontextualize things. They completely change them, and thatâs due to certain pieces of lore not being vague enough for it to be recontextualized properly. Hammer meets completed puzzle.
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For some odd reason blizz sure loves to go nuclear on their own lore and than act shocked when the new lore makes absolutely zero sense because the old lore was just thrown entirely out the window.
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Bro everytime they try they retcon it. Chronicles wasnt even the first, we had a Warcraft Encyclopedia website that defined older lore. Itâs an endless cycle of selling us lore books and then trashing those lore books because nobody writing the game has read them.
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Gotta love it
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The characters in-universe donât have to have the same knowledge as the playerbase, or vice versa.
Having in-universe accounts of events contested by characters alongside a âWord of Godâ account with the facts is still organic, and thereâs a concrete account of at least most events to keep the continuity consistent. Would you like it if a part of WoW lore you enjoyed was suddenly retconned to be non-canon?
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I always take in character accounts as not actual Lore in the sense of world building, and has nothing to do with how the actual story is. It is merely a biased opinion that is best a side story and not belonging in a lore lexicon.
I think the setting is too far into itâs life to suddenly try to go for a TES style âflawed narratorâ version of conveying itâs lore. Because its too engrained in the setting that said trope is only used for retcons: rarely do we see multiple accounts simultaneously exist for years alongside one another. When they make a âdifferentâ account in current writing, itâs almost always what suddenly becomes the true one lol.
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Agreed. The only reason why it works in TES is because it has been that way since Arena. WoW trying to dabble in it now is more irritating than anything.
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Also the mark of a weak storyteller to have to change established lore in such big ways in order to tell the story they want to, instead of working within the constraints already put into place.
EDIT: This isnât me saying there isnât a place for some level of retcons, especially when it is used to actually fix something that made no sense before. But that isnât what has happened as of late.
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