Im 100% for a faction leader doing some haneous awful war crimes. Maybe burn down another tree or destroy another capital. At least makes for interesting story line
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We’ve already had that story. Twice.
A third time will not make it better.
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Iono I enjoyed watching sylvanas burn that tree down. I’m down for a third.
The amount of guilds that either broke or went horde during BFA and SL was insane. Both those xpacs did a lot of damage to the game.
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Shadowlands was a really bad expansion lorewise. Blizzard made the mistake of trying to explain the mysteries of the cosmos, and all it did was reduce the feel of the game and lore.
All we learned from it is, death isn’t death until you experience super death by dying in the shadowlands. The supposed “inescapable wow hell” for bad souls is completely escapable, someone just forgot to turn the portals back on. We also learned some of the most powerful Gods we’ve ever encountered in wow are just robots (see Elune). The whole retconing of the Nathrezim…
Shadowlands is a stain on the lore of wow.
Blizzard tried to explain everything, left nothing unexplained. Which is a huge no no in writing, ESPECIALLY when you’re dealing with the cosmic forces of life and death and the afterlife. These are things that are best left unexplained imo because if you explain them it leave no room for imagination or belief.
They also tried to frame it as “Oh there are infinite afterlives, so everyone gets to go to their perfect one”. And then proceeded to only show us 4 of them 
You can’t have a story with “infinite worlds” and try to condense it down to a wow expansion and expect it to work well. The 4 afterlives we saw were VERY niche and didn’t leave room for all the different kinds of people/creatures we’ve encountered.
There was also the huge flaw of there supposedly being infinite worlds, but everyone we’ve ever met just “HAPPENED” to end up in the 4 we visited.
Shadowlands was just… so convoluted and overdone it was near impossible to take seriously. I wish we could somehow rewrite the lore and remove that entire storyline. It was so awful
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Avoiding the obvious bait that is the state comment, we have no real idea what Metzen has in store for the future. He way aim to lean into where the story’s been going, but to tweak it here and there to more accurately nod back toward older Warcraft moments. Or he may be looking at Warcraft’s history and seeing what can be altered in order to make new narratives work.
Just because Metzen’s returning doesn’t mean we’re resetting to Vanilla, and nor should it. A WoW without Pandaren is a WoW I no longer play.
Says the uninformed forum poster that has no clue what the actual performance expectations were. I mean, I don’t either, but Blizz kept them around, so they must be doing something right.
It’s an almost 20-year-old game. I’m sure they expect the player base to continue shrinking with every x-pack.
I’d rather have conflicts happening because we have heroes and villains on both sides then one side just doing stupid evil stunts and responding to catastrohic losses with more stupid evil stunts.
You know, that whole “compelling writing” thing.
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Really honestly, if the game had stayed the exact same since the days of Classic, it wouldn’t still be the King of MMOs and there def would have been WoW killer ages ago.
I feel like everything should evolve. WoW evolved and change throughout the years to accommodate the player base that changed with the game. Retail now is a much better state today to me and I can play it, whereas I can’t play Classic for more than 2 hours before I’m annoyed with mana regen being so garbage and Priest just being so freaking useless when not in a group. Back when I started in 2007, I thought the game was amazing. Now I think this version is bestest. Things changed.
You prefer mana to be completely irrelevant? IDK, its pretty clear from leveling a new character on retail vs a new character on classic why resource management is a good gameplay element. And priests are quite good at leveling so im not sure what you mean.
The new player experience in retail from a gameplay perspective is so mind numbingly bad its no wonder it doesnt bring in new players. Oneshotting mobs, no mana, gear all has the same 1 armor value. That doesnt even get into the narrative.
Even the best restaurants add new items to their menu. But they rarely change fundamentally what they are. If disneyland never added anything new either it would have died too. But they haven’t ever really change their core brand (until relatively recently that is).
Blizzard has made fundamental flaws in changing not only their core brand recipe, but they’ve also done so much damage to the pillars of mmo gameplay that its no wonder the subscriber count is failing.
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Look at this. How hard is it to get dragons right? Does this cinematic portray the archetype of a classic fantasy dragon? Why are they so human? It is too saccharine even for human standards. Yet these are supposed to be giant reptilian beings with morality and sentiment that would be alien to us.
So instead of the mysticism and auras of power and cunning that should emit from dragons, we get this. Instead of visages being disguises, it seems the other way around. Like they were born and raised in their visage forms. When do we actually experience them as dragons?
For an expansion centered on dragons we really don’t get much of them.
They should have voiced chronormu with a deep dragon voice and dropped all the cutesy stuff. Would have made for a more interesting character.
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I found sylvanas burning down the homes of her enemies to be pretty compelling and quite controversial. It was prolly one of the most talked about story lines throughout wows history. Plus I mean it’s war… where war like things happen. Probably one of the most realistic situations in wow regarding wartime scenarios.
Ah look at that, you’re back. Chromie’s always been expressive and emotional, and the voice has been a part of her character since her inception. You really haven’t been paying attention if Chromie having a peppy voice or bubbly attitude is somehow jarring to you.
WoW’s dragons have always been different. Red Dragons are terrors in most other fantasy, but here? They’re guardians of life. They’re preservers. They’re optimists. It took one of the most abhorrent moments in Warcraft Lore to get one to strike out in anger, and then said dragon felt guilty about that entirely-justified outburst of fury because it went against her personal ethics. The Black Dragonflight went wonky only because of their proximity to Old Gods.
Dragons aren’t engines of destruction and evil in this game, never really have been.
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Yea, it was great. And fit totally with the undead mentality. They were barely even part of the horde in vanilla and were always ruthless.
BFA’s story failed because it was a jumbled mess. An expansion about a faction war somehow turned into nagas and then old gods. Why couldn’t they just follow through on the faction conflict? 8.2 could have been the siege of mulgore with a quilboar/grimtotem raid. 8.3 could have been a joint raid in Undercity cleaning up the rest of Sylvana’s forces
And instead of Shadowlands, they should have just had her put on the helmet and have her go on a rampage. Introduce a third playable faction, the undead. Any undead get kicked out of the horde and have to either accept a new found cure, or remain loyal to sylvanas. Anyone wanting to join the undead have to accept the plague. Have a revamped Lordearon/blood elf zones/etc and have the expansion be about that conflict. Would have been cool to have an expansion back in the old world instead of shadowlands.
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I can’t take anyone seriously who italicizes their tone like that lmao.
Of course I’ve been paying attention. So have many others, and that’s why the playerbase is shrinking.
That’s strange, in the original wow red dragons roam azeroth burning unsuspecting players alive who cross their path without looking. We started off as hated with the bronze dragonflight because to dragons, we were just bugs. You can rewrite the past all you want in your mind but you are wrong. Dragons are dragons, and the current team writing them has no clue.
Theres no distance at all, and their new hatchery is just a new theme park hey let any random soldier near our almost extinct eggs. They should have had areas in the city and zones where if you went as a player, you’d get burned to a crisp because it was forbidden. Why did they just let everyone in to go anywhere they pleased?? The tone is completely off. They are dragons who look at mortals like we are insects and lesser beings. A few mechanics and tonal things like that would have gone far. Instead we get woowoo friendship is magic.
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The writing team has no edge to it, every thing is milktoast lukewarm meh. All the male characters don’t act like males as they wallow in their tears and emotions in a corner somewhere. Nothing has any consequence because anything with anger/war or actual value is getting done. The whole idea of the Jailer was a COMPLETE and UTTER failure because he is the most laughable overpowered clown who no one ever heard of but was apparently waiting for the stars to align as he worked his minions into destroying the universe because…“we are not ready”. It was just so incredibly meh. Personally i’m not sure the WoW team can write male characters anymore at all, they just don’t seem connected to what a male character is anymore or how any range of male characters are in the game. They seem stuck on “can’t have fratboy” stuff in the game…but frankly that’s what sells games and story, that’s WHY folks got to WoW to begin with whether the current team likes it or not and honestly i’m not sure where their marketing team is or if it even exists because they don’t play much to the actual playerbase that plays the game and spends their time playing to what they WANT the playerbase to be and that’s a huge part of the problem. Someone brought up the difference between the intro’s to LK and Wrath and WoD and then DF and if you watch these things side by side, there is a HUGE difference in tone and even story pace. LK and Wrath hit hard and DF is a giant fluff piece where the main character of the cinematic is really an afterthought that we don’t do much with at all, he is literally just a nothingburger in the right place at the right time but holds no true story meaning AT ALL.
Then you look at Evokers where the team was “trying something new” which i applaud but ANYONE who has known or followed the game over it’s lifetime KNOWS that folks didn’t want to pay skinny lizardmen and if you were going to do Dragons…THEN DO DRAGONS and not what we got. Again, it’s not all bad but it’s definitely not particularly WoW awesome. EXTREMELY bland and it’s obvious by the player numbers, yes folks play Evoker but it doesn’t seem like the hit other new classes were when they were introduced and i would say a HUGE part of that is their mediocre looks as skinny lizardmen that a strong wind would blow away.
Personally i feel Kul Tiran introduction is a microcosm of ALL that has gone wrong with WoW since Legion and how it’s gotten to where it’s at. Where as they did come up with an all new RIG and animations and everything that comes with that (a ton of work)…they did it for a “race” (ridiculous since it’s just talk/fat humans) that they HAD TO KNOW was going to have almost no appeal as obese/fat people. They could have done ANY NUMBER of new and more exciting things but they chose (and i think this goes a long way toward pointing to what is wrong with WoW) to do the “inclusive” (not trying to be political here it just is what it is) thing and make fat people a playable thing and then they followed it up with almost no customization options and almost no story as an addon to the Jaina family story we got in BFA. It’s easily one of the most MEDIOCRE/Half baked things they have ever done. I mean just think about the time investment into what had to be created and still what has to be done to keep it a playable race every tier with new assets built and armor fittings etc. etc. etc. and almost NO ONE plays them…gee i wonder why? For the vast majority of the player base playing fat people is NOT A FANTASY, on top of that The Alliance already has super short humans (gnomes), short humans (Dwarves), Humans, Cyborg short humans (mechagnomes), Tall skinny muscular humans (Night Elves or at least the skin color to be “human” is available) and short Skinny Humans (Void Elves). They could have chosen ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE that even had a remotely interesting story and race and it would have been an upgrade to what we got. But now the game is stuck with fat people almost no one plays because…someone wanted to have fat people in the game? I mean i would love to have been a Developer in those meetings when they decided to do this to see the thought process…here we have Jinyu and (if we needed a cool human race again) Vrykul and we have Sethrak etc. etc. etc. and EVEN they could have picked TUSKARR if they really had to have a fat playable race but they didn’t, they went with generic tall fat folks who stand out in no way at all. It’s mind bogglingly bad and since Legion i feel like that’s how the WoW team has been going, just kind of “doing” things from moment to moment with no clear direction, it’s very disjointed story wise (although DF is a major improvement in many areas) and thematically and it feels like the WoW team lost it’s way in many many ways.
That is why i feel like WoW hasn’t felt like WoW almost since Legion. Hopefully they can get back there.
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Hasn’t felt like Warcraft in a long time, (Wrath) especially after Warmode killed PvP.
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In Everquest “skinny lizardmen” were extremely popular.
Outright playing a dragon was never, ever even a remote possibility.
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Ironically i bought EQ2 before i bought WoW back in 2004 but it wouldn’t run on my computer so i got WoW. Anyways, i’m sure some folks love the idea of Lizardmen…but that’s not really what WoW was pushing nor has the community whole heartedly embraced them.
While i did write Dragons i meant Dragon humanoids, yes playing actual Dragons was never in the cards, playing something that felt like a Dragon clearly was the goal and the point is they missed the mark. The Dracthyr look ALMOST NOTHING like the Dragon people they should, they lack size and heft (a hallmark of almost everything in WoW). Hell their faces scream Gecko and Iguana and NOTHING like WoW dragons.
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I dont think there is a single race the community would have whole heartedly embraced. And any other race option would have required a completely different expansion to be relesaed.
So…a dragon-like being that stands upright with 2 legs and 2 arms? o.O
I have no clue how what you mean here, because I dont know what the standard for how “Dragon people” should look. I am not trying to sound sarcastic. I just honestly dont know other than “make them look like a body builder on steroids” you might mean. And I dont know how humanoid arm muscle mass is really more dragon-like.
Heft is only a hallmark specifically on male characters? And not all. Dracythyr are also different in that they are really designed to be quite androgynous. So they dont have the “male hefty” option. Since the female toons within WoW dont have that same aspect.
Forsaken for example. And people constantly ask for skinny humans. Showing that heft is not the end-all goal of a lot of people.