WoW lore completely lost me

Community General Discussion
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First of all, this is not a rant of the 9.1 cinematic.

Warcraft’s story was always simple fantasy writing: orcs vs humans, armies of the dead, a world ending demon legion and so on. All these threats to our world were basic enough to keep the story moving and the characters evolving.

Look at the best wow characters, like Arthas, Varian, Thrall and Illidan: all of them had clear goals, aspirations and personalities. There was nothing complex about them, and that was good. They are just cool characters.

For me the highest note was in Legion (i start playing in late Cata):
The expansion has a strong start, a clear well known threat to Azeroth, clear stakes, the return of classic characters and dumb fun lore moments (like Sargeras stabbing azeroth).

Then Blizzard jumped the shark in BFA: all build up, no payoff. We had a faction war orchestrated by a single character that was dropped halfway through in order to fight a old god. Suddenly, that simple lore was trying to be serious and complex, saying something about virtue and morality. It was so disappointing that i stopped played for the first time (wod was bad, but at least there was no punishing systems like in bfa) and waited, hoping that next time Blizzard would do things right.

And here we are in Shadowlands. From the start, they retconed Chronicle (and yes, it was a retcon, because blizzard NEVER said the book was only a titan’s point of view before shadowlands: in the announcement, they said the book was “a definitive tome of Warcraft history”), and now we are facing the Jailer, who we don’t know the powers, motivations, story, personality, nothing. The story has no build up, and for now, i still need to wait until 9.2 to understand what he is up to.

The story completely lost me, and was the story and setting that kept me playing through the low times of the game. And Blizzard doesn’t seem interested in tell small scale stories and will go through this Cosmic stuff. Shadowlands could have been a great expansion if Blizzard have made any build up for the Jailer, the Eternal Ones, First Ones and so on. Maybe with two more expansions of foreshadowing, a propper faction war and a n’zoth expansion, things would be clearer.

My sub will expire soon so i’m gonna take a break from the game for now, play somethig else and hope Blizzard return to basics. But i totally doubt they will, and i’m afraid with what they will do with the lore of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms if we were ever up to go back to these places again. I’m just tired of spending the last 4 years waiting for the story to get good again.

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I’m pretty sure this expansion is just serving as the set up lore wise for a cosmic war which I agree is a little ridiculous and I personally prefer simpler stories, but I think the unknown motivations of the jailer and everyone else is definitely intentional

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Agreed.

We’ve been reading a book for 12 chapters, and suddenly at chapter 13 new undeveloped characters are introduced, altering the plot and becoming the main plot devices. Everything that the first 12 chapters have set us up for has now been completely ignored in favor of a new plot and the following 3 chapters have tried to rewrite everything from the first 12 in order to setup chapter 17.

It’s just entirely too discombobulated.

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I miss the days of just looking for mankirks wife. This cosmic epic battles is just too much.

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Bro wow lore lost me when we went to argus and had legion tie fighters.

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I think WoW’s Lore is just fine.

As in, the history surrounding the Universe, it is second to none in my opinion.

WoW’s current story is the issue. But that is Not irreparable.

All that needs to happen to fix WoWs story is for this entire chapter of WoW to be left behind.

Once 10.0 hits, no more Shadowlands, no more Sylvanas.

Start fresh and go from there.

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The cause of this is from 2 major issues.

The first is that ever since wrath, we have been having to fight bigger and bigger and badder enemies each time. We went from the LK who would reach out wiht his massive armies to attack the world, to Deathwing would would set the world on fire, to the new horde warchief threatening to destory the world in darkness, to an unstopable orc army coming from another dimetnion, to the daemons buring all of azeroth, to azeroth is alive and is bleeding and oh my god old gods, now to literally fighting death itself. Its gotten outta hand as it tries to keep topping itself in bigger bads, the game needs to be brought back down to scale of we are just random dudes helping normal people.

The second issue is that blizzard since legion has been doing this narrative story with each EXP, and thats taken a lot from the game and forced a over arcing story that honestly is not a good one because of the lack of competent story. Warcraft is a setting where stories take place. Not a story that builds a setting like it has been.

We just need to go back to being murder hobos, not saviors of universe.

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I thought the same, but will be the same lore team with the same writers telling these “complex” character driving stories full of mysteries that will be explained in the next chapter!
I really wanted to be hopeful but since bfa all we had is build up and right now in 9.1 i still have the feeling that nothing happened.

Man you are right on point here.

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Current lore is your playing dnd, and the dungeon master is letting you get away with literally everything

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The storyline has been a spiraling powercreep tantamount to the Fast & Furious movies. Soon, we’ll have the equivalent of a car in space because “all you need is family”

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People felt the same way about Cataclysm. You can do an expansion that takes a step down.

Garrosh was a more down-to-earth villain, and it was wonderful. The sha we’re another great villain that served to exemplify garrosh’s role in the story.

But none of it was to the same Time Traveling, world breaking degree of cataclysm.

I would like it much better if 10.0 had another humanized villain, and not Shadowlord Murderdeath of the 9th dimension.

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Yeah. The simple adventurer quests were a lot more fun. Now we’re extremely epic beings who fight gods and devils. The world of warcraft has become the universe of warcraft and its not as exciting anymore.

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I the problem is that Legion told the last story that we were invested in.

And by that I mean the last story that was lingering from the RTS. In a game that didn’t need to keep putting out expansions, Legion would have been the end. Much like SC2 finished Legacy of the Void and stopped putting out SC2 box games. If they ever want to go back, they can always make SC3.

But WOW had to keep going. Sure, we could have had (and still could have) fun side story expansions like MOP. But we can’t stay there forever. It has to build.
The problem was that the story that has been building with Sylvanas since essentially Legion, keeps taking massive jumps with no intervening explanation. So we don’t care, and we get confused.

But now they’re committed. And at this point, I don’t know if they could write themselves out of this corner in anything less than 4-5 years, because it has to move at the pace of the game itself coming out.

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