Alright
Alright, let’s discuss this in the matter of WoWs story telling and how the definition you put helps define why Shadowlands was bad.
Legion came out in 2016. Voljin dies and randomly decides to name Sylvanas as Warchief. No one understood it and no one didn’t know why he didn’t choose Baine or hell even Lor’themar who was acting more in the interest of the Horde than Sylvanas.
The reason why this is isn’t known to us until about 4 years later in Shadowlands. And even then the reasoning for it now sits unknown to the player base. “To help the Jailer remake how death works.”
Okay? Why? “Azeroth divided will not be strong enough for what’s to come.” What does that even mean? When will we learn this? How does Sylvanas killing everyone help everyone aside from her and the ones that plotted with The Jailer?
Now your argument is “People just don’t understand.” I read a lot of the story and lore. I’m even going through ALL of the old expansions starting oldest to newest and like to think I have a pretty good understanding of Vanilla WoWs stories (mostly localized/regional such as Blackrock Menace or Qiraji Menace EK/Kalimdor respectively) and so on with the following expansions.
Retcon or not, how does writing a story in such a way where we are piecemealed very little about the story leaving us to guess what might happen. Instead we get Shadowlands and everyone is furious.
Perhaps in the next 20 years it might all come together and we have a moment of clarity once it’s all finally put together, but until then that and the story that exists from BfA to Shadowlands is objectively bad. No one knows what is going on in it or why.
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But have you read book #423684 that changes all the lore and kills 5 characters off screen?
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Another horrid method of Blizzard story telling. Now some things I get can be side content to compliment the game. I do like some of the stuff they added like the short stories, but those should be complimentary nuance to the main story in game.
Here’s a massive chunk of the story not told in the game.
Players: This story poop!
That’s an unfortunate and inevitable fact of the medium. When you’re telling a story that’s supposed to be drawn out over multiple years and span expansions, you have to leave holes that you can fill in later.
It’s why an MMO is not really a good way to tell a large-scale story like this, and I agree that they need to do better at focusing on smaller scale stories and plotlines that can be resolved more quickly and with less convolution. Of course, you do that and then people here whine about I killed gods last expansion why am I now having to fight off raiders and murlocs 
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That’s the thing though, if it’s currently unwritten, can we really assign any meaning to the parts of the story are untold. In other words, if the future is going to piece the spaghetti mess that is Sylvanas and SL, how can anyone say there it was all part of some greater story? The story that’s undecided and unwritten…
We can only hope that Sylvanas’s story is done. The Jailer used her to accomplish his goals, she had her sad sudden “oh wait I don’t want to be a slave after all!” moment and is now spending eternity in hell thinking about what she did.
The question to be answered now is what the Jailer was scared of that made him start working against everyone else. Hopefully Sylvanas has no part of that answer beyond what we already know.
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I 100% agree with everything you said. They can do it and it is so wonderfully done in localized zone stories. They are so darn good. But their ‘Main Story’ is just so… segmented. We went through a whole expansion to learn why Sylvanas was chosen to be Warchief and it was one of the worst arcs.
If she turned around and was trying to manipulate The Jailer to save The Forsaken and herself from the grizzly fate she saw when she impaled herself on the Saronite, that would have been on character for her.
The way they wrote her in Shadowlands was… out of the blue. And the “Good Sylvanas trapped inside” groan… That’s a personal qualm, but yes, structure needs to be better.
Without a doubt now we’re going to get Sylvanas redemption arc.
Just a nuance why people hated Shadowlands… “I will not serve!!”
proceeds to serve… 
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Tbh the only story from blizzard I ever though was nice was the sc1/bw one.
Can’t believe people are still crying about Sylvanas, she is not even in this xpac. Get over Shadowlands and move on in your life.
Hey the rest of us having a good conversation on a disagreement about the story. You’re welcome to add to it. If not… 
Some folks enjoy getting into the lore and discussing. You’re welcome not to. It’s easy to mute threads that are about topics you don’t care about.
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Wut, you don’t approve of the Disney Princess WOW stories? 
It’s magical in WOW now 
Best stories ever told, no one liked those Metal style theme, yuck… so barbaric. 
Like totally!!! 
This means nothing without elaboration. Please elaborate.
I wouldn’t call DF garbage. There is a problem with the fact that the aspects are trying to get back the power they gave up at the end of Cataclysm. Seeing them try to protect the world despite their lost power would make for a better story. I think the big winners for the expansion so far are the Tuskarr because they were given a much bigger in-world role than they had in Northrend (funny walrus people that fish good). The runner up being Sabelian because someone actually remembered he existed.
Please elaborate on this. What I’ve seen of the expansion is so disconnected from the rest of WoW that I can’t see it contributing to anything that would “move the story forward”. It’s a bunch of cameos by dead characters and in part like the movies made for an anime series that exist in a bubble and have zero effect on the “main” story seen in the TV series/manga.
I’d call it an attempt at long-term storytelling. I say it’s an attempt because it doesn’t actually succeed.
This might be an acceptable reason, if FFXIV didn’t exist. For all my issues with that game’s class design and the fact that the character writing devolved into anime “our protagonists will never die” writing, they managed to pull off a multi-year storyline without leaving visible holes to fill in. They instead reminded the player that certain entities existed and made them continual threats. The closest Blizzard ever came to this was having the Cult of the Damned pop up out of nowhere in WoD, and even that was poorly conceived because it was only to unceremoniously kill off Admiral Taylor.
If I understood Briselody’s explanation of Retcon is that at some point they will add in more information at a later date that will explain this and make previous information added later on (Jailer making the Helm of Domination) to fill in the gaps.
So, building a train track with sections missing and adding them in after the train has passed that part.
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The problem is that unless every expansion beyond a point takes back the power it grants us, we will inevitably reach a point where we’re slaying gods for fun and memes. And if every expansion does take back the power it gives, then there’s no real progression anymore and WoW may as well wipe the PCs back to level 1 at the start of every new expo because we’re already being shunted back to the status quo.
Generally, the longer people play a game, the more agency and power they want within it, but then again, games also tend to have an end after a year of play, let alone nearly two decades.
People used to always blame a person whose initials are IH and they also blamed someone initialed JH but I am a fervent believer that 10 years from now we will look back on the SD storytelling era as the largest disaster WoW has ever had. The amount of problems that his storytelling have caused can’t be fixed without a complete and total reboot.
I think the story was destroyed the moment Blizzard started getting random authors to write books that were apparently major story points of expansions. But hey, you blame who ever you feel for the story being bad. But I want to iterate again, the story wasn’t good before Danuser touched it either.
she will return is the issue. she knows things. as we were left with the (weak) cliffhanger of not knowing who the big bad was.
also that ending to me was not well thought out. actually…not thought out at all.
her punishment is to collect up assumed billions of souls. this should take years.
years billions of souls will suffer more. she needed another punishment. and the covenants put up massive numbers to sweep and clear the maw. 3 months tops, every soul judged and no longer in hell, unless they actually were judged to be there for real.
I am not sure who is getting punished here in that punishment. Sylvanas or the souls.