Of course you don’t 
Won’t stop you from broken-recording story bad at every opportunity, despite “not caring”.
You know what is more fun about the arguments here ?
You read people talking about stuff and saying “it is ridiculous that someone would believe that”, and when you get it down to the bones, it is EXACTLY what people have been believing, making wars about and writing “sacred book” on.
That is so freaking awesome. Please keep going.
But it is bad.
sigh
Is this carrying on the merits whether Shadowlands story is good or bad?
No, it’s carrying on the question of whether the people declaring Shadowlands story to be bad have anywhere near enough understanding of it to actually make that call.
I actually disagree strongly with the premise. Yes, the story is quite bad and not at all where the narrative should have logically gone given the foundation and path we were on and I do largely feel it is Legion and especially BfA where the “unraveling” has largely taken place (characters/thread plots not playing out how they logically should have mostly), but it can absolutely be salvaged and I even think it could lead to a greater game foundation and narrative arc if done my way.
Basically use light vs void to “reset” the wow universe. We all know (or should) that the void is among the greatest canonical threats we have yet to truly face and the light, a supposed equally powerful force, isn’t inherently benevolent or “on our side” either. We “know” these 2 forces are poised to clash “soon” ™ and I think DF largely being pegged as a filler/beach day expansion, can (maybe is) setting us up for that.
I think the story can be saved “if” the void were to come and consume us…literally we lose and our minds absorbed and “permanently” placed in their hivemind and we exist in what would be a twisted nightmare world of azeroth (horrific visions being the template for this). We “wake up” thinking our past lives of being Azeroth’s greatest heroes and champions…slayers of titans and gods even, was just a dream and in reality, we’re rodents hiding away on our own world where greater forces have all won and are fighting each other for dominance and control.
In this world, the legion was never beaten. The scourge and endless death was never pushed back. The void and old gods are entrenched and an active threat, the dragons are all united but made mad and seeking to scour the planet. We’re ants hiding deep underground taking pot shots at the various forces trying to keep any from truly dominating. In this world, there is no horde or alliance…we’re all 1 faction (horray no more stupid faction wars and leading to cross faction guilds). We can always sleep and “dream of a better world” aka going back to Azeroth prior to do legacy content and such.
The game could introduce twisted versions of the zones where flight is possible but EXTREMELY dangerous so nuking flying while not just arbitrarily removing it. Sure try and fly and find you just shot down or swarmed to death leading to content where we clear threats away, even if for a time, making that piece of the world a bit safer/useable.
The content just writes itself at that point. WoW can reuse assets and stories told in different but “corrected” ways to appeal to this twisted nightmare world whilst in the “real” world, we can have Azeroth the titan finally “hatch” and she be the narrative force to somehow rescue us.
I mean I could go on and on, but I mean I doubt anything that grand or sweeping could ever happen, but it is at least a narratively “correct” way to “fix” the story without just straight up butchering it with retcons brought out of nowhere.
1 Like
What would make someone qualified with making that call? It is generally received as an expansion that destroyed lore at the expense of no real reason why.
There is no conclusion or answer for why a lot of what happened, happened. At best it’s viewed as a Saturday Morning Villain shenanigans with a lot of ‘I’ll get you next time Gadget’.
Retcons are fine if they aren’t egregious and make sense. I think there were some interesting parts about Shadowlands, but the elements that were generally disliked overshadowed them.
1 Like
The reality is more people are parrots without an original thought and just parroting what someone more e-famous said. They can’t actually articulate in their own words/thoughts “why” the story was bad or what actual narrative problems exist…let alone gameplay ones either.
The reality is shadowlands was a pretty good expansion that largely did learn and was on the path to fixing a lot of the sins introduced in Legion and carried over in BfA. I could go feature for feature and explain how, but it’s going to fall on largely deaf ears. Just like, at the time, MoP was a ragged on and hated expansion and now many/most will consider it the last “true” expansion the game should learn from and lean back on.
I also think retcons aren’t fine. Shadowlands bit off way more than it could chew, narratively and gameplay wise, but I don’t have any massive qualms with the overall story with it. It setup a proper threat worthy of our canonical feats/power levels, it “had” a villian who actually represented a capable threat (even if much of the backstory and pieces weren’t given), and we logically progressed in that story/narrative and dealt with it.
I’ll take SL and its narrative story so far 1000x over the utter garbage DF has so far presented.
1 Like
It didn’t destroy anything. It moved the story forward.
And “retcon” has two different definitions and people use them in conversation interchangeably without realizing it. The actual definition is revealing information that re-interprets past events or adds context to them. That’s not a bad thing at all - lots of good stories do this. Sometimes not everything about a story is apparent at the time it’s told, nor should it be.
The definition that a lot of people here use is contradicting past information or introducing something that invalidates information that was previously presented as fact. Warcraft has relatively few of these, despite what the forums would have you believe. One of the only real examples I can think of is the WCIII booklet saying that Sargeras was corrupted by the eredar then TBC revealing that it was the other way around - one that Metzen personally corrected and apologized for.
Warcraft’s story is, at the end of the day, basically a comic book story. It’s made up as it goes and frequently shifts focus and quality as new writers come and go and make their mark on it. This is not new - it’s always been like this. People chicken-littling about how SL “destroyed” the story or how it’ll never recover or whatever over-dramatic nonsense they want to parrot don’t understand this and never will.
LOL are you suggesting there exists some objective standard or level of understanding for or against which subjective preference and perception must be weighed, in an arena exclusively that of subjectivity? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
For myself, SL was indeed BAD…it seemed completely abstract to the WoW universe and lore, as imperfect such as it was. This perception is neither right nor wrong, it is simply mine; and it’s not the result of parroting anyone else’s.
1 Like
How about you actually go into some actual detail here? Or is your opinion “streamer or source X said it is bad thus it is bad…hurr durr wait until source X says something again for my follow up thought”.
If you want details, why don’t you go re-read the forums over the past 2 years and you’ll find a tons of players explaining their personal opinions and reasons in great detail. You new here?
Not necessarily, but the opinion that someone may hold about a book that they’ve read is a lot more valuable and worth considering than that of someone who flipped to a couple random chapters and then watched someone else’s Youtube review on it.
It’s possible to play through the entirety of WoW while paying very little attention to the story, as many here will proudly attest to. That’s perfectly fine, but when those same people then decide to provide their opinion on the story they weren’t paying attention to - frequently based on opinions that they see parroted by others since they have no basis for their own - I think that’s perfectly open to criticism and mockery.
Just for starters;
Did you play through the Bastion questline by chance? Yeah, so Kyrian show up before we die so that at the moment of death they can ferry our soul to the Arbiter to judge us. Humm…except for that whole deal with the Legion using our souls for fuel thing. Guess the paragons of making suree we receive judgement so we can go to our eternal rest goes out the window if there are demons around.
Or, maybe you played through the Ardenweald campaign? If so, can you explain to Briselody that we see a memory of the very first mortal soul arriving in Ardenweald, so she understands that the Winter Queen was there before it arrived, and therefore couldn’t have been a mortal before she became the Winter Queen?
How exactly do you explain necromancers? Ghosts? The Eternal Ones just don’t seem to care that those dang Kyrian just decide not to do their jobs sometimes, and the Eternal Ones don’t care if spellcasters are pulling souls out of their realms?
Seriously; There are simply too many to list.
The story was trash.
4 Likes
They do, yes. If something has a claim on a soul, like the Legion capturing them for fuel or a necromancer or Valk’yr returning them to undeath, then they don’t interfere. That’s just how they work, which is explained in Kyrian quests.
Ardenweald was created for her, to facilitate her purpose. That has nothing to do with her creation or the origin of her soul.
Most just animated soul-less dead flesh. Particularly powerful ones, like the Lich King, can pull the soul back into it while maintaining some degree of control.
Kyrian can’t force a soul to move on to the Shadowlands. You spend a chunk of the Kyrian campaign having to live through a soul’s last moments so that you can properly convince him to move on. If they don’t, you get ghosts. Simple.
Not particularly, since there aren’t enough to actually affect them in any meaningful way. They can’t affect the physical world much anyways, so there’s not much they could do about it even if they did.
I once commented somewhere that questing in WoW has been garbage since Shadowlands. I can’t quest in SL zones or DF zones. It’s boring. There’s no mystery or intrigue. I don’t care where the story is leading me. I couldn’t quite quantify why except to say the story sucks.
You explained it for me. Thanks, friend. The sad thing is, I cannot possibly see it getting any better.
The story has become spoiled milk and I can’t drink it anymore. If you need me, I’ll be playing vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, MoP, WoD, and Legion on retail, over and over again, because that’s the most fun content I ever played in any MMO since 1999.
(Though City of Heroes certainly gets a shoutout for being second best!!)
This is the first expansion where I didn’t read all of the quest text and I really did not miss it at all. I don’t know what they need to do to the story but…something. Yet another world ending event has become a yawner.
I thought the best story in SL was at the end with formation of the Desolate Council. I think given the story pacing they’re trying to work with, i.e. long gaps between patches, smaller stories would be much more interesting.
1 Like
This statement is better than the OPs whole rant.
You know what? I’ve given it some thought and you’re right. They’re not robots.
Edit: They’re mechsuits. Your afterlife gods are literally mechsuits.
Does this make Elune a mechsuit? When do we get mechsuit class for Night Elves?