writings been terrible and nonsensical since 4.3. 4.2 if we’re splitting hairs. the ending for cata was just “oh us aspects are just giving up all our powers for literally no reason at all except plot contrivance. even though we have no logical reason to do so. now we’re gonna fly off to dragonisles for a decade+ and do little of consequence except die to a satyr.”
Nah bro. Anduin. Anduin is the goober
Well… that, too.
legion was the last good story
lets hope the void lord saga is good for the 10th anniversary of legion
Honestly, when you listen to the interviews with the people writing the narrative, it makes a lot of sense the story isn’t very good.
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But they did explore that. They showed us that souls are a resouce that the denizens of the shadowlands are able to consume in a lot of ways. And that’s exactly what happened with Arthas. Used as the source of power for Kingsmourne. He wasn’t in the place where souls get to have ongoing stories, like Kael’thas. He wasn’t going to get a reprieve or a redemption.
arthas got his soul ripped out prematurely by a vengeful bastion uther and thrown into the maw
who knows what the shadowlands had planned for him
I think that’s why, for my money, TES stories are more interesting. But their storytelling medium appears to be much more easily managed because (outside of ESO, never played), it’s all single-player and static.
Worst thing they could have done would gave been to bring him back as a major part of Shadowlands. Perfectly fine with the smaller lore characters being brought back and some we never got to see at all in WoW like Draka. But they should have left the bigger characters like Kael and KT alone or kept him to a minimum like Arthas.
Yeah, any single player RPG is going to have better and more dynamic storytelling than an MMO. The medium is severely limited in what it can do.
People like to talk up FFXIV like it’s the second coming of Tolkien but then I hear its current expansion is garbage and the original MSQ is a slog you “just have to get through”. A game designed to have millions of players that are all the main character in drip-fed plots that go on forever is just not ever going to be amazing. Period.
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Not all characters deserve a redemption arc. Arthas (and Sylvanas, and MoP Garrosh) is one of those characters.
To this day, i dont believe this actually came to be.
How in the nine hells, do you take one of the coolest pieces of helm in fantasy, and turn into that gold junk circlet??? like did somebody look at it and said “yeah, thats the good stuff!”
Its stuff like that that amazes me about subjectivity, cause i cant understand someone seeing that and thinking it was good to go
Demon hunters get to have the special illidan blades, but we went the entire expansion in the place that forstmourne was forged, with the dude who created then, and they didnt must a single once of pride to reforge or at least make a transmog option for Death knights, actually unbelievable
Hell, even other games get to have frostmourne as transmog, but not us.
They also hyped him in shadowlands as well, as a damage control PR, cause they knew they screw up after Sylvanus just demolish him like he was wet paper and broke the helm, SHE IS SO COOL GUYS, DONT YOU YALL LOVE HER LIKE ME? - Danuser
Only Baine was more useless than him
There is a difference in being acceptable or mediocre and being roaring flaming garbage.
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Sometimes things are not as they seem. Every writer knows how to space out the storytelling I believe, which brings me to my speculation that things will unfold in time, such as SL which seemed like an introduction by the time we got to Zereth Mortis.
He’s not. Most of them got booted.
Authors for the early Warcraft story (until death of the Lich King) took ‘inspiration’ from Tolkien, Lovecraft, R. R. Martin, etc. The latest were inspired from major real world tough events. Basically there aren’t any recent books/worlds to steal good ideas from, since there is nothing to get inspired from. So, at the end in SL we had Thanos.
There are plenty of good books, old and new, that arent explored yet, the difference is on the writing team.
the “early” team are metal heads who liked that epic and fantastic stuff, Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, Lovecraft, norse/greek mythology and so on. The new team point of reference is MCU, netflix and who know what they are reading these days
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On the plus side, it introduced the catalyst
Bit of a lore enthusiast nerd rant here, so bear with me, but:
I recently read the Sylvanas book explaining her whole backstory and her reasons for wanting to reshape the afterlife. It was a good book, and I enjoyed the way it showcased her redeeming qualities while also not shying away from demonstrating her hypocrisy. It did a good job of actually explaining why she did what she did with the Jailer, and while there are elements of the novel I had my gripes with, overall I was glad to understand her motives better.
(To crudely summarize: in life, her family was everything to her; in death, she discovered that all souls were robotically sorted into different afterlives with no semblance of choice, and therefore all families were separated from one another and never got to be reunited. It infuriated her to know her dead family members couldn’t be together, and she could not be with them when she died. It was still dumb of her to trust Zovaal to fix this, but at least she did have some motive beyond just ‘this world is a prison’ vague B.S.)
This book, while good, annoyed me because it really made me question why NONE of this was brought up in the game. I understand that they feasibly can’t make an in-game story anywhere near as nuanced as a novel, but there wasn’t a single hint of any humanity in Sylvanas’ actions aside from her occasional guilt over Anduin being mind controlled. They just made her do evil things and say vague stuff. They never once explained her motives or the fact that she didn’t want to/didn’t enjoy being a straight up villain. She’s not a “good person,” but she’s at the very least got more complexity than she’s given credit for, and Shadowlands frustrates me because it (and BFA, if I’m being honest) did a complete injustice to any of that complexity.
I’m a long time Sylvanas fan, and I don’t like that the game treated her so poorly that when a person says “I hate Sylvanas she’s a dumb character,” I honestly can’t argue with that. Like that is so frustrating that I really can’t even defend my favorite character because of the way her story was handled. I kinda have to just say “yeah she is a dumb character, I just choose to love her anyway.”
Shadowlands was Blizzard’s prime chance to show why Sylvanas had been making all the terrible decisions she’d been making, and instead they devoted absolutely no screentime to any of her motives. Her reasons weren’t “justification,” but they at least made her look a bit more understandable than… a lackey whose motivation is “everything sucks so let’s just burn it all to the ground.”
I love reading, don’t get me wrong, but why did I have to read a book to even know what one of Warcraft’s most prominent characters wanted to accomplish in an expansion heavily focused around her?
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Yea, you narrowed it better. Won’t write names but just by the look of the author on “Shadows Rising” book I get it. No surprise why Sylvanas turned as it is.
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