I will agree with alot of things you said but I will disagree with this. The entire theme of Wrath was how we were all following Arthas’ path and were a half a step from doing terrible things like him. Hell, the most memorable quest from Wrath for me was us wiping out that Zul’drak family because we needed a key or something.
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They have literally not been that since at least the end of Burning Crusade.
Most blood elf players don’t pay attention to that; their character still have green eyes = fel magic.
And they have made it their own, goofiness and all.
Well its failing ever more spectacular the farther they stray from their roots and what originally made it popular. And thus the rise of Classic.
You do realize the current end of Starcraft is literally the three factions ended up in a state of truce/maybe even peace and cooperation? Oh, exactly like how Warcraft currently is with the factions all working together.
Ooof, and how is Starcraft doing after than ending? Oh right, dead. How is WoW doing under this new direction? Oh right, retail is dying to the point they brought back classic after trying to tell us for YEARS ‘we didn’t want it’ in desperation. And the trend has only gotten stronger this year.
And I going to go with a simple the factions were so imbalanced for so long its most hardcore player base ended up Horde.
I wasn’t talking about Hardcore, those were Retail racial stats that show alliance at the bottom and Horde races outside of elves being extremely popular and dominatng the top 10.
In any case, the factions are(mostly) at peace
One thing to be at peace; another thing to turn it into one sided generic good vs bad guys and totally gut and destroy one faction in a 2 faction world to the detriment of the entire IP. And frankly also gutting the faction stats show is more popular and also is the less generic more unique and interesting one anyway. Makes a lot of sense really how retail has been failing when its essentially been mistreating the lore and faction that form its majority playerbase and more active player base on average. Duh.
People wanted high elves on the Alliance.
Like I said, Most pandering move in WoW history. Completely lore breaking and absolutely ruining any kind of faction identity. Beyond cringe. Just so some elf simps can role play as THE MOST generic boring iteration of elves possible against the established lore that High Elves were all but extinct.
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Belves didn’t have an option to not have green eyes until BfA…
Belves still have green eyes even when they weren’t actively absorbing fel, the process of their eyes losing their fel-imbued color was stated as being slow.
There have been a substantial number of Helves as part of the Alliance in vanilla, WC3, Wotlk, TBC…
Since forever, really.
Thought you said old lore was better than new lore, weird.
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Whatever you mean by ‘froo froo power rangers trash’, I’m guessing you’re trying to say that in the ‘new lore’ we see people banding together, dropping old hatreds, working together to fight the ‘big bad’.
Rofl. No but nice try making up a strawman arguement. You admit you don’t know what I mean by ‘froo froo’ but then go on to make it whatever it most convenient for your contrived argument. I introduce you to the most basic and obvious straw man argument I maybe have ever seen.
Modern WoW lore is lampooned for 2 things. 1) It’s now therapist touchy feel ‘lets all talk about our feelings’, tell don’t show objectively kindgarden level of story telling, 2) its trash treatment of faction lore more specifically Horde lore. ‘Froo Froo’ pertains to 1) mostly. See Bellular or Nixioms recent critics of Dragonflight lore and cinematics as an example.
That’s what WC3 was
Lol, leaving out that the Frozen Throne was literally the highlight of WC3 for most people which was maybe the single darkest story Blizzard ever told… And of all 3 WCs WCIII literally did the most to point the Alliance as morally questionable and NOT generic goodie goodie too shoes.
WC2 was in the Human campaign.
That feels like a huge stretch lol. Yes humans and orcs both gained allies during the course of their war to destroy one another. Not unusual thing to happen to gain allies who you have shared interests with during the course of a war narrative.
Nothing past WC1 has any connection to Warhammer at all.
Um. Right. Orcs. Humans. Dragons. Demons being the main antagonist all the way through WCIII xpacs and beyond into WoW at least until Legion. Ancient Entites that ordered the world. Light vs Void. Wow that doesn’t sound just like Warhammer.
cough Order vs Chaos cough
doesn’t mean that Warcraft should abandon everything its built by itself to start following this
WoW was built from WCI to III and during early WoW and been in decline ever since WotLK xpac. IE all the ‘new’ lore has only ruined what was once a great IP. Classic is popular because honestly the IP from then was better; the gameplay is boring according to almost everyone. Thing is retail gameplay is only a little less boring but the world/lore is crap in retail so might as well play the game with a compelling mmo-rpg world and lore even at the cost of much worse graphics.
This is entirely based on assumption, we don’t know the actual numbers of how many people are playing retail, only how many are raiding consistently.
It’s based on data from 3rd party sources; you can either provide better data or it will stand as the best data that there is on the subject.
The reality is you must have no faith the real data would be flattering to your argument if you deny the validity of any potential data rather than trying to find that which supported your argument. Rather than just trying to avoid the topic of 3rd party data all together.
The people who made ‘Kung Fu Panda’ complaints don’t care about the actual writing beyond aesthetic
No, it just felt juvenile and actually does seem to be the beginning of a softening in WoWs lore in retrospect that has become especially prominent in Shadowlands and now more so Dragonflight therapy sessions.
I feel that the vast majority of people actually liked MoP’s story.
No, they liked the gameplay of the era and Pandaria as a questing zone. The lore of MoP was some of the most controversial ever with every Horde player hating it to one degree or another.
Definitely the best expansion to ever center around the ‘faction conflict’ as a story point
Jesus F-ing Christ no and you are the first to ever say that.
Cata’s overall world lore was fine (main story sucked).
Nope, Cata ruined Horde lore as much as MoP did with Garrosh going bad for BS reasons and BFA did by doing it all over again with Sylvanas. WoW Retail literally can never recover from that. It’s a zombie of a game that is only going to shrink as it has been and will only shrink further as resource begin to be pulled away from it towards growing and thriving classic+.
WoD’s story was terrible and brought nothing to the table.
It literally brought NOT adding to the destruction of WoW lore beyond repair for at least 1 expansion which is more than we can say for MoP, Cata, and BFA.
TBC’s lore was literally nothing
And relative to most xpacs THAT IS GREAT! Better to DO NOTHING rather than just RUIN AND DESTROY GOOOD LORE AND REPLACE IT WITH GARBAGE. Classics didn’t have much ‘active’ lore, you just explored Lore as it was at the end of WCIII mostly. And it was the best version according to most people now.
Literally most of what the xpacs lore has been post WotLK has been SO BAD that they simply DO NOTHING and DO NO HARM is the best we can hope for from a WoW xpac in regards to lore. If that wasn’t the case Classic wouldn’t be the cultural phemenon it became.
Trash TBC lore all you like, TBC was the last WoW xpac to see major growth, Wotlk stagnated, and the crap that started with Cata has seen the game is serious decline ever since UNTIL the return of Classic.
Weird one to bring up in that list since she did not exist until Legion. Well after Wrath ended.
Not a strawman, just trying to understand what you were saying.
Since that’s what a lot of people are taking problem with in the most recent expansion.
Way to get extremely defensive by me slightly poking at your argument, though.
Why do people keep saying this?
This has always existed in WoW.
The most recent patch has had more of this, but we’ve always had it.
Warcraft has always been tell don’t show, people monologue about stuff all the time in this game.
Faction lore has always been trash and has never made sense.
The Horde becoming a world superpower instead of a conglomerate of refugees & outcasts trying to settle on Kalimdor is what made them lose their original identity (something that began in WoW vanilla but got worse over time).
WoW’s cinematics have always been hamfisted and cheesy.
Also watched both of their vids and didn’t find either of them all too substantial about the actual lore of the game…
Mostly just how they feel the ‘vibe’ of the game doesn’t fit with them anymore, which is entirely subjective.
Frozen Throne wasn’t dark.
It’s as cheesy, hokey, and goofy as any other piece of Warcraft media.
Pandaren Brewmasters came from WC3, something which you critiqued earlier in this thread.
The ending of WC3: TFT had Arthas playing electric guitar over the credits.
FFS look at the art style of the game, man. Everyone looks like a colorful wacky cartoon character, none of this is dark or gritty at all.
Funniest part about this is that the Alliance from WC2 isn’t the same Alliance as the one we see in WoW.
The Alliance during WC3 is also entirely different to the Alliance we see in WoW and was barely focused upon at all. We see the Human campaign largely through Lordaeron’s perspective, not the Alliance’s.
The backstory given to us about the Alliance in WC2 is that the human powers dropped their past hatreds, banded together, and fought the Horde for the good of Azeroth. Eventually the Alliance incorporates High Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes into after aiding them.
The story of the base game of WC2 is really simple. The Alliance, through working together and dropping past hatreds were successful, whilst the Horde who were betrayed by Gul’dan and suffered with in-fighting lost.
Warhammer didn’t invent those things.
These are basic fantasy tropes which both of these fantasy universes utilize.
If you really want to be that way you could say they’re both derivative from D&D and Tolkien and should both just copy off of them…
Saying that, WoW takes more from D&D than it ever took from Warhammer.
Light vs. Void didn’t become an actual narrative thing until Chronicles.
AKA, long after you say the lore got ‘bad’.
Pretty much everything from WC1 was retconned moving into WC2.
Tons of things were retconned from WC2 to WC3.
And a bunch of what was setup in WC3 was retconned moving into WoW.
It isn’t as linear as you might think, many of these games outright retcon the past one’s story in-order to create the story of the next game.
Hate to break it to you, but the average WoW player doesn’t give two sh!ts about the lore/story of the game.
The reason why classic is so successful rn is because of hype and because it’s far more accessible and easy to understand than retail.
Retail’s barrier to entry is terrible.
Gameplay influence’s game popularity more than the actual story does.
As I said, the data retrieved from those 3rd party sources is based on active raiders.
We draw assumptions on overall population based on that data.
Learn what sources you’re using.
MoP shows more active brutality than Classic.
‘Softening in WoWs lore’, bruh, get real.
This means nothing.
There is no ‘softening’ of lore, the lore doesn’t feel as impactful because people aren’t 13 anymore. None of this stuff was ever dark, edgy, or ‘badass’ unless you’re a teenager.
Your other two options are Cata and BfA.
Both of which you don’t seem to like particularly well.
No other expansions ever centered around the faction conflict.
Vanilla, the Horde and Alliance weren’t even in war… They were fighting proxy wars with one another and the actual storylines for Horde v. Alliance were non-existent outside of these proxy factions.
TBC had barely any faction conflict.
Wrath had barely any faction conflict until the end.
Care to elaborate why.
Garrosh was always a hot-head, he didn’t start actively turning warcriminal until MoP.
It retconned pretty much everything we knew about Draenor before then and replaced it with entirely new stuff.
It’s also largely ignorable because it happens in an alternate universe that you can completely ignore.
What is good lore to you, honestly.
What is good and bad is entirely subjective, I’m honestly curious.
You keep saying ‘this bad’ ‘this good’ but you never explain why you think it’s good or not.
Barely anyone cares about WoW outside of its playerbase.
That’s because MMOs back then were a major fad and WoW was chief among them.
Even still, it wasn’t as popular as people like to think it was.
It was the easiest to pick up and play, it was designed for people new to the genre.
Most people do not care about WoW lore, most WoW players do not care about WoW’s story or lore, this has always been true.
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Fair point that mysteries aren’t always plot holes, though some of the writers have done more than enough to earn my distrust.
They already had lore sorted with Chronicles (not just the cosmology). Those books were even advertised as the retcon to end all retcons. Then they changed their minds, at best damaging trust with their latest whim, at worst they lied to us and were guilty of false advertising. Is it not reasonable to expect to get what you were promised?
Trust takes awhile to rebuild, and keeping some of the worse retcons doesn’t fill me with confidence.
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MoP had a soft story?
Have you asked every single horde player that they felt that way? Have you done an unbiased randomly sampled survey that statistically matches the population data?
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May as well air out all the hot takes, letting the freak fly in this thread, probable hot take:
I couldn’t care any less about the retconning of Chronicle lore, because I think the retcons are fairly insignificant and not worth thinking much about beyond the one, singular important thing it did, which is to establish the six fundamental forces of the cosmos, and their war for control over the mortal realm and the entire multiverse. As long as that isn’t retconned, the “it’s only Titan perspective, lore is ruined!” stuff bounces off me like nothing.
Keep the retcons coming, it’s just refinement of the cosmology to flesh it out and make it work better. It’s better that the Shadowlands is the realm Death. It’s better that the Emerald Dream is a portion of the Lifelands. It’s better that leaders of Death were specified instead of being labelled “Undead” on the chart. Refinement.
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Calling bull.
There is no Hitler on the Alliance.
Arguably Jaina post-Cata pre-BfA tbh.
The Emerald Dream is treated by the newest ingame Lore Books as a Blueprint for all Realms and not part of the Realms of Life(which were referred to as the Gardens of Life in Maldraxxus).
In otherwords there is a Summer version of Ardenweald in the Emerald Dream…and an Autumn version in Thros the Blighted Lands…
Calia Menethil could easily be made a fantastic character.
Just have that porcelain face of hers crack, thus resembling the centerpiece of the Icon of Torment. Give her a big mace she thwacks people with but keep her powers Priestly.
Her carrying a big butt hammer would also mirror her brother but have her be the rightful queen.
Seriously just give her some personality, spookify the look a solid 30%, and the Forsaken can have a goth rule 63 Karl Franz.
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I am 100% here for goth queen Karl Franz.
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Give her a battle scar that looks like a crack in a porcelain mask, her brother’s OG hammer which I’m pretty sure is still missing but Forsakenify it, Priest armor that looks like a raven and darkhound instead of an eagle and lion.
Then all we need is a recolored plague bat to be her unique mount.
She’s still such a blank slate there’s zero reason we can’t make her a badass leader.
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That happened in Reign of Chaos though, not The Frozen Throne.
Chen Stormstout was a lore character though. He is even mentioned in Vanilla as you could find some of his old kegs in The Barrens and hand them into his apprentice. Only as horde though.
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Ah you see, the blank slate is her personality, because she is in fact a finger puppet for the Light. She will turn on you all at the direction of Yrel and set you all ablaze with holyfire with dead glassy eyes.
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Or we could have this but with alchemical weapons, necromancy, Forgotten Shadow light, skeletal horses and giant vampire bats.
“FOR LORDAERON, FOR THE FORSAKEN, FOR THE HORDE!”
Nope; doesn’t work because Calia is ‘light infused’ BS and an azz pulled character from nowhere really.
Forsaken were cool because they were creepy and kind of evil. They’ve been ruining that ever since end of WotLK and now its pretty much ruined beyond repair.
Even if they bring back Sylvanus the current blue eyed pussified version of her no longer has the edge factor to be a suitable Forsaken or Horde leader. It is literally impossible to create faction leader for the Forsaken better than Sylvanus before she was ruined in BFA just like Orcs/Horde as a whole are never going to have a leader better than Thrall. Their respective factions exist because of and are essentially defined by their protagonist characters.
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Complaining about hot-takes on a thread literally asking for hot-takes is like ordering a sandwich then complaining it has bread when it arrives.
Here’s another hot take from me; that “six fundamental cosmic forces vying for dominance” arc is either bad writing or poorly executed.
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