I am in a similar situation of others above - I believe Chieun nailed it the most.
I’ve had friends quitting because ‘WoW does not feel the same without a faction war’, ‘endless pointless grinding’, ‘glorified single player game’, and many other reasons.
The narrative is not compelling, and WoW nowadays has just the same label / name of the WoW that once was years ago. At least that is a diffused perception among the ones I speak with on a regular basis.
The solutions I witness around is more and more bubble-roleplay. People alt a huge amount and log where something of their interest goes on or where their best pal is; or lurk on a roof and prod in whisper their best friend once they see them logging if they want to roleplay.
I have been extremely demotivated lately to rp, let alone boot the game up and I used to love it and loved getting creative with new character concepts and new bits of lore to explore, especially given the addition of allied races in BFA.
The current lore while perhaps interesting in the grand sheme of things, does unfortunately do nothing for average joe, the baker in stormwind, or the vast majority of characters we rp as.
You wouldn’t simply venture into the realm of death on a whim, nor would you be drafted into or effected by a war that takes place on an entirely different plane of existance.
I’d like to put this as:
We’re playing warhammer fantasy tabletop, but currently everyone is working on age of sigmar instead… and it’s just not the same.
(If you get the reference)
What would improve things greatly is if roleplay was being looked at properly, and that it would receive quality of life changes and little bits of content or tools that players could then adapt to make more interesting and diverse rp content themselves.
A wonderful example of that is something like Epsilon WoW, a rp centric fan project in which they allowed people to use private phasing and spawning, resizing etc of props and npcs to create their own fictional recreations of the world.
And after having experienced the pure joy and passion that went into this I am mindblown.
There is a whole phase dedicated to what vol’dun would look like now that the faithless are defeated and the war has stopped, with the port now seeing trade, the terrace having become a small metropolis, small areas slowly growing some crops etc…
I’d love to show it but alas trust level forbids me to post images so you’ll have to take my word for it.
If we want things to get better and improve and especially attract people to give roleplay a try to begin with, let’s make some noise and support threads and initiatives that do promote rp some more so they get seen and share them with likeminded people.
And if you got ideas or suggestions feel free to join the discussion in the general section as well: Roleplay Initiative - Suggestion Index and Wishlist
I wish the current story was something like Age of Sigmar, where the story is still in touch with the day-to-day events of the common folk, as large and fantastical as the setting is.
Instead the story is like it’s trying to be a TV show.
It is? Most of what I’ve heard was just that some people felt alienated since for a good while games workshop was only doing AoS models and abandoned fantasy, hence I made the comparison to wow.
Will have to look into it, sorry if my analogy might be a little wrong there. ^^
Thankfully I can say I am not de-motivated to rp myself, something I manage through just not caring too much about the Shadowlands plot and just dealing with other problems, and content wise I thankfully have a fun raidgroup to atleast get curve with.
But… it is disheartening to see this game drive so many of my friends away due to the state it is in, both game-and storywise. And it is sad. I am reminded of that video on youtube where the guy goes to play classic, meets friends, has fun, but then they all dissappear one by one until he’s alone again. Can’t say I can blame my friends for not wanting to spend their time and money on this anymore though.
Fantasy wasn’t selling. They were selling more ‘Space Marine Tactical Squads’, more glue, than they did WHFB kits. It was totally unsustainable and instead of ditching fantasy entirely they did an end times plot and moved the story forward a whole age. It worked out, despite a rough start, and AoS is now vastly more popular than old Fantasy ever was.
Yep, genuinely.
I started my interest in warhammer with fantasy, from the Total War games. So I was initially very skeptical about AoS but once I actually began to open myself up to it a bit… it’s genuinely an amazing game. And while there are still some fantasy players who absolutely refuse to ever touch AoS, most have accepted that it’s actually pretty good and moved on, especially with how many old fantasy models are able to be used in Age of Sigmar armies nowadays.
So a comparison to Age of Sigmar implies that Shadowlands will eventually grow on people and become generally more sucessful than anything before it.
Exactly, AoS as it stands is imo Warhammer’s best game, I prefer it leaps and bounds to 40K and even Fantasy at this point, as much as I do like it.
With that said though, hopefully things improve eventually and word reaches some people who can put in a good word for us.
There are a ton of small things which would take very minimal effort to implement that could get the creative juices flowing again and would improve the overall willingness of people to keep on rping I reckon.
Till then, the only thing we can really do is reach out with an open hand and try to be welcoming and good to each other as we can because its not the big rp plots that get me invested, its the company of some genuinely great people to be around.
