Are all characters Lawful Good in WoW?

Lore Story
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So I’ve been questing through a lot of Dragonflight now to catch up on the story. I’m one of those weirdos that most often read the quest text and try to get the context of the gameplay ( I really need to know why I need to kill those 10 wolves).

As I’ve progressed through the story I’ve noticed some things.

  • There’s way more animated scenes than back in the day :+1:
  • A lot of really good voice acting :+1:
  • There are pretty clear narratives to each zone that tie together with side-quests :+1:

But I’ve become increasingly bored by the NPC characters in the game, because they are all the same Lawful Good character. Or most of them. They are empathetic, understanding, pacifist (ironically in world of WARCRAFT), reconciling and/or reconcilable, humanist and generally just a nice bunch of, dare I say it, Care Bears :purple_heart:.

This soup of characters needs some salt, some friction, some jerks sprinkled on the top. Toss in a menacing side-character or two, or just a stranger that doesn’t care about you. Give me a gang of chaotically evil ogres that just wont stop.

Anyway you get what I’m saying. I want more characters with character.
:v: peace and love :v:

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They have to because we are all heroes saving the day from evil all the time.

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I wouldn’t call them all “lawful”,since they don’t really seem to stand on any principles of justice, just a lot of “good will” and “mercy”, but I generally agree. Back in the day, pretty much every faction and subfaction was full of bad guys and morally dubious actions. Including the player hero, who might be asked to perform political assassinations or do whole quest chains just to realize he was setting some ancient evil free in his greed for loot.

Now everyone is enlightened and wants the same thing, and if we need some evil to fight, the devs just give us some abstract cosmic evil, or some cartoonish unexplored evil. And it has to be clear evil, because how else would good guys feel good about fighting it? Conflict doesn’t happen anymore because people have different wants and needs and stand in each others’ way, it happens because people want to destroy the universe and bigots aare bigots, or something…

Well, DF was the worst offender in that regard, and maybe they’ll take a different rout in the Worldsoul saga… I just wouldn’t bet on it.

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This in isolation, while talking about the players of this game is also one of the problems. In wow we have:

  • People who are super invested in the story
  • People who just care about the general vibe
  • People that can conceive an evil act can done from a good motivation
  • People unable to conceive any evil act being done, no matter the reason
  • Carebears
  • Trolls
  • Edgy Edgelords

And in a way, the only way to rally all those players against a baddy is to have it’s motivation to be crystalline clear and obviously evil (and wrong), else any gray motivated character is at risk to alienate one of those category. In a way, i understand Blizz to go on that path, even tho i prefer more nuances in a story.

I hope they’ll stick with the ambiguous and manipulative nature Xal’athat had in Legion and BFA, but i have doubt they’ll try to set her as gray as i hope they do. She’ll probably have a very obvious evil plan to bring the void to Azeroth for a very evil and wrong reason.

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Oh, I get the problem, I just don’t see why one would think that this would be a way to unite the groups you listed. Story people are most heavily invested in consistency, so if the world was more brutal and selfish before, they’re not happy with everone being fine with each other suddenly. Just as the vibe-people, that I probably belong to, won’t be happy if the vibe changes as much as it did. And I really don’t see edgelords and trolls enjoying it, either.

Seems more like a decision in favour of some players against the preferences of others to me. If they wanted to please everone I’d expect more of a scattershot approach, where different sections of the game have very different kinds of stories (like Horde and Alliance once did, for example…), just like they seperate gameplay activities according tom preferences. But that’d be more of an investment, and one that goes against their “gameplay first” principles.

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See it in another way. if i’m making you do an horrible quest full of immoral murders and acts, would you leave the game? Probably not, me neither. But i know people that would be very upset of being asked to perpetuate obviously horrible act (even tho they murder tons of mobs everyday, ahem). Remember the burning of Teldrassil with Horde players being really upset of being framed as the evil guys?

To avoid that, the best way is to make sure everyone feel like they’re the good guys and the enemy is the bad guy. And unfortunately, since some part of the community is so narrow on their view of what is good/evil devs have next to no room to play with gray area without hurting feelings.

10.1.5 introduced some quest that were considered ‘‘problematic’’, altho they were telling about part of the story of dragons we all know exist. But since it was ‘‘immoral’’ to capture Alexstrasza to chain her back i her prison, cause it made the player responsible of the consequences of this imprisonment, this quest has been removed after parts of the community angered about it. Others’s been changed so it felt less likely the player is responsible for horrible acts.

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Sure, but I know quite a few people who did quit the game and who referenced the change in tone as one of the main reasons. I am not arguing that there aren’t different groups of people. I am just saying that they chose whom to please and who to push away. Maybe there never was an option to please everyone.

But being harsh and brutal was kinda a standard feature of a game that called itself WARCRAFT. So don’t be surprised if people who liked it as it was are quite unhappy with the game throwing them away to chase some new audience. They are choosing whose criticism to listen to, and whose to ignore.

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Unfortunately, they listened to Carebears and Moral policy enforcers, yeah. I also hate that, even tho i understand. :woman_shrugging:

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Sure, I can understand it as well, though time will tell if their calculations will play out like they want them to or prove false. If they even are calculations - I mean, the team has change a looot, and new devs just bringing their carebear attitude in a game not made for it seems equally plausible to me.

It just doesn’t make any difference, does it? I don’t really care if I’m the loser in some corporate tradeoff, or if the people making the game don’t really want me there, I just care about the product they deliver. And the only thing I can do to influence the product is to explain my preferences where they might perhaps someday, probably through divine intervention, be part of what motivates some manager to make the devs include something into the game that throws me a bone. :wink:

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At least this is voiced by content creators, including some that are seemingly approuved by Blizzard. Maybe with a little bit of copium, we can hope for the story to take a little darker turn. Hey, at least if we can achieve to have a cast of allied character ranging from Chaotic good to Lawful good instead of Lawful good to neutral good, and baddies that shades in the neutral more than evil, it could makes for more interesting stories.

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Yes that’s right, I should have said I was using that term pretty loosely, I mean they seem to have the same moral compass as a lawful good character.

Yes as far as I remember the previous expansions have had more nuance and diversity in characters, or in their motives at least.

I mean we have the different dragonflights, they had an opportunity to make them vary a lot in character and motivations. But they don’t. They all feel the same but with a different paintjob. And we’re all sitting there singing kumbaya at the end of every quest.

I feel like all writers on Warcraft (game and books) needs to play through Warcraft 1-3, just to get a feeling from where the game comes.

But then again it might be the case that they don’t really care about making the story interesting. Most players don’t care, why put in any effort or take any risks?

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A friend to all is a friend to None .
So Yea I agree with Wimbert . They simply chose who to target .

If I have to be frank , they probably did not even chose , as there seems to be a political lobby for making the “proper choice”.
If you are a big enough company with visibility , you either “Comply” or get “Rained in” . The net result is Dragonflight .

Also It seems that back in vanilla and TBC , they were better at pleasing all ( or at the very least many) , than they they are right now , because the game was more popular back then .

The way they did it back then , was with class flavor and side quests .
The main story always was , beat the big villain … But … different classes had different motivation for doing so .
A paladin would beat the big bad , to be righteous AND save the world .
A warlock would beat the big bad to get more power . That the world got saved in the process was just a coincidence .

If you think about it , legion was also very popular and perhaps that was exactly due to the fact that classes had the most identity since vanilla in that expansion .
BFA on the other side , was practically the same as Legion , but instead of identity , you got shoved into the same mold as everyone else . Consequently the game was poorly received .

In the class centric expansions , if you wanted to play a certain trope , you chose a class that fits it . Now the choice is already made and we are all righteous heroes , helping others make the “right choice” . And as the OP correctly pointed out , this is completely warped , as the hero is pretending to be the good guy , while slaughtering countless others , who have a different mindset .

Which loops back nicely to the political agenda point above . A game is made to represent an idea and teach people something , while keeping it “fun and engaging” . Makes you wander , what exactly they want to teach with this one .

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I agree that the class focus added much, but I kinda understood, why it didn’t persist after the addon (though the way they did not deal with the class order situation was a biiig lore crime…). 12+ different campaigns led to some very mixed results, and not really that much content for anyone, even though the devs seemes to be going into overdrive.

I actually was kinda optimistic about the idea of player-chosen covenants with different ideologies going forward. 12+ campaigns might have been a bit much, but you didn’t really need that many to fit the calass character, did you? A warlock and a rogue or a DH and a DK could share a looot of content without ever feeling out of place. And well, there is a reason why the priest campaign was basically a small sidequest of the paladin campaign. My basic idea was to make the player choose between a few teams according to his preferences, no player power involved, and thus get a different campaign and probably some cosmetics, and I’m still kida partial to that concept… My suggestion was a people protector-focussed group, a uber-rationalistic science-focussed group, an ends before means style monster killer group and a eco-terrorist type planet protector group, and I still think that would cover enough ground to have something for basically every player…

But well, that didn’t happen, and the covenenat idea flopped too hard anyways, I guess. But yeah, if classes are the choice, the game certainly was more ideologically diverse when it focussed on classes, agreed.

Edit:
Ah, Covenants of Azeroth that was the thread…

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Yea , something like that could be fun .
The idea is similar to Mass effect and Dragon Age and other more recent RPGs focusing on player choice .
At the end of the game you always end up fighting the big bad , but the road you took is different .
It would also compel people to explore the story from an alt perspective and replay it , because it is different .
One person is looking to save the wee little dragons .
The other is looking to make a nice piece of dragon themed armor from any dragon that moves .

There is no reason why we should all side with Valdraken accord , if at the end of the day , we all end up killing Fyrak , because of our own reasons .
Maybe someone just wants to exterminate all dragons , which Fyrak ends up being a part of also .
The world ends up being saved non the less .

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Man this forum is dead. Before BFA happened there used to be much more users around.

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If the story telling is dead , why would you expect the story forum to be alive .
It’s like expecting people to talk about horse races , when post people have not even seen a horse IRL .
IF The War Within , does not change this , frankly it is the end of WoW s an RPG for me . It will just turn into some grindy mobile game .

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I remember Araphant and that Kul Tiran guy still. Sad times.

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Dragonflight was the Disney expansion where the story was created by corporate people with no emotional maturity or storytelling skills. That’s why.

Hopefully, the War Within will get things back on track.

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In this context…

Can you speak at all about the intentions behind narrative design for this expansion? In Dragonflight it felt like the story largely took a backseat or was hidden in lots of side quests.

Sean McCann:
I think now that we have this trilogy that we’re planning, we have a lot of things that we know we want to hit. We had that for Dragonflight, but Dragonflight also was us saying, hey, we went to the afterlife, we had a lot of big things, we need a moment to chill out a bit. Not everything needs to be, we need to save the world. We can just help a Tuskar kid. I think we had a little bit of a theme of Kalecgos and family. I don’t remember, that was kind of a light thing we did… I’m just joking. I helped with Kalecgos, so I know all about that. So that’s why we saw that Dragonflight was a little more chilled out and why we see now we’re going to gear up again with War Within. We had a pause, now let’s keep going. That’s at least a little bit of the insight I can give into that stuff.
https://www.wowhead.com/news/the-war-within-creator-summit-group-interview-michael-bybee-and-sean-mccann-338883#story

Seems like the devs - or at least some of them - actually treated DF as a pause to reorient themselves. I’m willing to take them at their word on this, and to try not prejudging WW and the Worldoul Saga on that basis. But it better be good…

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Hmm ok. I could understand that, and I would be fine with however they want to pace the narrative. I’m mostly annoyed with how many characters feel the same, in terms of their personality (or lack thereof :wink: ) I mean the artists are great at designing and painting the characters, I wish the writers were as good at making them dance.

But yeah I’m gonna try and be hopeful about War Within!