Unfortunately, they listened to Carebears and Moral policy enforcers, yeah. I also hate that, even tho i understand. 
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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. 
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.
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?
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…
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.
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…
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 ) 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!
That has nothing to do with creative writing which is what this thrread is about.
If all characters are carbon copies of each other, no matter if they’re all good or evil, then it’s becoming boring.
There has to be variety of personalities, motivations, priorities and such and keep the player engaged.
Especially in fantasy world, where it’s meant to be one massive sandbox where we’re supposed to experiment with various concepts.
A game called “Warcraft” should tackle all kind of ways to instigate all kinds of conflitcs.
Personally, I never had more fun when I played tabletop RPG and I played chaotic neutral character. Where I was allowed to act whatever I wanted. I could one day be generous, another day I would be total douche.
It was incredibly refreshing, and I miss that in WoW. Where you had truly distinct charactes, with great personalities, that are memorable.
And hard to make interesting story when you have writers that try to be as much safe and politically correct as possible. No wonder modern entertainment dies.
We can only hope that the story will become better with Danuser and Golden gone. The fact that he worked on the second half os SL and on DF says A LOT. Oh, and Metzen will also be back.
Well, yes. That’s why the question why it doesn’t do that right now was relevant to the topic, which led us to non-story explanations.
Danuser was story narration designer and seeing what he did with SL and how he stomped on years of WoW franchise with his fanfic concepts shown that he was not fit for the job.
I don’t know how much Golden had to say, she claims she only wrote dialogues for cinematics and some menial stuff, and ofc wrote books.
But at the same time she said how she was pushing Calia to be a thing, and how she favours the likes of Anduin, Baine and Jaina, becuase these are characters she is the most comfortable with.
I don’t know if she was the one who pushed it, but it’s clear and obvious that Blizzard has their pet characters who are constantly in spotlight, while others gather the dust and are irrelevant to the overarching plot.
I only came back to see what Darkspear Heritage questline will show, and I will not be there for TWW and who knows maybe next 2 expansions as well.
The Cosmic threats bore me to death. The marvel-like characters that act like superheroes annoy me as hell.
The little things that I care about- stories that expand on the world, on the cultures of playable races are mostly gone. It shouldn’t be that I have to wait 2 expansions to know what “my homies” are up to. It shouldn’t be that plenty of playable races are stuck in the limbo becuase the spotlight is on the likes of Alleria and Anduin goind on adventures.
I don’t even like them, nor I am interested in these stories. These are their personal journeys and I have no dog in this fight.
Especially when Anduin’s plot is balant copy of SL one.
He gets captured → The evil entity wants him for his grand plan → The evil entity tries to convert Anduin (this time to void), edgy elf female is involved.
You can’t make this up.
And in all this I shouldn’t feel like I am completely out of place among these Alliance characters. I’d like for Horde to have their own story and motivation to go on this campaign.
That’s a fair point. Whenever things went away from the faction conflict, the Horde was usually not more than a support cast, and 11.0 doesn’t seem to be an exeption in that. Maybe they’ll do something with Thrall, but that’s not exactly drawing Horde cheers as it used to, with good enough reason.
Taking Alliance into account this one seems kinda out of place, though. We’re getting huge chunks of dwarven, human and high elven lore here, in a way that could actually be a cool addition to the world, instead of undermining it. I get that these are the wrong races for you, but for me it doesn’t really sound like they are doing the wrong thing here.
And since you’re taking about the whole of the World Soul Saga, I’d say it might become less one-sidedly Alliance focussed over time. Those quilled half-troll things might well get more Horde involvement than dwarves and the holy “human” empire from the other side of Azeroth, and we already now that Midnight will prominently feature a re-done Quel’thalas, which should include troll stuff as well as Belves. A Northend that’s not all about Arthas also has potential for Troll and Tauren stuff. And then there is all the stuff we don’t know about that will come through the patches and their zones…
I mean, I get cynicism and pessimism on the story, but I’m not quite sure what you’re asking for here. I’m saying that even though I fully agree with you on this one:
What these idiots do is quite irrelevant to me. And it wouldn’t be more relevant if they were gnomes instead of humans and elves. Which is why I’m not really judging the suitability of the addon by that. The “main plot” is far, far less relevant to me than what they are actually permanently adding to the lore here, and how they are linking it to the stuff we had before. And on that front I’m not exactly hyped yet, either, but I do some moves in directions that could be interesting.
I’m not saying to remove it. Alliance can have it, and they can explore it to their heart’s desire. What I’m saying is that there should be a separate stuff for Horde.
Let’s have a Tauren lead the initiative on behalf of Earth mother, let’s have goblins there to assit them with digging technology, let’s have Trolls trying to find Dark trolls. Let’s have Shadowmoon clan trying to find a way to combat the void.
These aren’t trolls. These are furry nelves Wimbert.
So strange retcon, on the way…
Ugh… I sense another Amani villainbat incoming.
This is why I am not a fan of character driven stories. The plot should be more about stablishing a threat, or initiative, and selecting a team/group/ you name it to lead the campaign. To establish how our factions are dealing with incoming problems, what they want to gain there, what stake is there, and why they should be there to begin with.
I shouldn’t be there and be like “Sooo… you actually don’t need me here, I can go back home now?”
Istill remember vividly Jade forest and Vash’ir becuase of how we were introduced to this zone and how we progressed through it.
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Sounds nice. I don’t disagree. Did we ever really do it like that in Warcraft, though? I’m totally down on Horde and Alliance as non-antagonistic different perspectives on the same plot, but I really can’t remember an example of that happeing in WoW since… maybe parts of Wrath, I guess. And that was a looong time before Shadowlands.
I’m not saying that they should’t do it, I’m just saying that it’s a strange expectation to bring to this game at this point.
Well, both, that’s the point of the half-thing.
I’d say I don’t know why it had to be elves/humans again, but looking at player numbers… I guess there is a reason…
Agreed. But to be honest, at this point I have no idea how much that applies to WW. We’re mostly looking at the datamining concering the main plot for now so… I’m not surprised that what we see is focussed on the named characters that are on the same “save the world”-mission as we are. I get that there isn’t a focus on the factions here, but neither was there one in Vash’ir, which you highlighted as a positive example.
Indeed, surviving the sunken ship, gaining a foothold, finding out about the local siutation and how it connects to the bigger threat that bought us there and stabilizing it, before we get closer to the main threat seems to be pretty much what we are doing here as well. Sure, there’ll be some character drama that I’d prefer not to have with the characters that were already tainted with poopy plots that came before, but I didn’t sound that character-driven, yet. Stuff is happening around us, and we don’t really have much choice in how we react. Anduin is going through his crissis, while the plot is happening, the plot isn’t happening, because Anduin has his crisis.
I’d prefer a clearer role for the player character in general, but once again, that’s an old problem for WoW…