Blizzard too scared to be innovative towards lore

Lore Story
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Let us take Draenei for example.
In TBC they retconned this entire race to give the Alliance a “monster-like” race that was still pretty or beautiful.

Did it cater towards people invested into the storyline? No.
Did it appease to people interested in the storyline? No.

It retconned a proportion of the existing lore all to appease people for the “looks” the race has.

Sure it worked short term, but long term, when you change existing lore for an easy satisfaction, it corrupts the foundation it was set upon. Because people will no longer get as invested if writers can just change stuff towards their liking on a whim, even worse if they do this for marketing purposes.

Take Blood Elves. Why would they ally themselves with the Horde? Because “it needed a pretty race”.
Kinda ironic that the Horde is now more popular than Alliance in Classic.

As with Vulpera. An Orc who encountered a Vulpera back in 2006 would literally try to eat it. I’ll leave it towards your own assumption on why they added this atrocity of a race with little to no background present in the Warcraft universe, despite them being made playable over races that are already well established into the storyline. (Ogres, Naga, Ethereals, Broken Draenei, Murlocs, Furbolgs)

I do think that the Warcraft universe has been taking massive hits because Blizzard does not care about being consistent anymore. They care about profit. They just create things inside the story that would be “easy to market”.

Imagine if Chris Metzen just wrote off the Orcs as evil. Because market wise, Orcs were an evil, savage, brutal trope in fantasy.

Blizzard is just too scared to be innovative on their story and lore, and are too scared to go outside their think box when it comes towards marketing.

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You act like innovation and trope subversion is something people crave and Blizzard is just “scared” to do any of it, but then you go to Reddit and witness how people absolutely recoil at any ounce of nuance in the story and instead prefer to place entire factions into neat “good” and “evil” categories because anything beyond that is too hard to understand.

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I agree with most of the post, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the title. Yes, Blizzard puts too low of a priority on lore, leading to retcons, plot holes and a real lack of immersion into the world.

But lack of innovation really isn’t the problem here. They have plenty of bad ideas that they throw into the pot of WoW. They were willing to change the genre multiple times. They were willing to switch out most of the characters people cared about before. They were willing to move away from the Azeroth people cared about. They were stupidly brace in their innovations. What they lack is respect for what they had before their newest great innovation.

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See there’s the issue. You go to Reddit and take them serious.

That’s also a thing. I agree.

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I feel like Reddit represents a more accurate sample of your average player that the story forums. Wow fans are hella basic. Otherwise elves wouldn’t be the most popular race.

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Reddit is a contained echochamber where people can ostracise other people they do not agree with or rile eachother up.
Seriously stop referencing that site. It’s not a “representation about the average player”. It’s just fools wanting to complain about things for fake virtual social points.

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Okay, then what is?

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Actual players playing the game.

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That’s not because they revolt against nuance. Those are the voices of pure and basic tribalism.

People revolt against being absolutely good/bad, because they are often prone to compare with the other side and try to claim a better high ground.

OT: Blizzard has tried to mix meta with ingame reasonings in order to explain new lore developments. They throw in sudden twists for shock value, but then try to create a short term explanation for it.
I’m largely with Wimbert on this one. The issue is the fact that they largely discard the developments that preceded such twists.

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I’ve seen people on these forums, supposed “lore nerds”, get unreasonably upset at the suggestions that certain “good characters” should be made objectively bad, should be made to make costly mistakes, should be made to act on wrong impulses, etc.

Idk about you, but to me it seems that a whole lot of people are very much comfortable with good characters being good and bad characters being bad.

I mean, I’d want Blizzard to subvert tropes and innovate, but I can totally see why they don’t.

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I really wish that we got rid of the heart system on WoW aswell.
All it does is encourage cliques and echochambers.

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And the color of your pfp. My god, if I had a penny every time someone dismissed my opinion because of my red background, I’d have about… 5 bucks.

That being said, I do want to know if a person mains a night elf so I can read their posts with all the necessary prejudice :sunglasses:

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Well kind of only. They still had to change the Draenei heavily if you take a look at the WC 3 Dreanei and the Broken. The Draenei are a pretty version of their old / original selves.

I agree the story has it problems.
Especially how homogeneous everything became. It’s especially bad in the Alliance since the Highking became a thing (but not only for them).

This.

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Wimbert puts it correctly. It’s not that Blizzard is not innovative, or uncreative, or whatever thing we can freely sling at their faces. It is the general lack of respect and also the following of trends. It leads to characters becoming oddly same-y for the sake of trying to send off a rather poorly communicated message for shock value.

Taking into consideration, I can see why they wouldn’t like to incorporate darker elements to an audience such as WoW’s. I could freely say with the opinion - and also evidence from this forum - that its audiences have become more highly sensitive and squemish, which thus reflects quite strongly in what content WoW tries to bring. For recent examples, take a look at the controversies and backlash that occured during that shudder Teldrassil and Kul Tiras invasion content when they were released for the public to view and critique.

Sure, I would like it for WoW to be more braver with their content if they wanted even more highly mature and controversial content, but I can see Blizzard having to weigh the controversies and backlash that might come out of them.

It might have been okay in the past, but nowadays, there is more things for content research than just slapping down a bloodthirsty Orc that has a ravenous taste for particular small bipedal vulpines for food.

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Because the “critique” they got didn’t matter. The only critique this caused was on Reddit and Twitter and Blizzard somehow thinks those sites represent a bastion of high morals or “well criticism”.

Like as example, take the Garrosh line. Based upon the same principles.
I think Blizzard is letting Twitter and Reddit judge and steer the direction of the game too much, and are desperately trying to appease to this audience while older fans get left in the dirt.

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In these days, it is not just Reddit and Twitter however. And it is not just in WoW that these controversies happen. Sensitivity has become an all-round hot topic that anyone can feel sensitive about an issue and thus feel have a right to let it known in the loudest voice they can.

It’s a rather poor market model to rely only on Twitter and Reddit as the basis of one’s entire concept plan. If it really was just them, then muting or simply ignoring them would have been far arguably easier than contending with their wants and wishes alone.

I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but responding to current trends in a way that directly affects their storylines is how they have decided to do it. They’re not ENTIRELY wrong in doing so, because a market or industry that does not at least take a look at the trends of today is more liable to collapse, or worse, insult quite a lot of people in one fell swoop.

After their debacle with the same topic examples, I certainly wouldn’t want to if I wanted to bring an audience to play something I made.

To put it into a more direct vision:

Yes, they could easily do a remake of the Dark Monstrous Horde that a majority seems to want. But is it because people just want it for the story, and to hell with the consequences that come with it?

Because I tell you, Age of Reckoning tried and it didn’t go well. The excitement of playing something dark and evil turned out to be short-term, whereas long-term there were far more interests in playing the other side.

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If you analyse said impulses, you’ll note that they most of the time come as a defence mechanism to either shelter their favoured ones, or tarnish further the ones they dislike.

As I said, this is all but tribalism.
“My stuff if better than your stuff and should be kept that way”.

It’s not against nuance itself.

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WoW is plenty dark, though, especially the main plot. Just maybe not the right kind of dark. The story has never before been so insistent on looking at personal tragedy, the horror of war, and what it does to the people who fight it. That is clearly not a light tone. Dark thongs happen all the time, and they are taken very seriously (as long as they happen to peoples players are supposed to care for).

I think the problem isn’t the darkness or the lack of it… it is the kind of darkness we are getting.
Back in the day the world was brutal and angry. Everyone was out to kill everone else. Violence was the normal response to almost anything. A destroyed city and a murdered populace was a reason for celebration on one side, and retaliation on the other. Death was a part of Warcraft life, and the discussion wasn’t about how to make it stop, but which violence is justified and which isn’t.
Today everything is tragic. The same things that always happened in Warcraft are still happening. Wanton slaughter, destroyed cities, industrial torture… I’d say in many aspects it has gotten worse. But the story doesn’t sell it as normal anymore. They do everything they possibly can to make it seem as if violence should never ever happen, and that even the best of motives can only be tainted by war. The characters involved are either broken and evil, or they whine about what they are forced to do by the evil forces. No one believes in the “just war” or the “warrior’s life” anymore, indeed, these conceps are deliberately deconstructed and shown as empty, like in Saurfang’s BfA arc.

Back then war was a thing that happens, moral judgement was mostly left to the consumer. Today, war is a bad thing that happens, and it’s made as hard as possible to ever think otherwise.

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And I can’t help it but blame social media like Reddit and Twitter enforcing this idea onto Blizzard.
It’s like people are getting preached and that there’s an audience that latches onto the writers and LOVES that idea to berate other people here on the forums about it aswell.

I absolutely agree with your post, but we have to wonder what is driving Blizzard towards this way of storytelling, and why.

Well isn’t the vast bastion of those examples Reddit and Twitter? Like the culture set on these social media sites perfectly describe what you’re describing here.

If I give myself as an example where I had a great interest towards all the races present in Warcraft, good or bad, because of the interesting stories they brought, but nowadays the writers moved past that to sell the idea of what Wimbert said.

Most of the races have been watered down to where a leader is the entire representirety of a race.
There are no internal affairs inside the factions. Even with BfA, even in the Horde, the only internal affaire was “Sylvanas bad” to the point where every leader came together and just nodded along Baine. Even Lor’Themar who almost left the Horde in MoP but thankfuly to Jaina made sure to change his mind to that.

That Lor’Themar knew the Blood Elves, the Sunreavers were to a part to blame towards the conflict that escalated in Dalaran, and his reaction towards that was to immediatly kick and end any talk of joining with the Alliance. Because no matter what, good or bad, his people came first place.

That same Lor’Themar in BfA was okay with murdering Blood Elven sunreavers who wanted revenge against Jaina. The very reason why he quit negotiating with the Alliance.

All Blizzard has to say “well Lor’Themar evolved and grew and he realised that killing his own people is for the greater good” because Reddit and Twitter find those stories incredible for some reason.

Because like Wimbert said, they’re selling an idea that war is bad, everyone has to get along, etcetera.

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A vast example, yes, but not the only platform.

Like I said, if it was only Twitter and Reddit, they could just easily mute it and focus on other audiences. But even if they did, they’ll probably get the same message elsewhere.

I’m not saying their business model is right or wrong, but if you ponder why they are writing it like this and look more externally beyond pointing fingers, you can see why.