I’m tired, this lore is garbage. The lore has been slowly going down a hill but the last expansion and this one its like they just dive straight off a cliff.
Can we please get some new writers here? Probably ones that are not active on Twitter?
If you disagree, voice it out, but I’m god damn tired seeing a franchise I once held dear to my heart get retconned, changed, sucked out of their thumb because they thought it was cool.
Any writer would have problems trying to make the garbage we have presentable. But ones that stop making it worse would be nice. Preferably by not continuing the plot.
Yes, and they should also get a new game director since they think this is good enough to go into the game. Though it seems that Ian is getting softly sidelined with the addition on an assistant game director.
This is a clear sign they no longer believe in his ability to solely steer the direction of the game because do you honestly believe that Kotick and Activision would give a single solitary f*** about Ian’s mental health if he was just stressed?
i think we should get everyone new!!!
very based
I think what they really struggle with is pacing. I genuinely think Shadowlands might have gone down a lot better if the story wasn’t fed to us in breadcrumbs and repeated cliff-hanger tropes.
N’zoth was too fast. He had a long build-up and ended with all the excitement of a wet fart. Shadowlands was utterly out of the blue without enough foreshadowing and is now dragging on for an eternity. Complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
They really ought to look back at Legion when the pacing and story beats were at their best, at least in my opinion.
No, I do not. I think lore is great. I really like Shadowlands and how events from past expansions are touched as well and some even wrapped up.
Making an afterlife expansion seems weird to me its so ‘‘outside the box’’
Of course yes. But I’m not convinced this would solve the story problems the game has right now. It’s a deep reaching problem within the company itself.
The writers have to spin lore often around raids and other pve mechanics too, which seems to be a problem.
I can’t believe anyone likes SL or thinks it’s only about pacing. It’s so much worse than that.
Blizzard needs to do like FF14 and make consistent story that spans throughout expansions, and write ahead. Not just retcon the living life out of everything to fit the next “cool”. This is why WoW is utter garbage in lore now. They retcon, and the retcon isn’t done properly either, it’s just underlining what is currently needed for the next expansion.
Take both Sylvanas and Tyrande, both character arcs that have been since way before SL, dating back to WC 3. Both “of their people” and very much a leader, by caring about their people and doing what is necessary for their needs. Reduced to egocentric vengeful beeps that destroy every inch of story arc that has ever been about them.
They’ve pretty much destroyed Warcraft lore now, it’s no use to get invested in it. I’ve been a warcraft lore fan since Metzen started writing it. It has been the hallmark of well made story in games. However now, it’s not even a shadow of its former self.
Simply getting new writers wont help. Quiet the opposite - characters would end up with another personality shift due to different people pushing them into different directions.
I remember how people on forum were fed up with R. Knaak writing and his characters. How they couldnt wait for Golden to take over because how good her Arthas book was. Now everyone blames her and other writers.
It almost seems like Bible allegory - with writers as Jesus and player base as people of Jerusalem.
On more serious note, current state of story is resault of multiple factors:
There are gameplay constraints (bad guys got to end up as raid bosses).
There are marketing strategies - who’s going to sell new expansion best?
There is PR aspect - story has to have a message that will resonate good in media.
There is continuity, it’s helpful when there is solid base for story but can be a hindrance if it’s a tangled mess of plot holes and retconns to begin with.
There is “story legacy” where you have to becareful to not offend conservative long time fans with your new ideas.
And perhaps worst of all, there is fan-service. Which ever since fans can blackmail companies with mass dislikes in social media and various other platforms, must be taken into account.
So getting new writers wont be that much of an impact as people imagine.
This implies the current staff are actually writers, and not drunk idiots with crayons scrawling the “story” across the walls rather than the lined paper on their desks. At this point, the only way to fix this narrative car crash is probably to retcon everything with a Infinite Expansion. Back to at least the end of Legion, if not the end of MoP, then go in another direction with actual, competent writers.
This is the main problem - not a mere spin-off or regular expanded-universe poop that could be easily discarded, but the core Retail story itself in its very canon, is screwed now.
We can not un-do this.
Even if the most compelling expac is released for 10.0 I’ll still have the bad aftertaste of the already-written lore. And I don’t know if I’d be able to enjoy immersion again.
The most promising way would have been Classic Plus - back to classic fantasy genre of vanilla wow and draw a brand new Warcraft universe and lore from it. And this would require a radically different way of writing and handling their world. So yeah…
I’ve said it several times and I know I’m not the only one: The only way to even get an approximation to a fixed setting would be to have a complete new game starting fresh.
Story wise, bump the story a few hundred years into the future and put a few cataclysms in between.
Only both things combined, can give us what could be passed as a fresh start.
They’ve screwed WoW. Well, get new writers, and put them in charge of WoW 2.0.
New settings, new characters, zero story baggage from previous plots.
Maybe that way we can start anew and judge the story on its own merits. Worst case scenario it sucks out of it own volition but at least isn’t constantly tainting the arch’s we had in WoW 1.0.
Doing it right with a full reset will actually work. If anything, all that needs to be done correctly is making the ‘reset’ sensible. Method used as old as time to approach something already existing in a different direction.
Sunk cost and 16 years of accumulated stuff is most of what WoW has still going for it right now. Any reset that takes away any existing content, or anything players worked for, is a gamble that is likely to backfire.
And I actually doubt that a real reset would be needed to satisfy WoW players. Ignoring what came before has worked for them often enough, if the new thing they deliver is fun enough. I mean, sure, the story forum would still mope about, if they did an addon that did everything right in terms of theme, tone and gameplay, but retconned some story stuff, ignored other story stuff and just did whatever they felt like with the story. But everyone else really doesn’t care. And the people who still stick around in this forum are mostly here because they like complaining about the story, so who cares to cater to us? I know I wouldn’t.
They don’t need a good story. Else they would have failed a looooong time ago. They don’t even need a coherent world. They just have to stop connecting everything in one grand story and rubbing their dirty inconsitencies in our faces.
They can’t make a bad story into a good one. Not even with a reset. But they can just make us forget that the story was bad, while we are having fun with new stuff. They can use a time jump, or some resetting event for that, but they really don’t need to.
No, while I think the current writing staff are making a poor job of the story-telling I think there needs to be a fundamental shift with the way Blizzard works. Let the writers, write and hire a decent content editor. Preferably someone from outside who will read through and pick out the inconsistencies/errors and where they are not making themselves understood. Unfortunately the current crop are so invested in what they are doing, they seem unable to follow the story from the player perspective.
I have to disagree: the poor writing of the current lore would still be part of this “future” lore, written in stone as the cosmology and all.
Instead, Classic+ could easily go back to the sound milestone of Classic Lore and rewrite over.
That is true also. I guess there would be an inevitable split, between the Classic playerbase who would happily welcom a new branch of the game with a rewritten universe, and the players who stick to Retail and would feel betrayed…
I empathize with you. I would much rather have seen them continue World of Warcraft based on classic. But I don’t think they want to do a classic+ as it is more effort than simply cashing in on nostalgia. It’s also questionable whether they could pull off a classic+ – it seems like the modern developers don’t really understand the magic that made the “old WoW” work. So it’s safer for them to simply retrace the old steps with as few changes as possible.
And as you and Wimbert have already said, they can’t undo the story as there are people out there who are invested in it, and these people would feel betrayed. I also think that the vast majority of players simply don’t care about the narrative. They play for the gameplay, and the narrative is nothing more but a colourful backdrop to give context to things. They don’t necessarily play the game for immersion.
So I think Wimbert may have a point when he says that the best thing they can do is to distance themselves from the current garbage pile they’ve got. But for someone like me I’m not sure if it would be enough. I don’t know if I can muster the suspension of disbelief required to block out the existence of Shadowlands and the ramifications it has had on the world building. Shadowlands may very well have been the final nail in the coffin for me. But I’ve migrated over to classic, and I suspect I will enjoy classic until the final patch of the Wrath of the Lich King, which I think is very likely to come. But beyond that the future of WoW looks very bleak for me, personally.
Yes nothing makes sense…
Character arcs are abandonned
Characters are acting completely irrationally
Every major question is constantly unexplained leaving nothing but bad cliff hangers or just uncertainty
Several lore inconsistencies with fx. how death even works
Gigantic amounts of important and established characters aren’t a part of the story for some reason??? srsly why is somebody like Malfurion not helping Tyrande and the Night elves, or Velen with Anduin? Where are the forces from the legion order halls? You know that storytelling is horrible when one of the most consistent characters in the last 4-5 expansions has been the brawler boss/follower named “Meatball”