WoW has always done a large part of it’s storytelling through exposition dumps, what i’d say you take issue with is more the fact that they’re occupying you with menial tasks while dropping it on your head and overall just didn’t respect your time. It obviously becomes exponentially more grating the less invested in the story you are and the more you notice it.
SL itself was the perfect storm of the narrative falling on it’s face off a cliff and the gameplay crumbling under the weight of various borrowed power systems and other bad decisions, with both tearing each other down even farther.
I’d like to believe they’re taking a bit of a detour, they’re calming down on the edgier stuff as they’ve had some bad luck with it. They always say that it will always be world of WARcraft after all.
They’ve just made some bad story beats, and they’re trying to ease off and re-establish the core mysteries that made this universe interesting.
My current speculation is that we’re very much heading somewhere a bit darker, Titans being questioned, things being revealed to be a lot more complicated than previously thought.
As for real life politics affecting dev choices… Well yeah that’s bound to happen. I’m happy more people feel comfortable in the game… That being said, I’m not going to make a pink haired orc any time soon. I focus on what I like, ignore what’s not for me. I very much believe that the more classic “heavy metal” edge of the game can perfectly coexist with the bubblier stuff. They just need to find the balance. 50% classic epic fantasy, 25% darker edgier fantasy, 25% fun fantasy. Right now these percentages are a bit more 30%, 10%, 60%… Like imagine lord of the rings, but Aragorn, Boromir and Gandalf all cracked silly one liners all the time. Instead, the jokes and banter are between Gimli and Legolas, the heart warming and endearing moments come mostly from the hobbits, everyone else is relatively serious.
I see some people advocating for every race having every hair style and colour… I feel it’s not appropriate, it will ware out the concept of individual cultures. Dwarves like to plat their hair this way, whereas elves some other way… Maybe bubble gum pink hair works on Gnome’s genes but not on Orcs… Are there any rules? Not really, we’re playing a world in which illusory magics can be liberally cast by nearly all schools of power, where atomic re-calibrators are a thing, light floating space ships with super lasers co exist with metal swords and wooden maces.
Late to the thread but the pattern you’ve noticed has been going on for a while, it’s behaviour that is regularly mocked on message boards that are more sane and less censored than these forums. Obviously at this point I’m just repeating what you’ve already said but I think it’s important to emphasize that the US forums in particular (which are the only forums the devs take feedback from) have basically been ResetEra/twitter in all but name for years now. To put the absurdity of their behaviour in to context I distinctly remember at one point the most prominently upvoted story poster was a legitimate, genuinely diagnosed schizophrenic, black supremacist, orthodox christian, self described himbo, that spent 90% of their time claiming every fantasy race was derived from African peoples while spewing bile about europeans. A total race baiting hate monger.
Blizzard are more interested in listening to a minority of unhinged activists like that weirdo rather than your average Warcraft fan, I think the writers they’ve hired over the past few years show that. Even a veteran like Christie who’s long since lost her touch has been polluting the medium with their political outlook for a while now. My advice would be to just move on, the current team is running the franchise in to the ground while doing everything they possibly can to sanitize Warcraft out of pure spite. They genuinely seem to hate Legacy Warcraft, their own players and the franchise with a passion.
What’s more their biggest competitor FFXIV has all the ‘problematic’ themes they disapprove of (the kind Warcraft once had) and is regularly out performing them. Many of vocal devs on twitter actively play it so it’s clear they don’t even really believe in the legitimacy of their slacktivism, they don’t even want to play in their own sanitized sandbox. Aedrion summed it up, Warcraft is a lost cause for the sake of your sanity walk away don’t waste your time on yelling in to the void.
Do they? Maybe we should spell out a bit more clearly what’s the objectionable part, because what I’m seeing in FF certainly isn’t what I miss in WoW. Well, except basically competent story-telling, I guess, but I don’t think WoW ever had much of that.
The maw
or as some might know it;
The graveyard of level 50 alts.
Death by unskippable dialogue.
For me it was quite honestly that it also just wasn’t an interesting story.
I liked a lot of the BFA exposition even if it was a rushjob from thread A to thread B just to give us shadowlands, but everything in the maw just felt… what?
Why is this head honcho DK trying to tell my blood elf how great Jaina is after she tried to purge my sunreaver homies not even a canonical decade ago.
What I’m trying to say is that these people are hyper partisan zealouts that don’t just see fantasy race conflict but the basic themes and much of what makes up Warcrafts past lore as untenable. Not just simple terms like greenskin being a nono but the most basic inoffensive elements portrayed in the past because they look at everything through the lens of an ideologue, Nobundo’s short story is probably one of my favourite examples of what they used to be happy to portray in the setting when it became an MMORPG.
Even though Aedrions initial post hit the nail on the head I wanted to comment to Asjon because I used to feel the same way about D&D being hijacked by ideologues, it’s better to move on then hold out hoping for common sense to make a miraculous return. With out going over the particulars the devs on twitter have made it clear where they stand and it’s not with Warcraft.
I know exactly who you are talking about as I have ran into him numerous times and once he tried to cancel me for out of context Discord screenshots. He hides behind his twitter and his privilege status of playing the victim constantly. Even worse is that this guy is literally behind 90% of the inspiration tables of the wowpedia where he pulled them all out of his own %#@!.
Someone had to reach out to one of the admins of wowpedia through their discord to ask what was up with that. Dude literally just inserted his own headcanons and based those as facts. His most unhinged take was to state that Thrall was based on an African American slave who escaped and just revolted by killing any kind of white people, women and children included, and he saw this as a good thing.
Even though there was a LITERAL source by Metzen himself on who he based Thrall upon, he still went ahead and added his own crap stating it as a fact and it was up for around 2 years until the admins had to step in and delete his ridiculous nonsense after someone pointed that out.
This dude is insane but ofcourse the political landscape of the US paints him as some kind of speaker of truth.
This will be my last comment about him because I don’t want to make the thread about him but I think it’s important to recognize when someone paradoxical enough to claim to be a LBGTQ+ activist while also being a hardcore christian that hates LBGTQ+, who unironically spends their time comparing people with gender dysophia to the forsaken and scourge with bizarre allegories, or throwing around Nation of Islam fan theories while spewing a constant barrage of legitimately hateful comments that are all meekly accepted because of his dark skin gradient - all of which is tolerated so openly - shows just how far the community has fallen.
The fact is a genuine hate monger was able to easily establish himself within the lore community going so far as to be given the keys to wowpedia as a senior member, despite his behaviour he retained those privileges to do damage to the lore for years. This clown was seen as a senior authority on all things Warcraft even though his theories were on par with flat earthers and so historically illterate it would make even the most ardent revisionists blush with envy, which is to say in terms of historical literacy he had none. He wasn’t just wrong about the assertions that he conjured up with no basis in reality to push his race politics but he blatantly lied, misrepresented the facts, bullied people out of the community and tried to actively retcon the lore to suit his agenda.
In the past this bargain bin Tariq Nasheed off his meds would have been immediately told to take a hike but nowadays its clear (at least on the US side) they are sympathetic to his views regardless of whether they’re insane, the only reason they got rid of him is because he kept saying the quiet part out loud and embarrassing them. He was a liability that exposed them.
storm of the narrative falling on it’s face off a cliff and the gameplay crumbling under the weight of various borrowed power systems and other bad decisions, with both tearing each other down even farther.