Enough said.
Warcraft has always had silliness and quirky references but that was complimentary to the tone and brutal way the narrative was told.
Now it is all silly and quirky with rare drops of seriousness that are more often then not delivered in an illogical and bad way.
What do you mean , man.
During Wrath of the Lich King survival of all life on Azeroth was at stake, yet two factions still tried to take pot shots at each other and ended up bringing one of the airships down even.
Cataclysm - literally resource war, while mad dragon is rampaging.
Pandaria - literally invasion and conquest of a new land , full blown war between two factions and in between old world threat is looming just nearby.
TBC - two factions battling across Outland , trying to maintain as much control of foreign world as possible.
Shall I go on ?
Doesn’t matter if survival of the living is at stake , just like in real world, real powers will pull shapes on each other AND ESPECIALLY if one is being enroached by an outside threat. Makes the job easier.
What went wrong?
-Vanilla was good.
-TBC was decent.
-Wrath was superb.
-Cata was Michael Bay break everything. Gameplay and Class Design was at its peak though.
-MoP was superb.
-WoD was average. Half the Classes were also ruined by design.
-Legion was superb, but all Classes were turned into mobile gameplay.
-BFA was good. Class design was bad.
-Shadowlands was extremely tedious and disjointed in all facets.
-Dragonflight is just that I don’t care anymore.
-11.0 Last chance for Blizzard to maintain players by good Class design, combat, number tuning, itemization and proper number scaling. Lore? I really don’t care.
MoP armor design was kino
Especially PvP sets
Warrior ruby white gladiator armor
One can dream that one day we can mog everything and even shape armor and dye them as we want.
But here is the thing, it stopped making sense after the end of MoP and every single war, battle or even skirmish made next to no sense. Why? Because the Alliance won and due to a lapse of judgement on behalf of our high king at the time we decided to let the Horde chill. Now I am not an Erevien and I do not actually for one faction to be have complete dominance over the other, but Blizzard wrote themselves into a narrative corner with that ending. And to make things even worse, Blizzard’s every attempt to salvage the war sublot was bigger disgrace than the last. Let’s go way back to WC3, new Horde is formed, but they are not savage like the last one, Nelves , humans and dwarves team-up with them to stop big scary demon dude with a thing for trees. “Cycle of Hatred” novel, a new Alliance is formed, Horde and Alliance try to co-exist but are way too different, enter war. WoW vanilla, Horde Warchief wants peace, Alliance King is MIA, war continues. TBC we go to Outland, Horde Warchief still wants piece, Alliance king doesn’t negotiate with monsters, war continues. WotLK, a nice hermit organizes a tournament and invites both the Horde and Alliance to it, Warchief still wants piece, high king is somewhat willing to listen but is insulted by Warchiefs second cousins nephews sister in laws uncles son twice removed, war continues. Cata, thrall makes Garrosh the new warchief, even more war than before. MoP, yup war is in full swing right up till the end where one faction clearly defeated the other. So what happened next? Garrosh escaped to a different timeline and we had to stop him. Why was there war? I mean the only reason the Horde still existed was because Varian decided so, and on the other hand why would the horde want to fight Alliance so soon after their defeat (I know I know, skirmishes at an armistice but still). We continue, Gul’dan somehow returned and summoned the Legion, and a lot of stuff happened, first off we all set aside of our factions and started working as a unit via the order halls, and secondly and most importantly the Alliance recruited a race that live on a space station capable of nuking things from orbit as seen in the Argus campaign and the Lightforged racial ability “Light’s Judgment” which calls down a beam of light from the Vindicaar. Soo BfA… Sylvanas started a war because reasons, the Alliance kinda forgot they had a space station that can nuke things from orbit, somehow the Alliance won again even though for the most part instead of fighting the horde we had the bold strategy of actually helping them (in order to keep my sanity I will not go over details here). SL we pretend that nothing happened. DF we are at an armistice, but for real this time. I know that abridged it a lot, but surely you can see how it doesn’t make any sense after the end of MoP.
Pretty much the same thing as the “rebel” quest line.
Ok so idk if this is controvercial or not, but I saw these so called draconid rebels as terrorists, I mean they were literally building bombs and planning to destroy the city. And at the end of the quest chain we had a multiple choice where one option was super possitive, the other was somewhat neutral and the negative one was justva lame joke (something like “draconids are inferior because they don’t have wings”). Like seriously… I appreciate that you are giving my character options to say, even though Alexstrazsa will end up ignoring me at the end, but could you at least take it serious, eben if you don’t agree with my take on what the rebels are, there people that like to RP their characters as morally bad/evil, and the only morally bad/evil choice is a lame wing joke…
Then why bother commenting on a thread that makes its point on commenting specifically on lore and not gameplay, I wonder 
I mean it does though.
Because Blizzard did a bad job with BFA does not mean war could not legitimately start.
For starters, after Varian is dead warmongering alliance (eg Jaina) push to eliminate the Horde.
The mistake was not continuing a conflict narrative. The mistake was the way it was reasoned and the actor that ‘started it’.
My point wasn’t that war coulnd’t start, I mean look at BfA. My point was that the Alliance already won that war, twice now. And if yet another war starts that would make the Alliance twice the fools for not ending the Horde when they could. Narretively it feels stupid if youbare playing that faction (and yes I know that the Horde have a whole different issue).
PS Jaina is no longer a warmonger.
Clearly. I commented specifically about the pre BFA era.
Today I wouldn’t say that Alliance ‘have won’ per see. More like there was a truce at the end because there were crazy losses on both sides especially after the Horde civil war 2: Electric boogaloo.
War and/or conflict can be done and it can be done well with just a small pinch of writing acumen.
Just because the previous writers did a terrible job does not mean you need to throw an entire fundamental piece of what makes the setting what it is. Because as we see, the setting completely collapses on itself as things stand now, all the way to the reasons the factions even exist atm.
I don’t think small writing acuments is enough to make it make sence. The problem largely comes from the fact that races have next to no autonomy outside their factions. If we are to return to war and conflict we would have to dismantle the factions as a whole and move intobsomething like alliegances. For example lets retain how it is now Nelves, humans, worgen etc are allied, so are orcs, undead, trolls etc. Orcs and Nelves have another fight because of trees, the worgen join in because they are tight with the elves, then the undead join because they hate the worgen, humans, dwarves and tauren sit this one out because it doesn’t affect them.
Your examples are weird. Most of them do not describe a situation as the one I’m describing. And in the few cases where it does line up; that only emphasizes how stupid the people of Azeroth truly are. 
Love the nod to the Star Wars here
blood elf female
My feeling is that WoW used to be one of those cultural creations that sat on the softer side of a pop counter-culture movement that began in the 70s / 80s with the likes of punk, rap and then rave culture. But that culture has now largely died out, thanks to the all-consuming nature of corporate America and how pretty much all the interesting IPs are now under the control of corporate Boards of Directors. What we’ve seen in WoW is the same as what has happened with Disney’s blandification of Star Wars and Marvel - a mass defanging of the edgier and more innovative aspects of popular culture.
Thanks for such heartfelt post, I’ve read the whole thing and yeah I share the sentiments. I highlight the above quote as it was something I’ve been thinking myself quite a bit and the thing that bothers me the most about when big franchises such as SW or wow have big change of direction…
The disrespect of what came before. Not understanding characters, or re-arranging beloved lore in whatever way they think it’s best for whatever new view the current creators have.
To continue with the SW parallel for a bit, I’m not against change or new ideas… The Andor series was fantastic imo, it was really noting like any previous SW, indeed different and fresh, whilst in the same time added to the existing lore (expanded on the fact that rebellions aren’t just glamorous heroes, a lot of dark stuff happens within). The Disney trilogy took a bit old dumb on what came before, ruining passed characters and their arcs in order to sell their own new REALLY badly written ones… Segway back into wow for the worst villain ever, Zo’val…
How could they even entertain to ruin a character and concept like the Arthas / The Lich King? I guess they thought they were being smart… It makes you wonder, is there no internal lore QA happening anywhere in this company? Is there really nobody within the team with lore understanding like the guys Michael and Matt @Bellular, or Nobbel? Nobody they can double check an idea with?! Are they just all a bunch of over enthusiastic “yes-people” in there? The jailer could have been an interesting villain, the cosmological stuff could have worked greatly if simply sought to add to the franchise as oppose to change and super impose stuff… They need to have a person, or a team of people whatever, that they consult with, so whenever they write anything, from a simple quest text to a major character story arch, they can say “hey I’m not telling you what to write but this is really inconsistent with the character so far, consider alterations”.
I’m really wondering, will Chris Metzen be the wow franchise’s Dave Filoni? Not saying that man is pure gold or anything, he’s written some bad content too. But at least he gets the vibe of warcraft. Just like Filoni understands what fans are interested in SW, how to write new characters that are interacting appropriately with what’s been pre-established.
I’m sorry but
I really like your post. Long time fan too, but only since WoW was released.
I don’t actually care for the faction war at all, but I do care for everything else you have mentioned. Classic keep reminding me of why I got hooked on this game, and playing that I sometimes get disappointed how far retail went away from it.
One of my biggest disappointments of retail is to be found in this quote:
WoW is getting space whales?