Frustrated with the narrative

Lore Story
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I’m just going to write this as a fan of the lore, the world and as someone who’s frustrated with where the game is going currently.

I fell in love with the story of Warcraft when I first played WC2 and then 3 and then FT. I never really played RTS’ seriously, but the story of Warcraft hooked me. When I first discovered that soon I’d be able to explore the World of Warcraft I was so terrifically excited. I could make my mage, I could explore the world as a mage and I had no delusions of grandeur, I was an explorer, I’d go on to slay a few dragons, an elemental lord or two, combat a few big names from the RTS’ and pre-established characters and some new names that were implemented into the game overtime. I was there to explore the world I had many battles in, learn more about the story and go on to explore new continents and new directions the game was headed in.

But somewhere on my journey it got silly. I became a super special mortal who was chosen to lead an expedition to ‘old Draenor’, I was CHOSEN to wield powerful, fabled weapons, The ‘world soul’ of Azeroth chose me to be her 2nd super bestie, I can traverse the realm of the dead unhindered and these significantly higher beings all come to me for help?

I’m not an adventurer anymore, I’m a mortal being, who is significantly more special than any of the major lore characters only in terms of power level no where near as strong? It feels outrageously silly that this is where my character has come to. The ‘afterlife’ or ‘Shadowlands’ isn’t a place I ever thought I’d explore, or wanted to. The direction of cosmic threats and beings is getting to be too much.

I love to raid and run dungeons, but the thing that keeps me coming back to the game is to see where the story is going and I’m always left, on some level, disappointed. I don’t care if I’m the slayer of Arthas, Onyxia (Thrice), Nefarian (Twice) Deathwing, Garrosh, N’Zoth, Kil’Jaeden (Twice), Archimond (Twice), Kel’Thuzard (Thrice). I’m an adventurer who wants to explore and indulge in the expansive world that I used to love. I just wish I had that feeling back.

This is my opinion, I hope others share my frustration for no other reason than to gain traction for blizzard to wake up and listen that the narrative direction of this game the past 8 years hasn’t been amazing, and I get why some people would like to be the ‘Special’ in the world but it’s an MMORPG and I wish it would feel like one again.

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I get where you’Re coming from, but at the moment i think that them sorting the storytelling out, at least to the level of competency of someone who watched a Skillshare course once would be paramount. Because while the Art team and others can work their butts off it’s the story, which makes us invested in the world and events that take place in it. Most people are probably here, because we’ve been invested in WoW’S narrative, from some previous point in time and still have osme hope it could get better.

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I dislike this as well, but there are those who do like it. People who say that “I’ve done x, y and z, I should no longer be treated like a mere grunt!”

On some level I can understand that mindset. If your character has been part of every conflict of the game so far then maybe the story shouldn’t treat you as a nameless adventurer anymore. These days, however, we’ve reached a level where the game automatically assumes that your character has done everything there is to do. In this RPG you have no sway over the story and so you have no real agency.

Shadowlands streamlined the levelling experience. You can now play the game through whichever expansion you want. It’s quite jarring, in my opinion, if you start a character and select one of the later expansions – because you’ll have literally nothing on your CV but everyone will call you hero/champion anyways. It makes for an awful RPG experience.

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Going the player character as a hero route wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad idea. They had tried it with the nameless adventurer, and ran into problems, when they retroactively took player character accomplishments away from them and awarded them to NPCs. So they tried to go the other way, which worked well enough in more story-driven-MMOs and made our characters progress through the story, instead of witnessing it. In Legion most people were onboard with it. We had been an adventurer, we had become good enough that kings and warlords looked towards us as troubleshooters, and then we became acknowledged as the best in our field, and leaders of our own class of operatives. We got established characters as our followers, and were made to feel that we were part of the story.

Then BfA came, and Blizzard said “well, that was the feature of the last addon, now it’s not even worth commenting on anymore, here you go, you’re somehow not class champion anymore, you are Champion of Azeroth now”. And I think that point more than any other is when the idea of a consistent character identity became nothing more than a meme. It’s not necessarily that it was a bad idea to become world-saving heroes after we rose beyond killing bandits, it’s that they f… mucked it up. The idea of progress relies on continuity. And they threw that concept out of the window. Now they are just moving its corpse around.

So yeah, it would be nice if they dropped the act, accepted the failed experiment, and went back to nameless adventurers doing their stuff within an enchanting world.

But I think it’s more likely that they will try to go for some kind of soft reset and have us try again. And really… if the narrative is actually consistent the second time around, it might not be the worst idea for player experience. Players do like the single-player style narratives they get in many MMOs. So it might actually bring some players back.

But I don’t think that’d be playing to their strengths. At its best, WoW focused on Lore before Story. It’s not just that the player’s contribution in shaping the world was ignored, it’s that the world was much more shaped by the forces that were already in motion, instead of character drama. Factions and peoples were more important than their leaders, and that didn’t just go for playable factions. And they could still go back to that. But that’s so 2004, isn’t it?

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Just a passing thought, but maybe if writers didn’t rely so heavily on exceptionally gifted individuals and champions, if they started having more armies and groups (as opposed to identified heroes) taking credit for important accomplishments, then it wouldn’t be quite a problem. Say if it was an entire warband that had taken down Arthas or N’Zoth, we could have been part of that warband and thus have participated in that accomplishment without being specifically the ones to thank for it. Same goes for SL, we can be a Maw Walker sure, just not the only one. Sounds like an acceptable balance. It shouldn’t be too hard to do I think ?

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Thinking about it, Blizzard had started this process that the player was not going to be just a random and nameless adventurer since the beginning of TBC, but he/she was supposed to be an important hero and champion of his/her own race and faction already. Sure, it was still a slow process back then who likely could not be perceived by the playerbase, but the process was already there.

Indeed, let’s compare the questing experience of a Blood Elf/Draenei at level 20 in TBC with a Human/Orc at lvl 20 in Vanilla.

At level 20 the Blood Elf has already personally fought and stopped most of the threats of Quel’thalas, including a whole Scourge base, personally killed the betrayer of the elves
Dar’khan who sold the race to Arthas, and interacted with important Horde characters, not only with Lor’themar but also Sylvanas and Thrall, and doing this he/she personally makes sure that the Blood Elves join the Horde.

The Draenei player at level 20 already stops the machinations of Prince Kael’thas and the Burning Legion as well, preventing a Sunfury / demonic early invasion of Kalimdor, and stopping more Draenei to be corrupted into the Legion, and also interacts with other major Alliance leaders as well.

Now compare all of this with a lvl 20 Human player in Vanilla…he/she’s just a nameless nobody who’s trying his best to protect the Alliance towns killing Defias bandits in Elwynn and Westfall. His/her major accomplishment is that he/she has defeated Hogger…

Same for a lvl 20 Orc player, at lvl 20 he/she’s just killing random animals and other lesser threats in the Barrens, and maybe he/she has not even interacted with Thrall just yet.

Surely you can see a difference between the two questing experiences :stuck_out_tongue:

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Technically he is the questgiver, for some RFC quests, which take place in Durotar, but yeah.

They designed the Legion systems, with the borrowed power, in mind. It’s just people didn’t quite understand what it meant yet, because it was just as counter intuitive as it sounds to the audience.

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Systems are one thing. Story is quite another.

I don’t have a story problem with the way they phased out the legendary weapons. I do have one with the jarring disconnect between leading your class order to being a faction warrior, without any attempt to dissolve the orders or divorce you from them from Blizzard’s side. That’s just a lack of care for character continuity. And that’s what makes actual character progress with your player character impossible.

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Personally I never saw this as a problem, but I played on a server with the RP ruleset and on those servers you often had to disconnect your in-game actions from your character. It is also not unheard of that RPGs establish their own canon – even if the player may play the story in an entirely different way.

This is kind of how I’ve always envisioned it in my head. The “extras” don’t really get to stand in the limelight at all, they’re just there in the background to make things look more significant in cutscenes. But what if they actually mattered more to the story?

It’s not an easy problem to tackle. Take something like the Lich King fight – he lured “the best and brightest” of Azeroth to raise as his champions. How many were there, in the end? Just 25? There were many 25man raids that took him down, which one is canon? Are they all canon? As long as you all share the same world they can’t all be canon unless you’re opting to believe that you took him down and that people in other raids didn’t. You’re the main character in this MMORPG that millions of people play.

There’s no good solution, but I personally prefer it when the developer offers a canon explanation but still leaves enough wiggle-room for you to at least say that you were there and participated.

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Sure, it wasn’t a problem for me, either. But for many players it was, and since it was a legitimate concern it wasn’t unreasonable of the devs to act on it. And if they had done it right, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a mistake, though it’s not my preferred design.

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I agree with the first part, but in my case the hope is gone. I come back every now and then because I’m curious to see how low they’ll fall, since the writers have consistently picked the worst scenario possible at every turn since SL started. I’m looking at WoW the same way I look at « Riverdale »

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The question is how they could have done it right. I feel like there exists no comparitive game that has managed to do this well. When “story” becomes the focus there are certain expectations that must be met. Like the basic three-act-structure is a good enough foundation for a story and ideally each expansion of WoW should have its own, but whether they do I don’t know. Spontaneously, I feel that the answer is no but I’m open to other perspectives. I do think that they are trying to make a story though, but it’s become a jumbled mess.

Another problem with “story” is that endings are an integral part to a story. A poor ending can tarnish what had been a good story, and it seems MMORPGs aren’t really made with endings in mind. It feels like MMORPGs are designed to continue forever. This, I think, should be the main counter-argument against MMORPGs telling “stories”. I don’t think that story was the main appeal of MMORPGs 20 years ago. If you wanted a good story you’d watch a film or read a book. I don’t say that to diminish games as a storytelling medium – I think games have much greater storytelling potential than any other medium. But the appeal of the MMORPG was to immerse yourself in a fictional world in a way that no book or film could ever allow you to, and within that quality lies a form of storytelling unique to the interactive medium.

WoW’s strength was its lore. The linear path of unskippable dialogue you were forced to traverse in Bastion cannot compare to the magic of wandering Tirisfal Glades for the first time.

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Depends on what you see as “well”. I do think most other MMOs do it well enough. And mostly the same way. They give you “your” team of characters, send you on adventures with them, and make you care about what is happening through what is happening to them. And that’s also where the story structure comes in. The new threat of the new addon has some personal relation to your team-mates, and you help them through it and towards overcoming it. The Cataclysm killed my mother, I had a role in lifitng the Mists around Pandaria and now the Sha are my fault, the Grand Magistrix that let the demons in is my sister, the Horde killed my dog, and I’m gonna avenge him. You might not care about killing gods and mending worlds, but you can easily care about your Dragon’s Watch or Scions.

Blizzard tried to do that, but they were horrible at it. Only during Legion did they make the character cast your team, that revolved around you. And that was only ever half-baked and forgotten when the new addon rolled around. Apart from that they tried to make the story about characters they thought the player had a relation to instead of characters that actually were supposed to know and like our characters. And that’s a big part of why they failed to sell their continuing story. The Fourth War as a story of Saurfang coming to terms with the flaws of warrior culture was flawed, but fine. The Fourth War as the story of the player character who didn’t have any established motivations or relationships with Saurfang or Jaina and ran amok like usual was a mess.

I agree. But a big part of that is that they just royally f**ked up basic writing rules, failed to present the relevant information, and failed to actually involve the player in it. It wouldn’t be half as bad, if the writing was better. You’re right in claiming that that’s not all of it, though. I also think that the strength of an MMO is the world. A grand character story is neither needed, nor helpful, it just takes away from the MMO aspects, even if it is a good story.

And I agree that there is an inherent problem in never having a final ending. Not because you can’t keep a good story going for decades… but because you really have no way to fix the story, once you mucked it up. The longer the story goes, the higher the chance of unfogiveable story mistakes gets, if they don’t play it totally save and boring. And once that mistake is made, it taints everything that comes after. WoW’s story has made more than one of these mistakes and there isn’t any way to salvage it. They have to kill it and pretend it didn’t happen like it did, or it will drag them down forever.

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Despite TV shows in serial format having existed for many decades already, it seems to me as if there’s no real academic analysis of what type of structure would make them perpetually good and worth watching. I could be off the mark with it not existing, but even relatively bad movies with an iffy overarching story still feels coherent and not unwatchable most of the time due to their tried and true structure (from theatre I suppose, an ancient medium of entertainment that have had thousands of years to mature until today).

With what we already know about “safe” story structures that we inherently are compelled by, and most likely also like because of it being what we’d been brainwashed to expect, I don’t quite understand why the serial format feels so immature. I understand that writers in general want to avoid the style from the last century where the show could run for literally dozens of seasons, but instead suffered heavily from the issue of each new season feeling very similar to the previous. And I generally agree, if I’m to watch something in a serial format for more than one or two seasons I absolutely want to see some substantial changes to it in order for me to not get bored with every season feeling the same.

Maybe we could learn from history? The strength of the focus on the smaller individual stories and following a single protagonist is obviously that we can feel satisfied even though it’s usually contained within 1-3 hours.

Maybe the style of story telling behind the TV show adaptation Game of Thrones is the future? It’s still not very refined in this regard I feel as the focus narrows down with each successive season. Though, I feel that the concept that George RR Martin had and “forced” on the producers of GoT was its best strength as the different stories are compelling and did to a much lesser extent fall into the trap of “narrative power creep”, or the inclination to make each season have an even bigger and more dire big bad to keep people’s attention to not risk the “sameness” of earlier TV shows treatment of new seasons. That GoT’s individual plots still develop and escalate over time (with a much more modest approach that doesn’t quite try to prevent you from becoming desensitized by upping the dose again and again to keep you addicted) where the large scale conflicts generally comes from the intersection between many different interests, upping the stakes for every character considerably without the need for as much narrative power creep.

I really wish that WoW and other MMO’s and serialized games could learn from the lessons taught from GoT, the sixth best TV show ever made according to viewer opinion on IMDB (which might have made number one TBH if it wasn’t for the last season being mediocre at best). If it wasn’t for the fact that that the majority (or basically all of the more important or interesting) threads got progressively more resolved towards the end I’d easily watch 10 more seasons of the show even if all characters would be replaced over time and substituted with younger generations or something.

I mostly agree, and I sort of don’t. I think that a grand character story absolutely can be fun and compelling even in an MMO, but I also agree that it also poses a huge risk that the story won’t be fit for an MMO. I’ve come to really appreciate there being a looming “big bad” in each expansion of WoW, though with the reservation that both the way that it has become to be delivered, and its general aimlessness drags the overarching story into the mud.

For example TBC, that Illidan is the big bad really can motivate players and give context as to why we’d want to go to Outland. With that said, the way that the main story with the important characters was treated was to make players faceless in the larger scope of things. Your character could have been there, but books of history won’t mention your name even if you’d RP your character as having been there at the final blow at Illidan that allowed him to be captured again. I think that’s perfectly find and good, but over the top “sword in Azeroth” or “super saiyan chosen one with the power of azeroth to defeat an old god” with in game prompts that names your character specifically as the only one that can save Azeroth really should be seen as the biggest sin that a story can make in an MMO because you have to suspend disbelief over everyone else also being the chosen one at the same time even though the game only recognizes you personally as the saviour without room for others when it tells you its story.

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Now, I don’t have a problem with that, either. Of course stories have to happen, even in an MMO. And it should take as long as it takes to tell it, be it one quest or a whole addon. Heck, if there is a really great idea, they can have the story woven through multiple addons. What I mean when I’m talking about the “grand character story”, is a story that’s the central focus of the whole game. Anything else is just a “side story”, and the grand plot won’t end with the addon, it will just switch focus. What I want is a player-focussed experience with lots of different stories that are mostly independent from one another and only connected through the shared setting. That’s where WoW was always at its best.

That’s why the questing content so often was far superior to the main plot. I enjoyed Zandalar, and I really enjoyed Kul Tiras. But the story of BfA? To me it sucked. As soon as we start focussing on some great heroes that we follow around, and stand witness to events that should affect everyone but are supposed to care about them through how they affect Jaina, Anduin and Baine, they lose me.

A quest chain can be fun and memorable. A zone can have a cool story. An addon can have a good plot. A villain arc or a cosmic mystery can span decades, without us ever bringing them down or fully figuring out what’s going on. It’s not about the time it takes. it’s about the idea that the one plot is important and changes everything, and the rest doesn’t. All the stuff you do running around the world? Peanuts. It’s only when Jaina and Thrall are there, that it becomes something. It’s only when they feel about it, that it becomes real. There is one plot, you have to care about, elsewise you won’t be able to enjoy the lore. That’s where FFXIV lost me, for example. I didn’t care for the main plot. And if you don’t care about that, it’s really hard to care for that game.

And like I said before in this thread… I do think that it wouldn’t necessarily have been bad, if Blizzard actually did such a plot and did it well. But I do think that trying was an unnecessary risk, and now that they failed… well, it’s hard to see how they can get out of that. If they had stuck to telling largely independent stories that wouldn’t have been a problem, and it certainly would have been as, or rather more, entertaining than the grand narrative they tried to feed us.

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I see, alright. That was me misinterpreting, then. Nicely written, I agree.

I left the game in early Pandaria (not a judgment of the expansion itself, mostly just that I had been no-lifing the game for 5+ years at that point), and came back during BfA due to the promise of rejuvenating the conflicts between Horde and Alliance. Aside from the very start of BfA’s main story I was severely let down due to it being a false promise. There were certainly some really good writing in there too, not a complete shtshow, as I love Talanji’s arc (and that my character more or less was just assisting rather than being a protagonist). I even wished that she would become Horde’s warchief due to the way in which she seemingly played the biggest role in unifying The Horde during a time at which it had notable turbulent conflicts within as Sylvanas with a mental decline had shouldered the warchief title. Additionally, she had been taught and prepared for taking over the leadership of the Zandalari tribe as an heir with all that it entails (including the strong diplomatic bonds with almost all of the troll tribes), which I think would both be appropriate as a fresh unifying leader (filling a somewhat similar role to that of what Thrall used to do) and start a new arc with tension about an outsider taking the role. Maybe others will disagree strongly with that opinion, and I don’t think it would make sense to put her there right now as the window of opportunity largely has passed.

If they just had kept BfA’s story more in line with that, how the Talanji story developed, I think that I would have liked the expansion’s story over all. But the whole deal with the Heart of Azeroth felt like flaming garbage to me.

Ah well, I think WoW’s narrative arc is done for and never can recover in a way in which you and I (and others as well) would think that it could lift itself up to a high standard. Sadly.

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I’m not sure that it couldn’t, in theory.

If they gave us their mea culpas, gave up on their grand plot and just did smaller stories from now on… I guess I could live with that. That’s the beauty of the independent stories. The lack of continuity becomes much, much less important. Small-scale stories about small-scale events can entertain me while I totally forget about the clusterhugs they did before.
It’s never gonna happen, of course. But I could be satisfied with it.

Another method that I could be mollified by would be just as humiliating to the writers as giving up: Turning the story into a self-aware parody. If the story can’t be taken seriously… it shouldn’t. Make it comedy, and share tons of inside jokes about WoW and its writing flaws with us. I could really enjoy that (even if no one else could :wink:).

Edit:
More realistic than that… They could go for some kind of reset. This “book” of the story is closed, and the next one is a new story that doesn’t reference the old one very much. Not exactly something that would restore my trust, but something that might actually happen… and save future story from ridicule, if people are still willing to give it a chance. Which seems debatable…

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Yeah… I remember a lot of people going on about the Faction War being played out and all that, but honestly the expansion’s premise ended before it really had a chance to begin. Yes, the zone to zone storytelling was fine, even very good at times, but the whole Saurfang thing undermined everything that happened. What was sold as irreconcilable conflict way past the point of backing down has become contorted into a strange abomination of the Horde distancing itself, from itself.

I think a key to continuous storytelling is in allowing the characters(and players) to build up a relationship with the player character and the consistent ability to relate the player to the antagonist of the piece, even if it is by proxy. Taking BfA as an example tell me honestly did you ever feel as one of the Warchief’s or High King’s most reliable and trusted agents?

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So yeah, as my friend and I talked about yesterday, even though I think that the origin story of Azerite is (for me) in the top 3 of stupidest things in WoW, Azerite in BfA is the prime example of why the Blizzard promise of more Horde vs. Alliance was a lie (intentional or not).

The setup is there for conflicts about the resource, yet it was to me only just like the glitter of the expansion. Flashy and without any real purpose. Yet it’s being treated (just like glitter) as something that people actually like, even though it’s probably the most hated decorative item as it gets f-ing everywhere. You can’t just ignore it because you’ll find the glitter in your home years after spilling some on the floor, as we as players in the game had to grind for it and so on, constantly being reminded of its existence. If it actually served some purpose in the grand story it would be fine, I think, not ideal, but at least something to carry the story forward.

"Hm… Human pirates being a thorn in the side for Kul’Tiras? Why though? I know, throw in some Azerite, boom, conflict.

What do you mean when you say that it’s superficial? It relates to Azeroth dying, isn’t that great?"

No, I really didn’t to be honest. I think that’s a positive when we’re forced to sit through super hero-esque storytelling. Mainly I felt like I was at the right place at the right time, which was a breath of fresh air from the whole Magni & Heart of Azeroth thing.

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Don’t get me wrong i recognise the value of down to earth stories, but i feel like that’s a perfect way to highlight the dichotomy between what we’ve been sold and what actually happened. Loosely speaking being considered a reliable specialist is what i would find a solid middle ground between not recognising what you did at all and nonsense like N’zoth laser. In fact i would argue that the coincidental nature exemplifies a lack of purpose and focus, where the expansion’s selling point became the side narrative to Magni, HoA, Old Gods, Saurfang, etc.

Luck in storytelling i find is something good at putting things into motion, but kind of results in the overall narrative feeling very contrived and remove the illusion of agency from the player.

(I¨ve got no idea why they ignored legitimate grievances, in favor of Azerite and the Jailer… who knows maybe the story would ahve actually been morally grey, if they bothered to explore both sides of the conflict properly instead of doing anything but that)

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