Depends on how you count. Cata and BfA are much maligned, certainly, but Cata mostly had the faction stuff in the leveling phase, and not as a main story, while BfA had it as background and endgame story.
On the other hand, the view towards MoP seems to be relatively positive by now, and most of the story objections are really about how it ended, and how Garrosh was maligned. I personally think the Purge of Dalaran was the high point of Blizzard’s faction conflict writing, where both sides vehemently justify their position to this day.
WoD on the other hand didn’t really include faction stuff at all, and we all know how popular that one is. They tried to milk the orcs vs humans premise without including a player conflict, though…
True. But feeling engagement with a bad story is not a good thing. It’s an annoyance. Especially if you aren’t playing the game because of the story. And I find it hard to believe that annoying people is helping to sell subscriptions.
A neutral story might not engage players, but at least it doesn’t push them away.
MoP was much like Cata, where the faction war was largely in the background. You had it momentarily in the first zone, then a little bit with the whole bell thing. MoP and Cata was very much the same, and the Purge of Dalaran was really a mess, mostly because they appearantly decided to leave a small detail out, which would have added far more nuance to the whole situation.
But even with that cutscene that was allegedly supposed to come out, the whole situation made little sense.
“Oh no, I better turn a blind eye and risk facing Jaina’s wrath over Garrosh’, my people could be in danger if I don’t!” in danger of some orcs across the ocean who are already preoccupied with a war against the Alliance.
Peak storytelling blizzard, peak storytelling.
Whenever blizzard writes a faction war they rely too heavily on turning characters into plot devices, and characters who hang around characters-turned-plot dvice holding the idiot ball.
But idiocy in the Horde seems to be the favored state some in the hardcore Horde-only circle. Including the allegedly Horde-biased developers.
Every WoW expansion has been crap, story-wise. Every single one has twisted characters to serve the narrative constantly. Without exception. We’re not comparing good with bad, but bad with worse. MoP is still among the best, while being almost as heavy on the faction theme as BfA. I don’t have to disagree with any of your criticisms of MoP to say that. And that’s not an uncommon opinion.
Note that I am actually all in favour of getting rid of the factions. I just don’t agree that the faction war makes or breaks an addon.
Personally I am not in favour of getting rid of the faction. I just want blizzard to stop turning characters into plot devices. They just need to have more details included, otherwise the faction war just breaks any suspension of belief, as explained in my longer post, some ideas just does not make sense everything considered.
A faction war might not make or break an expansion, I mean, WoW is a video game first and MoP is generally praised for it’s gameplay systems, rather than it’s story. So far, with every faction war included, it have broken the story element of the expansion.
I did like one thing they did in MoP though. Alliance and Horde used the locals as soldiers, rather than just getting reinforcement asap. Wish they could have done this with Warlords of Draenor some more, instead we had Khadgar opening portals left and right.
Sure- That’s just not a faction war specific problem at all.
Don’t know about you, but for me that ship has long sailed, and I just want them to stop creating a main plot at all now. Just small-scale stuff that can’t mess up too much.
WoD didn’t need a faction war to break the story. It’s neither necessary nor sufficient. Blizzard’s writing just sucks on loads of levels.
There is so little info about the creature that it’s not that much to tell. Like, at most there are speculations about how his origin story affects what is known about the origins of titans in general, and that his memories from A Thousand Years of War fit the actions of both the Burning Legion and the Pantheon, but that’s about it.
The further you go, the more speculative it becomes. Like, what would his “no hope, just pain” mean when it’s pretty much what Sylvanas felt during Edge of Night events. Or why his mythic phase looks like it’s filled with Revendreth coloured anima.
Well, BfA could not maintain the focus on it even for a single expansion, so, maybe yes, maybe the lack of focus and “organic” flow of events is what made them arguably bad.
Azshara is remembered by the community, and seemingly quite a few people like her.
How could you forget the glorious Ashran? It was so amazing that we didn’t even need Karabor.
This is the simplest form of an argument that comes up A lot.
And it is a fair point, the game is called Warcraft. But why is it called that? I mean, I get why the three first games were called that, They were very much games about war, and back in vanilla, so was WoW (At least to some extend) but nowadays, I am not sure if the people making the game want it to be a war game anymore, at least not all of them, and at least not all the time.
But it would be a little odd (and probably a terrible marketing strategy) to change the name of the game at this point, right? Video games just don’t suddenly change names, and especially when the game is the latest in the line of an incredibly popular franchise.
The developers have backed themselves into a corner, where they have to make the game at least somewhat about war, even though that might not be the kind of game they want to make, because anything else would be false advertising.
It isn’t, though. It’s called World of Warcraft. As in “the world in which the Warcraft games play”. Highlighting the WORLD makes much more sense than highlighting the WAR, if you’re talking about this specific game. Warcraft came before, what was new was the world.
WoW vanilla wasn’t about the faction war, though. It played a very, very minor role, outside of the pvp mechanic. Just like Warcraft 3 wasn’t about Horde vs Alliance at all.
Fair point, I actually didn’t play back in vanilla so I was only basing my argument on how people keep talking about it (And those famous “good old days”) and what tiny bit of Classic I’ve played.
Not just Horde vs. Alliance no, but certainly a game about war. Different factions with grand armies waging huge battles with you as their commander, and the medium of RTS worked very well for that.
I mean, yeah, true, but as evident by our dear, oddly soy fixated, goblin friend above, People are still gonna expect war because it has war in the title (And the ‘Warcraft’ part is rather more visually imposing than the ‘World of’ part, don’t you think?)
And Starcraft has star and craft in it, but you don’t really craft stars in that game.
I think we can simply say that people are using idiotic rhetoric. Even if war could be against the old gods, or the naaru. A war is not necessarily a ‘faction war’ afterall.
If blizzard can pull off a decent faction war story, then I would be hyped. But they can’t, never have been able to, so I rather they focus on wars against other beings.
And is there any question if they get it? We’re in a war against the allies of the Jailer right now. Players that hit this dead horse aren’t just expecting any war, they are expecting a very specific war, the war between player factions. And that’s really not in the name. It never was.
Apart from that, and the fact that warcraft isn’t even the most prominent word here… the word is war"craft", not just war. That’s not the same thing. Are any people annoyed that we don’t get any lectures on the craft of war in the game? I very much doubt that.
Not really, I mean… the symbol in the logo is a globe. shrug
I actually completely agree on these points. (I might have phrased it a bit differently ) Unfortunately so, because it means that some people are still gonna read an “Orcs versus humans” war into the title even though it’s not there. I just did that, and I didn’t even want to. I guess I am as much at the mercy of the discourse as anyone else.
They did try to add some Sun Tzu “art of war” stuff at some point. It had… Mixed reactions…
I’m more interested in developing the races further. This can be achieved by looking at racial/faction conflicts.
‘Conflict’ and ‘Warmongering’ are different things though.
Bliz need to focus more on a races expansion. Legon worked because classes are close to everyone’s heart… so are the races and the factions are an extension of that.
No one aside from Elves give a hoot about the weak covenants, and that’s because Ardenweald is 100% a NE zone.
Hence why I’m calling for a racial focused expansion … and not just heritage armour tokenism.
100% is a little hyperbolic. The general tone certainly seems rather elvish, especially with all the tragic drama being highlighted. But neither the Drust stuff nor the Bwonsamdi stuff are things that would have been put in an NE zone. Those are different storylines that really had nothing to do with them.
Not saying that Ysera, Tyrande, the Night Warrior, saving Teldrassil souls and so on don’t take a big part of the covenant story’s attention, but 100% is far enough off the mark to call out, I feel.
I generally think that this could be a nice idea, and I’ve hoped for that since Legion… but that’s a buttload of different storylines, especially if you count all allied races. 23 (or 24, if youu do 2 for pandas), are certainly too many. The 12 they did for classes were already pretty thin for quite a lot of the classes… just remember priests…
So there should be ways to lower the number of questlines to make it a bit more managable. Maybe take 4-8 groups of races instead 24 races, or just have one storyline with a looot of team-ups, where your race shows you your races contribution instead of the whole story. Could still work to fit a lot of racial stuff in.
I am not sure if the reasons for “why” still work in the company.
I don’t know. Looking at the “crossroads” cinematic after Warbringers: Jaina already was like that to me.
Depends on a scope. For example, if we would get a single letter every other expansion after we leave a certain place, like updates about what’s going on in Northrend, etc., would it be too much work?
In a similar way, would extra text in a quest that touches a subject important for a race, or adding an extra side quest, be that much of work? It would still offer unique perspective where it would make sense, but does not have to bloat.
Sometimes full time quest lines are good, but sometimes just a single line can offer a lot more than seems on a surface.
Sure. That’s possible. Would that make anyone happy, though? It certainly would do nothing but annoy me to read some updates that probably won’t be reflected in the game anyways. Especially since I don’t believe that Blizzard would actually feel bound by stuff they only mentioned.
I actually prefer to have the races untouched, and their progress left to my imagination, if that is the alternative.