How is it even possible that wow lore currently is so bad?

Community General Discussion
41

I assume because they had no idea with how to continue after Legion. In Legion the players defeated the major threat behind everything to that day. And instead of building up another major threat over the course of 3-6 expansions, they decided to crunch it down to 2. And that is why BfA and SL are so less liked. They simply can’t tell a story that is suited for 3-6 expansions.

To make another Tolkien reference, it is like cutting 2/3 of the stuff of the first LotR book and replacing it with only the important parts of the 2nd and 3rd book of the Ring-saga.

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It’s also that Burning Legion influenced a lot of races, characters and world itself. It had an effect on the characters in the world.
Currently this shadowlands thing is told to be dangerous and need to be solved. But there’s really no story for characters, no internal conflict, nothing really influences characters with exceptions of very few major characters.

But is it really a world?
Such a small number of characters won’t even make a village.

I feel like people want to see more the factions and other interesting groups of people and not just very few leaders that are basically 2 or 3 copy pasted archetypes with story of “there is a baddie, he somehow very obviously deceived us, even though every player saw it coming, he’s impossible to beat and then we beat it easily”.

They even burnt down Teldrassil, but there is literally no story of what the afterefect is. That’s something that people ACTUALLY WOULD’VE wanted to experience and walk-through. Instead of this story.

As well as Lordaeon. People would be hugely interested in what happened after there. There are folks they recognize, places they recognize, world they recognize.
Instead we get story of some convoluted place with characters we don’t know, unrelatable story, few unrelatable characters, villians with no purpose.

There are no Night Elves, there is only Tyrande.
There are no Undeads, only Sylvanas…
etc.

I was actually happy about Demon Hunters having Altruis as an alternative to Illidan. Now he basically doesn’t exist either.

They fail to craft a world, or they don’t bother.
Because world consist of more than just few characters.
They even fail to introduce some interested plurality of opinions.

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43

That is a very good point. For example the refugees we see in Stormwind… Where will they settle down? How can they work on their Traumata? How will it change the overall view of them to Horde and their Sympathizers?

Exactly. Main problem there. They focus on the characters, not the world. At this point WoW SL can be compared to a very bad opera sitcom.

I think that is the source of the problem. They said “we focus on the characters first” internally probably, before creating the environment that forges their path. It is like dropping humans on a place where earth in space would be, but without an earth to actually carry them.

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44

Because its too difficult to put good story into script which programmers and animators have to emulate. Too different people trying to work together.

And ultimately shareholders dont care if the story is good or bad. They only want next expansion to be marketed and hyped that everybody believes that its is going to be amazing. Shadowlands fooled us all.

Look at Cyberpunk 2077. Nothing but marketing and fancy graphics. Everything else was a scam.

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The Jailer was just mad this whole time because he was forced to have his nips out. I feel for him.

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“currently”?

The premise for the last expansion was Sylvanas going bat :poop: insane and screaming “Azuriiiiite” and they made an expansion out of it.

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We don’t REALLY know that he’s bad tho, that’s the worst part. We were only told that he is by the devs and other eternals because he wanted to go against da wae of the first ones…

48

Magneto.
Pre Onslaught.

“Ahh Logan. My most visceral foe… At long last, our long battle, is OVER!”

Charles Xavier and Blue team strike force on Avalon look on in horror

“No Erik Don’t do this!”

Magneto proceeds to rip out Wolverine’s adamantium

“no more Erik, NO MORE! I HAVE WATCHED YOU DESTROY ENTIRE CITIES AND KILLED THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE! NO MORE! NEVER AGAIN WILL YOU TAKE A LIFE!”

Charles Xavier mind blasts magneto and wipes his mind

“Ahh Charles… I never thought… You… would.”

Collapses into a prone figure

“Charles… CHARLES! We must leave!”

“Yes Jean but everyone help Logan, his injuries are life threatening”

Collossus enters and picks up magneto

“I have secured you an escape. Leave before this station destroys itself.”

“Peter, come with us. Please”

“No Charles. I will stay. Where I failed my little snowflake, perhaps I will not fail Magneto. I too, paid a heavy price in this battle. Dos vidanya”

Xavier sighs and drops his head

“May you find peace Piotr Rasputin”.

Sorry but Magneto is the best villain I ever read, and that storyline Fatal Attractions still remains one of the best comic book stories I’ve ever read.

Should have been a movie the whole saga tbh.

49

I hope this is sarcasm, because that is not true at all.

50

It is 100% true. When we are talking about current Blizzard “team” even Hazzikostas didnt care or realised storytelling is distorted until it was pointed out for him.

They are so out of touch about the game its unreal. Every damn Blizzard dev team member should fully watch this playthrough of timeless legend so they would have a slight clue what good, engaging and COHERRENT story telling means.

What they have been doing with WoW since beginning is unbelievably terrible.

51

I mean, that is basically a common problem when writing stories. You, the author, know the story already. But a stranger does not. Sometimes people forget others should read over their stuff first before publishing it. Seems like that was the case with Shadowlands and Blizzard the last 2 years.

52

Some of the individual patches would have been base material for whole expansions with expanded zones and lore (Nazjatar, Nyalotha, Argus mostly coming to mind). That could have kept the game going for at least another decade instead of releasing them as single zones (or even just a raid) that anybody remotely caring about the WOW lore would go “Is this it? Whats going on?”

But then its another matter if the expanded lore against such stuff is about helping a faction of native rapana earn their freedom vs a threat from rival giant frogs that we need to sort by undergoing a rep grind in the course of 12 weeks.

53

What I see as the problem is that there was no cutscene about Kairos opening portal for Garrosh for AU Draenor. There was no proper backstory for Kairos in game. Then again we should have seen Sylvanas jumping to her death from ICC and meeting this mysterious Jailer. Jailer should also have way more backstory. Sylvansa died third time in Silverpine questline. They can still redeem this in 9.2 but it kinda comes too late in terms of storytelling. Sylvanas has had too much stage time already imho.

54

Just got to wait for the delayed Sylvanas book to understand what is going on because Blizzard can’t be arsed to put it in the game and want more $$$.

55

The problem with baldy isn’t he’s not a bad villain but a wasted villain.
He just came out of nowhere, and it turns out everything possibly bad and evil and whatever, was totally him all along.
And we’re expected to act like “WOOOOW SUCH A TWIST!”
When it pretty much just undermines the stakes of most of warcraft. Doesn’t really matter if you die now, Souls can be split in two to give excuses for anything bad, afterlife and religion of most the game is now null and void, any plot hole can just be tossed at baldy and given the badge of “MASTER PLAN!”
If there would have been legitimate build up to him, or some in game stuff related to finding chains of the jailor, hearing bout him in past expansions maybe have a cult worshiping the maw or something.
Hell there might have been, in a book somewhere. But I don’t feel like I should buy a book to understand the main lore of the game.

In reality it’s like that Flash meme.
"IT WAS MEEE ALL ALONG HERO!"

56

That I can agree on. Their story telling was often a cluster****.

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