… and I can’t believe how awesome this book is even today!
After all these years, it was hugely inspiring to read once again about Alleria and Turalyon. A tale about faith, about doing right things. And the ending, oh, the ending… when they realize they won’t return home, Alleria sees how Turalyon’s eyes shine bright!!!
It wasn’t long ago when Warcraft still produced awesome stories - three years ago we had Before the Storm, with a lot of cool moments concerning Turalyon and Alonsus Faol… and the gathering, oh, the gathering…
Today we have that pile of crap called Shadows Rising. Madeleine Roux clearly lacks talent, and the story just reflects modern political trends of the woke-left. So we have Flynn&Shaw and a couple of non-traditional marriages - all for the sake of pleasing the supporters of certain political agenda. The narrative itself was bland and uninspiring and after all these months I remember nothing.
Which makes me wonder - why haven’t Blizzard invited the great writers of the old like Richard Knaak, Aaron Rosenberg and Jeff Grubb? They’re still active! Why Blizzard has to experiment with people like Roux that clearly lacks talent?!
I don’t know if there’s anything I want to look forward to on Blizzcon… with the exception of Burning Crusade release. I hope that it will be released as-is, with #nochanges, because if Blizzard can’t produce good stories anymore, they should at least preserve the past. Otherwise, can’t wait to play BC just because it had a great story that was true to Warcraft roots and not badly retconned.
this, BC had the worst story of all expacs, to the extent almost none had a clue why is this dude evil now, and why are we actuay here, do we fight demons or who is the real evil here.
was a compleate mess whit no red line what so ever.
And hell, I’d have been able to swallow even that if they didn’t then go on and basically say “AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!”.
Even if you didn’t even kill him in BT, it’s still somehow “your fault”. At which point I went “Screw you, Xe’ra”, and was actually happy to see Illidan blast her to bits.
The story forum hated Knaak back in the day. Knaak was mostly hated for pushing his pet characters to ridiculous heighs and generally pushing power levels to degrees that were hard to relate to. That was back when people still cared about that, I guess…
And there is still a looot of hostility towards Golden, who kinda became the main writer when Knaak was phased out. Golden brought the world of her novels closer to the game, kept it as grounded as it was, but modernized much of the morality and thinking of the characters within the world, and many feel that it doesn’t exactly mesh well with what came before… or with what other devs are still doing. It also came with a tighter connection between the books and the game, making it harder to ignore. I have no idea about most what Rhonin and Krassus did, because I didn’t read their books, and didn’t have to. But, if I didn’t know what Jaina and Anduin did in their novels I would be missing much more relevant context…
So while you may be drawing your line at Roux, Blizzard writers didn’t exactly have stellar reception here before her. I certainly think that Before the Storm was a steaming pile of horse manure, like most of the novels in this era of WoW. I haven’t read much of Knaak, but Wolfheart at least seemed like an improvement to that, I guess, although I wasn’t exactly impressed, either… I guess I would prefer the return of writers like that to the catlady squadron, but that’s not saying much at all. Writing quality was never great in WoW, sadly, and the longer it goes on, the more convoluted and harder to write it gets.
Great writers would have problems making good stories in the mess that we have now. And we don’t have great writers. Nor did we have any before. They never did better than “well enough”.
Which is odd, because there is a better version of this line in the game.
Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron
This small box has many shifting panels, moving hinges and hidden clasps. Yet no matter how you manipulate them, it seems impossible to actually open the box to reveal the contents within. It is also difficult to even try because the dark artifact constantly whispers to you, ‘It WAS your fault. It WAS your fault. It WAS your fault. It WAS your fault.’
So, they could do better. Oh well.
I got halfway through The Last Guardian. Early parts seem actually reasonably good so far. But who knows how the story wraps up.
It for sure did not have a single story flowing through the expansion. It had, however, good enough exposition, and some story bits still could be interesting.
Like ethereals using Dimensius to actually “become void”, instead of fighting it like some could expect. And given the presence of the void ethereals by the Legion time frame, they managed to find a way.
No overarching plot, just short side stories and exposition. Hit or miss side stories. IMO not a bad thing. WoW team is good at short ones I would say.
Well, I wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that none are “reasonably good” anyways. Just not great. And I think reasonably good writers are not good enough to salvage something good out of the dumpster fire that is 15 years of WoW lore.
“Short stories” like the ones we had in BC, turned characters like Zul’jin, Kael’thas or Vashj, into killable fodder dumped into dungeons and raids for the sake of the fashy effect that lasted the 10 second gasp players had when they discovered they’d be in these instances.
The only times Blizzard writers “shined”, was when they were less focused on tackling the main plot, and somehow managed to achieve the sweet-spot between Easter egg and open-ending side story, while checking on their world building development box.
Stories I like in the game, are typically short, self contained, etc. Now, there are exception to it, there are some characters / events that just have a bunch of hints but not many details and still interesting to me, but those are rare.
TBC had no “central” plotline unlike recent expansions.
TBC while is a disjointed mess has some interesting things that are relevant till the modern time. For example, IMO it has more polished and diverse view of draenei than the race had ever since. I would say what I saw in Legion related lore videos seems like a downgrade.
I can agree with that. And they still to this day IMO are better in the short stories, like those that could be sometimes seen in cinematics, than in overaching narrative.
For example, Bastion one introduced a new character, and many people could sympathise with Devos and were genuinely upset that she was not explored further but was just a dungeon boss.
Or how they managed to introduce N’Zoth and Azshara more or less for the first time in the game (well, not the first time, but the first time in focus), and do it in a way that was interesting, managed to show their personalities, why they might be “bad” or “good”.
Overall TBC story was not a careful one (but not without some occasionally good bits). And according to this video, which supposedly quotes the official blizzard magazine, up until Cataclysm (including it), the story part only took 5% of the time spent on quest development.
You gave 0 arguments against her writing. All you did was cry about gay people making a couple of cameos. “Political agenda” is kinda silly since these people make out around 15% of the world’s population.
Shadow’s Rising from a plot point was not very rich (the plot is provided by Blizzard). The author herself is definitely talented.
Madeline Roux herself wasn’t even behind FlynnShaw as a concept; and if Blizzard thought their commissioned author was “pushing an agenda” they didn’t agree with, they wouldn’t have hired her. The story forums in general needs to accept the fact Azeroth becoming a diverse place, and Blizzard is 100% in support of this. Their whining won’t cancel it out.
