Millenium: Can we expect Night’s Orea and the other short stories and books of the same ilk to ever be added to the game (in the form of books or cutscenes)? Overall, the history of the game is currently excellent but for many players it is difficult to grasp since major fragments of these can only be found in books not available in game (and paid).
Ion Hazzikostas: “We have tried to be ever more attentive to this subject over the last few years. I think back to a time, post-Warcraft III up to Cataclysm in particular, when a main character such as Cairne could die without this event being seen on the screen and the players not being informed directly; if you didn’t read the books then you never learned what had happened. We understand the interest in the story of our game, both through the game itself and through watching videos or reading related resources like Chronicles, but we really want to incorporate everything we do. can directly come into play, and this can take the form of a book found here or there exploring the motivations of a given character or teaching us more about his past in order to better understand who he is. However, these elements are not crucial to understanding the events taking place in-game. If you ever need to read a book outside of the game to understand a major quest or plot in the game that is World of Warcraft, then that would mean that we would have caused significant narrative disruption.”
To be fair I have to somewhat side with Ion on this one. The way of story telling and questing now is in the form of campaign quests, so all you have to do is the campaign to follow the story, and also reach the max level.
Personally I quite like the idea of campaign questing. Mainly because I used to just accept quests without reading them, I still do that, but I can also follow the story better.
That being said throughout earlier expansions, when leveling was a huge part of the game and it wasn’t just end game, I enjoyed that way of leveling too. Some questlines were interesting because they were their own stories within the side missions. You can still get side quests but they’re not as interesting as they’ve been in the past.
Also, my issue with the campaign questing is;
new players only get to play the BFA questline, and the heart of azeroth and azerite gear are useless whilst leveling. A sure sign that borrowed power is actually a bad thing. It makes that whole leveling experience kind of garbage. You can’t do anything with your heart of azeroth and you cant level it up with azerite when leveling quick enough. They should look into it so that by the time you’ve leveled 10-50, your Heart of Azeroth is at least level 50. This way new players actually get to experience its power, rather than getting to 50 and then going straight to Shadowlands to dump the Heart of Azeroth in the trash.
To be honest, looking ahead to the future, I want 10.0 to revamp Azeroth and for campaign questing to take place across Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. All the old expansions can go to Chromie time and be accessible through portals that Chromie and the her dragon gang control. This way, new players have a much larger world experience and have to travel and level through many zones.
I don’t think this would happen though, since leveling is an almost obsolete part of the game now and its all focused on end game. Regardless even at max level, if the story and rewards were good, I would continue and complete the campaign at max level anyway. I dunno… I’m tired and typed more than I expected to.
But it was crap even back then, I still remember people logging in at the start of Cata and asking “Wait when Cairne die and why is Magni a chandelier”, to this day there are even people wondering wtf actually happened, also there are people that don’t know that Garrosh did not intend to kill Cairne but had help from the Grimtotem that secretly poisoned his weapon. Just because people were more accepting of this stupidity back then doesn’t mean that this should be you template. Jesus Christ we really need a new game director.
I do hate that so much of the story happens outside of the game.
Even some bits that are portrayed in the game don’t match the books very well.
We will see if this changes going forward. I definitely get the impression they are holding back on the Sylvanas book release because we need to see something unfold in game first.
I am glad he at least acknowledges that they have done so multiple times so far. Now we shall see if they will stop doing that or not. I personally am not interested in any of their books, and I should not have to buy them in order to make sense of the important story moments.
His example with Cairne is perhaps one of the biggest offenders, as is the War Crimes novel.
In the past Blizzard used the books to fill out holes in the story that they couldn’t cover in the game. Usually to set up a new expansion or flesh out certain character development or introduce a story plot that later appears in the game.
And that was all fine if you read the books as they came out. But if you didn’t, then there were some holes in your story experience.
Today they are better at ensuring that the books have isolated stories that you don’t have to read. They’re nice to read, but not need to read. They add more depth and perspective to certain stories and characters, like Sylvanas and her doings. But if you just play through the game’s campaign quests, then you still get the story from start to finish.
They’ve basically learned that the game needs to be the theatrical release, and then the books can offer the director’s cut and the spin offs or companion guide or whatever.
I don’t see how people can fault Ion for that decision. If anything, given that lots of people have always lamented that they are forced to read the books to understand the story, this ought to be an answer that gets a thumbs-up from the community.
The game was much less story driven back then though. It was more local stories based around zones with an overall big bad mentioned now and then.
We were in Zangamarsh stopping Naga stealing all the water, many didn’t know why we were stopping them stealing the water. Some knew about Lady Vash and some other knew that Illidan was something to do with it.
But these days we on on Campaigns and all our questing (apart from some minor side quests) are all about the over all story.
Yet they break the story up into chunks (four different covenant stories) and carve off more chunks into books, some story driven and some being history / encyclopedia chronicles.
Back in TBC or Wrath there were books in game that you could click on and read up if you wanted to, so the lore was there to be had if you wanted it But you could just play the local stories if you wanted.
Yeah but my point is that big lore characters like faction leaders suddenly dying and/or disappearing was a huge deal even back then.
Well the problem with how SL dealt with it this is that the covenant stories were integral so you needed to have 4 characters to understand what was happening. Legion handles this in a much better way, each order hall had unique (minus the priest one that was pretty much copy pasted from the paladin one, NPCs even calling you Highlord as priest) but it didn’t impact the overall story and was just there for flavor. I had no freaking clue what was happening in De Other Side before I rolled a NF character. Also a big pet peeve of mine was that I rolled a Venthyr, Kyrian and Necrolord character at the start of SL and was doing those 3 stories simulteniously when they released, my Kyrian character got to experience the end of part 1 Necrolord story (where you assault the Hall of Constructs and kill the fat thing) 1 week before my Necrolord character, and the quests were exactly the same.
Like you said there were lore book or other ways to explain things in game (honestly I forgot how it was particularly when it comes to Zangarmash and Vashj) back then. While true many didn’t know, and probably many still don’t know but the resources are still in the game. The problem with the Cata examples is that there is no explanation (or at least while doing the content correlating to the expansion, Magni gets context in BfA). And this has been an issue since forever, Ion saying “well people didn’t mind it then” is A) false and B) should not be encouraged to continue this mistake and make even worse.
I don’t think “the story” part should be mandatory in any way in either of these games. I mean to require(lock you out of content unless completed) people to go trough be it quest chains or dungeons/raids you must have something exceptional that will blow peoples minds, which both games do not have. And every person plays games for different reasons, story is not always that reason.
They should look at putting the books in game, like in the early days of WoW where you come across books in Scarlet Monastery that you can read to learn the history of events.
They could turn this into another collection, a personal library.
Go round the world collecting chapters to complete books.
Like the Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest
I agree with this.
The different stories were good for alts. BFA with three zones and SL with four zones, almost all of which are needed to level are not great for repeated play.
