I remember the day how these forums used to be, full with life and speculation.
Now look at it, it’s almost a graveyard. 8 active topics, the rest buried because there is no engagement for over a month.
This used to be the 2nd most active subforum, below general chat.
Turns out that no one really loves to talk about lore anymore.
The people still playing have no interest in it. They just want their next twitch drop and are looking forward to spend their precious tendies. Tendies! Even the name sounds like some chicken nuggies you give to a young child.
Safe to say, it is over, and I’m glad that this subforum didn’t get hijacked by tumblr activists like the US one.
Yeah, one reason was a certain German bloodelve who spam here and hijacked topics and spam also threi his nonsense that people lose the motivation since every topic was derailed by him and people loses motivation to argue agienst a wall.
Belive me, i know what im talking of since we got the same situation in the german forum- which has lose interest and became relatively quite.
Another (big) reason was SL, which was a large mess storywise and also maby retcon occurs with external mwdie like the chronicles and exploring azeroth
WoW has been riding on the Warcraft 3 plot and characters and the faction war for most of its runtime. That’s gone, and the game never managed to find a replacement people actually care for. They attempted to build up quite a bit between vanilla and now, but with their haphazard approach to continuity and retcons, none of that stood the test of time.
What is left is vague, unrelatable, or has little similarities with what people found interesting about the Warcraft setting. Trying to sell me on the “great cosmic powers” conflict, or Azeroth as some super MacGuffin, will never get me invested, nor will Anduin, or the edgy elf ladies of the month. And settling on “simple and inoffensive” as the tone going forward won’t get anything but my eyes rolling.
Faction conflict and the “rule of cool” are over, now we get NPCs with four dialogue options telling us how they feel, not much to discuss when everything is safe and inoffensive, and all “good guy” npcs are friends with each other.
If they did another expansion with the premise of BfA (and hopefuly not screw it up again) I guarantee you we would see a flare up in activity once more.
The only ones to blame for the disappearance of lore fans and the declining activity on the lore forums are Blizzard writers themselves. I used to be a fan of lore and made good friends while debating and speculating on the French lore forum a few years ago, then the retcons in game and in external supports sucked out the fun and interest we all had in it. A lot of us gave up during SL. By that point, it was very clear that the lore of the WoW universe was interchangeable and characters were plot devices that didn’t deserve any long term emotional investment.
I had to stop caring about the lore as much as I used to back to early SL days to be able to enjoy the game again. I was never the type to see Metzen as a lore messiah so his return didn’t generate any particular hype for me and while I don’t hate the story so far, I feel like the writing is slightly too childish for people to care about it the way they used to.
I think there’s simply been too much of a shift in the tone and aesthetics of the setting. I won’t pretend as if the game’s writing was ever high art though it did have its memorable moments and interesting, charismatic and cool characters.
The faction war and racial tensions brought a lot of meat to the table and made role-play very memorable and compelling. Bereft of that, the setting has become rather generic - and even the art style seems to have been eroded away on many fronts.
Because the lore is dull and boring.
People don’t get hyped for the lore.
WoW turned to one day of the week game where majority log on for the reset and leave.
As someone who used to visit the story forums daily and read everything posted with great interest, I think somewhere along the lines, be it in the end of BFA or through SL (though I think for me it’d started since the end of Legion), retcons upon retcons, significant changes in faction/race identity, as well as what felt somewhat lazy writing in the lore that didn’t take into account the world that had existed in the game the years before made me fall out of love with following the lore as I used to.
I mean… case in point, we’re getting a faction war patch, even if it’s a minor one, and I didn’t really have to look at anything to be convinced that the whole depth would be “racism is bad”. Looking into it only confirmed it. Whatever would I have to say about that? Yeah, racism is bad. That’s not epic, that’s not aspirational, that’s not fun, that’s not an interesting exploration of the human condition. That’s not a fricking story. It’s probably too obvious for a bumper sticker.
But that’s the only thing they have to say about the faction conflict that was the only genuine human conflict the player races were emotionally engaged in. I always thought the faction-conflict was too flat and simplistic to be interesting. Well, compared to “racism is bad” it’s high art.
If you create post on general forums about some chill, fun topic you will get 10 maybe 30 replies before it will sink to the bottom. Meanwhile if you make a controversial troll post or whine about some new content replies will go in houndres.
Back in BfA or Shadowlands there was higher activity on this sub forum but lots of it was Alliance, Horde or Sylvanas fans fighting each other. That constant bickering drew players here and once here they would hop in to other topics to for example join speculating what new zones we will get. They would also often bring their unending back and forth post duels there aswell.
Modern lore doesnt really feature much for people to fight over. There either isn’t enough controversy in it to spark forum outrage or lore events people could be invested in.
The problem is that many pseudo-modern writers don’t wanna separate fiction from reality, and always feel like every fantasy world needs to be like their idealistic world view of what should be. (almost) Everyone knows, that racism, misoginy, misandry, etc. are obviously bad, but that doesn’t mean that an Orc can’t resent a Nightelf in a fictional story, or vice-versa. In general, it doesn’t mean that bad/evil things can’t exist in a fantasy setting. I think overly idealistic fantasy worlds are very boring and predictable. Look at Elder Scrolls for example, where many very cruel concepts are present. That doesn’t mean Bethesda endorsed these, it’s just how the world of Tamriel used to be, and this roughness makes it also feel more immersive. Starfield on the other hand has the same problem that Retail wow has at the moment, where the story feels monotone. I think after BFA was over, Blizzard kind of stopped forging interesting fantasy worlds. The story since Shadowlands was overly sanitized and felt fake in many ways.
Without evil, there is no good, and vice-versa. It’s relative. In a fantasy world like 2025-Azeroth a Paladin has the vibe of a light magic combat mage. They are completely carried by how cool they look, but otherwise shallow. And Warlocks aren’t really wicked anymore, they just draw power from a cosmological force. There is nothing that a Paladin can really be righteous in, as everyone is kind of behaving nice, or just end up messing with some cosmology or primordial force that tricks/consumes them.
I think a lot of the earlier stories by Metzen were very powerful. For example - despite hatred between Humans and Orcs, Eitrigg and Tirion became brothers in arms. The whole Saga of Arthas until Wotlk was obviously legendary.
Was a long paragraph, but I feel very strongly about this topic, and I hope that in the future, fantasy worlds can explore more concepts freely without mentally babysitting the player’s moral compass.
Short: I hope “sapere aude” becomes a pillar of writing in the future.
Though I more or less sort of agree with the overall sentiment, that statement is just not true, otherwise the world wouldn’t be devolving into what it is, nor would there be bigotry in it.
But yes, I’ll agree with the fact that overall it feels like nuance is being deleted cause, though original goals are ticked, there’s nothing to replace them. WoW could really benefit from a rapid time skip (far more than three years) with a new cast and new problems for the races of Azeroth, as well as a faction reform to keep things interesting. But for logistical reasons, that’s never going to happen.
I think the players just need to be given more trust to understand ethics themselves. I think, if some don’t, it’s not Blizzard’s fault that some people lack education and/or common sense. Though I believe the majority of people know moral good vs evil as a gut feeling, and can be trusted to mentally process a rough, non-idealistic fantasy world.
Well after The world soul saga I expect there to be some sort of soft-reset in the story. This can be achieved for example via an armageddon event, or via a very aggressive change of scale, similar to how the Lich King was suddenly a small fish in the context of the shadowlands.
I hope you don’t mean by that some sort of dark and gritty version of WoW, which would be more like the Witcher or Games of Thrones?
I like WarCraft the way it is - overstylized cartoony heroic high fantasy.
Vanilla was nice too, though I only got to see it through Classic. Granted, I didn’t like the gameplay at all, but the zones’ stories and settings were gorgeous. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the Plaguelands and seeing what they were like before Cata. I’d love to see something like that return.
Welcome to world of huxboxcraft, where all the realistic pragmatism and prejudice has been filed off and replaced with boring and inoffensive storytelling based on fluffy pie in the sky idealism and evil has to be a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
Hm, considering that they obviously don’t want to cater to the Blood and Thunder crowd anymore, maybe saturday morning cartoons wouldn’t be the worst thing they could try to emulate. If they want a hugbox, they could try worse stuff to make it a good one. It’s certainly not what I signed up for, but it is something one could like. Give me a team of likeable characters that don’t get switched out every patch, and focus on their interactions in different kinds of difficult situations that focus on elements from the backstory of one or two characters per storyline. Create a villains gallery that might not be made up of especially deep characters, but where everyone has their own style and mannerisms. Let them survive facing us, to plot another day, and maybe team up with others to create new dangers for the player’s team, and fun interactions on the side of the uneasy villain alliances.
At the moment they aren’t doing any of that, though. They have pretty much dismantled what Warcraft was, but if they have settled on a tone and style for their story, I couldn’t describe it, and I don’t think it’s working.
As others have stated, there’s nothing to discuss anymore, nothing to investigate, nothing to feel invested about. There is no edge, no hook to grab with the story and lore. It was nice at the start of TWW, but now it’s kinda too nice, y’know, that it became sterile. Got the impression writers don’t take nothing seriously at all. So why should I? Hence, nothing to discuss really.