"It's a fantasy game!"

Community General Discussion
#1

“You’re playing this game with dragons and magic and you’re upset that they add [X] to it???”

I really don’t understand why the above rhetoric is thrown around so much.
If you guys think it’s so easy to write fantasy stuff under the base of “it’s just fantasy, you can add whatever you want”, why haven’t you given it a try and see how hard it is to maintain an audience that’s interested in your works of fiction?

It’s actually quite hard to write a fantasy setting that balances real life and fiction to make the person consuming said entertainment believe that it could be an actual world that exists.

This isn’t even aimed towards the recent hairstyles, it’s aimed towards the people in general that use the above excuse justifying the silly things they’ve been adding recently and how infantile the story setting has been getting lately.

And just because you got the idea that WoW has been depicted “cartoony”, while the gameplay can be a bit cartoony, the main setting of the franchise has always been serious.

An example below:

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#2

Every little detail matters.

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#3

That “always” is more like “sometimes”. Yeah, WoW has it’s serious moments, especially lorewise. But in game this seriousness always got focused on the main stary for the most part. On the other hand, the world itself, the sidequests etc were always full of a more laid back, humorous style, where the game just never took itself seriously. Even in Vanilla. There were tons of sidequests just for fun, just to have a laugh. For example the one where you had to collect silk cloth for a dwarf stuck in an outhouse… for reasons…

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#4

No one would give two hoots about WoW lore had it not been built into an MMO game.

#5

Warcraft 3 was immensively popular, what did you actually mean with this?

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#6

The “lore” is pretty much disregarded, what matters to players is the game activities, PvP, arenas, BGs, or M+, raids, and of course class combat mechanics.

No one, other than idle forum posters, really cares that Wrathion used his human form to stab Nzoth with a dagger and whether he should be in Dragon form.

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#7

“Always been serious”.

No it hasn’t. It flip flops between super serious and flippant and light for no discernable reason. That’s the main problem in my eyes.

You can’t be all light hearted and whimsical for years and then hold up one gritty video as proof that “its always been serious”.

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#8

You’re always welcome to show a whimsical cinematic pre Dragonflight expansion with this obtuse, obnoxious claims of yours.
I understand that in the gameplay and with some quests, it doesn’t have to be serious all the time, but point me towards the actual storyline where you find all these whimsical things you speak off?

I find it quite funny you speak of “one gritty video”. These are a series. Show how much you really know about the game besides parsing and running m+.

From Arthas stabbing his father, to Archimonde destroying Dalaran, from Grommash giving his life to kill Mannoroth, to Orcs invading the black temple and murdering Draenei, women and children included.

Please see the follow cinematic below and point to me where you see the whimsical style that you claim to be is Warcraft?

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#9

Warlords of Draenor to Ship on November 13, 2014

The age of the whimsical panda is over…

Chris Metzen, Blizzard Senior Vice President, Story and Franchise Development

Chris Metzen said it, not me. “Obtuse and obnoxious” indeed. Like I said, they flip flop between hardcore and whimsical. WoD, which all your links come from was an expansion to show that “rawr they were hardcore, fite me!!!” etc.

Sorry its not a cinematic, but the words of the of one of the leaders of story development.

Easy to zoom in on one bit to prove your point isn’t it. Shame it comes at the expense of the bigger picture.

#10

Then I apologise for throwing out a statement like that. But I’d love to know where it has been said.

I know that with Pandaria, they had made the game about Panda’s too much and they’re happy with the result of the Mogu, the Mantid and the Yaungol. I guess they knew it was too whimsical to last longer.

Fact is, MoP lost nearly 2 million subscribers before Throne of Thunder had launched. That’s a huge number, you can look these statistics up.

By the time SoO launched, it lost another 800k until it stabelised itself.

Notice the theme and the player’s reaction?

Funny that despite WoD being a really bad expansion in most people’s eyes, it had one succes, bringing back all the lost subscriber numbers MoP had lost.

These graphs are there, you can just google them.

So I think, they realised Pandaria was not the right setting, and brought back the drums of war, which is why I don’t understand why they made Dragonflight like this again…

#11

Have any examples?

Subjective. I think it’s fine.
It’s a bit more light-hearted, for sure, and I’m glad it is. The Shadowlands period was depressing and bleak. This makes for a nice counter balance.
But light-hearted isn’t infantile. Just to make that clear.

And no; you can’t just add ANYTHING to a fantasy game; of course not.
We need to look at everything on a case by case basis. Some things will fit in some people’s view and some won’t. In the end the devs decide. Not us.

#12

What a bunch of nonsense. If wow lore and the warcraft universe didn’t exist, the game wouldn’t have had any chance of surviving the last 4 years.
If everything goes down the drain, the warcraft franchise with its lore and world is the one thing keeping people subscribed

#13

WoW has sold several times as many copies as Warcraft 3, i think it’s safe to assume that when people mention “Warcraft”, they most likely mean WoW rather than the RTS-games, sure, the “Warcraft”-brand helped drive initial sales, but WoW went far beyond that over the years.

What keeps people playing WoW isn’t the story, the story has been the weak point of the whole franchise for years, people keep playing because the gameplay is better than the competition.

#14

I generally see this argument deployed when the X being added is quite minor and shouldn’t really cause a fuss but somehow it does.
Adding Tauren Rogues for example caused such a fuss. When upright cows walking around with swords has been accepted for many years.

#15

Did you think and stop for a second how Warcraft 3 would compare with Dragonflight?

No doubt that Warcraft 3 helped WoW become even more popular but look at the state of it now.

The whole childlike infantile setting of Dragonflight, characters like Sendrax or the Majordomo, hell just do the introduction on the Dragonflight Isles.

#16

Right; so only subjective things and not any factual examples. :white_check_mark:
I think those things are absolutely fine the way they are. They belong in WoW perfectly well.

We can agree to disagree of course. Which we should; because we’re never going to agree. We like different things.

#17

Warcraft is not just wow. Warcraft is warcraft (rts), wow, Hearthstone, soon the new mobile game, all the geek fandom about it, all the lore and so on. Some people read warcraft books/play on a rp server/etc but don’t actually play wow itself. Like it or not, but without its lore, and without its universe, wow would have completely died. People see Murlocs for example, hear the iconic murloc scream, and get nostalgic emotions. This is what makes wow survive I believe, and it’s also why games like league of legends, pokemon, etc. are still played by adults these days.

#18

I forgot to mention, the way the artstyle has become less gritty and grim, and more round. Which is cheaper to produce, but it feels like a mobile game.

I don’t think you should expect people to take this game serious when you have a big dragon turn into a little fox.
You could say Chromie is the same, but she’s not.
Chromie never had a role of authority. A role where respect is needed to command. Nobody, in their right mind, would expect to take a Vulpera seriously.

#19

My man, you know who you’re replying to right? This dude doesn’t even have the self control to stop race-changing every few days and tossing buckets of cash at Actvision in so doing. Everything is subjective to him until you say something he hard disagrees with. Then you’re suddenly ‘wrong’.

Save yourself the headache of trying to make people on the General Forum understand that WoW is just ‘Activision Online’ now. In fact! I’ll make a post in Story later where we can discuss the tone and style. That way you can talk about it with people who care. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#20

If only we were able to see the serious side ingame, i’m not going to buy like 15 books wich contains all the lore we missed ingame