Lack of impact and consequences in Midnight's storytelling

Lore Story
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So, Midnight started out very strong.

The early story actually made me feel like we might lose for once, ..especially after the Voidspire ending.
And honestly, that’s something WoW desperately needs i.m.o. Every expansion ends in victory, and it’s becoming predictable.

We need a “revenge of the Sith” moment, where things go badly, and the consequences actually matter.

Take the Void beam hitting Quel’Danas.
This is supposed to be an incredibly powerful force… yet the city is completely untouched.
No destruction, no panic, no visible aftermath ..not even shattered windows.
(Most) People just go about their day like nothing happened.

That completely breaks immersion.

If something like that happened, we should see something like:
-parts of the city destroyed or in ruins
-citizens fleeing in panic
-a real sense of desperation and loss
-people leaving the city

Instead, we get none of that. The aftermath feels underdeveloped and weightless.

The same applies to the story progression.
After defeating L’ura, we’re left with almost no clarity about what Xal’atath actually achieved, what her plan is, or where the story is heading next.
It feels incomplete, like key narrative beats are missing.

For an expansion called “Midnight,” I expected a darker turning point.
But even when things look bad, we’re still effectively winning, and that removes all tension for me.

WoW needs to be willing to let players lose sometimes.
Not temporarily, not symbolically, but in a way that has lasting consequences.
Destroy cities. Kill or permanently change important characters.

Show the cost of war and magic.

Not everything needs to end in hope, unity, and a clean resolution.
A darker, more grounded story would make the victories feel meaningful again.

From me:
Midnight story start: 8/10
Midnight season 1 story so far: 2/10
(i can already predict the conclusion of the story of season 1, hence the low rating.)

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So basically, you want an ultimate defeat one month after the release of the expansion. Makes sense.

This has been confirmed by Metzen during the BlizzCon in 2023. We will lose at the end of Midnight.

Haven’t you noticed npcs queuing to leave the city via portals, being blocked on the docks due to a lack of boats and the crackling void effects that sent everyone in the city into a panic previously? We know that most civilians have already fled. We also know that the ones who stay are so afraid of what is going on that they turn to illegally smuggling fel infused mana wyrms and crystals into the city once more. Just do some side quests.

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There IS elements of these. But if you’re looking for extreme visual clarity, i’m afraid you won’t find much on that front.

I also went into this expecting a Fall-esque decimation, but I found surprising satisfaction and enjoyment in their side-quests. Sure, I’m not seeing the Voidstorm completely ripping apart Quel’danas or making a new dead scar or any of that delicious wonders I had hoped for, but there’s a lot to appreciate still from seeing the events of Tranquillien, the desperation turning to Fel again and even the horrors of the Lightbloom.

What I am WITH you on however is that, yet again, we have to contend with the fact that Xal’atath has once again escaped scot-free with us not having an idea of what she intends. Not even a clue.

It is why I am starting to think it is not Xal’atah being deceptive, but rather the protagonists, the hero (the player) and our allies being made out as quite dumb and unintelligent. (For god’s sake Arator, you are a paladin and you have a SHIELD. THROW IT AT HER. Vereesa, you have a BOW.)

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I try very hard to not care about Warcraft’s story, because I was never really a big fan of the actual story (the world is cool, the story past vanilla doesn’t do it justice), but at least old Warcraft’s “hype moments and aura farming” were decently set-up and justified and had narrative impact. The ol’ Wrathgate cutscene had more point to it than this. This is…pointless.

Like okay, I can buy the end of Voidspire. That’s fine. It actually does something with the characters, even if it’s the most basic use of them. It’s choppy and unrefined narratively, but generally - fine, it moves the story forward well enough. But the end of March on Quel’Danas? Absolute tripe. Spoilers ahead…

Sylvanas literally returned, shot one arrow, said some words trying to look cool, got hugged and went away again. Narrative impact? Zero. Literally half the cast could have done that while looking less stupid. Xal just leaves and nobody does anything, the present crisis is put on hold, hip hip hooray, Sylvanas lays down cryptic hints that can be twisted into just about anything later down the line.

Like the actual outcome of the scene is “Arator and Vereesa don’t die, Sylvanas gets told that despite everything, people back home still want her back” (do they? and here I thought redemption didn’t come cheap). Okay, I guess. Status quo maintained. Anything else you’d like for us see? Any actually important events? No? Okay.

Before you start with “buuuut it was set up beforehand with the prepatch” - no, it wasn’t. What was set up is “Sylvanas will show up later and will likely be important”, not “Sylvanas can just show up for two minutes of star power and to bail out the incompetent main character”.

I won’t do the new hip thing and say “did AI write this”, because this is on-brand from the times where AI wasn’t a commonplace tool. But seriously, people, please - try to make the story less about “character shows up for a star moment and leaves”. Don’t just write up situations which have to be solved via deus ex machina (or diabolus ex machina sometimes, like whatever Xally ends up doing most of the time). Try to think in terms that aren’t “look how cool that character was” (also they aren’t, because the tension isn’t there).

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What I don’t get is why Blizzard is so reluctant to have us loose?

Like… Why can’t we finish a raid by loosing anyways? Have a villain (not taking Xal’atath here) strike us down in a way that incapacitates/knocks us out without killing us before they accomplish their current goal and move on to the next stage?

We literally had our characters die in the Argus fight in Antorus only to be ressurected by Eonar to keep on fighting…

Like, where the hell is the creativity from the devs side?

We players CAN loose. We players SHOULD loose from time to time.

And not in the way as they did in the Arathi Questline with us getting some small hammer bonked over the head. That’s just ridicules and insulting.

Like, Bungie in Destiny 2 Vanilla managed to pull that off in a cutscene and a follow-up level (and was ridiculed by players for it). Yet Blizzard can’t be bothered to have some NPCs beat us from time to time or have us walk into a trap and NOT mess it up.

Taking the linked example… Why can’t a villain show up, go with us hand to hand in combat, then disable us with some stun or CC before kicking us off some cliff and returning to their business while being all like “Hah, you are so pathetic. I have better things to do than fighting ants beneath my shoe!”…

It’s literally that simple. Yet Blizzard can’t even do that.

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it does, yeah

a major capital city is directly under attack by the very same force that even the burning legion feared

only for very little of consequence to occur

just look at the sheer amount of direct and indirect consequences that came of the scourge’s invasion back in the ‘good old days’

so much political intrigue across multiple kingdoms, the forsaken coming to be, the blood elf and high elf split, blood elves being betrayed by the alliance and reluctantly joining the horde out of necessity and so on

we don’t even get a fraction of that

so roleplayers are struggling to find events to react to that feel satisfying and not overly saccharine

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I fail to see how it does. Losing now instead of at the end of the expansion as announced would make very little sense when we know that the conclusion is coming in The Last Titan. The content to be released from now until the next expansion comes out would be filled with even more stuff that a lot of (if not most) players would care less about than what is currently going on. You can’t look at the narrative structure of this game and seriously expect an ultimate defeat before the first patch is over. Be for real.

This happened in a different game with different writing and narrative structure.

Most of these events were told of outside of the game and the parts that were in WoW definitely took more than one patch to be laid out.

The desperation of the citizens who turn back to fel to be able to survive and fight back, other citizens leaving the city en masse, a big chunk of the city being left to rot in Murder Alley, Eversong Woods being invaded by the Twilight cult and the Sunwell ultimately being destroyed are overly saccharine events?

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Considering the only alternative to having no visible consequences in the world seems to be random destruction that sticks around for decades (like what we had in Silvermoon before, for example), done for cheap shock value (like Teldrassil and Dalaran)… Yeah, I prefer it this way, actually. Not because consequences wouldn’t be a part of a better dramatic plot, and more because they’d mess it up anyways, so I’d prefer the pretty places I like to stay intact, though.

Go ham on the character deaths and other consequences, for all I care, though, at this point there nothing of value to lose on that front. And if they put them all in Khadgar-wheelchairs to pretend they are serious, I can at least appreciate the memes.

On another note, as a roleplayer myself, I have never understood why people were so set on taking pains to adapt Blizzard’s horrible plot into their roleplay, instead of doing their own plots based on the absurd number of open threads Blizzard’s vague worldbuilding left them to play with…

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He never said that, don’t attribute to people something they never said.

He, and many others would like our Voidspire Defeat to fill meaningful, have meaningful consequences, and did feel like it lacked consequences.

Nonsense, Silvermoon is full of citizens, both rich and poor. If most civillians had fled, it would look much more militarized, with the soldiers outnumbering the civillians, which is not the case.

This happened in the same universe, in the game that is a direct precursor to WoW and which excellent story was a huge factor of WoW becoming so successful in the first place.

If Warcraft 3 story was written in the same manner, the current wow is written, it would’ve died in its infancy. A huge chunk current WoW players are still the ones who fell in love with it because of warcraft 3/ early WoW lore.

We hold up the current lore to the standards of the lore that made this franchise popular in the first place. And I think that’s just right.

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We don’t need some mass scale destruction to feel consequences, moreover Silvermoon didn’t fall so whatever markings they could put on it would be minor.
The Isle of Quel’danas on the other hand could’ve been transformed by the void devastation. It is not a part of Silvermoon.

Because any lore you create for your own characters will still be in the context of larger lore, that is written by Blizzard.

The lore of my 6 characters is still 80% linked to the lore of warcraft 3 - vanilla - tbc - WOTLK, because I really struggle to find inspiration to create my own good lore based on the slaggish writing of recent expansion. There are some good bits like Ghost of Koresh or some excellent side quests, but they’re often overshadowed by this low quality slop that dominates the main story.

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Sure, and as I said, if you are talking characters, go nuts, I don’t care. But a lot here was talking about the environment, and with that… yeah, looking back, I don’t trust them to fix it afterwards, and I’m happier if they refrain from it than I am when they mess it up. If there was an option to get both environmental consequences and a cleanup after, that’d be great, but I don’t see that coming.

Yeah, that’s my point though. You don’t have to tie your character story to current events at all, you just have to acknowledge that they are happening when asked. No one can stop you from having some adventures in Mogu ruins and Kaldorei burrows instead of Silvermoon, so there is no reason to be tied down by current developments at all. Just go somewhere else and do something you find better with the people you want to take there.

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Legitimately, some of the best stories i’ve had the pleasure to RP in made by minds more creative than myself were done in the middle of a ‘big bad about to smash u!’ expansion that had little or no connections to it at all.

In fact, i’ve been seeing players write some real cool plant-horror vibes out of the Lightbloom that makes me think back to the old horror/splatter-horror genre. I’m all in for it!

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In case of acknowledging the canon, that’s kind of a must if we don’t want RP to devolve into a whisperfest of getting stories straight because we each adopt our own version of the story that do not match

in case of adopting story, sometimes its wanting to tell the story but better, sometimes its just touching on the things that blizzard introduced but doing your own thing with it.
What I’m mostly hearing now is frustration that the darkwell got fixed almost immediatly to the point where we can’t really RP around it

pretend it hasn’t been restored yet is an option but not one thats viable if the world we RP in itself acknowledges that it happened in a short timespan, which it just has. We’re not even in the .0.5 patch and the story is just done.

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I didn’t contest that you have to take Blizzard’s story as canon (since you can’t convince your whole server just not to do it, I guess…), but I remain wholly baffled by people who dislike the story every bit as much as I do preferring to adapt it anyways, instead of just making their own stories within the setting. If they can do better than Blizzard, they don’t need to stick to them. And if they can’t… Yeah, then all is lost.

And the timing problems we are getting with the sunwell for example are by no means special or new. The times when you get a reasonable timeline where you have enough time to plan for the event and are able to play an RP adaptation that on the one hand isn’t overtaken by the lore and on the other hand, doesn’t leave your characters sitting on a cliffhanger that needs another patch to resolve are vanishingly rare. So if timing bothers you, that’s one more reason never to stick to the current Blizzard main plot.

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Oh yeah definately I just mean more to some extend you have to acknowledge what happens

We were in silvermoon and its kind of weird to pretend for a week that the voidstorm was trying to feed shadow to the sunwell like it was a baby bird that it wasn’t happening, so we did something acknowledging it happened and had hoped to use it as a background thing, for which its fine. Still did our own thing, but even then if the grander lines that push the story around get too painfull, at some point it starts hurting the desire to engage with the world in spite of its good parts, rather then because of it.

Its this weird case of zoom out and the board looks fine but zoom in and man do I hate these pieces on it.

True on one hand, but on the other hand, if you take a seasonal expansion that was seen as enjoyable storywise (lets say Legion even tho it had its own flaws);
Imagine if Legion’s patch .0.5 patch dropped and it was like well guys thats that, sargeras is done and dealt with. We have had threats span a whole expansion, imo that was why Legion worked so well compared to everything that followed, the legion was actually constantly around in some capacity looming and being threatening, why couldn’t we have had that with the darkwell?

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Oh, I’ll certainly agree that if you want to base your RP on the main plot of the season this one is especially rushed. But taking Legion as an example… I don’t remember Blizzard’s plot really adding much to the RP I had back then, either. Sure, the thematic plot villains in these 2 years were usually demons, but that’s basically it. And on the other hand, while the plot that Blizzard presented was pretty much ignored by most RPers I interacted with during WoD and SL, RP went on fine with what might even have been a larger variety of plot topics and genres (though with a regrettably shrinking general playerbase, that was also felt in RP, of course…).

But then I’ve always hated playing in new zones where Blizzard’s next lore update might mess with the RP I was having and was totally fine exploring countries that were already forgotten by their wirters since they weren’t as new and shiny. Blizzard’s writing team isn’t a GM I’d trust my RP to, so I don’t really appreciate it messing with my actually trusted GM’s plans, if that makes sense.

Not that it matters anymore, at this point I’m not getting into open WoW RP again either way, but well, I did care before…

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We did lose, it just doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels more like, as a certain elf would put it, a setback. The story bring so rushed definitely doesn’t help.

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