Except… they’re not really wrong, are they? Let’s not pretend the writers first are some sort of literary experts who can manage to write novels that are very serious throughout and still can manage to carry something that’s even more serious through writing or whatever was meant.
They’re overall narrative writers using quest texts and visual media to convey the story, you’re not going to have book-level means of carrying through a serious story and WoW never really had serious stuff all the time anyway. I’d rather say the problem with Dragonflight’s very uppity and joyful unseriousness… is just par the course for Blizzard’s habit of overcorrecting past mistakes.
Shadowlands was bleak all the way through, everything was serious all the time and you could very well see that some things were far more serious than other things. And the end result was a completely boring, awful story that was horrible to experience and made you lose interest in the setting altogether. Any sort of whimsy just created a very weird tonal dissonance that you don’t even want to explore, because everything else is just bleak and your brain shuts down.
They’re correct in that the way WoW’s story gets told, you do need pauses between all the Serious Storytelling you’re getting to breathe, it’s the simplest way you can write a more dynamic story being told.
I’ll also say that past French interviews done with Blizzard, to my knowledge, have all been very questionable in answers as it seems to get parsed through Google Translate and context goes missing.
In fairness, they’re making a good point: a story needs to have rising and falling dramatic tension, it can’t just stay at high tension forever. Characters can’t spend their every waking moment in epic fights and dramatic speeches about the fate of the world, there need to be little moments too.
FFXIV understands this, and weaves in humor too, as well as little personal scenes fleshing out and humanizing its cast. So the point is valid, the problem is with the execution.
I just wish the WoW team knew when, where, how and why as to weaving in softer or harsher elements like humour or anxiety. Alas, they do not, and whilst their words may be educated their actions are not.
Edit: the fact they constantly overcorrect the narrative tone and story only goes to show how badly they manage to “practice what they preach”.
While I do agree Dragonflight has sort of taken it to the extreme with very chipper stuff being constantly told, and sometimes fails at telling the more serious stories (mostly because the questline ends, instead of exploring any of the emotions further)… most of the times when players complain about the story not being serious enough, they don’t want a serious story.
They just want an Americanizes Michael Bay story of blood and gore and explosions and wahoo look how Serious™ this is!
Which is how Serious Sam got made. The most Serious™ game, y’know. Except, in WoW’s players’ eyes it also has to have slurs and stuff, because that makes things even more Serious™.
I’m imagining these writers as kids, sitting infront of the TV on a saterday morning huffing glue while watching Bob Ross tell them about happy mistakes.
That’s a good point. WoW questlines are often hamstrung not just by their short length, but also by abruptly ending with you moving on to new adventures right after solving this problem. Simply having proper denouement would be an easy win that would improve the quality of the stories the WoW writers tell.
Cataclysm was especially bad about this. Oh, you’ve just had the epic confrontation in this subzone? Here’s the breadcrumb to the next bunch of quests, no time to rest, got to level up!
It’s a consequence of the story being optimized for the needs of raiders, who just see leveling as a nuisance and want to get to max level ASAP.
I didn’t even necessarily mean this, but moreso just that they’re telling a story and… it ends. Like, not even really any resolution. In Dragonflight, I’m mostly thinking of the Tuskarr rep story where you dealt with this one dude grieving over their pet’s death. And the questline ends with you just finding a completely new pet and… the questline ends. Nevermind that it was established earlier that you have pets for life, so I was expecting some sort of handholding the tuskarr dude through trying to move on and whatnot (as I had to handhold him through everything prior), and yet it just had a very abrupt ending.
I kinda wish it’d was easier to google for the reputation questlines, as right now I can’t even confirm what I said was 100% true, I’m mostly remembering the vibes and feeling like the questline didn’t really have an ending, as it just ended.
I dunno, I think Warcraft struck a pretty good balance between being fairly grounded and gritty when it needed to be but with lighter moments weaved in elsewhere.
It just dug itself a hole it couldn’t get out of because much like FFXIV, it had certain characters complicit in horrific atrocities and then lacked the stones to follow through by actually holding them accountable for them.
I’m - perhaps foolishly - being cautiously optimistic that after Dragonflight we might see a return to some of the older style of storytelling where a healthier balance is struck again.
IDK - I think Blizzard will overcorrect as always and like with response to MoP, will just end up making an even more brainless gore expansion. Except, MoP had quite plenty of gritty serious stuff as well and the playerbase simply decided to ignore all of it, so with Dragonflight being a flanderised version of MoP, we’ll get an even more flanderised version of WoD next expac.
I should stress that while I’ve been mentioning FFXIV as an example of superior storytelling, it’s not flawless. It cheats. It didn’t have all the lore mapped out from the start, and you can see the seams; while it doesn’t outright retcon anything, as far as I know, it does take lore hooks in directions that were probably not intended by the original writers.
Sometimes they throw in a timey-wimey ball to write characters you know and care about into the backstory of an expansion. Sometimes their technobabble works in convenient new ways to get you to new places. Sometimes foreshadowed story arcs are abruptly resolved off screen without your involvement.
Thing is, FFXIV cheats a little to accomplish something difficult (a high fantasy examination of the problem of evil, with serious treatment of topics like demonization, colonialism, and historical revisionism) while WoW cheats a lot to accomplish something easy (rule of cool action schlock). I still maintain that WoW has superior world feel, but vibes alone can only carry you ao far when it comes to making your audience care about the world you’ve built.
Only valid if the blue team then gets playable centaur and tuskar(?) to cover de facto ownershp of two zones in the dragon isles to match the shape of the broken isles horde situation.
WoW isn’t ESO, stop with the unreliable narrator and contradicting stories because the only one who will be hurt in confusion by this is the writer team since they can’t even remember stuff from two patches ago.
“In Legion, there was for example a Nathrezim, Lothraxion, who chose to join the Army of Light.”
Lmao, first Lothraxxian was forcifully Lightforged, then he was an agent of death purposely joining the Light to infiltrate that sphere of magic, and now he just chose to join the Light, lol
Get a grip on your story, you bunch of bricks.
I knew there was something with a Dream Portal and Nordrassil, I just wasn’t sure anymore, but fair enough! 1 world tree out of 5 has a Dream Portal😩
expansion. Except, MoP had quite plenty of gritty serious stuff as well and the playerbase simply decided to ignore all of it, so with Dragonflight being a flanderised version of MoP, we’ll get an even more flanderised version of WoD next expac.
answer 