never going to get over how they retroactively made it worse by tying Sylvanas’ stupid plans to the Jailer.
Speaking of, I didn’t read it, but the non-Shadowlands tie-in stuff in the Sylv novel is meant to be pretty okay too. Damning with faint praise I guess.
Anyway if you wanna read a WoW novel you should pick up The Last Guardian or the Vol’jin book.
Seems to be some marked point in time where her novel quality largely dipped considering Lord of the Clans and Arthas came out in 01 and 09 respectively. Whether that’s down to her or Blizzard interference you can only speculate really.
I’m just forever seething that there’s a half-finished Kael novella that will never see the light of day.
If I remember correctly we learn in questing that the early earthen started to deviate from their purpose and a watcher named Dorn was placed to keep them in line, he ruled with an iron fist and in the end the earthen rebelled. Another watcher then arrived and placed the edicts there to prevent any further uprising.
Respectfully, I disagree. You need both in the story, and both make up for the worldbuilding. I’ve seen Golden’s influence as more character-driven and introspective, where you ideally get to see and hear a specific character’s thoughts and so on. I think DF as an expansion is somewhat special that it’s the first time -ever- for WoW where the entire Azeroth collectively had a moment to heal together, after years on years of world-ending calamities. I’m not sure if we would’ve had that without Golden (and/or maybe Danuser, idk where his influence stopped). I don’t have much faith in people like Metzen or previous writers to have done the same.
Elegy by Golden is also fantastic, by the by.
The problem is that we didn’t have both. The world is still stuck in Cata/BfA/its own expansion limbo, and the timeskip brought absolutely nothing new despite all the talks about renewal. The only real update on the world we had since its introduction was the Exploring Pandaria book, and it has no reflection in-game. We could have avoided the timeskip overall, and absolutely nothing would’ve changed aside from the two elves getting married off-screen.
Yes, in terms of zone design and so on, nothing has changed, but DF did bring with itself a ton of stories about healing and renewal, including stories for many Azeroth races.
As I said, you need both. WoW is lacking in worldbuilding, and with Golden gone will it also lack character-driven/focused stories next, too?
My impression is that Golden is a good character writer, but without much passion for the kind of imagination-gripping ideas that make fantasy, well, fantasy.
Metzen, on the other hand, comes up with imagination-gripping ideas all the time — the Warcraft setting as we know it is largely his creation — but doesn’t have much care or patience for proper characterization.
Golden’s best-regarded books are Lord of the Clans and Arthas. What do they have in common? They’re both based on games with vivid characters in them: Warcraft Adventures and Warcraft 3, respectively. Golden took what worked, threw away what didn’t, made the narratives consistent and made the characters actually feel like real people with inner worlds.
And sure, Lord of the Clans was a somber and serious book adapted from the basic plot of a really silly unreleased game, but the basic plot and the basic worldbuilding were already there. Golden put meat on that skeleton. Where she stumbles is crafting skeletons of her own.
Golden’s books also had the problem that the people writing the games wouldn’t read them and would just override her characterizations, resulting in things like post-MoP Jaina flip-flopping between “slowly recovering PTSD victim” and “Daelin Jr” depending on the writer.
In an ideal world, Metzen and Golden would have made a good team. Metzen would be responsible for worldbuilding and very broad character concepts, and Golden for fleshing out the characters and making sure the setting kept its feet on the ground.
But alas.
I feel the fact we didn’t have an expansion dedicated to the timeframe of the timeskip is indication enough about the competence of the writing team.
Not that I would have expected them to write something grandiose if we had an expansion set during peace time (considering what we keep getting otherwise, which is Azeroth entering DEFCON 1 every 2 years), but it would have been abundant with world building as we are regulated to dealing with local threats and the aftermath/cleanup of the Legion and Scourge, as well as whatever animosity still exists between the Alliance and the Horde and their subfactions.
Instead we got nada.
What exactly do you mean by “both”? I only mentioned only the short story she wrote, which was meant to be our bridge for the timeskip, but instead was all about wedding of Lor´themar and Thalyssra. I genuinely don´t understand what you´re saying.
We however didn´t do much healing, we instead went to Dragon Isles to face the world-ending calamity of Primalists (whose goal is to remake Azeroth) and Fyrakk (who just wanted to burn it all), sprinkled in with dealing with the threat of Infinite Dragonflight in a minor patch.
Besides night elves, we didn´t get much renewal at all.
How is this her fault when Blizzard did not want to make more stories? Should characters themselves be put into a limbo for some general telling of what happened instead?
Did we play the same expansion?
That’s a good question, because aside from nelves getting a new tree and the orc racial armor questline there really isn’t much to tell about renewal. Or at all, with that we got the motivation of the Primalists clear only now, and only about night elf ones.
That’s a good question, because a majority of the complaints in this thread about DF has been it’s overbearing renewal and healing narrative, building back etcetera. Night Elves, Forsaken, Gilneas, Orcs, the dragonflights, Dragon Isles natives, holiday event updates, (arguably TWW cinematic), and probably more that I’m forgetting (already forgot to add in Gilneas)…
Sorry, but to say there isn’t much about renewal is absurd. This has been the major storytelling complaint of Dragonflight, that everything is saccharine and Disney-fied storytelling about renewal. And a lot of those stories are character-driven, from minor questline NPCs talking about their own renewal and healing to larger faction-focused e.g. Night Elves.
I disagree!
The themes of healing, renewal, and new beginnings come up a lot of the time in Dragonflight. Patching up broken relationships, repopulating the dragonflights, resettling the Dragon Isles, restoring old oaths and bonds, remembering past tragedies and trying to move on, finding out who you are in a changed world, reclaiming and rebuilding your lost homeland, passing the mantle to the next generation.
It’s underscored as early as the opening cinematic, when the Isles awaken and the water streams along the aqueducts as the dragons return.
The two races that now count oblivion a blessing stripped from them.
We kinda talk about the world in general and races we play as, first and foremost?.. And besides, what’s there to renew with the locals that aren’t dragonkin? The centaur that simply need to get rid of a bunch of power-hungry jerks or tuskarr that do nothing but live their lives and get abused in the process? Even the draconid rebellion was simply about Alex going “me sorry, let’s keep it up as it was”. And… there’s nothing else.
Despite dealing with Fyrakk and the primalist and their destructive nature, the whole vibe and air of Dragonflight felt very serene to me. And it did feel like that was the point of the expansion. Focus on healing, growth, tranquility and peace.
Renewal has a place but it can’t be the only flavor we have to contend with. While DF tackled important events of the past and given them the appropriate weight in some places IE such as the Dragonmaw Clan, The red dragon who tells stories whose name I forgot and such… In other areas it is lacking or just plain weird on how it plays out such as Chrome or the Avengers assemble moment, Nozdormu’s rather lax attitude, the Forsaken involvement in Gilneas retaking…
These are awkwardly done, not outright bad but definitely could have used some more work, refinement and attention.
Stop moving the goalposts now. The major themes of Dragonflight was renewal, which was also underpinned with the story. Should there have been more to bridge the timeskip? Obviously. Hence my entire comment about needing both. Dragonflight as an expansion has been very character-focused, with a lot of stories being told through specific quest NPCs talking about their own life and renewal and so on.
If you ask this:
You did not play the expansion, sorry not sorry. Go make a character at level 60 and go through the quests again. Spoiler - there are also non-natives like Orcs talking about their own life and whatnot, like the Dragonmaw in Ruby Life Pools.
That was not the argument and not something I disagree with.
We talk about different things, it seems. I keep telling that the world of Warcraft has experienced far too little renewal to call it a major theme, and what was done with the singular characters often was… less than good. True, there are several personal stories that are genuinely good, but it’s not something we can build RP out of. For that we need more global changes, or at least them being mentioned, but aside from the orc questline, Amirdrassil and the mess Gilneas reclamation turned out to be we still have nothing that could truly be called a new page to write from.
I still don´t understand what you meant in your original response though (and we don´t know the context, for all we know, Golden was the one who came up with the idea of wedding being the timeskip story).
Apparently we didn´t, because:
were part of side story in 10.2, with reclaiming of Lordaeron being part of 9.2.5.
were absent from the expansion´s major plotline. I don´t count heritage armor questline as some big theme of Dragonflight.
got 5 quests in 10.2.5.
And how is bunch of Dragon Isles content, part of entire Azeroth having a moment to heal together?
These themes are however focused on Dragon Isles, with only 10.2.5 moving them back to Azeroth in form of major focus (and even then it´s done quite badly when it comes to Gilneas storyline).
My comment about not getting much renewal with the exception of night elves was done in context of Nerathion´s comment about entire Azeroth getting a moment to heal together. But we didn´t really get that because the content was all about these new islands popping up while the homeland is still left in Cata/BfA limbo.
“Deals hole-y damage.”
Ah, I see the person who named Dark Wispers still works at Blizzard.