I believe the problem we don’t share is that Shadowlands goes out of its way to retroactively change majority of established lore. It’s never been done well. Not whenever Blizzard changes small things in Chronicles nor when they change character’s interpretation mid way.
And Shadowlands is by far the widest scope of that. They changed entire lore to be Jailer’s Master Plan. Mauled multiple character lore to just suit that writing. And the pay off was… Not great.
SL straight up changed events that we have seen/read/played though in the past. How is that as you say “not meeting expectations”, when the criticism is entirely different. Like expectations about the future story is pretty much the exact opposite of “man I really dont like how you showed that event completely different from the previous time you showed me that event”.
It doesn’t contradict anything. Blizzard never showed the Titans as uber creators. They woke up and started to make stuff on their wim cuz they thought they know how to manage life and worlds. That is it. The First Ones explain the cosmic allignment perfectly since it predates all until the first mortals died a natural death. Hence afterlife.
I get you, thank you. To answer that question though …
My remark was in reply and a reflection if there’s not a difference between subjectively disagreeing with a story’s direction yet still respecting those decisions … to being slighted.
Which is something I can’t understand, hence why I said they lost me in the thread.
There are plenty of aspects of the Shadowlands expansion and its writing that I disagree with, I mention some of them in my first post in this thread regarding Zovaal.
But I still respect them. And mostly, through interviews and such, I at least know what they [the writers] claimed to be the motivations behind those narrative decisions.
I might still not agree with them.
And in this case I don’t, I have a dozen ideas for what I think could’ve been done better. However, I’m not out here angry [supposedly] or wishing something were to happen to those that were or are behind those decisions.
Do you just have 1 talking point? Who said anything about the Titans creatimg anything. I have given enough examples in this thread amd many many others how SL breaks pre-established lore and characters. If you are going to invent straw mans stay out of the conversation.
Yes, especially when he was crying in Nagrand literally profering the words: “life is not worth living”.
Anyways, I don’t see Shadowlands as a bad expansion lorewise.
People get lore and gameplay mixed up.
They hate cataclysm because of the one-year Dragon Soul flop, but it was a great expansion.
They hate shadowlands because PVE wasn’t at its prime but, again, it was a good expansion.
The worst expansions are still TBC and BFA for obvious reasons.
No, the worst expansion is still WOLK, because it sucked in both aspects of the game. Lore was just fanservice after fanservice for Warcraft III widows, and gameplay was irrelevant to the point that Heroics were done without tanks or healers, and you’d get a full T9 in the mailbox for running said heroics.
Dude you were claiming SL amongs those worst expansions prior to this week. During BfA you were frolicking out of your mouth how awesome it was that you got to burn the tree and killing Alliance until the other shoe dropped. You do not have opinions, you have whims and random thoughts.
How dare you have a memory? This is the internet.
The problem is really not that they took the story in a different direction than we thought they would, the problem is that they were not familiar with Warcraft and tried to do bad self-inserts instead, and then later on those self-inserts changed - after Blizzard expressly promised no more self-inserts, they then decided to proceed to do arguably even worse self-inserts based on sexuality.
Now, when this kind of thing happens there’s some negative feedback and the market sorts itself out.
In this case there’s a fairly competently game and world that’s put alongside it, making this a very disappointing piece which people nevertheless manage to ignore, and thus the market doesn’t correct for it very well, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing what’s going on.
I do not respect them. As humans, sure, but professionally I do not. They have taken money for mucking up someone else’s work, and they have even driven several of the original creators out of the company through harassment. The original creators have been very nice about how they’ve said this, with things like “I don’t want to work on someone else’s fantasy universe” from Samwise, or Metzen saying “it’s much more democratized and I can’t lead them”.
They have also directly flamed people on X, told large swathes of the fanbase to get lost, demeaned and degraded white men as a demographic, and so much more.
That is not worthy of respect.
And then they create stuff like 11.1.7. Like, I’m sorry, but I cringed so hard I nearly had to go to the hospital.
I also have another strongly held view, that getting fired does not mean the end of your career. Fire them gracefully, with good severance. There’s no need to be rude, but profession is profession.
I enjoyed Shadowlands. The oly good thing about TBC was blood elves. The lore was a lackluster disaster.
I see—thank you for your reply and clarification.
Good grief.
TBC ruined around a dozen good characters who could have had been integrated into the Horde without Thrall’s purity stick and never become villain batted.
BFA destroyed what was left of the Horde leadership and replaced it with random people nobody cares about. So Yes I will still be angry about this for the next 20 years.
Fair on KT, everyone has their own opinion on how that went down after all.
I will say tho, glad for you that you were able to enjoy Shadowlands on the note of it just not feeling like wow, but for people like me who wanted more warcraft in their warcraft it was torture.
Speaking as a roleplayer, nothing from that expansion is fun to use in roleplay, everything is just poison
If your character starts talking about SL lore, people will just call him mad IC. They’ll acknowledge that SL happened on the player level, but a lot of people also say but my character took no part and doesn’t know anything because it took away all the mysticism around the wow lore to the point where it just wouldn’t be fun to rp around it.
The story in part also is a reason why a portion of the playerbase may or may not buy, considering people having the game and paying a sub is tied to their revenue stream, absolutely heads should roll when the story is so abysmal it becomes a reason for people to stay away from the game even to this day.
As for the respect, I will respect them as human beings respect other human beings, just not the way they fulfill their professional roles. There’s just very little about shadowlands that is respectable, atleast from my perspective.
Maybe how much it doubled down on the worst ideas from both legion and BFA before it, that was impressive but more a game mechanic thing (crazy how it was a perfect storm)
I think thats true for you as well even if you don’t word it that way directly? or maybe I’m wrong in that case just tell me to shut up.
Speaking of SL writing for the most part
I dont even hold that against them, do I agree with it - no, but I believe I am pretty good at separathing the art from the artist. Its just that the art on its own is crap.
My biggest beef with SL’s lore is the “It was Dreadlords all along!”-reveal, it cheapens everything else, as it’s just a bunch of Dreadlords playing 4D chess with each other, under the leadership of a Season 1 raid boss who’s suddenly made more important because… he has good voice acting?
I can separate the art from the artist. But the Artist must also be able to separate themselves from the art they make. If they’re told to write Warcraft Story they should write Warcraft story not twist it into their own vision of how it should work. If they can’t do that you get a very low quality self Insert story.
The story belongs to Blizzard so it is not our job to say anything about it.