A dog owner hugged me when I was a kid I was sitting on her lap, then her dog got jealous and bit my leg. Since then I think dogs are jealous beings and try to avoid them outside. Specifically before going to some widely known dog walk places I feel obligated to wear shoes instead of slippers. The reason behind is if a dog attacks me so that I can fight or flight.
According to their logic I must declare war on all dogs and dog owners.
I am still against specifically pitbulls, they must be eredicated from earth. There are a few more dangerous dog types but pitbulls are the worst by far.
Shadowlands wasn’t even remotely dark in my opinion.
Just because many beings die in a story setting doesn’t make the tone of the story dark.
The only dark stories we really have seen in SL was with the Kyrian Covenant when we re-visitied Uthers Warcraft III memories, Sylvanas/Uther Cutscene and the Covenant trailers before launch. It could be argued that the imprisonment of the Runecarver Smith (already forgot his name due to the boring lore back then) counts partially too because we actually see him being chained up and being tormented in the past.
I wouldn’t even count the Sin stone stories of Revendreth as “dark”, more like “borderline dark”.
The only real dark themed raid was Sanctum of Domination in that expansion. All others could have fit in every regular medieval/fantasy RPG.
Torghast perhaps was the only real dark activity that did fill players with a bit of dread, before they removed the chasing boss enemy when your time runs out (granted, it was a BS mechanic but it contributed A LOT to the immersion).
It’s a fantasy world. Maybe dragons can just lay eggs spontaneously without mating? Maybe dragons just needed to have mated once in their life and then they keep laying eggs. You can very easily just make up a story in the end, and when I can do it so easily, the writers there can do it 100 times better than me
Yet it felt so boring and bland and disconnect from us players. I blame partially the patch cadence for that because it took so long for story to continue, especially with the stupid covenant grinding for story quests. If you tell a story and it takes ages for it to continue, by the time it does people have stopped caring.
What exactly you classify as “dark” for wow? Because almost every single detail about SL is edgy as heck, maldraxxus is eternal slaughterhouse, revendreth is factory where main product is suffering, bastion will remove your identity and make you an obedient robot, ardenweald is very somber.
Maw is literally a hell
For me following points must be met to count as dark:
The story must be told including the player emotionally (not as some sorts of environment story)
The story must have (as typical for good stories) introduction, build-up, finale and conclusion.
The story has to take time to develop, not become irrelevant after a few quests.
If including main story characters, the quest should be 100% narrative driven, not “do your usual MMO type gameplay” stuff (aka, go kill 20 boars because NPC told NPC fixes a problem off-screen).
Dark themes need to include personal drama, not just (f.e.) dystopian “a lot of souls get send to the maw”. There needs to be an actual connection to the Player and the NPCs.
Dark themes need to include fitting music in narrative and combat, not just pre-rendered cutscenes.
Cutscenes need to be live-rendered WITH the player character implemented WITHOUT looking wonky, because that breaks the immersion of the player actually being there in the story.
Narratives need to contain disturbing ideas that make players actually terrified or affected by the thoughts (like said quest in the topic above)
That’s a few lines of story being perfectly voice acted, making a huge difference in your percepetions of the enemy race because of what is said. Not because of the environment. Or what you see. Yet WoW manages to fail that, because like 90% of all quests ARE TEXT ONLY.
Another Example from Elder Scrolls Online (a game fully voice acted). I played a region side quest once that had me helping a civilian that was exploited by some foreign guards (in almost the same way as the quest in this topic) but instead of being forced directly, the guards used a poison to poison the NPCs mother and would threaten to keep the antidot from her unless her daugther would “please their men”.
That is dark story for me. Outright disgusting, criminal acts that makes you learn to hate NPCs.
Take the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 for example and compare it to Kang from Ant Man.
Kang in Ant Man is always told to the audience as the “big great evil” yet he gets easily pushed over by some Ants, Ant Man and the Wasp AND his untrained daughter. In the entire movie barely anything bad is shown. All is explained in this “clean, words based story” but the bloody details are all left out. As result, you only find Kang at best cool, but not necessarily evil.
In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 on the other hand we discover Rocket Racoons Backstory with the High Evolutionary (a person that plays god via animal experiments and has a big god complex) as part of his Coma while alongside seeing the other GotG doing their best and worst to save him from dying. You see in that movie the Villain (High Evolutionary) actually doing really bad things like animal torture, unethical genetic manipulation and even outright murder, alongside with seeing blood and gore at some points. The movie actively makes you hate the Villain (not the actor ofc).
I hope you get the point with this comparison. Both movies are from the same studio. The one is too children friendly and fails to build a connection with the audience. The other goes all out and forms a very strong, emotional bond with all the characters, while still having the silly moments in it.
All nice ideas, horribly executed due to the Covenant designs as factions. I only played the Kyrian stories and the Maw ones due to the faction limitations. And once they removed them, the interest to even play them was long gone. Hence why I said above:
Agreed. An average idea can still be solid with perfect execution. A dark story with horrible execution will still be
WoW has better execution than Destiny. Destiny had better writing at the moment of SL.
The entirety of Witch Queen was more captivating than the entire SL combined (and WQ was only half as long as SL in duration).
Again, if it takes for a story 6 months to continue, by the time it does people have stopped caring.
There are always those that complain for the sake of complaining. It is one thing to complain about something because it is (factual) bad. It’s something else to complain about something that isn’t an issue other than failed false expectations.
That was the point. To make an example that makes you realize that even Marvel can sometimes manage better entertainment in their production than WoW does these days.
Well, Shadowlands was dark-oriented (not really dark imo tho) but badly written/executed. Dragonflight is lighthearted themed and good enough written/executed.
My point being, we need dark story themes again which are well written and executed. That is my point and the only thing I advocate here for.
1917 is also a far better movie than marvel Eternals.
It goes both sides, complaints at that moment were “it doesn’t feels like mmo and i feel too special”, i don’t agree with this people and i hate memes about ashbringer but here we are.
GotG 3 is a good written movie, marvel is not a term for low quality they have good movies, but they do have undeperforming villains most of the time too.
we don’t have abundance of dark themes for 2 patches (despite of sarkareth story being quite dark and aberrus connected to void and live experiments lmao) and y’all acting like we dont have them for 10 years
Well, to be fair… Those 2 patches are in summary 6 months long now with lots of narrative holes.
For reference, in Destiny 2 thats 2 entire story seasons with individual content and story setting.
What I think WoWs problem is, that it takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to continue the story alongside the gameplay content. They need to make more filler story content in established zones independently during seasons so that they can kick out 1 major gameplay or 2 every season and 4-6 smaller story patches within a single season that don’t have extra rewards tied to them. Just for pushing the narrative further.
That way they can also fix their lack of build-up in some stories for the future.
Aside of that, the story of Aberrus is ok. Just not “top notch non plus ultra” as most veteran people expected once Blizzard to deliver.
That “top notch non plus ultra” story we should get is what people would have expected from Blizzard a bit more than a decade ago when they were still Blizzard, the most prestigious AAA studio in the industry. Not Activision-Blizzard, the greedy company
D2 seasons with little exceptions is “story beat introduced at the start of the season>grind repetitve “new” activity for 3 months in a row while recieving small story progression every week in the form of little dialogue and/or monologue at the end of solo activity>story ends at the end of the season and can be frozen for 2 expacs in a row (like black armory and ada1 for example)” wow has so much more going on in one patch it’s baffling.
Again, I didn’t say Destiny 2 is better in story in the seasons. I only said in that time 2 entire season stories did go live and were told while WoW takes 2-3x longer to do the same bare minimum.
Hence why the company went downhill since then most of the time in case of Warcrafts popularity. Remember, WotLK (2008-2010 roughly) had the highest sub count and Legion was a shortlived recovery of those sub numbers. Not only due to story conclusion of Warcraft III characters but also due to the gameplay and design state of the game back then.
They say that, but what do we get? Abominations: horrible undead monstrosities that are sewn together from multiple corpses.
Gameplay: literally build-a-bear.
Night Fae: making difficult decisions around the rebirth of the natural world, deciding who to save and what to kill:
gameplay: fill your bags with garbage that rewards nothing.
Torghast: torture souls for all eternity where you get lost in shifting corridors
Gameplay: timed loot run that takes a few minutes - atmosphere has not a single scream. No chance of being lost due to our very convenient map.
NOBODY ESCAPES THE MAW
30 minutes later: free exit
It’s just… they’re saying this stuff but they won’t show it. And people just don’t really even know what’s going on anymore. Part of what makes Arthas so effective is that his horrors are on display all the time.
Hence I made the Guardians of the Galaxy 3 example above
Edit: The last time I have actually seen a lore character kill someone in a dark, disturbing way was actually even in BfA and it was only in a cinematic.
If we would have that in general I could take WoW a lot more serious. But no, company and certain players are afraid of darkness. They want rather have peace-washed hippies as elves and so on
Edit 2: Meanwhile in Diablo 4, you literally see your horse die in the first few minutes of the game prologue and see the stomach slit open on the corpse as same as pieces bit out of the poor dead thing. You even hear how it dies in the cutscene.
There is a reason why I did buy Diablo 4 already last week so soon.
