It’s difficult to put to words just how bad this is. He basically wanted to unite all of creation, by remaking it through the Sepulcher fueled by Azeroth’s soul. Then he got the Eternal one juju literally beaten out of him and ended up going “A divided universe can’t hope to survive what comes next…”
The marketing for 9.2 was like “This is gonna be the swansong of the Warcraft story so far”… something i doubt many of us actually believed given the recent story, but DAYUM this is just such a low effort, recycled, generic thrash it’s actually funny, in a really cynical kind of way. Just think about how many fan favourite characters were sacrificed at the altar of giving this dude a shred of credibility, how they pulled all the stops and tied him into basically every bad thing that ever happened to make it look like it was him all along…
Well the major plot threads of BfA served to directly establish and build up to this, while the whole N’zoth geting kamehamehad into oblivion was kind of isolated and inconsequentioal, because we all assume they will go back on it, at this rate.
At this point, is there even any use discussing lore? The level of writing is so incredibly bad, even first grade “what I did on my vacation”-stories are more engaging and interesting.
There is a reason I have advocated for scrapping the idea of a “main plot” in WoW altogether. It’s not needed and not helpful. And they suck at it.
Remember the vanilla main plot? No? Good, since it didn’t really have one, and what it did have was actually retconned into TBC with the Varian comics. Did it matter? No. There were things happening all over the place. Some were forgettable, some were a bit stupid, and some were actually cool and memorable. And that worked well enough.
TBCs main plot was so bad that it’s good that it was so strangely told that most people didn’t even notice it, with Illidan and Kael suddenly becoming super villains and some Naga randomly draining the swamp - for political reasons, I assume. Did it matter? No, there was some cool backgroud stuff, some epic setpieces, some random cool stuff, and content enough.
Even Wrath was largely a collection of unrelated plots. The Nexus War and Ulduar were completely different plot lines from the Lich King, for example. Sure, if you looked deep enough there might have been some connective tissue somewhere that people who like it could geek out over, but you really didn’t need it to understand what was going on. Why are we killing Malygos? Because that dude thinks we aren’t careful enough with magic and is willing to force his views on us, so he’s just asking for a carefully overcharged fireball to the face. Why are we raiding Ulduar? Because the Titan stuff has become infested with creepy stuff we don’t fully understand, but it’s ominous as heck, and considering how powerful that is we don’t want it in the wrong hands…err, tentacles. Why are we killing Arthas? Because zombie invasion, duh.
Back then they created content that had a story. If it fit the big baddie of the time, great. If not… still great. They didn’t force everything into one plotline. And that’s what they need to go back to. Leave the coherent narrative to the games that are better at it. That’s not what WoW was started for. That takes a lot of preplanning that WoW never did, and a lot of storytelling tools that WoW doesn’t have. Focussing on it, is playing to its own weaknesses. And that’s just stupid.
This was even worse than the N’ Zoth one. WTF are you doing Danuser??? Usually i dont want to complain that much and i want to enjoy the story even if it is bad but this one drove me crazy. WTF was that? The annoying thing is when Primus asked Zovaal what led him to this path…if only you had told us what rewritting the rules of the universe means and then that something bigger is coming then ok fine everyone would be happy tbh because that reveals what led him to his choices, becoming the Jailer, perhaps why sylvanas followed him etc. But that was terrible. My biggest issue is the length. 3 expansions in the row and the ending is HORRIBLE…GARBAGE. You just demolished W3 and Arthas and basically all the warcraft lore. I get you want to start something new and announced 9.2 aas the final chapter of one book of WoW saga but at least respect our stories and then procceed to the new ones. And I’m not saying that since you putted the Jailer the story immediatly demolished becase there ar some good parts but the finale of Zovaal is dissapointing, it is horrible, it is short and garbage while even with the current situation it could have been good seeing Azeroth perhaps vs Jailer, the sword of Sargeras of as i said what rewritting the universe means.
As for 10.0 i think the trailer is going to be a continuation of the story somehow with the big bad being the void in the background and in 11.0 a big void cataclysm will happen.
Dont want to talk about it anymore really what a dissapointment
It might be better not to critique what you personally don’t know rather than making assumptions, as much as I loath twitter culture you shouldn’t tar everyone with the same brush. Allegations is one thing but a lady took her own life over the way she was treated you might want to have some respect for that rather than dismissing it with imageboard nihilism. California is a terrible place, the people there practice ridiculous politics even by most countries standards but that doesn’t make it right to dismiss what happened to her and many others.
What really stuck with me like I’ve already said on my Classic main is that unfortunately it seems like the writers have little to no respect for the original lore, the Sylvanas cinematic felt like it was throwing shade on the old lore while at the same time paying one of the most iconic characters in the franchise no respect so Slyvanas can once again steal the spotlight in such a disrespectful, hypocritical, seemingly meta way despite the very important characters present. Someone did an edit of that scene on reddit where everyone instead made a small sorrowful remark before it fell silent, it felt far more poignant even if it’s ridiculous that Arthas appeared as a ball of energy before evaporating.
The Jailer is just Sargeras 2.0 except he’s very lame, Shadowlands has been a massive stain on the lore. The retcons, the ridiculousness of it all, the writers are obviously living in a bubble because anyone with common sense would have told them how silly the decisions they’ve made are. They’ve obviously had no critique of their ideas because the fact this actually got approved is astonishing, it shows a complete disregard for the game or an absolute lack of talent at Blizzard, personally I also think they just don’t care. Even Metzen despite his flaws cared about the story and the fans, nothing he ever wrote apart from Me’dan was this bad but that character was quietly benched from the main lore because he was at least self aware enough to gauge the players reactions to his work.
It has it’s place, in the early expansions it has been overshadowed by the systems and social environment, which isn’t exactly replicable in the modern product courtsy of all the systems made to circumvent it. The systems which more often than not don’t pan out get too much spotlight, as well as their obscession with having the expansions lead from one to the other, but still be self contained.
Unfortunately the Arthas thing was a wet fart, at the end of a period of huge creative indigestion. They could have done it better, but they could have done it a lot worse too, as has been shown over the past expansion and a half. It’s kind of unfortunate that we’ve had Anduin there, in his stead the whole way, but what can you do?
Jailer is wierd and tacked on. He served no real purpose outside of being the bad dude, but he just lacked things that would make him appealing he had neither the bravado nor the story to back him up. We still don’t know the hell he wanted to do outside of very vague broad strokes least of all what scared him to this point… It’S just tedious at this point this is like the 8th time we had a major BBEG go for the “But wait X is bigger, badder and all so I’m actually scared of it.”
In WoW I don’t think it does. They don’t have the tools for it, they don’t have the skills for it, and they don’t have the right priorities for it. The story is among their worst features. It was never great, but compared to the competition even in the MMO market it has been a trainwreck for years. That’s a good reason to work on it, but that makes it horrible to put too much of a spotlight on it.
And it’s not just “back in the day”, but since they are seen as the glory days, it’s what I brought up. It’s true in modern addons as well, for me at least. The quest zones in BfA were really cool, for example, the addon just got worse and worse the more the main plot and main cast came in. Mechagon felt great, and was practically wholly independent of the main story. And that’s what I’m getting at. Might be that a story takes more than a patch or two to tell, ok, but that doesn’t mean they should get all the ressources and every other plot has to be tied into them, and justrified against taking away time from Anduin and friends. One bad plot should not be allowed to drag down all the stories and world-building of the addon (and even beyond it), just because it’s the “main plot”. But as they are doing it right now it does. And they have to stop.
In WoW I want cool places with cool peoples, mixed with overacted action. I don’t want a great story. So… what they sold me before.
No, we know full well that the relationship she had with her supervisor had become one sided, abusive and intolerable. This was publically shown a while ago, Blizzard are going to court for this and paying a huge settlement to her family precisely because she was abused. I’m not going to share the details because frankly they’re disgusting but it was shown on reddit, it’s easily found on google. Stop digging the hole deeper I gave you an out now you’re doubling down out of sheer ignorance.
WoW has effectively turned in to Dragonball Z during the cell saga where the writers have no material so they’re trying to drag everything out. I don’t think even they know what they want to do because the reality is they’re coming up with it on the spot, holding back like this isn’t the sign of a good writer. It’s typically someone that’s trying to avoid having their work criticized which is seems to the case. Danuser chose to retweet one tweet in particular that praised his work earlier, well you have to scroll through around 300 tweets to actually find it. So they’re definitely ignoring reality.
They’ve set us up for an expansion based on a cosmic big bad, they just don’t want to admit it right now because they will lose face.
BNot really, though. That was no setup, it was foreshadowing at most. We haven’t the slightest clue what the guy was referring to, and considering how WoW story seems to work… I kinda doubt the devs themselves are sure about that. If they wanted to set something up, they could easily have done so. They could have hinted at void lords, whatever is behind the devourers or something new entirely. They didn’t. They just left the door open.
So I actually don’t think a cosmic plot is any more or less likely than it was before. This foreshadowing can be dived into next, sure. Or they could delay it. Or they could delay it until they have a better idea and scrap it then.
They will have to hire capable writers and let them do their job. There is no way to circumvent that, because there always must be a story, even if it’s not something you consider all that important it’s something you will always expect to be there, even if it takes a back seat to everything else like say the original doom.
When you abandon that you get things like BfA and Shadowlands, where the main core throughline of the expansion is tacked on and inconsequential, which ultimately undermines it’s resolution. That’s why both N’zoth and Zovaal ended up like abad joke, int he end.
He made it clear that he was doing everything he did for the exact same reason Sargeras was, infact he was even behind that! He’s Sargeras 2.0 but with out any substance.