A mature story is one in which an adult theme is treated tastefully.
The WoW team is definitely putting in the effort to tell mature stories. The Erstwhile Ecologists Quest Chain is a well-done story about two people in a romantic relationship that never devolves into how much they sleep with each other. So, something can’t be said about 100% of similar stories in other games.
And the Bronze Dragonflight should have been the main story of Dragonflight from the start.
But then we come to the problems. One, we are still in the comic booky realm, where the only way Bruce Wayne could become Batman and does help people only if his parents died in front of him. At first glance, this is a very deep idea, but once you look at it for more than a second, you come to the logical conclusion that a character as compassionate and caring as Bruce Wayne would try to help people in some way and do it correctly even if his parents didn’t die.
As a result, the villains of Dragonflight, especially the Primals, have turned into ProDZ villains.
The Black DragonFlight story can be summarized with the title Dumb and Dumber.
And fine, the Evanescence’s discography fits well with the Death Knight storyline, and you can cut yourself on the Demon Hunter one, but at least those stories are clear what they’re about and were they’re going.
On the other hand, the Evoker/Dracthyr has lost all threads.
And these are stories about looking for yourself and what is your place when you don’t know if you are a failed experiment, losed loved ones, someone’s entire life being destroyed, the death of entire ways of life, about legacy, about genuine grievances that can’t be resolved by killing the bad guy, and about feeling powerless when your home was being destroyed or changed against your will.
These different themes are looked at, but nothing is done with them, and as a result, the story feels hollow. So, the comic booky style may have worked in the past, but clearly it isn’t working now.
This isn’t to say that comics didn’t have actual mature stories, but there is a difference between Bruce Wayne doing good things only because his parents died in front of him and him being motivated by wanting another child to not lose their parents like he did.
And yes, some of you will argue that writing in video games is hard. So, writing mature stories is even harder, but here is an example of that thinking being wrong.
Guild Wars Original a very mature game because of quests like the Little Lost Bear, which deals with the subject of a child’s death, manages to do it on a smaller scale without losing its younger audience score, because it never oversteps its boundaries and focuses on the subject.
( So, it’s very insulting when the sequel to Warhammer Online, Warhammer Online 2, that uses the Guild Wars name as a sticker on top of its title ends up extremely not just immature but also infantile because the hacks from Mythic UnEntertainment that forcefully replaced the original team can’t accept their careers were over years ago. Mainly because, despite throwing adult themes in, ends up having romantic relationships that are only about the physical, abuse that causes severe panic attacks is used as a joke and hand waved away, and let’s not talk about how they treat mental illness, addiction, death, pestilence, the consequences of war (which makes it even worse because the entire story of Guild Wars Original was built on that), and degenerative conditions.)
And if people are still worried that this will affect the age rating, stories like this
despite being reviewed over the years, they still hold the same age rating.
