The MAIN issue with WoW's story since Legion

Community General Discussion
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Well, there’s two, the first being that no expansion tells a complete story anymore, but I won’t touch on that.

The other is that WoW has moved on from being a story and is becoming a mythology. The main reason why everyone is so disenfranchised with the story is that it has become too crazy and unrelatable. Take Arthas - you can relate to him. His story is a classic - a man of great expectation becoming corrupted in pursuit of his ideals. Not only can you relate to it, but chances are you know someone in your life who is the real life embodiment of this. So his story is relatable.

But now… the story is about the mingling of Titans, and how systems work in a fictional world and none of it is relatable. Yes, it makes sense internally for the most part, but it is impossible for anyone as a consumer to insert themselves into the story.

With mythology, 90% of the burden is carried by the fact that gods’ mingling affects our world. Our reality. But now we’re being asked to invest ourselves into a mythology and grand narrative that has nothing to do with our own existence.

Stories take too long to tell, by the time you reach the end, you’ve forgotten the beginning, you’ve forgotten what the story’s idea is. No expansion’s story should bleed into the next one, or should be told in books.

A HUGE reason why BFA’s story was so disappointing is that there was no actual end to the expansion. Yes, we killed an Old Squid, who didn’t really make an appearance through the entirety of this expansion’s run. N’zoth is dead… allegedly, but who cares? The interesting part was the war between the horde and alliance, and Sylvanas’ pursuit and none of those got satisfying endings.

Hell… even the cannon in Azshara didn’t get fired. Bigger isn’t always better. Especially in WoW’s story structure. It is actually hard to go and play the whole story, from Legion through BFA to Shadowlands, because so much of it happens in raids. This is another reason why Blizz should contain all stories to one expansion.

The worst part is that we can already start predicting what 10.0 will be, because its story is already being set up. And it’s sad, because you can again make the assumption that 9.0 will be an incomplete story.

Each expansion is basically its own game, and each expansion must offer a complete story that ends with a satisfying ending. It doesn’t matter how well the intrigue has been weaved in since cataclysm, and how we find Shadowlands references in Mists of Pandaria… if there’s no satisfying end to each episode of the story.

This is the problem. Blizz is obsessed with telling a never-ending story that keeps you edging all of the time, but it never gives you this satisfactory release. You never get the feeling of killing Illidan in the Black Temple, or Arthas in Icecrown. Hell, even Deathwing felt like an ending to a story. This is why people don’t like it.

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It could still work perfectly fine if their writers were concerned with what originally drew players to WoW mythology and lore.
But it’s not really the case, so it’s bound to look more and more like different game with every expac

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I think the last really good story from Blizzard was Suramar. The rest just reminds of cartoons, where some “allpowerful” villains die from power of goodness and show up again somehow.

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Usually, I am all for stories that evolve. Warcraft is old, very old… Similar standards possibly can’t keep standing for years and years. WoW is what it is - expansion-based. At this point in time, it’s expanded to a scale that maybe the writers are having difficulty catching up with. There are several zones, each with their own story while weaving in with the larger plot… Not to mention, they also have to manage adding in their own visions and goals. There has to be a mix both of littler things and larger ones, and there are now so many micro-elements to manage that it may be getting too cumbersome.

I would empathize with WoW, I never really give up on long stories because they adapt with changing times, writers and contexts. But I just… can’t? It feels like a rackety vehicle that tries to keep elements of its parents, but also tries to be sleek and modern and fresh. Like an MG. Blizzard is clearly trying to hold on to the past and what has already been established. That’s why, as much as a reboot would be wanted, I doubt it would come to be.

It’s honestly just kind of sad to see the characters that were established at the start, and are still so prominent. It all feels so desperate.

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But the reason why the old story worked is because it was grounded in reality. Arthas was an allpowerful being, an unstoppable force of evil. But we understood his path, we could relate to his reality. Back then the world made sense.

Now we’re finding out that the Shadowlands is a structure with bureaucracy and factions, and also that the Titans weren’t good and maybe Sargeras was right and also Sargeras, Arthas and Sylvanas are linked and it really becomes nonsensical, and it becomes even more of a nonsense story when you see it’s been told over the span of 8 years. It is constantly referencing things that we’ve forgotten. In fact, the reason why the story seems like nonsense is because it is completely built on things that were hinted in content that many players probably missed, or forgot about because it was done so long ago.

This is why an expansion’s story needs to be contained within itself. We shouldn’t be getting one story, which could easily be contained within one book, over a span of 6-8 years. If you decided to read Dostoyevski and one of his books took you 6-8 years, at the end it won’t be making sense, because by the time you reach that point, you’ll have forgotten everything that led to it.

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That’s why I always wanted a First war expansion, as a relaunch of sorts.
Shame they have wasted time travel/parallel universes on draenor fiasco

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Up until wrath and cats we were just riding on the story of wc3 and wc2 we have pretty much run them dry of content.

Within the wc games a lot happened and time move forward, figures died, new figures arose etc etc.

Nowadays It feels stagnant. Malfurion, tyrande are still kicking about and are boring. Green Jesus is the same.

If wc4 was made after 3 I guarantee the Warcraft universe would look very different. We wouldn’t have repeating stuff like the emerald nightmare coming back etc etc.

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Completely disagree. Never understood this relatable arguement, someone told me they love the first Star Wars because they related to Luke. I thought really? He is so whiny and annoying. I don’t relate to any of the characters and still enjoyed it.

In fact, I like WoW for the reason that I can’t relate to it. It’s a grand adventure and I am a hero, hardly something I can relate to in real life. I love the mythology aspect and the story deepening, the faction war was a veneer for the true threat and whilst I find factions wars to be MEH as my character has helped the other countless times, I still enjoyed the story.

I also never raid beyond LFR and even when I have, this satisfactory end you speak of always eludes me. There is no end, just a pause. I suppose I feel an end with a new beginning. I love WoW lore as it is.

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I don’t mean relatable in that way. I agree with you and I hate how modern writing in games, movies and even books focuses so much on having a self-insert for the reader. I mean relatable in that it is recognizable and you can make sense of it instinctively. You don’t need an explanation on how Kalimdor works, or even the two continents at war - this makes sense, the two continents being a representation of the divide between the two factions. But with the Shadowlands, unless you take a history course in Warcraft, you simply can’t understand how it works.

Me too! I actually am really hyped for Shadowlands. But the thing I missed in BFA, and also in Legion, but got in both TBC and WoTLK is a feeling that we put an end to something. Each expansion recently is a continuation of the story, not A Story on its own. This causes expansions to feel incomplete. Do you know when I got the feeling that BFA is done for me? It happened about a week ago, when I got my engineering to 175 and crafted the Blingtron 7000. At that point, I felt like my journey is complete.

And that’s sad, because the core plot points of BFA’s original story were never resolved. They’re still hanging in the air.

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Alright, I see your point. I would hate to be a new player to WoW quite honestly. I can get into other games and explore all their expansions without an issue but WoW is… difficult. It’s brilliant for a vanilla player seeing how all of the universe ties together and hidden stuff that makes the past more understood (such as Sylvanas’ bargin, Uther’s soul split blahblah) new players… clueless.

The ending for me was getting my backpack from horrific visions and going “Okay done, bored now.” I do agree that it doesn’t feel quite so complete without that final boss you’ve been hunting the entire expansion. I mean we assume it’s Sylvanas in SL but it probably isn’t, whereas we knew who it was in TBC, WotLK and Cata.

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Dunno about Luke, but Han was quite cool in that decade

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At this point the WoW story feels like an expansive fanfiction like the expanded universe in Star wars

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They should hire Danny Filth to write their stories.

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Blizz cut the faction war dead just when things got interesting…Azhara should have been skipped and replaced with a continuation of the warfare.

A story where the war would only get more depressed by time where both factions are actively destroying each other and more people dying that way would have been a lot more interesting and most likely would have served sylvanas goals even further.

Instead we got an old god tossed in front of us not much after we already stopped another budget old god already.

I was hyped for BFA because I thought it would be a faction war expansion, a break from god like beings, but Blizzard released the squid instead.

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I think one of the problems is that it’s a 15yo game that originally started on lore from the Warcraft games and tied up those loose ends. Now every bad guy has to be worse than the last… there comes a point where you can’t get much worse. It’s like a good show going on for too many seasons.

I think a time skip to the future when we return to Azeroth, where our names are but legends, would be beneficial to the game. I don’t see it happening but learning about what happened to the world in the last idk 50-100 years in our absence and solving base issues again might be a good rejuvenation of the game.

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Thought about this and it would be a good way to get a somesort of fresh start.

And as far as always having to have a big bad powerful end boss, I think a faction war would have been a good way to distance from it as it would be more about your allegiance to your own faction and how far you are ready to go for it.

The big bad is the war in kits entirety

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That was all well and good at the start but now we’ve stood side by side and are essentially champions to both factions, my character would rather be neutral. I mean take being your class leader and then next expansion you’re just a faction champion again?? And demon hunters fighting against each other makes no sense. For me the faction divide is old and no longer fits.

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The problem isn’t the faction divide, it’s that Blizz wrote the story to require both factions to do the same content. They tried and succeeded 90% of the way with BFA - both factions had different content and only one got the story of Uldir. It was good… but then they had to squander it with these old gods and N’zoth and Xal’atath and all of that garbage that nobody really cares about. I am so sad this expansion wasn’t just a simple war between the Horde and the Alliance. This is what everyone wanted.

This is why everyone came back to WoW after that awesome cinematic. We all felt like… it’s going to be like the good old days - just killing each other and being at war and having fun. But Blizzard then had to try to play smart and oooh, it’s not really a battle for azeroth, but it is a Battle For Azeroth, you know waddamsayin, you’re not fighting for dominance over the world you’re fighting to save it… yet again. Ugh.

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the biggest issue is that we went from people who helped deal with the problems and slowly built up to maybe “helping out” with one or 2 big guys, all the way to “hero that saves the galaxy, again and again”, which makes it harder to go back everytime to “dude that gathers sticks so we don’t freeze to gain our trust”

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In the mean time fetching some boar hides.

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