The main story shouldn't be in raids

Community General Discussion
1

Why not?

  1. Nobody likes group content being broken up by cinematics.
  2. We can’t hear the cinematic over our friends’ voices and we have to tell them all to be quiet.
  3. Nobody wants to see the same story beat and then having to skip it every week.
  4. When the content is no longer current it is impossible to experience the full story again as there are no groups who do it anymore.
  5. People who don’t want to raid become forced to do so in order to experience a coherent story

This problem just keeps coming up over and over. The most recent example is now people are asking to experience old stories due to the new levelling system in Shadowlands. They want to go to Argus, for instance.

How do we get to Argus? Well, we go into Tomb of Sargeras. That’s where it happens. And now people want to level in Legion, and we just sliced out half the zones because there is no way we can tell the story of people getting up there in the first place.

And I am not amused about that. Argus was an incredible adventure and players who return deserve a chance to experience it as part of a coherent story, and they can’t do that properly without Blizzard having to completely overhaul an entire raid dungeon to become a 5-man dungeon of low difficulty.

The story of Azeroth is the story of its players and NPC’s and the world itself. It’s not linear and it’s not the same for every player. Stop giving out singular titles to every single player and pretending we’re all playing our own separate little universe where we’re all incredibly special.

This is an MMORPG, and we’ve all got our own, distinct part to play on Azeroth. The stories told are more than the stories Blizzard tells, and the stories Blizzard do want to tell and need everyone to experience must be accessible to every player who likes the core of MMO’s: Being in the open world and interacting with players.

Back in the day we called the design Blizzard’ve committed to “Raid or die”, and it was generally looked down upon as a design system.

But instead of listening to these people saying they don’t want to raid, Blizzard instead doubled down and decided that they did want to raid, they just didn’t want to find people to do it with, and implemented LFR to fix it.

It isn’t fixed. Some people just don’t want to raid. And I’m not one of those people, but I get frustrated because of point 1-4 anyway, and objectively we’ve got a lot of problems on our hands because Blizzard keep doing this. So Blizzard, please? Stop it.

Raids should obviously have a story and a location and a reason for existing, but they should not form unmissable story beats without which the game stops making sense.

6 Likes
2

So most RPG stories have a bad guy. You obviously kill the bad guy of the expansion or deal with them in some way, Why would the story not happen at that point? aka inside the raid. Aren’t you missing out in the story if you aren’t taking part in dealing with them? I don’t get it.

If you’re so into the story why wouldn’t you want to see the inside of the raid and the story that the raid tells? There is plenty of story outside the raids too, I’m not even a big fan of raiding anymore either and I still disagree with you.

Isn’t seeing the inside of the raid important to you? Never going to it is like missing out a zone in the expansion, The atmosphere in the raids is a massive part of the story, Everything from random npc interactions etc. So you want raids to be a pathetic side quest stories, how does that make sense exactly? How would you go about it? Why would we kill Gul’dan for example and have no story about him in the raid?

1 Like
3
  1. Have you asked literally everyone? Bit of an assumption to say nobody.
  2. That’s what youtube is for, but in my personal experience the raid leader will tell everyone to keep quiet on the first kill and people respect that.
  3. Again with the nobody thing, after the first kill, if you’re only there for the story, why would you rejoin again? people do it every week for the loot, they don’t care about the story at this point.
  4. LFR? There’s also still loads of active raiding guilds until the next expansion.
    5.LFR. LFR isn’t raiding, it’s like taking a stroll through the story book.
    Edit: forgot to awnser #5
2 Likes
4

Kind of agree but that’s the whole game. Quest then cinematic. Quest then cinematic.

Leave the voice channel you’re in. I do it all the time.

Get an addon that auto skips cinematics if you’ve seen it already. I think BigWigs raid tool has this built in as default.

If it’s no longer current you can solo it.

LFR. I didn’t raid at all this expac and I’ve managed to experience it all through LFR. This is one of the main reasons this exists.

5

Its not like those cinematics last for 10 minutes…

If its problem for u then mute them

Most bosstimer addons skip them after u’ve watched them once or u can disable them overall

Thats simply a lie… its quite easy to find groups for uldir/dazar/cos/ep,ofc not so many as it was in legion because mogs are mostly trash but sill

Thats why lfr exist,still would love story mode tho

6

Main story should also not be restricted to books and other external sources.

12 Likes
7

Fully agree on that but well they love to leech how much money they can from their customers

8

This I agree with. If they have to make a book to end/start an expansion then there should be a quick catch up story in game at the start of the expac.

9

That I agree with, I can see how it’s hard to implement though. How would they fit so much lore into the game? Especially stuff that’s happened in the past. I know we have caverns of time etc for that but you can only do that so much.

However they clearly hold back to get book sales, I give you that.

10

This isn’t an ordinary RPG. It’s an MMORPG.

  • Who’s the bad guy in RuneScape?
  • Who’s the bad guy in Ultima Online?
  • Who’s the bad guy in Elder Scrolls Online?
  • Who’s the bad guy in Classic looming over everything? And don’t say Ragnaros - he’s not.
  • What happened in tBC when the bad guy was Illidan and people didn’t want to raid? That’s right, people got pissed.

Yes, but you can’t. There are no raid groups for low levels to run Tomb of Sargeras, or whatever. So you’re going to have to miss out on that if you’re late to the party, and that should be OK.

There shouldn’t be a central story that everyone must play through unless you put it someplace where they can’t miss it.

  1. Stop being pedantic. Do you like it?
  2. Enjoying WoW shouldn’t be dependent on YouTube.
  3. Who says I’m only there for the story? I might be there for things that are not the story, yet I still get that cinematic I have to cancel every time unless I install addons.
  4. That’s fantastic and all, but unfortunately we’ve got a ton of expansions behind whose stories are all broken now, and Shadowlands can’t fix them without overhauling every raid
  5. Looking For Raid. But you’re right, in a sense. It’s trying to take the raiding out of going into raids. So why is that a thing? Because the story beats are in there - and that is the only reason.

No, it isn’t.

I shouldn’t have to to tab out of the game and fiddle with voice software during a cinematic or major story moment that’s trying to immerse me. Kindda defeats the point, doesn’t it?

It does indeed, because literally nobody wants to see it.

Unless you’re at the appropriate level, of course.

Yeah, and it shouldn’t need to. If LFR should exist it should be on its own merits.

Further quotes down the post are making the same points, and my response is the same.

It indeed should not. And that includes YouTube.

11

Biggest offenders are transition stories they release between expansions. What they could have done with that is to take note from FFXIV patch structure, where the first 3 major patches after the expansion release finishes the expansion’s story, then there are 3 more patches which builds the story leading into the next expansion.

In shadowland’s case, that would have been, on the horde side to assist Talanji with the increasing tensions caused by battle for dazar.

For WoD it could have been about Garrosh’s trail and so on…

Basically take the most notable events in the books and translate them to the game.

3 Likes
12

Look, I completely agree with you, but you’re derailing the thread. :stuck_out_tongue: This is about raids, not books.

Let’s bring it back in focus: Can you not see that, to the person who doesn’t want to raid, and there are many of these players, a book full of major plot points and a raid instance full of major plot points are exactly the same thing?

1 Like
13

You have to realise the way Blizzard see the game is anything before the current expansion is almost a dead game.

You can see this in the way they’ve handled levelling and tried several ways of getting people to max level to experience the story.

They don’t care about previous expansion story and expect new players to look up the story if they want to see what it was and how it happened.

It will be interesting to see how they handle it with the Level squish and the choose your expansion route they’re taking.

14

Hang on, you moan about story being locked behind raids and when someone says the main story should also not be locked behind a book, you moan at them for not talking about your main story complaints.

1 Like
15

I do, and that’s exactly why the main story shouldn’t be in raids.

They do, they just failed terribly. :stuck_out_tongue:
They want new players to start in BfA so they can understand why they end up in the Shadowlands - and that’s perfectly fine.
What isn’t fine is that in order to understand BfA, you have to understand Azerite, and to understand Azerite you have to understand Sargeras’s sword, and to understand Sargeras’s sword you have to understand Antorus, and to understand Antorus you have to understand the Vindicaar, and to understand the Vindicaar you have to understand the Tomb of Sargeras, and that’s where the story starts. Fortunately Tomb of Sargeras does not inherently depend on prior story to understand how we got in there, so that’s where it ends this time.

EDIT: In fact it’s worse. You may understand how BfA starts by this point, but in order to understand Shadowlands you have to understand what happens after the levelling, too. In particular you need to understand all the wars that Sylvanas cause and the burning of Teldrassil. But the game skips all that because that requires doing the entire War Campaign which involves… raiding. x’D

This problem does not apply to earlier expansions. You don’t have to know how Deathwing was defeated in order to understand why Pandaria opened up, for instance. Pandaria opened up because of the Sundering, and the Sundering was caused independent of the Lich King and is quite visible as you level up. Bingo.

That’s kindda what I’m getting at. Handling that is going to be hilariously difficult. So far we’re losing half the zones because of this.

I wasn’t saying she’s wrong.

Because it’s a raid and because it’s by far the most unimmersive way to experience the story, involving teleports and queue systems and menus rather than worlds and people.

16

Why do you think LFR doesn’t fix it?

17

What is a raid to you and what aspect of a “raid” is bothering you?
Imo LFR is not raiding, just the fact that you have more than 5 people in an instance doesn’t automatically make it a raid. If you look in classic you have dungeons for 10-15 people.

Actually if the story concluded in a dungeon would be the same? you think story content should only be outdoor and non-instanced.

18

Going to drag up FFXIV.

Again how they initially did story content related to dungeons was by having it in the dungeons and raids… It’s didn’t go so well so by the 1st expansion they moved over to a much better model, which is by having most of the story’s action take place before and after the instance. An example that could work in WoW is by having Ny’alotha be two instances with the cutscene leading into n’zoth and after his defeat take place outside the actual raids.

Ofc this wouldn’t work too well with blizzards instance on forcing players into doing the raids 4-5 times before they are allowed to skip ahead just to make players sub longer.

2 Likes
19

I don’t mind doing lfr the big boss being defeated is part of the story. What did annoy me was having to do siege of boralus when it was mythic to continue the main quest. I loathe mythics

20

Ff14 made it even more friendly for casuals by being able to do the story dungeons with 3 npcs. This is a great solution for ppl who have to afk suddenly due to little kids or so.

1 Like