Yep, exactly.
It’s still sort of weird tho to contemplate those actions and then conclude the problem was his attitude 
But I think that’s where you see the shift from human, compassionate to what he became later, and how he could end up there. Because of the lack of humanity in that moment.
Yes, arthas was chosen as ner’zul’s champion from the moment he was born, kel’tuzad explains it to him in undead campaign
Well, the story makes it clear he had begun his descent into madness. But I still think this was an impossible situation. Even if Arthas knew more than he did at that point, the outcome would have been the same if not worse. Arthas was many things, arrogant at the same time unsure of himself, impatient and most of all inexperienced. But there was always someone to keep him in check, until that point where they dumped him like used toilet paper. So yeah, he chose what I assume to be the only choice he believed he had.
Uther was wrong for abandoning him because he was his mentor, jaina is Kirin tor student that knew arthas as benevolent charismatic boy, love interest, she wasn’t ready for participating in mass killings
dont forget the Red ridge questline being one giant Rambo Refrence.
what shocked you mean john j keeshan is Rambo … no wonder all his quests are references ,) i remember all the night elf fans in bfa was mad at hat they though shandris feathermoon was going to hook up with him 
Marvelization…Disneyfication…
I don’t know.
I’d hesitate to overanalyze Blizzard’s story issues, because they seem quite banal once you look at them.
A simple issue is that they change their stories during production (because WoW is a content-driven and not a story-driven production), but they don’t seem to have time or resources to implement their new stories properly afterward, so they end up with some half-baked results that are unsatisfying.
Warlords of Draenor is one big mish-mash of incomplete and incohesive stories. So is Shadowlands. And to a lesser degree so is Battle for Azeroth and Dragonflight. Legion is probably the most complete and cohesive recent expansion, but even that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Blizzard used to adhere to the mantra “When it’s ready”, but with WoW expansions it feels more like the mantra is “Just ship it”.
Another simple issue is that they do quantity over quality, also in terms of story.
That’s the edge that large companies like Blizzard Entertainment has in the industry – their ability to create juggernaut games with lots of stuff. That’s the niche that triple A game developers have found for themselves in this new digital age with fierce competition from indie developers who are capable of competing on quality. It’s quantity. Blizzard can make big games like few other companies can.
The problem is just that while there can be a lot of value in simply stuffing a game with more gameplay content, the same does not exactly hold true for story. Whether you get 800 or 1000 or 1200 quests in a WoW expansion is not as important as whether those quests tell a quality story. But the goal isn’t to tell a quality story – it is simply to tell a lot of story.
How much story does Dragonflight juggle with? Dragonscale Expedition, Djaradin, Tyr, Aspects, Bronze Flight, Blue Flight, Black Flight, Dragonkin Rebellion, Amirdrassil, Gnolls, Furlbogs, Tuskarr, Centaur, Incarnates, Neltharion’s past, The Emerald Dream, Dracthyr, Titans, The Void, Azeroth, Old Gods, Niffen, War of the Scaleborn, Nesingwary, The Kirin Tor, The Infinite Dragonflight, Murozond, Night Elves, Humans, Orcs, Forsaken, and so on.
The emphasis is on Quantity.
Those two examples alone – the fact that Blizzard just writes a ton of stories as fast as possible and crams them into the game, and then re-writes half of them after the fact, that obviously makes for a lackluster result.
They don’t have the basics in order for writing a good story, regardless of what that story is.
Which is the issue. I rather have a lot of different kinds of fun fetch/kill/collect quests without story instead of quests with boring gameplay and quantity story tied to it.
Like, just add a bounty board with pure gameplay quests that are repeatable and have you do XY task without any meaningful story dialogue.
I use a mod in Skyrim that add such bounty boards to the game villages and capitals with lots of optional fetch/kill/collect quests that award gold without a single bit of story tied to them and it doesn’t break the immersion at all.
Players really don’t need to know every minor detail about an NPCs life in an expansion that they never will bother about to see again (see the 2 dragons in DF next to the area of the Wingrest Embassy (Waking Shore) that have us collect animals and save them from “bad, bad Murlocs” while they are talking about their emotions). Just have “Looking for an Adventurer to bring me XY in YZ quantity” or kill stuff in the correct wording.
Like let us say there is the main story quest line of the zone which is focused on quality story telling, then there are the side quests for world building which are also focused on quality.
AND THEN just add those filler quests on a bounty board in the resting hubs of that zone (and every other zone ofc) for some extra stuff to do. Also making them independent from each others boards would be good.
So like:
Resting hub 1
Fetch Quest A,B,C
Kill Quest A,B,C
Gather Quest A,B,C
Resting hub 2
Fetch Quest D,E,F
Kill Quest D,E,F
Gather Quest D,E,F
Each of them awards some gold and XP (later on some gold and crafting mats or loot). A lot of problems solved with a simple feature:
The problem here is that you cannot just decide to produce a masterpiece.
It may flop, and then you’re screwed.
That’s sort of the underlying reason for why we get more Marvel films and not more Lord of the Rings films.
Marvel films are mostly a safe business (so far), whereas Lord of the Rings was a huge gamble. Most companies don’t want to gamble their entire existence hoping to create a masterpiece – they’ll settle for a mediocre product with a decent profitability. That’s why we only get one Lord of the Rings trilogy for every hundred Marvel films.
And the reason why Blizzard develops its games with an emphasis on quantity (goes for other Blizzard games as well), is because it’s a business model that’s proven itself to work and that they are able to execute successfully.
And they cannot afford to gamble that, because too much of the company is tied up in it.
There was a big leak recently which provided some gold nuggets from Phil Spencer in an email that’s floating around the web (if you want to look it up). I’ll just quote a few parts:
[…]
Without a lock on physical distribution the role of the AAA publisher has changed and become less important in today’s gaming industry. Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf.
These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP.
[…]
Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
Blizzard’s entire reason for existence the past 20 years has been World of Warcraft. They’re not going to gamble their business model because some forum posters are unhappy with the ending cinematic for Dragonflight. They’re just going to double down on it (which they are with The World Soul Saga), because – like Phil Spencer alludes to above – they don’t have anything else to fall back on.
While I get that “play it save” mentality from a corporate perspecitve… We are ALREADY at a very low level of expectation. It isn’t even hard to tell better, more compelling stories than now for WoW. They just have to take it slow, make us players actually get attached to the characters without them being “whimsy-bimsy 
Pinocchio” and more of the Warcraft spirit (which Metzen HOPEFULLY will return to us now) and most of us would be MUCH MORE happy.
Basically it isn’t even much we players are asking for. Even BfA level of story telling with photorealistic cinematics would be better than no improvement at all.
Through shamanistic rituals, divine intervention and night elf genocides no less.
Oh and with nostalgia injections of course. Also let’s add to it signposting “What sword, ha ha, funny meme, remember it? Olololol”
BFA literally has less cohesive and far more poorly written story than DF what the hell.
But that’s not the business model.
Have you seen the Blizzcon presentation for The World Soul Saga?
The main take-away is more World of Warcraft more often.
Their approach is not to take it slow – it is to speed it up.
More expansions. More patches. More content. More story. Comics. Novels. Plushies. Probably a TV serie. Anything they can come up with. More. More. More.
And you’re going to pay for it every step of the way.
Like Phil Spencer says, then the modus operandi is to milk these established IPs, because the companies don’t really have any alternatives.
Blizzard already have the next patch for Dragonflight lined up. Retaking Gilneas! Why? Because they want you to stay subscribed, that’s why!
If they wanted to tell an amazing story, then they’d take their time. But they’re not taking their time. They’re committing to a new patch release every 8 weeks, so the quality will reflect that.
The long-term goal for Blizzard is to transition to a new product portfolio as World of Warcraft settles into its role as a cash cow that slowly gets drained. They’re not trying to make award-winning game experiences. They’re trying to keep their customers subscribed and paying by constantly enticing them with new stuff.
Again, have you seen the Blizzcon presentation for The World Soul Saga?
That was not a man trying to sell you the equivalent of a bold Lars Von Trier art movie.
That was a man wanting to sell you phase 3 of the World of Warcraft MCU in a fast-sequence trilogy with an extended deluxe edition up front.
Tbh it depends on how vast story is, for example whole worldsoul saga story size hypothetically can be compared to 1 expac, and tww is patch 1, this way it can be more fleshed out with room to breath for writers.
But oh boy if TWW won’t have LARGE EPIC HYPE NIPPLER THANOS SARGERAS ENDSINGER ANTI SPIRAL TZEENTCH KHORNE SLAANESH NURGLE as final boss this community will go ape mad
I am not speaking of the content of the story telling but the tone used in the delivery.
Imagine how Dragonflight would have been if it were told to us players 40% more seriously than what we got… The most grim story point we had in the entire expansion so far were the corpses on the ground before Alexstraza confronts the beacons in the Emerald Dream. That was THE ONLY TIME we even have seen blood on screen in this expansion. Just as a hint.
You misunderstood my words. It is totally fine to have just 1 main story line within an expansion. As long as all the seasons are build-up and exposition OF the said story line.
Like take Arthas for example in WC3 Vanilla and the DLC Frozen Throne which continued the story and improved on it by telling more nuance and details while pushing the story forward.
That’s all I mean and want when saying “they should take it slow”. Instead of rushing from Story line A to Story line B they should have several expansions with an ongoing story line and the expansions (+ Seasons) mainly serve as Act 1-3 with the seasons being chapters. Something they FINALLY seem to do with the Worldsoul Saga.
Since I joined WoW back in 2017, on several occasions I did wrote on the forums (both german and english one) how they should take Destiny 2 story model and adopt it in a better pacing for WoW. And they are finally doing it.
Now all we can do is wait and pray that Metzen and his team aren’t fumbling the ball like Bungie did with Destiny 2 and Lightfall. And by that I mean “not overdelivering so hard with TWW that Midnight feels shallow and boring”. Because that is what Bungie did with Witch Queen compared to Lightfall.
To be honest, Gilneas doesn’t need a full dedicated season. It’s just a country on the surface of Azeroth with remnants of a long passed War. Not much to clean up there. Only thing preventing Blizzard from doing so until recently was that they didn’t focus on it by writing an conclusion to remove the plague (which they did by now with the cleansing of Lordaeron in 9.1.5/9.1.7).
The major difference being that Metzen is the creator of this franchise, THE GUY with the vision Blizzard has been lacking the last 6 years since he left due to burnout of working on 3 different Blizzard IPs at once (from what I have heard). He is focusing SOLELY on Warcraft now and it is the IP he loves the most by his own words.
Call me naive but to me, a new player to WoW compared to veterans, that does sound a lot like the creator trying to save his baby.
Ah okay.
As a player, I would like this too.
It will not happen.
Again, it’s not the business model.
Blizzard creates many storylines as a way to leverage…you guessed it…quantity.
If there’s just one storyline, then that one storyline has to be really good in order to keep everyone invested in it. Great if that happens, but if it doesn’t, then you’re screwed. It also ties the content down, because the story dictates the game experience if you just have a single storyline. And that’s not how WoW works. WoW is a content-driven production, not a story-driven production. Blizzard’s core value is Gameplay First. Not story – gameplay.
And the worst part about having just one storyline is that when it’s concluded, then players quit. That’s the end of the game. They’re done. Traditional gaming, right? That’s not good for a subscription-based business.
It’s safer to have a lot of storylines that play out simultaneously. Then it doesn’t matter if some aren’t so successful as there are others to fall back on. You don’t even have to conclude all of them – in fact it’s best if you don’t! That leaves players anticipating future story updates, which they’ll want to stick around for. And you want them to stick around.
I think Danuser explained it in an interview for patch 10.1, without perhaps thinking about what he was saying, that whenever the story provided answers to some of these lore mysteries, that they also made sure to add new mysteries.
That’s cute from a story perspective, but it’s also cynical from a business perspective, because you never get that sense of conclusion…even after 19 years!
It was an example to illustrate the point that Blizzard pursues a very aggressive content cadence (8 weeks patch turnover). The story team will simply have to keep up. That means we’re going to get fast storytelling, with varying quality, which will likely jump all over the place as the gameplay content tends to do.
The point here is not to tell a good story, it is to retain customers by luring them with a carrot (in this case, the long-anticipated return to Gilneas).
That changes nothing, because he’s locked down into the existing formulaic World of Warcraft production.
Maybe he can tell a better story than the existing writers, but he’s subject to the same business constraints as they have been – as far as the game production is concerned.
I’ll call you naive.
It sounds to me like a business trying to sell its product through nostalgia.
A bit like Star Wars dragging Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford into their movies to fuel the nostalgia and the fans’ hope for a return to form.
I can see that point. But the players preferring story will quit anyways after the story is concluded. No matter if it is good or bad. In fact, if the story is bad they will most likely quit even before the conclusion of it.
From a buisness perspective it doesn’t make sense to deliver a bad service that drives away customers. It makes more sense to deliver at least a good enough experience. And when people would say (for example) that another boring DLC like Dragonflight doesn’t catch them anymore and they leave, that means Blizzard has to improve their minimum standard.
I mean, that’s just the idea of “infinite story telling”. Tell several stories in a row without the audience realizing the stories are separated parts.
Narrative writing on professional level is not really a matter of speed. It’s a matter of inspiration and vision. You can write a quality story within a few weeks if you are lucky with your inspiration and creativity. Or you can sit there half a year because you just can’t catch the spark of the story in the right way.
And since Metzen is back, the vision is basically guaranteed.
Yes. But he is also the guy at the studio that cares the most about the universe. And someone who cares is willing to fight for it. So he either makes at least the best out of the restricted playground he has or he even convinces his superior to give him more room to please both sides (players and managers alike).
Alright, I can see that point. But remember, I am not a WoW veteran. My “nostalgia” is basically BfA Season 2 onwards. I never have felt or experienced “the WoW spirit” unlike others. At least not in WoW itself with WoW being the franchise.
Blizzard don’t set out to write a bad story for World of Warcraft. That’s not the goal.
There are just some circumstances surrounding the production of World of Warcraft (that I covered in my initial post) that - among other - result in the stories we see in the game.
Those circumstances can more or less be boiled down to cynical business reasons.
And the business isn’t changing anytime soon, given that Blizzard have already previewed the next 5+ years of WoW at the recent Blizzcon. And it looks like business as usual.
Fair be it if some hopeful fans want to believe that Chris Metzen is the Messiah of prophecy who will redeem the story, but that seems to be a slightly different and more religious discussion.
I agree in part, they have reduced characters and the world to a black and white story which almost always comes across as childish to an adult audience, they didn’t do it out of malice. It’s from either laziness or incompetence in writing, pick your poison. what I mean by that is they the writers are half doing it because they can’t be bother, or, they are not talented enough to keep up with crafting deep storylines and it’s easier to write for a black and white world.
The company wont care too much because wow currently still sells (albeit less than it used to) and this reduction allows them to churn out more content faster which they monetise.
The issue is, that’s a too big to fail mentality. It’s the same one Disney’s had for the past few years and now they are losing billions, within the next few years the board will enforce corrective actions.
Same thing will happen with blizzard and Microsoft. It’s no secret retail is not particularly popular at the moment, they really struggle to get players back to the game and I can’t imagine the circus that was the end raid cinematic is helping bring people into the next expac. Eventually Microsoft will either shed wow to being a micro transaction free to play gatcha esque game or they will force a change with the writing to try and bring the game back into good repute with it’s core demo.
Agreed. And the sooner that happens from Blizzards side, the better. Now is not the time to go “lay low and play it safe”. They need to invest and take the risk if they want to go big again.
They don’t.
Here’s the ABC of business models. This is roughly how Blizzard approaches portfolio investment and growth and such. If you’re unsure about where WoW fits in the model, then I’ll give you a hint: Moo.
