The story is absolutely abysmal, Blizzard

Community General Discussion
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I can’t keep not talking about this…

Blizzard, I bring you advice from the wizard himself:

He’s right. Do you understand what this means?

It means stringing me along with a pre-determined list of things to do while giving me no agency whatsoever feels terrible? A story that ignores every ability I have, which completely ignores my presence other than rendering me in a cutscene, isn’t fun. That’s what it means.

I feel like a fool. I am getting a “narcissistic injury” and it isn’t fun. Oh, the world doesn’t revolve around me, you say? Well, I’m not asking it to. I’m asking for my immediate surroundings to pay attention to me.

What I liked about the 11.1 story is that I could choose a cartel - or not. I could run around to do the things I wanted to do. Everything and everyone responded to me. There weren’t enough consequences for my choices, but the game broadly respected my character’s autonomy.

The 11.1.7 patch does not. In fact, most of these .5 and .7 patches do not. Blizzard, you forget that you’re making an open world game with lots of diverse characters. This kind of storytelling doesn’t work here. It never has at any point for the last 10 years where you’ve been trying it, and it still doesn’t.

Honestly, I knew 99% of what was going to happen, and I know I could have stopped it, but the game won’t let me. I can’t imagine what it’s like being a priest MD’ing all those invulnerability bubbles only for nothing to happen because the plot must complete.

Why do you show me a terrible racist in prison who I can immediately tell is going to cause an insurrection and then not allow me to just end her right then and there? Because you need her for the next expansion? BAH! You could’ve made her disappear into a puff of smoke and reveal herself as an illusion if I do that.

Also, get some new voice actors or educate the ones you have. They are constantly saying everything in a high pitch, making them sound out of their depth and confused. Doesn’t inspire much confidence, and makes the fact that I am following their stupid commands blindly even worse.

I have no opportunity to be a Pandaren.
I have no opportunity to be a mage.
I have no opportunity to be smart.
I have no opportunity to talk to these people.

I have no opportunity to do anything but pull 15 mobs simultaneously and AoE’ing them down. I don’t matter.

What’s the point?
Honestly, what’s the point?

Stop making this kind of content. It’s garbage.

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Gabe: “Here’s a universe. Make something beautiful.”
Blizzard: “Here’s a treadmill. Run it our way.”

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I love the story in games. WoW has changed, players have changed.

We have people who like to rush and race to max level to get to the loot.

How many people truly care for the story like the old days?

It’s just not realistic in an MMO.

I’d love to see a single player WoW spin off that focuses on the story and lets you have companions, where the full story can be told. With dungeons and loot.

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Yes it is?

Just don’t railroad me and let me explore the world on my own?

11.1 reveals that it is perfectly realistic in an MMO. Well, the scenarios don’t, but honestly in most of that the danger actually hid from me so there was indeed nothing I could have done.

The problem here is scenarios and cutscenes with the player character that the player can’t control in them. Stop making these.

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I do.
I read quests, I learn about the characters, I look at the world around me.
I don’t want to be max level in 2 days, clear the content and then have 5 months of nothing to do.
Let me take my time and clear the content on a pace that suits me AND respects my free time.

It absolutely is.
There’s been numerous MMOs where you pick a faction, get locked to phase because you decided on solution B instead of A.

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Forget phases.

There can just be extra things or quests or different options for completing the objective, story shortcuts, etc. based on “Are you a mage?”, “Did you pick the Bilgewater Cartel?” and things like that.

Heck, have an alternative side of the story where if you’re a retribution paladin or disc priest etc. you can do the story that’s one step ahead of the normal one, causing the uprising in the first place. Maybe include some elementals into the story and if you play Shaman you get to go summon them first.

I literally just played a D&D solo adventure made by a 17 year old for fun and it asked me about my class and race all the time. If he can do it, so can Blizz. They’re just lazy about it because they’re busy pumping out 9 garbage systems in a single patch.

You thought we were tired of systems disappearing after 2 years and then starting over?

Try having them disappear and replaced every 2 months, and then the story’s as thin as water! Welcome to our new reality.

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Same I like to really enjoy the new content the first time round. Which is why I loved EA. There was no pressure to be raid ready or race into M+.

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you could have posted this in the other on going thread about story which you are meant to do.

you talk about it all the time :grimacing:

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For all of this, the game has to be an actual RPG which is not. Sure you can roleplay in your head that you are a pandaren mage but the game 99.99% of the time won’t acknowledge it. Tbh I don’t blame them. It would be a huge work… we now have 13 classes with diverse specs and like 20ish races. It would be cool to see it, but it wont happen.

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SW:TOR kind of did it. You were given agency even in a multiplayer scenario. Although in a multiplayer scenario conversation choice was a vote, your personal choice was still canon for your character. I think all the endings were ambiguous enough so the overall story would not be impacted, but in SW:TOR you as a player actually felt like you had a degree of agency. And even if in the end you didn’t, it still felt great.

WoW just puts your character next to main NPCs and lets you gawk at them for a minute or so, until you are free to continue collecting bear tails for them.

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What is the point of having races and classes if nothing acknowledges them?

I’m currently playing through Morrowind and the characters are, somewhat unrealistically because that game is weird but still, responding to gender, race, skills, factions, fame, and more.

All of this shouldn’t be about the state of the world. It should be the state of me in it. In that example, nothing prevents the world from having one character being in the mage guild and one being in the fighter’s guild. They can peacefully coexist even if it were multiplayer.

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If a person has experience outside of WoW, they understand, that is very doable to give the player agency.
Furthermore, there is variety of solutions from quick fixes right here right now to long-term and expensive.

Here is a cheap and dirty fix, Blizzard

Part I. Fix Chromie time and breadcrumbing
Step1. Link every quest and character to patch
This actually kind be done automatically or semi-automatically, not hard.
Step2. When a player is in chromie time, hide all the quests, characters and players, that dont belong.
Step3. Scale all lvl and ilvl to current max lvl/ilvl not to break story progression.
Step4. Create a post-title phase for every location, similar to how silithus works. Basically, when the player completed all/major patch quests in the zone, the player gets access to the post-title zone.
Again, this can be done in an expensive way or a cheap way. The cheap way is to remove part of the red mobs, color yellow another part, thin out the third part, turn green the fourth part and replace with friendly NPCs the fifth part.
This is ofcourse jsut bare minimum, but it is at least something, aas there is nothing worse for breaking suspension of disbelief than killing a million murlocks, and yet there are still there.
Step5. Add NPCs/Toy/UI element, that allows a person to check, where he is in the story, including: “patches completed”, quests completed, “unlocked trailers”. A person should always be able to rewatch every trailer for a completed quest

Part II. Steal “character’s memories” from CKIII and Sims4 and “rate this activity” from Ubi games
CK III, which is an RPG strategy, has a auto-compelled book for every character, that records what happened to them. (Frankly this was doable as early at least as dwarf fortress…)
Do the same for WOW, where you store some actions of the character and then a brief book/diary is automatically compiled. Allow players to make public or private this book, which then can be “inspected”.
Sims 4 has an option to make a screenshot and then mark it as “valuable memory”. Do the same and allow the screenshot to be added to the afore mentioned book.
AC Unity had “rate the experience” button. Add that to game activities. Now the book will contain memorable activities, that the player liked.

Part III. Steal from developers of WOW classic
For the opening of AQ gates we gathered resources.
Make it where players can influence story outcomes by:

  • pooling resources
  • running WQs
  • Choosing factions, which faction to support like we did in classic with centaurs

Based on which player group “won” let that influence the story
Does not have to be about war. Can affect one town/housing neighborhood being built or another etc.

None of this is too complicated. None of this is brand new. None of this is too expensive.

But the impact on player agency, suspense of disbelief and RPG development of the game would be enormous.

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WoW is the most linear MMORPG I ever played.

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Yes, it was very predictable. I think Legion spoiled us in terms of class identity and then it was sorely ripped away.

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Legion did a decent job at it but not perfect. It wasn’t really woven into the actual world much, but it was good. I liked it.

And BfA with faction identity. BfA was amazing in this respect. And then we got Shadowlands, which tried but did it so poorly it destroyed the concept. :frowning:

If they’d made rewards like those in TWW or Dragonflight and put them on the Shadowlands factions, it would’ve worked out really well.

It’s not that it shouldn’t give combat rewards - I think that’s proven to be fine. The problem was that the combat reward was in addition to the normal rewards, in other words it could not be outscaled by items everyone could get.

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This is one of the many reasons why It is pointless to introduce new playable races. Back in the day it was different, we had different starting experience with each race and sometimes we had class specific things to do. Now we are at the point where even your faction is meaningless. I guess this is the price of the “new” direction the game is going.

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Ffxiv has an excellent story .so does guild wars 2 .saying it is not realistic is just a lazy excuse for blizzard nothing more

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Well it’s a combinatorics problem Blizzard didn’t really consider.

If you have 8 races spread across 11 zones and you want to update them - tough but doable.

If you have 10 races across 15 zones - now it’s getting hard, but it remains doable.

Then they added a DK one. 16 zones.

Then they added two more races - in both cases without a 2nd zone. 18 zones.

Then they added a 19th.

Then they added like 12 new races, each with a tiny tiny experience that wasn’t their starter (though it should have been). Let’s call them half a zone each.

So that’s 25 zones.

Now someone comes along and says “Our intro experience isn’t very good. We need to update it”.

RIP developers.

But I don’t think they need to go this far. Just sticking 20 quests inside an area that we’ve already explored that tells a slightly different story is enough, and having a ton of breadcrumb quests nudging you into all this content that’s focused around every spec and race in the game is enough, too.

But I guess that’s going to be Classic+.

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I was going to mention SW:TOR too. They managed multiple classes and let you work through a story with quite meaningful options, including sometimes the title you earned at the end. I enjoyed playing a full on dark side Sith Warrior force choking adversaries and keeping my companion as a slave (she stopped talking to me haha) or playing a full light side Sith Warrior whose positive actions made the Empire see him as pro the Imperials (saving lives of normal soldiers); created a risk of exposure as a light sider, and whose companion ended up marrying him,. I could choose mercy or vengeance and it would affect multiple parts of the story as it moved forwards. It was great stuff done on much less budget than WoW.

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While my Inquisitor was Dark Side, I really loved Light Side Warrior. Such a great story experience.

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