The story of Warcraft is being outsourced to YouTubers

Community General Discussion
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Something has started to increasingly annoy me, which is my dependence on content creators (YouTubers specifically) to tell me the entire story experience, because I seem unable to get it myself in the game.

Ghosts of K’aresh feels like a pretty contained story. It’s an isolated island, everything that happens more or less happens there. So if I play through all the quests, then surely I will get the whole story, yeah?

WRONG!

I play through the entire campaign, I do all the side quests, I read everything the NPCs have to say, and I also try to read the books that I come across.
I feel like I put forth my best effort to get the complete story experience.
So why do I feel like I miss a lot of it anyway?

There is a huge mythos to the creation of K’aresh.
There is a lot of very detailed backstory that explains exactly what happened that led to the destruction of K’aresh.
There is a plethora of details about the characters involved that help identify them as heroes, villains, anti-heroes, tragic heroes, and so on.
But if you just play through the quests as Blizzard presents them to you, then you really don’t pick up on most of any of this.

I’d say whenever I play through any broader story in WoW, then I get 60%-80% of the entirety of it. The rest I have to get from content creators on YouTube who’ve deep-dived, taken notes, and meticulously searched through all the details and put all the pieces together.
I find it really hard to do that myself, as a player who also does a lot of other things in the game whilst going through the story – and as a person who also does other things in life than obsess over WoW story and lore.

Take Ghosts of K’aresh.
You have K’aresh itself. If you play through all the story there you got around 50% understanding of what’s actually going on in terms of story. Like my mom who sleeps through half the movie every time she goes to the cinema. She kind of knows what the movie was about, but at the same time, not really.
The rest of the story of K’aresh and what’s taking place, well that comes from other places. Remember Netherstorm in The Burning Crusade and those Ethereals there? Yeah, those 18 year old quests relating to that are actually very important to what’s taking place on K’aresh now. And how fresh is any of that in anyone’s memory?!
Same with Alleria, Locus Walker, and Xal’atath. A lot of that story is spread out between Legion and Battle for Azeroth, and most of it is actually very crucial to understanding why these characters behave the way they do and what their roles in the story are. How well does anyone remember this?!
And none of it is very easy to go back and do again, if you want to freshen up your memory. It’s not like grabbing a book from the bookshelf and flipping to page 50 in order to read the few lines you couldn’t remember. You can’t do that here!
And sometimes there are very important and absolutely crucial story details being hidden in some lore book that’s 10 pages long and it’s on page 4 where there’s a single sentence that’s slightly cryptic, but if you understand the context of it, then it reveals a huge story event. And it’s so easy to miss!!

I feel like the story experience in WoW is becoming so difficult to keep up with, because it is so hard to get the entirety of it by simply playing the game as a normal player.
You’re getting quests in east and west. Characters talk to you about now and then and before. There are visual story hints scattered across the world that tell tales through images rather than words, and there are deliberate blanks where you have to fill in the pieces of the story puzzle yourself by connecting information given by different sources. There is all of that and more, and it all takes place over weeks or months whilst you’re also trying to progress through Delves and Dungeons and Raids and do lots of other things that don’t focus on the story being told.

And to be fair to the content creators on YouTube – they are really good at telling the story! I’d go so far as to say that they are almost better than Blizzard themselves! Which is ridiculous! I’ve personally gotten to the point now where I find it more satisfying to listen to Bellular or Nobbel87 summarize what’s happening in a very bedtime story manner, rather than actually playing WoW and experiencing the story through the game itself!! How crazy is that?!

I mean here:
https://youtu.be/USqsjGni1Eg
https://youtu.be/FW02JPRdvCM

Have anyone here who have played through Ghosts of K’aresh understood the story to the degree those two content creators are presenting it? Because I haven’t.

One question, if you all please. A little litmus test to see how well Blizzard communicates the story:

Do you understand who Nexus-King Salhadaar is in the story and why he is the second-last boss in Manaforge Omega?

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I’m not going to look at the youtube links but yes, I understand the lore and remember all the parts. There are stories they are now doing for free and with an audio version that of course aren’t in the game but easily accessible.

I know who he is, how he is back, and why he is a boss. I don’t know what happens to him yet as I only play LFR. I feel I’m more of an exception these days though. I get the impression not many people really care for the lore or take the time to read anything.

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back in time i cared about the lore. But since to understand what’s happening now is required to check on a multiple sources and is so badly written, i gave up and i go straight to play clueless.
The problem i dont find any NPC interesting lately. Why should i care about Xalaltath or the locus walker? They are here for 2 years and after that will disappear for good.

I was a bit intrigued about the arathi but the horrible previous patch with that storyline (and im not speaking about the cinematic, it was the story that is a nonsense) smashed my interest.

I used to have chills when illidan destroyed xe’ra. Now even ax exp about dragon aspects gave me… mothin.

About Salhadaar i perfectly remember him back in TBC but since like Tyrathion im a LFR player i dont know why is here.

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For me, my time is very limited. I don’t really have time for content creators anymore, and if I do need them, it’s just for Class and Game play related aspects.

I gave up on WoW story a long time ago. It doesn’t make sense when playing the game, so I just enjoy the game as it happens, and use whatever theme of the zone/dungeon I’m in to tell a mini story of that journey.

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Just read the books then. The youtubers just summarize Blizzard’s books. You can’t really expect to get everything in wow itself from a 30 years old IP. Obviously a lot of optional side story will be covered in long-form content like novels. The bread and butter of wow’s story is still shown in the game with a lot of cinematic content too.

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But that’s extra story. Like I said, part of the problem is that there’s so much story and it’s in so many places, and you have to put it all together yourself.
It’s not presented in a very digestible manner, so to speak.
So I wouldn’t say it’s easily accessible. As an individual medium? Sure. But as a cohesive story it’s a problem that parts of it are here, there, and everywhere, and there’s no real direction provided for any of it.

But that’s also on Blizzard. They should know their audience. If players don’t care to read everything, then it’s silly that Blizzard keeps insisting on providing most of the story through written text.

I feel like Blizzard does something very wrong when they mandate that everyone should play through their hours-long campaign, but then still don’t manage to offer a story experience that people care about and are intrigued by.

I mean, 100% of the playerbase will play through the K’aresh campaign – because they have to. If that’s not sufficient to know the story and the lore of the place, and it’s not compelling enough to care about it, then that’s pretty bad game development.

If the campaign is mandatory, I feel like it should provide 90% of the story and lore, so that everyone has a full understanding of the context of the game they’re playing. And then the remaining 10% can be hidden lore books and minor NPC dialogue and what not.
But it’s pretty absurd that you play through the campaign for hours and hours and still end up feeling like you have to seek out multiple other sources of story in order to really understand what’s going on.

I have a full bookshelf of Warcraft novels, comics, and even the manga they did!
I am not lacking in this department and I don’t speak from a n00b perspective. I would consider myself pretty nerdy on story and lore.

The problem I have with the books (and other external stories) is that they are often necessary reading in order to understand the context of the story in the game – as if Blizzard couldn’t cram everything into the game so they put the remainder of it into the books, making it mandatory reading if you want the full scope of the story.
So it’s not “just read the books” it’s “also read the books”.

When Blizzard comes out with a story like Ghosts of K’aresh, which is a very contained story, then I feel like Blizzard should be able to convey that story in a pretty structured manner so that most players will understand the majority of it by simply playing the game as it’s presented to them.

I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation to have. That’s kind of a bare minimum I have for any other video game that I play. I don’t see why WoW should be treated differently in that regard.

And fact of the matter is just that if you play through Ghosts of K’aresh as Blizzard presents it to you, you’re not really getting anywhere close to a full understanding of the story Blizzard have woven together. You’re getting the major beats, and if you want the context for those major beats and a lot of the background, then you have to seek it out in a myriad of different places and piece everything together yourself.

I don’t think that’s very good storytelling, and I don’t think it meets the expectation I have (or the expectation others ought to have, if they haven’t constantly lowered their expectations for the story because Blizzard don’t deliver). And I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to have in the first place.

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Just incase you didnt know as you seem to be very new around here . Jito is an ex MvP and one of the biggest WoW nerds ( no offence meant jito btw) on these forums, so do not try and fob him off by saying “just read a book then” when he has at least made the effort with a long and detailed post about there views.

The recent cut scene from raid tells a vastly different view, it hardly tells anything at all to be fair.

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That’s why they put the lorewalking quests in the game in 11.1.7 to catch people up to this story, but I think they should have maybe given a pop up warning to direct players to these quests before they start the current campaign

I don’t think it’s mandatory reading for the most part, but it’s usually just for people, who wanna have the “fullest” experience. Maybe reading rise of the Horde would have been very beneficial before playing Legion. A problem is for sure that it is definitely almost impossible to just linearly play through the wow story, because the game is too old. Lorewalking is the recent feature, that is supposed to fix this problem.

Else I don’t think it’s bad that some story telling is outsourced to content creators. It does also create a nice eco system of youtubers, who tell wow stories in ways that are interesting highlighting details most people have missed. For example Nixiom did really good videos lately:

I would say this isn’t really a flaw, it is a feature. Warhammer40k also has this type of content creation, and it’s good generally. Of course it isn’t an excuse for Blizzard to slack, but it’s okay if some things are not 100% clear immediately.

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I watched a Bellular video to try to make sense of what’s happening in Karesh. I’m still confused.

I guess I’m just a dumb doorf that doesn’t get cosmic drama.

Cool zone though so I forgive them.

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No, you’re not. This patch is Blizzard fixing and concluding stories that go back to TBC. If you don’t understand everything, it’s not a problem. Maybe play the lorewalking campaign first, which you can pick up in Dornogal from Lorewalker Cho, get to know some of the new world building stuff since shadowlands, and then it should be clear more or less.

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Gotcha, will do that, thanks for the tip.

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It’s something Blizzard have increasingly emphasized since…Legion? It’s around there that they really start to ramp up.

It’s innuendo.
It’s mystery.

The story genre has to a large degree shifted from pure fantasy and become more crime and mystery, even the detective genre.

The focal point of the story these days is very much to solve a mystery. Currently that’s Xal’atath and who she is and what her goal is.
And it’s presented just like your classical detective novels, be it Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot (my favorite), or Miss Marple.
There’s no dead body, but there’s still a mystery as Blizzard shows a scene or presents a character that’s more puzzling than revealing.
And then there’s a lot of hints and clues strewn about in the game that players can find and put together like pieces of a puzzle, and Blizzard will tease more pieces to the puzzle in future content, and then everyone gets to play detective and speculate, guess, and theorize on who the murderer is based on all the hints and clues they’ve dug up.

Is Xal’atath an Old God? Is she a Void Lord? Does she want to consume the World Soul? Is she trying to corrupt it?

It’s honestly a great story direction and I love it.

It just falls a bit short in some areas.

One shortcoming is that the crime and mystery genre, and the detective genre, requires a lot of careful precision on the writer’s part and a lot of constant attention on the reader’s part – or in this case, the player’s part.
Usually that challenge is solved by the great detective having an assistant (Dr. Watson, Captain Hastings, etc.) who isn’t super smart or wise and can’t put the clues together, so the great detective (Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot) gets to explain to them and by proxy to the reader, so you understand the story even if you’re not clever enough to put the clues together. You end up empathizing with the assistant because they’re like yourself.
Yada yada, long story short – Blizzard don’t have that in WoW. There is no assistant or companion to help the player out with the hints and the clues to all the mysteries that are going on. If the player gets lost somewhere along the way, then they’re just lost forever. They’re not getting back into the story because it’s one long mystery and if you’re not keeping up with it, then you end up finding yourself as clueless as Dr. Watson or Captain Hastings.
And there is also no great detective in WoW. Technically that’s supposed to be us – not our characters but us as players. But that’s a really really high bar to set for the story, that it falls to the player to figure it all out because no one in the game’s story seems to figure it out (often deliberately through innuendo because Blizzard wants to preserve the mystery).

I really like Blizzard’s decision to take the Warcraft story more into the crime and mystery genre than the pure fantasy genre it originally occupied. But I don’t think Blizzard pulls off this great detective story they’ve got going on. They got the crime and the mystery, but they don’t have the great detective to solve it, or the assistant to act as a surrogate to the player who might be a bit slow to pick up on the clues.
They’re missing that, and therefore, I think, players struggle with the story.

I played through those Lorewalking questlines, and whilst they were fine for what they were, they were also very insufficient for what they were meant to accomplish.
And again, it speaks to the fact that it’s an insurmountable task for the player to keep track of so much story just to keep up with the current plotline, and Blizzard’s way of trying to help with that isn’t really super successful. It’s still a lot of information you’re given and have to piece together yourself in the context of the ongoing story.

I don’t think Blizzard wins anything by having a confusing and fragmented story in the game that content creators can afterward take and turn into a beautiful tale. That’s to the benefit of the content creators and their viewers – it’s not to the benefit of the people playing Blizzard’s game.

Ergo why I said it’s a problem that these content creators are starting to tell the stories on their channels better than Blizzard tells them in the game. That’s a loud call to Blizzard to do better.

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How do you imagine Blizzard linearizing wow’s story though? That’s a sisyphean task. There is 30 years of story in this franchise spread on many different games. Blizzard could make Warcraft 4 technically and try to summarize wow’s story in there, as the Prequel of a hardreset of wow, i.e. wow 2. That’d be a possible solution. Maybe World’s Edge Studio would be interested in making Warcraft 4

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This sums up everything i was going to spend several paragraphs to say, i don’t understand who this Salhadaar guy is, was he in the BC Dimensius questline? I did that 19 years ago, they can’t expect me to still remember that…

All i can piece together is that he was supposed to be dead, but isn’t, and now those oath-obsessed rag-bags are on his side? Guess i’ll just kill them, can’t go wrong with that…

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Like I said, then they need a great detective and an assistant who can be us.

That’s the approach that works in every crime and mystery story.

For example, in Hercule Poirot there’ll be a mystery and Poirot will ask Captain Hastings if he noticed that the door to the room was unlocked, and Captain Hastings will say no, because why would he notice that (and by proxy, why would we the reader/viewer notice that?). And then Poirot says: “Aha!” and then moves on.

That’s a smart way of presenting a clue to the audience. It makes sure that everyone understands that the unlocked door is an important clue. And even if we don’t know how it matters, we know that it does – because Hercule Poirot is the great detective and he just suggested that it does matter.

It’s the same in Sherlock Holmes with Dr. Watson.

And it works because it creates a story where the reader/viewer gets to go along with the investigation and even though they wish to be as clever as the great detective, they often find themselves relating to the role of the more simple-minded assistant. But you get to guess along as the plot progresses and the detective introduces more and more of the clues, and by the end the detective will reveal who the murderer is and the reader/viewer will get to be surprised if it was someone else than they thought, or satisfied if they guessed correctly.

WoW misses that.

I’ll give an example from my own experience.

Early in Dragonflight in the first zone, almost at the very beginning of the leveling experience, there’s a wreckage of an old viking ship on the beach. You’re questing nearby so maybe you notice it, or maybe you don’t because you’re too focused on completing your quest.
I didn’t notice it. And it turned out to be a very important clue for understanding the background story of the Djaradin. And I couldn’t piece that story together until much later when someone on the interwebs mentioned the wreckage and I had to go back and conclude that yeah, I had missed that.

So that’s a problem. Blizzard puts a lot of clues and hints into the game that are important for understanding the full scope of the story, but they don’t put in the great detective to make sure that we get presented to all these hints and clues in the right order.
We either find them all ourselves, or we’re screwed.

Blizzard needs to have a great detective in the game. And it doesn’t have to be an actual character, it can also just be a UI screen that acts as a journal where you keep note of everything you’ve come across and what you’re missing and how it perhaps all fits together (lots of mystery games opt for that).

There are lots of ways to solve it, but Blizzard needs to help players find the clues and solve the mystery. You can’t tell a story in the crime and mystery genre and not have the vehicle for progressing players along in that story, i.e. the functionality of the great detective.

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Story is simply b a d worst negative

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This is my main gripe with Blizzard’s story telling.
Why do I need to constantly get extra, external resources to understand the story, lore and reasoning behind things.

The game is supposed to tell me all of this.

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You feel that you miss a lot of it, because the story is built over some 30 years across a whole lot of different mediums.

Alleria was introduced in warcraft 2, and ethereals in tbc. We even fought a version of dimensius back then.

What you are describing is an unavoidable problem, because the story was not meant to be a saga spawning 30+ years, nor all the characters to evolve like they did. Blizzard has the task to work in the confines of the already existing story, and create new plot threads to progress it.

It might be hard, but there is no alternative, since it is impossible to use 30 year old characters and stories and to also give you all the context in a single patch.

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Perfect is the enemy of good.

And whilst I wholeheartedly agree that it is an impossible challenge to convey the entirety of 30 years of an evolving plot to every player at any moment in the story, I do think Blizzard could do a lot better than they currently are.

I think a lot could be helped by just containing the story to less sources.

For example with K’aresh there’s a mystery to what really happened that destroyed the planet and created the Ethereals and so on. And you get bits and pieces of that information from Locus Walker and Ve’nari and Xal’atath and Soul-Scribe and others. And they all speak with innuendo because Blizzard wants to preserve the mystery for a long time - it does create curiosity.

But it’s simply just too much. The information gets spread out across too many sources over too long a period in too cryptic words, so that the actual events of what happened end up being extremely vaguely conveyed.
At some point Blizzard has to reign the mystery build-up in a bit and make sure that they actually present the story to the player in a cohesive manner that can easily be understood.

And that’s not a question of conveying 30 years of story. That’s a question of conveying a small summary of background story relating to the newest content in the game and not having it turn into the longest running game of Cluedo.

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High-Priest of K’aresh who went and backstabbed Locus-Walker, blaming him for the collapse of the shields (well, and the whole kareshi gone ethereals thing) and then declared himself High-King, but was actually the one who teamed up with Dimensius. He then tried to recollect the shattered parts of Dimensius after K’aresh blew up, which is prolly why he was in Netherstorm, but we killed him… buut he was rezzed by the big void walker and then told Soul-Scribe to be a good girl and heel, which she of course did because the mummys just blindly follow their oaths instead of using their brains. So, guess we’ll kill him again in the manaforge… or not, haven’t been in the raid yet.

That’s what I understood after reading “Doom of K’aresh”, doing the Lorewalking and playing though the campaign. How many points do I get?