Thing is, the story does actually matter and is important

Community General Discussion
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Title. I know people have been talking for 20 years now about how most people do not give a single damn about the story… but that’s been proven wrong many times again and again.

Sure, there are people who just wanna do high keys or mythic raids and are there to spam dungeons, but those are like what… maybe 1% of players? Looking at Dragonflight, there wasn’t really a lot to do besides spam dungeons in mythic +, so those people were happy (kinda, because I saw a lot of them complaining how mythic+ itself sucked this expansion, and that raids were just meh compared to previous expansion which I do agree with, but we’re getting off topic here).

However, Dragonflight was by far the least played and least popular expansion thus far… why? What went wrong? Well, more or less everything, but we’ll get to it later.

Some 99% of people don’t do high end keys or raiding beyond normal, and what are they here for? For other things the game was supposed to provide, and Dragonflight provided almost none of that. There was almost nothing for those 99% of players to do. Open world content became irrelevant after 2 weeks of a new patch, heroic dungeons were boring with no mechanics at all and hardly any rewards, raids themselves were meh…

But what was the worst thing about the last two expansions by far, again, two least popular expansions by far? Yes the story. The story in Shadowlands was ridiculous, sure there was lots of it, but it was ridiculous, breaking and rewriting anything that happened in the last 18 years and making a meme of itself. Good thing is Blizzard seems to have acknowledged it with a post something like “yeah, we messed up, the story sucked.” Then came Dragonfligt with pretty much no story at all (could be summed up in like two sentences), and it was still the same quality as Shadowlands.

And when you think about it… what was wrong with Shadowlands besides the story? Well, the answer is nothing really. The art and zones were amazing, stunning. Open world content was fun and rewarding. Raids and dungeons were really good and fun… than came Dragonflight and took turn for the worst with it all…

Of course those 1% of players were especially unhappy with Shadowlands because they had no time for high end keys and mythic raiding for all the chores they had to do to get there… but those other 99% were still leaving. Why? Competition, game being old, all that? Sure, but obviously the main problem was the story itself. The story was ridiculous and boring and failed to hook them.

If the story was good, even if everything else wasn’t, they’d still be hooked and stayed. Proof, previous bad expansions.

The main problem with the story in both Shadowlands and Dragonflight was the way it was thought out, imo. When writing a story of an expansion, you have to be writing for an expansion as a whole, not patch by patch… compare Legion and Dragonflight for example. In Legion it was obviously all well thought out from the moment we landed on the Broken Isles, to the big conclusion in Antorus… while in Dragonflight we had lots of “now what” moments. Raszageth released the other Incarnates? Great, now what? We have no idea of what to do with them. Fyrakk got dark lava? Great, now what are we gonna do with Vyranoth? Sure, let her go to Alexstrasza and be all like “I’m on your side now” for hardly any real reason.

There are a few other things I’d talk about, but this already unintendedly turned into a wall of text.

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Thanks for the well thought out post - particularly the quote above. I’m sure they did have an overall story arc, but it didn’t really seem like that. Especially in DF (which I otherwise like a lot). Characters doing things which seem illogical when we think of their former selves. New characters appearing, seemingly from nowhere.

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Seasons in games should never be handled like Seasons in a TV Show.

Actually, Seasons in games need to be treated like the Seasons of a Year (Spring, Summer Autumn, Winter). Each one changes the environment and story but they all are part of the same year.

Means, an Expansions Story has to progress from S1 to S4, like Wrath of the Lich King did for example.

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I’d even push that back to BFA.
BFA had good zone stories like Drustvar and Nazmir but the overall Campaign story was woeful.

I think this is why they’ve brought back Chris Metzen. They’ve recognised that what they were doing which was concentrating on systems, (borrowed power, AP grinds, Essenses or Soulbinds, Corruptions or what ever) just wasn’t engaging players and in fact was putting many off.

This started in WoD where they dropped the story to give us more mission tables. Skipped whole chapters of story so Yrel goes from padawan to Grand Master over night while Grommash goes from uber villain to hero at the same time.

Legion bucked the trend by having lots of story mostly around Order Halls and Artifacts. But they also flung Illidan, Maiev, KillJadaen, Sergaras and the kitchen sink at the story / lore.

But then they dropped the ball. They abandoned Orders, who’s in charge of the Earthen Ring now? (could be me but I’ve not been to my Order Hall in years). One of the best features of Legion, primarily for its story telling ability.

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Yep thats right i knew players back in the day who just played this game because of the story and the lore it had.

They seem to be putting effort in to the story and the lore with the war within lets see what happens but i agree good story contributes to a better game.

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The df story had a few wierd turns in it but still better than shadowlands imo.

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Not according to the leaked subs.

https://tagn.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/wowsubscriberschart2.png

However I do agree with you that story does matter, but WoWs story doesn’t matter after SL.

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you are so wrong like they even gave out the numbers for the playercount they had ish. DF-classic at launch of 10.2 had around 7.25m players the highest numbers since legion and in SL it had 3.5m ish i dont remeber the exact number and bfa had around the same amount of players aswell till classic rereleased.

i cant lie i cant be bothered to read the rest of the post as im sure both you and i mean the story mattters because it puts atmosphere into the game and it makes you care about characters in the game etc etc which is an important part of any game thats targeted towards a more single player playing style like wow is for a majority of their players

DF story was not good but i hope the TWW will change that as we finally got a villain the playerbase cares about with characters in it we care about

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since time move differently in Shadowlands i wanted us too come back to a light side fanatical Turalyon manipulated by the void, instead we got a tech demo of a worthless crafting system and dragonriding and the worse expansion since MoP.

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I have come to see games as world-centric and player-centric (and there are arguably some hybrids who balance it well). WoW has leaned more and more towards being player-centric. I think it has been player-centric at least from TBC onwards but the world does not even seem to be on the background anymore like before. Even the relational aspect with the world is amiss for the player.

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It is difficult for developers to write a good story as long as they decide that both factions should be friends and sing happy songs around fire camps.

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Yeah we should name it Horliance (Horde + alliance + a fitting way the word sounds because nothing matters anymore :D)

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I mean it makes sense that characters would appear from nowhere given what the Dragon Isles are. :stuck_out_tongue:

But I don’t disagree with you overall. That’s more of a side note. I completely agree with you that characters tend to behave irrationally or out of character. I thought the story was comically bad, in general. Especially the big narratives, the smaller ones tended to be better.

My two biggest gripes are:

  1. Characters are misbehaving or behaving illogically. Most commonly they appear to lack conviction or pride, and conviction is only seen as a sign of madness.
  2. My character is, once again, forced to partake in a story that she should not be comfortable with. In particular, the way I like to think of Ishayo, she would deeply resent the centaurs and possibly the blue dragonflight, though that one isn’t too clear, while she would adore the Tuskarr in particular. She would also more than likely be wary of the Valdrakken Accord but with the welcome she got be comfortable there.

But I can’t roleplay that within the game. I am expected to complete everything, in order.

“That’s the story, deal with it.”

WoW has always been like this to a degree, but it didn’t bother me too much because I thought most of the factions I joined had at least some moral to them or I was able to completely avoid doing quests for them because there was no linear story.

In Shadowlands I was forced to straight up behave like a complete idiot. At least that wasn’t the case this time.

I also completely agree with the OP on the difficulty of open world content. And trust me, TWW is awful in this regard as well. The mobs die so fast I literally can’t cast my rotation. There just isn’t enough time to kill before random mini-hits has killed the mob. Most frequently I fail to generate procs because I can’t cast Frostbolt because the mobs die before I can fire one.

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Only one expansion had the Faction war play any part in the story and that was BFA. Not a good expansion in terms of its overall story (sure some of the zone stories were good, Drustvar or Nazmir) but those barely related to the faction war at all.

MOP had some elements of it too with the Jinyu helping the Alliance and the Hozen helping the Horde. But mostly you just quested and ignored the other faction.

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Well technically not being at war does not mean that the story cant be good.

The horde and alliance are still two hostile factions we could eventually go to war again in the future.

The lore has been terrible since the shadow lands blizzard brought back chris metzen and hired new writers so lets see if they get things back on track.

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