To be honest while I absolutely understand that Alex Afrasiabi is persona non grata due to sexual harassment It’s a bit laughable that they blame everything on him. So what? He was the only person who wanted to burn Teldrassil but others had no courage to say it’s bad. To be fair story wasn’t the problem of BFA so I actually liked his story more than what we got in Shadowlands.
Without watching the video, is there, like, an explicit admission/opinion that the story has gone to s#&% (from current devs/writers), or how exactly are his wants in story directions framed?
It’s all speculation but “no courage to say its bad”. It was probably a career limiting move to push back too hard when the boss was dead set on it.
They don’t tho. They blame the tree on him, everything else is made up by players believing Blizz is looking for a scapegoat.
TLDR according to the various people who reported on it, seemingly based on multiple inside sources : Alex Afrasiabi was the guy responsible for the lore of BFA & Legion (By that i mean it was his actual job, i forgot the exact wording). He’s the one who decided to burn the tree despite seemingly most of the team being against it. Yet he’s the lore boss so they went along with his idea.
The issue is that he had no plan to explain whatever happened in early BFA & was put aside because of the harassment allegations, before being fired when it was made public.
So Blizz had to deal with the aftermath to explain the motivations of a character that seemingly had none beside “burning the tree will look cool”.
It doesn’t excuse the writing of whatever happened afterward, but it does explain quite a bit.
Keep in mind that by the time he was removed the plot of SL must’ve already been in the works to some degree, as Blizz works on multiple expansions ahead of release so that artists can have enough time to create art assets.
Even if it’s true, the way Danuser and the rest of the team handled the story from Teldrassil onwards was arguably even more damaging for the story. Alex didn’t make the Shadowlands story. Danuser and the writing team did.
I have no sympathy for any of them. They’re even worse than Afrasiabi when it comes to destroying the story and the characters.
Yeeeeah, I mean, I agree that Afrasiabi was a prick, AND his story (BFA) was not good. But to blame Shadowlands being awful (even worse than BFA) on him is pathetic.
I understand that Danuser and co want to write the story out of this hole, but the writing, the worldbuilding, the whole story of SL is an epic disaster, and most of it can’t be explained by having to pick up where BFA left off.
New guy gets off the phone with a customer who was very irate, and says to his boss: “Who is Joe? That customer was steaming!”
Boss replies: “Oh, Joe was the guy we used to blame things on after he left. But Ben resigned last week, so if you need to shift some blame, say Ben did it.”
It could be scapegoating, at this point, tbh.
OTOH, when it all came out about the ‘frat boy culture’ and the sort of things going on behind the scenes… did you honestly not have a little feeling of ‘oh, well that makes sense then’?
Because to me it was suddenly very plausible that actually the devs were trying to feed players garbage story and systems in order to see what the most they would swallow and keep paying was. It legitimately makes sense that that mindset, honestly would try that out ‘for the lulz’ and because they could.
And now look at how much feedback is affecting 9.2. It’s not looking perfect, but holy cow is it looking better. I am optimistic in a way I haven’t been since… Wrath. Devs seem to be listening. They seem to be acknowledging feedback, and more importantly, making changes based on player sentiment.
And that’s huge. It’s so huge, it actually makes it plausible that there was a man/group at the top who were actively sabotaging the game and squashing dissent.
At least when it comes to the story, SL has a better one IMO.
To be honest. I’d argue. I still prefer faction war and old gods that retcons to make some bald boring guy relevant.
It’s looking better than current WoW but you’re too genreous in your opinion. It would be better if they made 2 sets - 1 for PvE and 1 for PvP because there were already some raiding whiners saying they have to play arena.
Well, yes maybe he ‘burned the tree’, but imo, that’s not the problem, but the fact that there are a lot of things that make no sense story wise, and this has been the case since cataclysm. Like burn the tree or not burn the tree, doesn’t matter, it just needs to make sense.
Yeah the harassement is real, but let’s not try to blame everything on this guy. The story is not the only problem, he didn’t design the grindy systems that we got since legion for example, let’s be real.
It looks to me like someone is trying to shift the attention to him and dump all the blame there, when there are a lot of areas where the game is not delivering, and has been like that for some time. But I guess it’s easier to say it’s the harasser’s fault for everything and make people forget there are also others responsible for the bad state of the game.
Hit the nail on the head methinks. The story in BFA was… not very good but the story in Shadowlands has been absolutely dreadful and they can’t blame that on him. The story of BFA was also, as you say, nowhere near the worst thing about that expansion. I can excuse a poor story if the gameplay makes up for it. Alfrasiabi wasn’t the one who pushed azerite armour, corruptions, covenants, soulbinds and time gates down our throats. I’d gladly sit through a 3 hour WoW movie directed by Alfrasiabi than grind dailies in Korthia or run choreghast over and over.
I think that BFA story up till 8.2 when Azshara’s palace was introduced was really good. That pact between Sylvanas and Azshara didn’t really make sense and last patch well… Looked like lack of resources. Anyway the begining of BFA and even Battle for Dazar’Alor were pretty good and I was definetely way more invested in the story than in SL. Why? Because Kul Tiras was well known for years. Zandalari trolls were known for years. A lot of lore characters were involved. What about SL?.. Well we got big bald guy that nobody knew about but apparenly he is the main reason for everything bad to happen in WoW before. We got 4 lands that nobody cares about and 4 covenants that nobody feels attached to. This cosmic crap doesn’t even feel like WoW anymore. Burning Teldrassil wasn’t mistake in my opinion it just added some heat to the expansion. Justifying all Sylvanas moves now with shattered soul is lame and boring. She seemed to be way more complex and interesting character everything was her decision. Now we get Illidan 2.0. She was mind controlled but she is good inside… Come on…
Burning of Teldrasil was awesome thing from a LORE perspective
cause it was actualy something that didn’t happend for long time in game called world of WARcraft
defeating ashara in nazjatar or killin nzoth completely no need for it happen in BFA they could iterate on that burning and made a whole plot around it
First half of BFA meaning the war between aliance and horde was COOL
when we were deffending or attacking dazar’alor was PEAK of the BFA
after that it went down pretty quick
First of all they didn’t need to get rid of N’Zoth right away. The fact he was unleashed and still there gathering powers could basically be a base for old got expansion. Instead a guy who was hyped from Cata and who corrupted Emerald Dream got just defeated in 1 patch…
I don’t think I’ve heard of Bellular.
I also never spent money on streamers on youtube(or anyone on youtube for that matter) so maybe I don’t qualify to comment about the matter
But still, it’s Monday so let’s have a good time
This warning is for the people who always comment “oh no another topic about youtubers/streamers video”. I warned so they just dont’ enter and the quality of the conversation is higher.
I agree. I always bring high quality stuff. Thank you
I think the general overarching story has been good. Just the Sylvanas writing has sucked.
I’ll have to disagree with that statement based on how it felt while playing early BFA.
The burning of the tree only happened during the pre patch event, which means that 90% of the players missed it.
It at the time made little to no sense beyond Sylvanas going crazy after being taunted by a dying sentinel.
Then she… Spares malfurion for no reason ? During the siege of Undercity she escapes like a cartoon vilain after unleashing a plague on her own troops & raising them as undeads. Yet I thought undeath was a torment, why sacrifice your own people ?
Afterward we had to deal with a rep gated storyline in which sylvanas acts exactly like arthas to the extent of torturing & trying to mind control a corpse we seeked & raised as an undead… To use as a spy and assassin against jaina ?
Then we have all this deal with ashvane and the assassination attempts on Thrall.
I mean the character motivations are all over the place in the 8.0 to 8.1.5 lore content.
I can understand your point to an extent as you mention the zones and factions in BFA (some of which were excellent imho, such as drustvar and nazmir) but the main storyline had a lot of issues imo.