Where did the setting go wrong?

Argent Dawn
41

So many people here clearly did not play BFA or played some other entirely different WoW, which I would really like to see. Faction war hasn’t been “done to death” it is a core part of WoW and always has been, it’s the game you chose to play, to invest your years into. However it is nowhere near the only part of the WoW core. Many players and especially ALL the devs confuse gameplay with story - just because you can go kill Arthas in ICC today in gameplay, doesn’t mean he is still there lorewise, same goes for the crossfaction play, just because it is infinitely better for gameplay that people can play whatever race or faction they want and still do content together doesn’t mean that we all have to be BFFs now, more customiaztions is always good people who want to run m+ as red draenei or red eyed night elf should be allowed to do so, and if RPers can’t be bothered to stick to the lore, they could add a simple tooltip into the character creation and be done with it, or do their favourite copy+paste questline kill 10 mobs and click 6 doodads where they explain what’s up with that. BFA was botched not because of faction war, but becasue they went through 3 different expansions in 1, faction war was put aside in 8.1.5, since then we only had metions of it between some individual characters. But people are happy to parrot “BFA bad” because it’s what everybody says and I am not saying it was good, but it was 100% not bad because of the faction war, it was just marketed as faction war, but more than half the expansion didn’t have anything to do with it, people had issues with BFA becasue of gameplay like Azerite gear and “having to grind AP” which they honestly didn’t unless they were mythic raider. From the story perspective rather than faction war I would understand criticism like that big things like Zandalar, Nazjatar and N’zoth didn’t meet the expectation after being build up for over a decade and to be fair it would be really hard to make Zandalar that would please everybody, I loved the zones, but for the mighty empire of Zandalar we were hearing about since vanilla, I wouldn’t blame anyone if they expected more.

Now that is nothing new, the faction conflict has ALWAYS been present and ALWAYS was paused so the most powerful factions could team up for the sake of greater good. There was never a single storyline at a time in an expansion (until BFA and shadowlands). Did the faction conflict story prevent you from enjoying the chase after Illidan in Outland and stopping the summoning of Kil’jaeden, from the war against the Lich King, stopping Deathwing, dealing with the old god corruption in Pandaria? It has always been there for those who enjoy it and sometime it was more in the forefront, sometime is was pushed to the background a little to give story to those who don’t enjoy faction war, it was delicate balance and it was never perfect, but it worked. I find people who say that it’s good that faction war has been cancelled incredibly selfish and honestly have accidentaly started playing a different game. There has always been room for a little bit of something for everyone, now there isn’t anything for anyone (or for a tiny portion of the players and while I don’t have the numbers, since nobody does, all the people trying to figured them out for PVE coming up with current WoW loosing players, anyone who plays PVP just knows - I feel you brothers… and while RP is by no means dead as people keep dooming, if anyone believes it is anywhere near BFA levels of alive, then they are delusional). Player count is going down however for many different reasons, but as of dragonflight one of the reasons absolutely is the state of the setting as a whole.

The current devs are lazy and incopetent and the narrative team most of all which can’t for the life of them create anything of their own, so they have to butcher someone else’s creation, so instead of going after your fellow players who love the fantasy of their characters’ faction and race and the diversity of WoW in general and are disappointed that it has been/is being erased take it out with the devs. This goes beyond just faction war, they are taking away all the conflict and danger from the world the primalists are about as dangerous as the jailer’s people, which is not dangerous at all, and while I enjoyed the human heritage storyline, was it really necessary to split defias into clearly good and bad guys, of which the bad guys seem don’t seem dangerous at all with loss of their leadership, popular support and many members.

Nobody is saying that the faction war should be the sole focus all the time, but the advocates of (and I have never used it before but I am going to start now just because I know it bothers some) world of PEACEcraft are content of to lose loyal oldschool players and friends over bad writing and if that’s the trade you are willing to make, than enjoy I guess.

8 Likes
42

Though I wouldn’t consider it necessarily a problem with the ‘setting’ so much as how we engage with it, datamining is partly to blame with this. We know a vast amount of what’s coming months before it’s available, even before people can look at it properly on the PTR as people comb over strings and IDs for information, which ruins a bit of the surprise and thrill of discovery.

However, in turn, it’s hard to say that datamining/PTR stuff isn’t also useful. Even ignoring the testing of content for bugs (which, frankly, blizz should be doing themselves with paid testers), with the recent orc priest situation directed feedback on something in development saw it fixed and improved for actual release. Were everything kept hush-hush until it made it to live, that would’ve been much worse. In other words, it’s hard to entirely trust Blizz with the idea of banishing datamining and the PTR to the shadow realm.

43

MMO Champion has a lot to answer for, yeah. The entirety of Cataclysm was absorbed into my brain from datamining once the beta dropped that by the time it launched there was nothing new for me to explore.

It’s my own fault for looking, but that temptation is too strong.

3 Likes
44

These didn’t happen in a vacuum mind, while i agree they were all dusted off in a patch. The 1-60 experience was littered with quests that were building them up. Such as Onyxia meddling with Stormwind in the guise of Katrana and the black dragon plot to rule it from the shadows.

5 Likes
45

The thunder king was only one patch and still manages to hype up properly. I don’t think it’s only because of age but because you need capable writers working together with capable world~ and quest designers.
Fyrakk could have been an epic one patch enemy but he is reduced to a dot on the map.

4 Likes
46

I was going to mention this as well, but that only really applies to Onyxia and for the rest they do similar things now where there are quests referring to these threats before the patch rolls around where they kill them.

Onyxia was a very unique case and we haven’t seen anything like it since. Very influential to the Alliance story and rather than being a last raid boss she’s just hanging out in a cave. No fluff.

1 Like
47

Sure, if you were an Alliance player…

(I was, at the time, it was cool)

1 Like
48

To be fair, i don’t see anything wrong with having faction orientated threats. Story telling doesn’t have to be symmetrical. As long as you can access the content. :dracthyr_shrug:

49

I’m not against it either, honestly (though in the greater context of the lack of Horde content in vanilla, I can understand why it stung a little/a lot). As Akamito said Onyxia was also kind of an outlier in that regard, there wasn’t any real setup for C’thun outside of the shifting sands patch, for instance. N’zoth was teased far heavier with quests and even that mini-raid, but he’s still viewed as ‘wasted’ while C’thun is generally overlooked/accepted.

50

I could give you a very long and an elaborate answer but I would say the lore went wrong from MoP/WoD transition onwards.

That being said, it was still salvageable, all the way to Battle of Dazar Alor patch in BFA. After that it’s been unsalvageable, save for our characters waking up from a comatose sleep after the defeat of Garrosh in Siege of Orgrimmar.

BFA especially stings because the trailer is probably one of the best Blizzard has ever made to date. And it really sets the mood that there’s gonna be a massive horde v alliance conflict ahead- Which then proceeds to disintegrate into a sad orc story instead, and evolving into a horde vs horde + alliance story once again (all in one patch)

Ah well at least the nelves got owned so there is that. Can’t have it all.

2 Likes
51

I think people give C’thun slack because of the whole war effort thing. The opening of AQ was this mystical event years ago that lagged PCs, the boss himself was so broken that Blizzard had to fix him etc.

The coming for Classic dispelled all fanfare around AQ and Ol’ mr Eyeball for me.

4 Likes
52

Ain’t reading all that.

I’m happy for u tho.

Or sorry that happened.

4 Likes
53

Thunder King was not in-fact in one patch. Lei Shen’s legend was breadcrumbed and littered across the Pandaria questing experience, there’s a mogu quest boss going “The Thunder comes…” in early Jade Forest, as well as plenty of mentions of the Thunder King in Pandaria archeology and the Lorewalker reputation scrolls. All of this before his resurrection via Zandalari in Kun-Lai.

54

I will say that, between Classic and BFA, there have been basically two decades of storytelling and game development. You can’t say “it worked then, why can’t it work now?”

Aside from the fact that the first classic bosses (aside from C’thun and Hakkar) had a quite decent of build up, and even someone like C’thun still had plenty of lore dedicated to him at the time - the War of the Shifting Sands was a massive event, it cannot be understated. But we were also in what, 2005? Twenty years have passed since then and it is reasonable that people have different expectations.

N’Zoth as a whole was a wasted villain: he started to have a proper character build up since the Cataclysm. He wasn’t some generic overlord but, rather, the great schemer behind Deathwing, behind Azshara, and the one who kept influencing the nightmare from behind the scenes. He was the last Old God and quite frankly, after ten years of build up, he was killed fairly quickly in an expansion that simply had too much going on. And to give us what in return? The Jailer and the primalists? People have all the rights to be pissed off about Blizzard not thinking how to manage their resources and squandering them.

3 Likes
55

can we talk about how classic had soul. i haven’t heard anyone say that meme for a while and i’ve missed it

2 Likes
56

I believe it’s spelled sovl

1 Like
57

Classic with updated graphics and races and maps would unironically be banger.

I also want the old bear form for tauren back.

1 Like
58

just give me classic with updated graphics. i don’t want the races

not racist. just don’t like em

3 Likes
59

‘Loyal oldschool’ - good grief, I’ve been playing and caring about Azeroth since WC2, get off the high horse before you hurt yourself.

The faction war as a hard and fast ‘rule’ was shaky after WC3, what with the factions (bar Undead) teaming up to defeat Archimonde. The entire premise of Frozen Throne was sub-faction themed (Night Elves perhaps being mostil still cohesive, but they had the least time in WC3 vanilla, ‘Alliance’ being about the Blood Elves going their seperate way and Undead being Arthas vs Illidan) rather than overarching faction vs faction.

Legion, realistically, was the cut off point for it making any sense. “Oh, we just saved the whole planet Proper, now lets just go back to fighting each other” is the most tired and boring plot ‘device’ ever. The caveat is it COULD have worked, if they’d had a proper lead up to ‘Inexplicable faction war’ → ‘Wait, the Naga are involved and doing shady stuff’ → ‘Oops, Sargaras stabbing the planet let the Old Gods get a grip, Suddenly All Ny’alotha’.

But they didn’t do that, and the SL arc was a travesty in writing, so yes that does mean BFA and the poorly bracketed return to muh faction war was bad and stupid.

Edit: Also, argument loses 10 points for ‘World of Peacecraft’, get a new bit good god.

5 Likes
60

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that, at this point, Azeroth is a bit of a tired setting. Nineteen years of World of Warcraft, another decade before that of the Warcraft RTS titles. That is a very, very long time for a story that, for 2/3 of its time, has been played out in the format of a MMO.

No doubt this would have been offset in part by a clearer vision for the story and progression of the world’s narrative, rather than the incoherent back-and-forth the writers have given us. The MMO format has always required them to innovate to the next, big thing which eventually comes to the detriment of narrative fidelity when it’s not in the best of hands.

There’s not one turning point where the game went wrong, just a stream of decisions over the years that led the setting to where it is.

Of course, the world is still pretty great for roleplayers. There’s a lot of freedom for us to just… make up our own stuff and run with it, since Azeroth is a pretty run of the mill fantasy ballpit.

6 Likes