Where next

Argent Dawn
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I’m sure as RPers we are some of the most story-conscious WoW players, and I doubt very much what I have to say is a hot-take, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Does anyone else feel like Blizzard’s writing is just… lost?

By this I don’t mean the plots are boring or the subject matter is too juvenile or any of those things… I mean objectively, from a direction point of view, it’s all a little confused?

For instance, a lot of people hated Cataclysm for the game dynamics and seemingly projected that onto what in fact was a fairly logical direction in the Lore of the game. Now, regardless what you think of the quality that they’re churning out, it just feels like they’ve fallen into Marvel-Syndrome: defeating the Enemy of All Enemies… but wait here’s another one two years later – here’s some valuable allies determined to protect Azeroth to help you along the way… Oh, where were they when the Lich King was kicking about? Uh…

This is me saying this while I actually like more recent expansions from a plot POV. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s engaging. Doesn’t mean it makes sense when you zoom out.

All this sort of hit me when I went back to play a little bit of Classic. The base game made so much sense; you could totally see TBC, WOTLK… I know this is in hindsight but it does fit together nicely.

I guess what I’m saying is that Classic to Cata reads like a perfect fantasy series, each building off the next… The rest read like stand-alone albeit thrilling sagas in their own right.

Which is great, but it has left gaping inconsistencies. To take a gentle example, I see why the Tauren allied with the Orcs in sheer gratitude at the beginning. But why on Azeroth aren’t the Night Elves and Tauren the 2nd closest alliance behind Humans-Dwarves?

Am I going mad or is this a common feeling?

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I think it was quite lost in the BfA to DF era, which is exactly why they brought in Metzen. The feel I get from War Within and following expansions is that the story will finally have a narrative where one expansion leads to another, similar to what we had in Cata-Legion (maybe even better since sometimes the connection between these expansions was based on weird events such as Garrosh being put on trial and escaping).

I completely disagree on this part. The only connection between these expansions was that they were leftover plots from Warcraft 3. The last patch of Vanilla focused on Scourge, then suddenly Dark Portal opens and Legion spews forth, so we go in and beat up Illidari. Also everyone from The Frozen Throne expansion of Warcraft 3 is there and they´re raid bosses for some reason (including leader of the blood elves, great job from Blizzard, removing iconic character and replacing him with nobody they only bothered to develop 6 years later in MoP).
Then, after we defeat Kil´jaeden in his sun jacuzzi, Arthas suddenly awakens, followed by Deathwing who randomly decides now is the time to go and leave his lava jacuzzi.

The MoP-Legion era (with stories started in Cata, such as the best Warchief who did nothing wrong), despite its problems, feels like the most cohesive time of WoW storytelling.

Tauren are food, you don´t become friends with food.

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Fair I guess… What I meant by logical is that they drip-fed us the characters, the lore, the stakes etc between these earlier expansions. Even if they did it in the haphazard way you have listed above, don’t you get the feeling the story-boarders were in the room day 1, connecting the dots from Classic to WOTLK?

Execution, okay – though from a marketing POV I’m sure it was a brilliant move having Warcraft 3 expansions and WoW expansions making crossovers.

Lol fair

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Because not All Tauren are Druids. most of the Tauren give 0 Fs about Night elves. Sunwalkers and Seers were even created to off set the Focus on Night elf culture among the tauren through the Druids.

Night elves care about preserving Life and worship the moon.
Tauren care about preserving Balance, and worship the Embodiment of nature , and her Eyes.

They are not that similar.

On your other points.

Cata flowed into mists seamlessly. It was the escalation of the war that started after the Battle for the Undercity.

Mists then flowed into Warlords, not so seamlessly due to it only found in a book.

Warlords concluded the Garrosh VS Varian arch that started in Wotlk and revived Gul’dan.
Gul’dan then brought the legion back. and started the Sylvanas VS Anduin arch. Which was concluded in Shadowlands.

Only Dragonflight, has been the Stand alone Expansion.

Dragonflight is the odd one out, as it is not about a big world ending threat, it does not have and Struggle between the Horde or alliance (not that SL had that either) And there for it is the Disneyfication of WoW.

1 expansion where blizzard is not relying on their trusty tropes, and all of WoW is suddenly changing.

From the looks of it TWW is going Right back to WoD/Legion/Bfa story telling that people seem to suddenly want now.

I personally have hardly any issues with Blizzard’s story telling. Aside from them introducing some new concept with out proper explanation, For example the Ohn’aran Centaur apparently predating the Desolace Centaur by about 10.000 years. with no further lore given about them what so ever, aside from being led to the isles by the Wild god.

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Nope. I think they were just making stuff up based on what stories they started in Warcraft 3. Only in Wrath did they start creating actual story instead of pulling characters from previous games, books and comics.
If anything, TBC as an expansion is one of the most harmful things that happened to the lore because of what it did with its characters. While Vashj or Illidan definitely weren´t some nice guys, turning them into simple raid bosses was a terrible choice (and they later desperately tried to return Illidan to more positive character). And what was done to Kael´thas was a travesty. All of this was done simply because Blizzard wanted famous characters as raid bosses for their raid boss killing game.
They also completely retconned draenei, one of the main races of TBC, and while I like the new draenei much better, it´s still a sign of how they were really making stuff up as they went.
Meanwhile, blood elves, despite their introduction to the Horde being handled well, were made into a Horde race simply because Horde needed numbers. Doesn´t sound like a trait of story being planned long ahead.

Old WoW has so much stuff in it that, were it released today, would be complained about to no end, both in terms of gameplay and lore. But, because it´s early WoW, it gets a pass.

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since 8.1, more or less yes.

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They literally released the schedule for every expansion release from 2024 to 2030, and have been making a habit of making yearly public schedules of game content. Critics of the quality of story or content aside, calling the visible future of Warcraft ‘aimless’ is pretty dishonest, considering we are the most aware of their plans for the future than we have ever been.

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Of course, things seem more sensible looking back, hindsight is 20/20 after all. But even Blizzard writers have admitted that they had no idea what they were doing story-wise for TBC, and how Kael’thas & Illidan were generally treated as characters truly show that. We can’t know if the story makes sense in the future… Because it hasn’t been released yet.

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Yes, and we have also been told that The Burning Crusade was only planned and developed in a year, with the original idea being a pirate-themed expansion. We, also, know how two expansions that release in 2026 and 2028 are going to start, and they even know how it’s going to end, with the writing and art team already moving on to fleshing out Midnight, as per their words on interviews.

Let’s not compare apples to oranges here just to keep a train of discourse that doesn’t even make sense.

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I had the same feeling, OP.
I think from Classic to Cataclysm, you can see that they have used all the main story threads that they had left open on Azeroth: Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing. We knew these people were around, hence dealing with their schemes made sense.

It was the Azeroth we came to know and love. With the vibe and the art we know and love.

The two odd expansions, Mist of Pandaria and Warlords, were likely not decided beforehand, but you can see that they were still grounded in the setting. MoP was about adventuring in a wild new continent and the faction war, gave us some lore about the titans, and in general advanced plot threads that, again, felt grounded in the setting (faction war, Anduin, Varian, Garrosh). Meanwhile WoD was about an iconic Warcraft race, the orcs, and served us as a ladder to prep up the Legion, what many saw as The Villain of WoW.

Legion is the great promise of both MoP and WoD, and it is a villain that just felt too great to fight after Deathwing. It feels it brings a satisfying closure to a lot of plot threads open in WoW novels and books.

BFA instead is a little bit out of the blue. Your power level appears squished, Azerite is a bit of a cheap plot device, and the whole faction war came out of the blue, with plenty of characters betraying their previous personality and motivations to fight a war they had no stakes in. It felt forced and out of character. It doesn’t help that we fight the faction war of foreign lands that look like a dinosaur park, or a GoT grim dark setting. Still, in spite of its flaws, it manages to speak about Warcraft: the faction war, the Old Gods.

Here comes a problem however. Without Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing, the Legion, the faction war, and the Old Gods too, what is left for us? Because at this stage Blizz used all the plot threads they had established since Warcraft 3 and Classic WoW.

Shadowlands is an expansion that obviously isn’t grounded in the Warcraft setting. I’m not going to elaborate on that, it’s an awful idea with an awful execution.

And Dragonflight has a similar problem: these villains come a bit out of nowhere, and they arrive at a stage in time in which they really shouldn’t be a threat for us. Besides, it’s obvious they were never set up as antagonists, so meh, they are okay, but do indeed feel random evil dragons - because they are.

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In fact, with WoD, we know it was not decided beforehand in its current form.

The writers didn’t originally know how to continue from MoP. One abandoned idea was that Garrosh would rally the downtrodden races, such as gnolls, troggs, kobolds, and centaur:

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Mongrel_Horde

Then the idea was that Garrosh would escape to Outland, where he would find a magical horn that would turn it into old Draenor. Then they scrapped that idea too in favor of the alternate universe time travel concept we got. And even that was very different in the beginning:

https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/File:Draenor_early_layout.jpg

And WoD kept undergoing rewrites and redesigns throughout its development, wasting a lot of development time and resources on things that got cut from the released game.

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I knew about the Mongrel Horde but, a magical horn?! Really! A magical horn…? Damn, that sounds worse than the AU Draenor somehow.

For what is worth, WoD tried really hard. In some aspects, you can see the creators of the game loved what they were doing, and the content is enjoyable - PvP was good, raids were pretty decent… But other aspects of the game completely killed it. To this day, it’s arguably one of the worst expansions to date.

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For what is worth, WoD tried really hard. In some aspects, you can see the creators of the game loved what they were doing, and the content is enjoyable - PvP was good, raids were pretty decent… But other aspects of the game completely killed it.

The leveling experience in WOD was the best of any expansion up to that point, hands down. It still holds up to this day imo. And yeah as you said all raiders that played through WOD loved it. It was the last expansion where you could just be a raider and only log in to raid. It was killed by the lack of post-release content. 6.0 had Highmaul and BRF, 6.1 had selfie cams (lol) and mythic dungeons (banger system), and 6.2 had HFC. And that was it. I know Blizzard has never outright confirmed that they scrapped the entire middle part of the story of WOD but it’s painfully obvious that they did indeed only tell the beginning and the end.

To this day, it’s arguably one of the worst expansions to date.

It can be 3rd behind Shadowlands and BFA. There’s no shot any expansion goes higher on that list than those two. I am one of the biggest Blizzard shills alive and if SL hadn’t been followed up by DF I would’ve actually quit the game for good.

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More accurately pre-Danuser so more MoP/WoD and the better parts of Legion.
Honestly if we can go an expansion without off the wall whacky cosmicism and wildly ridiculous out of character war crimes being committed I’ll be gucci.

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SL for me is the S-tier of the worse. From the lore to the gameplay, everything felt designed to take away time from me, even the fake portals that were actually a flight path, or the non-mandatory mandatory renown grind, or all that borrowed power shenanigan.

BFA did a lot of things wrong. I am not sure if I’d classify it as worse than the two-patches expansion however. Maybe on the basis that it turned WoW into a massive chore, hmm.

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WOD’s issue is that while everything that actually made it into the game was good, there was not enough stuff that made it in. BFA added things that made the game actively worse. There’s no contest.

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I disagree here, heavily. While it may be a matter of personal taste, I find the Garrison an awful introduction into the game, with the execution delivering half of what was promised, content that eventually turned into a prison for the player, a prison that removed the MMO aspect from WoW.

And a lot of things related to garrisons. Mission tables were far worse than Legion’s.

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Didn’t know about this - do you have a link? I’d like to read.

Also I’d note having a roadmap doesn’t in itself mitigate against each expansion feeling very standalone-ish vs the early days where the Big Bads seemed to build upon one another and you even got hints of them throughout each wave.

This sums up what I meant actually. Not about how intricacies of plot and game mechanics - all subject to dev and marketing team input - played out but the fact they were all linked… Rather than a jaunt to grab the Heart of Azeroth one expac, a mission hall to get an ancient artifact the other, a new continent next, Azerite etc etc.

Having watched the latest trailer it looks like they *are * beginning to link stories back in together quite explicitly which is sweet – marries up well with what everyone seems to be saying about Blizz’s writing being better from hereon. And I’d agree. Like I said from a subjective perspective I really enjoyed more recent expansions but it doesn’t stop me feeling like I’m jumping between universes but with the same few vague faces and plot drivers.

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Watch the main announcement from Blizzcon 2023, they announced next 3 expansions.

What hints about Kil´jaeden being the big bad of TBC did Vanilla provide, and what hints about Lich King did TBC provide?

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I’ll never understand why people bring this up. Why would they be? The Night Elves had a xenophobic empire for 10,000 years and stood idly by as the Tauren were getting genocided by Centaur. The Horde helps them 5 minutes after landing while the Night Elves stood by for ages.

In what reality would/should the Tauren be closer to Night Elves?

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