Why did Stormwind lose all of its 'edge' and 'medieval flair'?

Lore Story
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Two things first: Yes, I already posted this on reddit and the answer to the question in the title is also clear. Blizzard wanted the Alliance and Stormwind especially as the good guys of the setting, and as such everything somewhat controversial was removed from the kingdom. Still let us talk about this.

Stormwind in Classic-WoW feels like a completely different nation. I’m not necessarily talk about the rampant corruption within the city, even though it also adds much needed flavor to the kingdom as having a deadly, decadent court makes things spicier. (Not to mention that these corrupt nobles are actually protected by the simple fact that they have connections and belong to the nobility. Lescovar needs to be assassinated and is not put on a trial or imprisoned.)

I’m talking about little stuff like the quest called “The Color of Blood.” You can get this quest from Nikola Raskol, who is an older woman wandering around the Old Town of Stormwind. The quest sends you to the stockades in order to collect some bandanas from the defias. Why are you doing this? Well…

“Bitterness flows through my veins like a cold river. My grandson, Mac, was such a good boy. A mere 14 years old . When the army was sent off to the front, Mac took up arms to defend the city. He was a guard in The Stockade, where the Defias gang is locked up. Mac reprimanded some of the prisoners for tearing their wool blankets to make scarves, a symbol of their gang. For that Mac was stabbed in the back. I want revenge. Bring me 10 of their precious Wool Bandanas. They are the color of blood.”

He wasn’t killed or hurt by orcs, undead or demons. He was killed by another human. And absolutely no one outside of his grandmother actually gives a damn about it. Just another young man getting killed in a prison riot what else is new? Nowadays a big deal is made out of the fact that farmers need to be recruited. (Fully ignoring the fact that something like this already happened in Wrath of the Lich King, and all the way back in Warcraft 3. ‘Call to Arms’ as the special ability of humanity anyone?)

Other examples of Stormwinds different mindset comes from the fact that some quests and notes you pick up (in the Stalvan questline for example) talk about arranged marriages. An innkeeper in Menethil Harbor talks about how the sailors come to the town in order to drink, gamble and pick up women. The uprising in the Stockades is dealt with by simply executing everyone who is raising his weapon or some kind of weapon. And Thelwater also threatens you : If he thinks that you work together with the prisoners he and his men will find you and kill you.

Last but not least: The overall dialogue of the NPCs. Someone like Magistrate Solomon acts a lot more like you would expect from someone in his position. The overall tone is somewhat more serious.

I don’t know but Classic-Stormwind feels like it has a lot more character than the current version of it. Nowadays it feels like it only exists to serve the Wrynns…which is made pretty clear in ‘Before the Storm’ where a count serves as a butler. And seemingly it’s not even a form of punishment for the noble (because you know I could see it as a punishment against insolent nobles). You could replace the people of Stormwind with robots and nothing would change that much.

In Classic it feels a lot more like Stormwind is actually a complete nation. A very Vanilla-flavored nation but a nation nonetheless.

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There is also a cool low level quest where you have to speak to an armor vendor and he says something like “Strange. Why are we producing so many armors and weapons as of late, almost as if we were in times of war? Is there something the nobles are hiding from us?”. It is an interesting quest, because it implies the distrust that the common people have for the aristocracy, a topic that is never touched.

I disagree that Anduin Wrynn is the problem. He is a victim, just like the people of Stormwind. Much like them, Anduin is neutered into being a stereotype. He is young and wise beyond his years, yet also inexperienced as a ruler and very idealistic. That’s a dangerous combination. Sadly Anduin is never allowed to show a more ruthless or tyrannical side because the people of Stormwind are so shallow and literally never revolt. See? It works both ways.

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Well, the shift seems kind of obvious to me: Stormwind isn’t representing Stormwind anymore, it represents the Alliance. The Alliance includes powerful mages, dwarven industry, gnomish inventions and elven magic and wisdom. Even more, it includes spacefaring aliens, who have living embodiments of the Light with them that preach peace and enlightenment.

Is it really a wonder that they found it hard to combine all of that with a xenophobic, religious, hardened, uneducated, oppressive culture?

That they decided that population doesn’t really matter at all for nobody, and armies can come anytime from anywhere, no matter if their race is basically extinct, didn’t help, though…

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Stormwind got basically nothing since classic. And no, Anduin doesn’t count as development. Just look at the human leveling zones, what is there? Brotherhood of the Horse, Conjurers of Stormwind, Clerics of Northshire? No, CSI: Miami parody and a zone revolving around a Rambo reference. Darkshire was the last bastion and we killed all the named npcs there in Legion because they got wololo’d by the demons or something.

And I sincerely doubt that this is ever going to change. Just imagine if we ever got a Stormwind focused patch - elf fans would burn the forums down, crying about human potential and god knows what because in their heads, apparently, Tirion and Khadgar somehow count as Stormwind development.

And I kind of agree with Arctur about Anduin being a victim. It seemed they want to develop him with that Legion cinematic and BfA release (him saying “time to take what is rightfully ours” concerning Lordaeron was nice), but then they made him MoP-Anduin again. Shame.

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He never changed from his MoP persona. Anduin at his core will always be an idealist who seeks peace. But he does not have to be JUST that. I remember Blizzard saying once that he was marching on Lordaeron to prove his worth as High King – that his goal was not primarily to avenge the night smurfs, but to bask in the great triumph and glory that come from reclaiming the “holy land”.

This would be a very interesting plot point and would add a lot to Anduin’s character! He has big shoes to fill, because his father Varian was a great High King, and Anduin knows this! He knows what the people think of him and how they see him compared to Varian, because he heard them in Legion.

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I partially agree with this. Stormwind is the seat of the leader of the Grand Alliance, and is given no true flavor of its own. But I think it really is also an issue of Blizzard’s writing team having written themselves into a corner:

Blizzard seems to tunnel vision in its writing to only the latest expansion, which always takes us further away from Stormwind. This isn’t helped by the fact that in Classic all human zones had particular problems (bandits, orcs, gnolls, undead, you name it) and Cataclysm failed to expand on these zones to a significant level; they’re still defined by the struggles they had in Classic even when these problems have been solved.

In my humble, ignorant opinion, ultimately it’s all a failure of world-building and fleshing out of details, as the WoW lore tends to be written with a broad brush. Classic had a load of problems but those were for the most part either resolved or deemed resolved. Noble intrigues were slashed when Varian returned and tightened his powers as Absolute Monarch and all the different questlines were finished, and Cataclysm served as footnotes or reboots of the same problems.

WoW’s writers have always been horrible at fleshing out the world, this is just the nature of things.

Stormwind has become a bit too stable of a kingdom for it to be fun, because the focus of the game shifts so heavily into foreign issues. I’d love for Genn and Rogers to be at the frontline of a movement of dissent or that the populace sees Anduin as too busy with foreign policy (or when compared to Varian who was a decisive military mind, Anduin sometimes erring on the side of inaction). Sadly Genn is being written to be Anduin’s father figure slash uncle, and Rogers is somewhere screeching about the Horde I guess.

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I don’t know, the Alliance is still an absolutistic monarchy without real laws were the leaders can have you arbitrarily executed for petty things like apostasy or theft. I don’t think peasants have any rights at all.
All in all Azeroth is a pretty bleak place compared to our world if you are not one of the favoured adventurers or nobility.
And if you say that stormwind was made to serve the wrynns, well that just reinforces my point about it being an absolutistic monarch, just think about the countries in our world that have that form of government and tell me if that’s not “edgy” enough.
I don’t know about “medieval flair”, but I don’t think wow is medieval at all, even in classic it was at best steampunk, now it’s full blown sci-fi with swords.

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One of my greatest disapointments was when they threw out the idea of corruption in SW and when the powers of The Light turned out to be the result of giant bell chimes. There was so much potential there, just kinda squandered. Stormwind is a boring city, with boring NPCs.
Still we know the lead writer LOOOOVES Cryduin so we will never go back from the perfect pretty prince, that would be too close to the idea of “killing your darling”.

I mean just imagine, ANduin had had enough, basically declares martial law in a fit of rage (probably what could be argued as uncertainty as to what to do as well) suddenly people are forced to conscript in MASSIVE numbers. Knight X you work with is a total bro, but damn Knight Y and Z are total doucebags who see the peasant conscripts like cannon fodder (just like we have many examples of IRL), still you have to work with them, at least for awhile, it’s war after all. Racial tensions run high. Night Elves and Gilneans are getting impatient and the Dranei may not approve of this shift in ways of how Anduin starts to use his forces and people.

Nobles also take advantage of the situation, some defect with their forces and has to be forced or convinced to “Join the Good Fight”. Yet some are also worried that there are talks of turning to a more professional army, not lead by knights, but generals picked from the peasantry.
That is all just ontop of my head which I also think it would give it the more Absolutist Monarchy feel.

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It is sad that Stormwind has changed so much. It used to be this absolutely amazing city with a towering cathedral and imposing keep. Everything felt so enclosed, so built up and grand. Nowadays the city seems much flatter and more open and empty with the docks being so big and spacious; it’s became a dumping down for faction content and ironically the park district would have been perfect for the refugees if it had been rebuilt as it was before and the memorial for King Wrynn was built next to his wifes memorial. Sadly Blizzard just overlook these things, and thus Stormwind and Orgrimmar remain in this sad state of being shadows of what they could be for players as the main hubs of their respective factions.

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I’ll elabrate on the nobles a bit…

The Defias-story made perfectly clear that the House of Nobles had a great amount of power, especially over the purse strings of the kingdom. When they decided that the masons weren’t going to be paid more, they weren’t. Apart from that they had relatively free reign for 10 years, and made most of the important decisions (under Onyxia’s influence).

That King Varian could just storm in and take the reigns without protests or undermining is frankly ridiculous. Power people don’t very much like to give up power, and Varian didn’t really inspire loyalty during his reign. After his wife’s death not that long after his coronation he spend a frickin’ decade apparently moping around and doing nothing. The Varian-comics even show that the populace didn’t have a good opinion of Varian and found it questionable if he would be any better than the nobles, after his return from Defias capture. Even better… this revealed that Varian was captured to the whole populace, and a special tax was levied to buy him free. Yay monarchy…

So who exactly was there to defend Varian’s absolute powers before the House of Nobles? He would at least need the loyalty of the military to be able to force others to obey, and how exactly did the moping king manange to aquire that now? Wouldn’t the local lord who did his best inspire much more loyalty in the soldiery of his region?
Blizzard didn’t even care to make the Wrynn-family blessed by the Holy Light, or something, to at least give them a position of religious importance that would inspire loyalty…

Really, this is just ridiculous. An absolute monarchy does need an iron fist to be enforced. Varian before his return didn’t. Use it or lose it, that’s also true for power. So Varian should have lost quite a bit of his. But no, he was celebrated like he was Aragorn, coming at the darkest hour of the kingdom with an army to save them all.

This is stupid.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers had no understanding of real world history and while he is not my favorite writer, I think it’s sad that they didn’t go the approach of finding someone with an interest/passion like Brandon Sanderson (not asking for his level, I know he is very famous and it would be far too expensive) who study medieval warfare/history, martial arts, psychology and a whole tons of things to improve his books in his spare time. As a n00blet amateur writer it’s really inspiring to see someone put that much effort into their books and I know the common phrase “it’s just fantasy” but it feels kinda cool/satisfying, for me personally, when you realize how something worked/works and can ponder how to implement it. If that last line even made sense.

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I do tend to think that writing what comes down to heavily editorialized fan fiction, that will be chained to whatever game developers thinks would be a cool gameplay mechanic, doesn’t exactly draw the best quality of writers.

Then again, I guess there is no lack of enthusiastic writers looking for something that at least puts them on the map and might bring their real work to the world’s attention, so what do I know…

Might just be hard to filter out the competent ones, if you aren’t an expert yourself, and they didn’t have enough popularity without you to have a good grip on the pupular reception…

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Sure, I’ve no doubt it’s different. There are most likely restrictions, but it’s hard to say what those are without knowing the inner workings. I do think a lead writer has quite a bit of leeway, otherwise there would be little point. Of course you can’t go to the devs and say: “Right I got this grand climax planned out, so just build me an extra 3 raids and then I also need you to make a scenario where we turn the game into a sorta total war like game, be done by next patch so we release it before the new expac, yeah?”
It does seem they have quite a bit of a hand in deciding motivations and story arcs though and how things unfold. I mean we got one writer who fangirls over Anduin and one writer who fanbois over Nanathos and made Sylvanas his waifu.

I don’t know, I just feel this is a hard one to pin on the company, also back when they announced they were bringing Christie on the team, it seemed like a big deal, like she would have influence.

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Which wasn’t much of a risk for them, because she had been compliant to her restrictions in writing the big novels for the last addons - and when writing for other universes like StarWars. And really, I think that, much more than anything else got her the job. She nods and accepts ridiculous premises for her work.

Of course she has influence on dialogues and motivations and such things. But there is only so much you can do when they tell you that the story starts at point A and ends at point C, crossing point B in between.

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