World of Warcraft is the world of an rts game. This is what separates it from all the other mmorpgs. Rts games can tell the story of a war like no mmo can (no matter how good its writers are), and an mmo can make you play with so many different people which is something rts games can’t do. There needs to be a new rts Warcraft that structures the main story and events of the game. The interesting parts of the story laid out by the rts would then be added into the mmo’s world. This way, the game wouldn’t need to force lore to people through interruptions, the world would start feeling mysterious and not micro managed. Plus, people who like the story behind this world would get something far better structured.
There’s something special about WoW compared to failed mmos like Wildstar, and it’s the culture that Warcraft as a frenchise created around it. I get the feeling that WoW used up most of it and it has now started to damage it. I think an rts game is a need for Warcraft. The story in wow just never progressed in a satisfying way. Since Legion, they’ve been trying to focus on some of the characters in order to organize the story better and in order to make it easier for them to communicate the story of the game to the audience. But I feel like the scope of their approach is extremely limited, and it doesn’t feel that much like an improvement.
Warcraft has a deep lore. In past even people who didn’t know much about it were still fascinated by it. It was something mysterious. Nowadays the lore turned into something people skip when a cinematic appears. It’s linear, and it depends heavily on cheap bursts to have an impact on people. Your character doesn’t really have any impact on things that happen anyway. Specially with BfA, the “world” of warcraft started to be about a few characters. The story became their story. The world switched from being a mysterious place waiting to be discovered, to being something that’s changed/created when somebody does something right/wrong.
Character driven story telling is good when it doesn’t feel choppy and when you’re doing meaningful things during the story (like in Suramar questline). It doesn’t work when this story is presented in small unsatisfying chunks. The depth and the ‘epic’ feeling are also affected because story telling that is too dependent on a few characters can and does feel like a reality tv show at times.
The problem with WoW’s story in general is that it’s constrained by the game itself.
You cannot have either faction flat out lose to the other since this will get half the player base mad (a faction conflict with a promise of no satisfactory resolution, to me, meant that it was a terrible idea for BFA to feature it so prominently). You cannot wipe a playable race off the planet in an act of genocide for obvious reasons.
Another constraint is the nature of the MMO. This adds a far bigger disconnect between the prominent characters and the players since we don’t get to play as them, but instead play as someone who’s rather inconsequential to the main story. It’s why I always enjoyed the smaller, regional stories since it feels like the character I control is having an actual impact on things.
It’s why I actually rather liked the player character power creep in Legion. Someone who’s helped save the world against countless threats like the Scourge and Deathwing and lived to tell the tale would likely (and rightly) be regarded as a living legend, and has generally done a lot more of the leg-work compared to the established lore characters.
A theoretical Warcraft 4 would avoid these problems.
This is an issue of Blizzard’s own making, a lot of the toxicity is generated from their own hype peddling and encouraging people to identify as a game mechanic (lol). The game would have been a lot better if it was like it was originally intended; the factions are a narrative and not part of the gameplay. It would have let the story run in a similar vein to Vanilla; factions within the factions are fighting.
Yeah, a new Warcraft would make wow turn back to its roots.
Ideally i’d want Warcraft 4 but maybe Warcraft III reforged would be enough to serve the same function with expansions etc if it turns out to be a good game.
you se the biggest blunder in my oppinion that Blizzard did whit wow lore, started when they decided to make the Forsaken a playable race, this should never have happend, becuse it makes no sence what so ever, not even from horde side it doesnt make sence. Due to this wow lore will always be in a stand still, becuse you can never for example mix all the races whit eachother, somethign that should have happend insantly in vanilla, where humans, orcs, tauren, gnomes, and dwarfs, should have been able to shoose what side they are on, but this could never happen becuse of the forsaken, becuse in most races eyes they where the scourge still.
Wow needs to take a backseat as a supporting game rather than a main story developing game.
WoW should be waht drives world development, but the story should come from a single player game - Witcher 3 series style.
Then the MMO provides an expansion with whatever new area the single player game goes too, and you can get a lot of the filler quests and detail quests, kill some of the other challenges shown and have a shot at some of the things the RPG game did.
Amen to that. The problem isn’t that they need a RTS game, but that they try to tell the same kind of story as they did in their RPG-heavy RTS in an MMO. That’s not how WoW started out. Vanilla barely had any story development at all, just adventurers saving the world from unknown evils and learning about new lands.
That’s why I liked MoP so much (with the exception of the Garrosh-stuff). The new continent, it’s own history and its own races and cultures were the main focus.
Exactly. It is what the mmo format wow is built in does best. IT is not good at telling detailed stories or focused new plot… it really doesn’t have the scope to do the sort of justice many of their controversial changes demand.
And most of those changes are because WoW is the flagship game of rhte warcraft franchise, so all warcraft development happens through it.
Ship great events and actual stories to single player game (RTS, RPG, whatever you want), then wow can have a lot more flesher quests that explore the world like in classic.
WoW isn’t like Witcher though. Witcher universe is more realistic, WoW is made to be more mythological, it exists in a mythological universe with far more hard-to-believe elements.
RTS worked fine to tell its story, because of the nature of the game we filled in the gaps automatically. And when WoW was first launched, it was still able to have the world feeling even with all of its simplicity. (no in game cinematics, no voice acting etc.) The more they try to complicate it, the less immersive it becomes.
Ah, I meant overdoing things by trying to make everything that happens in the world too much about some specific plot. Like you said 123 next.
So I guess we don’t disagree there