Shadowlands Discussion (SPOILERS)

Assets still take time to make, so I imagine they at least thought it up during BFA.

Back in Cata, though? No way.

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I do not believe them. They lie.

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I can believe them - it’s just that their planning doesn’t go beyond ‘erm, yeah, we’ll do the Deathhell expansion after the War expansion, hah’ - and then when it’s time to actually start doing it they scramble to retcon / force stuff to justify the story as to why it’s happening.

Before the Storm has already been retconned in terms of Sylv becoming Warchief; in the book, she clearly thinks (internal dialogue, so she’s not lying, unless she’s lying to herself in her brain to trick an omniscient narrator, lol, does she know she’s in a video game?) that she didn’t want to become leader, but now it’s being implied it was her plan all along.

Blizz just don’t know what continuity or foreshadowing is. Daily reminder, bros; if you want a good MMO story, play FFXIV.

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And again, corporate meddling I imagine is huge. The writers are told that X and Y needs to happen in the new expansion for flashy marketing value and Z and A need to return because they are popular characters and will sell, and the writers are then stuck trying to make that work somehow even though it is all a total non sequitur.

I have the idea there is a bit of a contradiction going on. If they work so far in advance on the story, why are there so much retcons necessary?

Granted, Metzen did say the last thing he worked on before he left Blizzard in 2016 was the Burning of Teldrassil.

Maybe she didn’t, but she had to to make the plan work?

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I like the theory of that Sylvanas was forced into leadership, and then adjusted her plan accordingly to the new position so gotten.

We still do not know if it was the Jailer that named her Warchief, while it is heavily implied that it was him, we still do not know for certain.

In Shadowlands we will find out more about Vol’jin, deal with Helya and other things that will clear all this mess out.

I think blizz outright said that the Jailer had a hand in her promotion, during blizzcon.

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I’ll need to look through the BlizzCon interviews and Q&A and stuff again but I am quite certain that they have not revealed who named Vol’jin yet as I think it will be a mystery we will discover while we find out who made him return from the Shadowlands.

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Jailer_(character)

Wowpedia did add some info from different interviews and such but kept the part about Vol’jin as speculation.

At least we can ignore most of the Chronicles as some biased, subjective work I guess. Chronicles 1 should be utterly retconned out of existence in my opinion. It kills so much of the mystery it’s not even funny. Not just for the universe but for the races as well.

Though with the story being so inconsistent and messed up now…I don’t see the point in caring anymore. Retconning really does seem to be something they do far too often, and it turns the story into a mess.

Step 1 to ruining the magic: explaining the magic.

Things really should just be allowed to have their mystery.

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I honestly feel the opposite.

I am glad we are getting Shadowlands so we get more info about the power that Death Knights draw them from.

Specially Revendreth due to Angelus being a blood user and the only kinda blood magic undead kinda been using is the San’layn so going to be cool to see some other type of Blood Users.

Oh, by all means I’m hyped for Shadowlands.

But displaying more about magic through the game and explaining it in a book are different things. The former is compelling storytelling, the latter is boring exposition that adds nothing other than unnecessary rules.

I honestly feel mixed about it.

At one hand the community complains ‘‘Why aren’t they doing this, or tell us more about this.’’

And then when Blizzard really goes in to tell… It is often shot down.

I just think you can never truly please everyone.

I personally love that they took the time to sit down and make the Chronicles for us, I really need to find the time read through it all.

At one hand people been begging Blizzard to set up rules so we can have some guidance in certain things but that naturally upset some people over it not being what they wanted it to be.

In the end I think having things confirmed no matter how bad it is, is better than not having it confirmed since people do not like people going too far out of ‘‘canon’’ stuff.

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Unironically: they think they want it, but they don’t. It sounds nice in their heads, but it really isn’t.

Destroying the mystery of a setting is a surefire way to make that selfsame setting utterly uninteresting.

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Some things certainly needed clarification and more info, but for the most part, I also agree that revealing all the mysteries ultimately cheapens the setting and makes it poorer as a result, as there’s much less room for creative speculations, ideas and imagination.

Chronicles are the main offender for me, especially the first volume. Even though they were retconned to be a subjective view, I still believe that nothing short of their complete and utter retcon will help at this point. Most of the stuff in that book was something we didn’t even have to know, and it ruined a lot of stuff which made Warcraft setting interesting and mystical for me.

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Some things were in need of clarification. The reason the magic chart became so popular is because they needed to give some coherence to character’s abilities (ie. Archimonde uses completely different spells between TBC and WoD, to the extent that a new approach to magic had been implied already), because the lore on magic had become too much inconsistent.

Other than that, I liked some bits of the chronicles, I just think they hyped them up as this “big WoW bible”, when in fact they keep getting retconned or ignored in many bits.

It’s easy to be annoyed by it, as I have been. The “bad” ending, though, is the one I actually liked. The ending doesn’t quite fit the characters as well as they’d like it to, but I don’t think it’s enough of an issue to ruin it. If anything, it just gives the ending the right sense of closure. The other endings, while not bad at all, seem a bit rushed and incomplete. One of the best parts of the story was the introduction of some really great, original monsters, the most notable of which being the dragon, a creature that was so cool I wanted to give it an extra special review.

tmw suddenly tauren came from Yaungol, not the other way around.

Does this change anything at all? Probably not. Was it even a necessary change? Probably not.

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Opens a can of monster
sipppp

Next Blizzcon Q&A panel

“HEY its me ya boi (insert name here) from Argent Dawn SHOUTOUT TO (insert guild here), I have a wee question for you: How doe’s warriors rage work? It allows them to do all kinds of supernatural feats of strength (e.g. broxigar killing a small mountain of demons by himself, Varian 1 shotting the largest fel reaver that ever existed, Grom 1 shotting Mannoroth twice). is it some mystical magical power we don’t know of, or similar to that of chi??”

Reality is often disappointing. But now with a mic, it can be w/e I want it to be.

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