Worldbuilding: Orc Farms Over Old Gods

Lore Story
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I pilfered this from the U.S forums. Figured it’d be interesting to discuss here too.

And my own opinion (Which I already put in the US thread)…

Agree. One. Hundred. Percent.

I’m so sick and tired of Blizzard trying to outdo themselves with world/galaxy/cosmos/universe ending threats.

In the end it doesn’t matter if they’re Old Gods, Titans or Demons, they’re always one dimensional loot piñatas whose only purpose is to feed our desire for gear and cosmetics. They’re tear-inducingly boring.

Yet despite their ‘power’ and ‘might’ we always have a plethora of resources to fight them with. We can fund endless wars and field endless armies without consequence.
Indeed the only time consequence was shown was in Westfall and that was brushed under the rug after we wiped out the defias. AGAIN.

The toll our wars take on the day-to-day lives of the citizenship is rarely shown beyond the immediate ‘Oh no, there’s an army invading our town! Stop them!’.
We never see any form of protest, nation-wide poverty or social issues stemming from these Wars and it makes them feel meaningless.

Big threats are fine, if you’re going to use them as a vehicle to show their impact on the world.

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I agree, we need to tackle more mundane and relatable problems, without over-the-top and hyperbolic plots of World Ending Threats.
Cataclysm did a good job in the rework of the questing experience, and most of its most notable and interesting narratives weren’t related to the overarching story about Deathwing (even if they had flavours of it).

BfA could’ve been another example of this kind of plot if they weren’t handling this faction war as poorly and onesided as they are currently doing.

Vanilla offered this sort of world building too. But the popularity it had, I feel like it came more because of the novelty it represented in the gaming industry. It really had some quite tangible flaws it took years to fix.

In short, I think that the premise of investing more on world building features and more concise and ‘grounded’ day to day problems, would certainly make the game much better.
But we should take into account the target audience.
Kids rather have ‘awesome’ and ‘grand’ plots of dooming threats and world ending enemies.
So it’s unlikely that after setting the bar at “We are ending galactic demon armies”, certain players would feel good about going back to “They are stealing my crops”.
I certainly would, but I won’t presume this to be the rule.

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This. 100% this.

We can only feel the stakes of the world beeing in danger if we actually have something in this world to care about.

Dont get me wrong, visiting new lands and discovering new cultures and races is really cool. But at least for me, the „core“ and the „heart“ of Warcraft have always been the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Thats the home of our people. Thats where we as characters and player-factions come from. So how are things going? Is westfall still ridden with crime and poverty? Is duskwood still abandoned and even worse off, now that the nights watch went demon cult? What about the blackrock? Are the Blackrock Orcs and the Forest Trolls there still a thing?

You´d thing Loch Modan and Menethil Harbor would be repaired by now. And what is going on in the western and easter plaguelands? Have they build new cities? Are we still at the status quo? What does the average joe actually thing about all these crazy events going down? Do they even know? Was the war on AU Draenor something they know about, or is the prospect of some alternate reality in the past nothing more then a myth for Grunt Brogg or Farmer Thomas?

How are the allied races integrating in our societys, actually? We are indeed (in my opinion, at least) in dire need of some tiragarde sound/ drustvar treatment for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms No crazy end of everything stuff, just pirates, corrupt corporations, scheming nobles and some witches that might be a problem for the local area, but not the planet as a whole.

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I can only talk about what I think and I am kinda in both camps. I enjoy both World Ending Threats and I enjoy regional type threats and just doing trivial things. The problem with WoW is that they have just exhausted the “world ending threat” card since TBC really, arguably parts of Vanilla also had this with Hakkar and the New Plague.

Every expansion has had the grand narrative of the world ending and having little to no consequence for stopping them World Ending threats just make them tedious and hard to take seriously. The only time it really did was what Zarao said and in Westfall, and I am pretty sure I read somewhere in a book that the war against the Lich King and what it did to all the nations made the Twilight Hammer cult spread like wildfire. But they are the only times I have seen these threats have an affect on every day people.

I generally think the only way to change this is for a WoW 2 with a new engine. The game is getting too old to have any special interactions with the World and the lore is too far down the rabbit whole to just go back to being your average day Joe.

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Too late for that. The mundane world building has to come before you throw in loads of world-changing events. BC was already a step in the wrong direction in this regard, going full sci-fi. The damage is done. Everything that comes now would hust be just a drop in the bucket.

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I find this 100% agreeable.

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Yupp agreed on all points.

Adventurer > Superhero
Especially Legion Artifacts and WoD Garrison (player centric stories in general) ruined this…

I disagree.
While you are of course right, that the damage is already done, I don’t think returning to simpler stuff is impossible.

BfA is a perfect example of this, since at least for the Alliance, that Adventurer feeling has returned in some form.

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It’s a great idea, but given how the lore has been developed, I’m not sure it’s so easy to switch to that.
If you would write that way, the Old Gods, Scourge or Legion, each threat with the ability to create an almost limitless number of armies would’ve won a long time ago. It’s jarring how we even won against such threats if the entire countryside was laid to waste and the population suffered a serious blow.

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Of couse you can do adventurer stuff. And you can build up new places the right way. But for the homleands of most of the playable races? It is too late. They decided to make almost everything in every culture about the few leading characters they have, gave them no pilitical dempth, didn’t care for logistics nor economics, and made guessing population numbers impossible. They even jumped around on simple things like life expectancy. Every coherent bit of small-scale world-building they could do there… would essentially be a retcon.

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Remove the faction conflict and fix some void stuff…and basically most of the Alliance questing experience you have grounded and detailed stories.
Drustvar and Tiragarde specially.

Horde side, the hyperbolic and grand plot affected most its areas. But Zuldazar still had some rather detailed and insightful stories regarding the Zandalari culture.

Not saying that either route is better than the other, but the world building and detail for Alliance stories in BfA has certainly reached the peak of Blizzards creative team. You just have to take a look at Boralus and it’s detailing.

And I agree with Op that I would personally expand on that sort of settings to create stories, rather than having to constantly look over my shoulder while expecting the next catastrophe that endangers the whole planet. My opinion.

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Weren’t Orcs known for being nomatic on Draenor with very few settling down in areas?
Also, considering how Orcs have been built up as they overly masculine warrior culture, farming would be quite strange to see.

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Durotar is filled with pig farms. So they have tried to cultivate the land.

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Actual pigs or is this a joke about Quilboar?

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Actual pigs. Or boars. There’s a cooking daily where you have to help slaughter them.

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This is exactly what I’ve been stewing over recently. The problem is that nothing seems to go forwards on Azeroth, when Blizzard leave an expansion behind they just leave everything in a frozen state and even build over/phase over elements of old expansions for their new ones.

It’s all about these high fantasy mega events and super fantastical worlds now but the thing is you don’t level through all of that and when you have to visit the old world for quests it looks sad and outdated.

I’d love to see how Ashenvale has changed now that the Horde have steamrolled it. I’d love to see what the Goblins did with Azshara, what the Plaguelands are like with the Scourge slowly being wiped out. How is Suramar now? Have they managed to rebuild in the regions which the Legion invaded?

We’ve gone through so many neutral factions as well, every expansion instead of using the existing ones they create something new. Argent Crusade, Order Halls, Legionfall, now Champions of Azeroth.

Other games seem to do this very well, they just keep revisiting old zones and slowly updating them as time advances in their game and make sure we know what’s happening everywhere as time goes by and in order to support their stories, I think it would be a good move for Blizzard to take a patch to go back and focus on how Azeroth has changed.

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Nice read. :+1:

Edit: Regarding the issue you exposed, I feel like it has to do with how overwritten content is often equated to losing past stories.

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I’d say that we had really good ‘mundane’ world building in MOP, certainly in the earlier questing experience before Escalation happened.
I get the feeling that the reason we’ve not seen it too much since then is the Blizzard pendulum reacting to the “MOP is bad” crowd and hurtling miles away from everything in that expansion

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Tiragarde Sound and Boralus are their best examples of mundane world building in this expansion, it’s so detailed with so many little things to look at. Other than that the Horde zones are all hyper fantasy, Jungle/desert/swamp and I had really high hopes for Stormsong Valley to be a second coming of the Valley of the Four Winds, but unfortunately they decided to pack in so much conflict content there with the siege of Brennadam, Naga, Azerite monsters, pirates… It’s just lost any charm it would have had as the peaceful rolling fields which it was meant to consist of.

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Just because I always find it funny:

Byrok did not need to fish, of course. Durotar included some excellent farmland. Since the human lands were located in the marshy territory to the south, humans could not grow crops, and so turned most of their energy to fishing. They would trade their surplus to the orcs in exchange for their surplus crops.

From Cycle of Hatred.

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I disagree, a bunch of zones Alliance sides have their storylines unfinished (Ashenvale, Stonetalon for example)

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