Hi guys, I’m sorry for a bit negative topic today, but I felt like I needed to share my thoughts on Shadowlands lore, and it’s writing team.
(I’m aware it is the start of an expansion, I’m trying to be optimistic that it will be better in time, at least for me)
Some examples why I Shadowlands writing feels underwhelming and it seems to be carried by art team.
Every single character is calling us “Mortal” and just 5 seconds later they just die by us, this is so overused and it’s getting annoying at this point…
"Champion complex", I believe they have to stop with us being the Chosen one, the magnificent one, hero, and other. When I did Shadowlands questing, and everyone telling me that I’m the one who the first ones’ relic responded to, that I’m the one to save Shadowlands-…
Single player Game, with the “Champion complex” I feel like this game is more of a solo game, I actually feel awkward when I see more players around me, like am I not supposed to be the maw walker, only person who can travel through maw with the first ones’ relic?
Sylvanas, okay this is a big one, but carrying a character through 3 expansions making them one of the main characters is too much, and also being in 20+ cinematics. This character became rather boring, it feels overused and her character arch needs to end.
"This is cool, put it in" this is completely terrible mindset I have experienced, with so many retcons and so many non logical things that are here just for the sake of being cool.
I will never understand why people care about the writing in this game , it is and always was irrelevant to me. But if you really do care I mean it is what it is it’s never been good anyway
I quite disagree with this, I believe Mits of Pandaria had one of the best lore in the game, it was done beautifully, unlike it’s budget copy Battle for Azeroth.
I believe MOP just proves that good writing can happen, it just needs right people and motivation!
I think sh’es overused now, bit like Thrall was in the past.
They have to be really careful on this, still not enjoying seeing Thrall about.
Sylvanas needs to be out of the main story for several expansions after this. Time to give other characters a go and build them up. Something I don’t think the story team has managed to acomplish so far.
Looked at the latest FFXIV trailer and all i could think is, oh god can’t wait to see where the story is going.
In WoW it’s almost always, what and who will they screw over this time. And how quickly are we going to murder the newest big bad even though everything went according to his plans.
The good part of that is that never happened before, our Horde or Alliance characters never just went against us or became evil, it was something fresh. But then they kept using it in BFA.
Mop:Destroying Alliance Faction City > Going To New Continent>Warchief Goes Mad > Warchief Opens a Portal to Another World…
BFA: Destroying Alliance Faction City > Going To New Continent > Warchief Goes Mad > Warchief Opens a Portal to Another World…
It was still out of character, so I consider it bad writing. The person who executed his general for treating taurens badly suddenly turns out a complete racist. It’s a game, so a certain suspension of disbelief is expected, but this was too much.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for the writing team, it can’t be easy being told one day “great job” then the next day getting a circular email telling them that everything they wrote is now meaningless because the higher ups decided to cave in to vocal minority on Reddit.
I actually really dislike that they are usually not respectful to the material they are working with, retcon is what I hate the most, it makes all the lore and all the books I’ve read meaningless just because new writing team has taken over.
Also most of them are very vocal on twitter, saying that orcs and the whole horde presents black people, and goblins jews.
Same with lots of racism they have been exposed, and Steve with his waifu Sylvanas.
Yeeh… No… The overall narrative of WoW have been bad for a very long time.
Even during MoP it was quite clear after their means of elevating Varian to a hero was to screw over the other faction leaders. In cata we had Green moses turn Green Jesus cause Thrall was clearly not awesome enough before.
Illidan being brought back from the dead… twice… Only to do literally nothing the second time around.
Then there are huge swats of the story which is simply left outside of the game in books. The game have drought periods of months… These were opportune times to add smaller story patches.
As i said earlier, FFXIV is an actually fun story, mainly because it’s consistent and coherent. They build upon what they have and whatever retcons they might have made feels natural to the story. Unlike wow where characters are twisted, corrupted or neglected to fit whatever cool spectacle they want to tell.
This is basically how I feel about the entirety of this expansion. Some of it feels well intended and intelligently designed but by and large feels very “rule of cool” and “hmm, it’d be cool if that happened let’s just make it happen, don’t overthink it”, etc, etc.
I guess it’s really not a bad way to write a game like WoW where I feel as if the majority of players don’t play for the story now, but eh. It’s not to my tastes particularly.