???
I know who you reffer to with the second person, as incorrect as I think it is.
But who is the first person? Golden? Fairly certain she was mostly known for her Star trek stories.
And no, it’s not “sjws” or whatever bogeyman you think is the problem. The problem is that they are bad at writing stories, and that the medium they have choosen for this story was the worst possible.
What about Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Books, Ghostbusters 2016, Terminator, 3 Angels for Charly, Mass Effect…hell BioWares entire Studio, Battlefield 5, “Video Games Journalism”…i could go on. You’re just plain wrong, you just defend them because they align with your politics.
P.S. Remember this, they will NEVER kill off a female character in this game because muh wahmen empowerment yaaas queen.
There are no real legitimate threats for the PC anymore.
At this point in time the PC is basically a demigod
We should have lost BFA to Nzoth and spend the next expansion trying to take Azeroth back from the Black Empire .
After that one expansion rebuilding society then WoW ends
And WoW 2 starts with a timeskip of at least a hundred years and a new PC living in a vastly different Azeroth.
And yet despite the PCs best efforts they haven’t even scratched Sylvanas
We keep borrowing powers.
We are no demi-gods.
Which is, by itself, both lore-wise and game-wise, more than a disappointment. It worked great in Legion but now in SL and even back in BFA? No more than a broken system imo.
I’m quite okay with being a random adventurer. When I’m doing random adventurer things. I can certainly be a mostly anonymous hero of villages and slayer of dragons. The cowboy with no name who saves the day and then rides off into the sunset. And I’d very much like to go back to that, actually.
But when I’m supposedly the one General of Draenor, Highlord of my Class, Champion of Azeroth, Maw Walker… no, anonymity and sidelines in cinematics just don’t work. I’m the hero here, get those big name losers out of the frame, will you? The big hero shouldn’t be the sidekick of the likes of Thrall, he should have his own team of brave companions to relate to, like most of these kinds of games provide for.
Both can work, in theory. But Blizzard has no idea what they want in this, and just wavers back and forth.
Thing is, Blizzard doesn’t quite get it right conveying that feeling.
We’re that weird mix of super known mega hero and foot soldier at the same time.
One’s place in the world doesn’t quite feel right.
Champion, go collect me 10 poops for… uh science. Hurry, yeah?
That’s because the player’s story is now secondary to the protagonist’s. Your experiences does not matter, the story will assume that you have done everything there is to do.
When I played through the introduction to the corruption-system they introduced in BFA, Magni told me at one point that I ought to see the Ramkahen as I had supposedly helped them in the past and maybe they could return the favour. After he said that I opened my reputation tab and saw that my reputation with the Ramkahen was neutral. On this particular character I had never helped the Ramkahen at all.
If you are to be the hero then you should have more agency. In BFA, Horde players got to make their first story-related decision ever in BFA when they got to pick between being a Sylvanas loyalist or not, and look how well that turned out. We did get a choice with the covenants, and while I never really played the end game of Shadowlands it does seem as though the unique stories for the covenants are kind of short, and going forward everyone will have the same story regardless of covenant?
For an MMORPG I prefer to be the adventurer. Even in Star Wars: The Old Republic, a game that had excellent stories at the start of the game, felt like it did storytelling worse than vanilla World of Warcraft. Not because the stories were bad, but because the manner they were told did not suit the genre of an MMORPG.
I full agree. A good hero story is a single-player story that makes your character the protagonist, the mover. He might have superiors, but he also commands a dedicated team of characters the player can get to care about and that stick with him over time, without ever overshadowing him. There is some friction with the mmo-idea there. But it can be enjoyable enough, and if Blizzard were to commit to it, it would be a great improvement.
The other direction would be a game without protagonists at all. The only character that really matters in the grand scheme is the world itself. The player character doesn’t exactly change the world, he gets to know it and keeps it from being changed for the worse. There is no grand plot involivng intricate character arcs, there are just closed, independent stories that might or might not work together to tell a developing narrative about the game world. Characters can have arcs, of course, but that’s more or less incidental. It’s not about them.
I’d prefer the later as well. But my point was that Blizzard doesn’t commit to either direction and just muddles everything up.
Sad as it is, this is the case. The team even admitted they did not know whey they want to go with Sylvanas story at the start of this year.
Even with them seemingly pulling from D&D Shadowlands (the soul split, name SL etc.).
Yep it has to be one or the other.
I don’t like to be the hero of legend in a mmorpg. But that’s just me, others like it.
Wanting to both at the same time does not work.
Not exactly. They said that key moments only came together by then. So it’s more like they admitted that they didn’t know how to do her arc, not that they didn’t know what that arc would be. That’s quite a difference. I’m certainly not in the habit of defending Blizzard’s writing, but we have to be wary of letting our biases make us hear what we want to hear.
Possible, I can admit to that. It still seems like a very late point do decide on such things (well of course some changes can always occur even during short time frames).
To me personally main plot in an mmo game isn’t that important. When you play a single player game, main story is kinda the core, but mmo? I was always more intrigued discovering zone or region stories, like where is Mankrik’s wife, what did Stalvan Mistmantle do etc etc. Each zone in the game has it’s own story, told through quests, not through cutscenes.
The only ones who feel bad are those who are responsible for the peace treaty. Which are Baine and Thrall. They need to be executed like the filthy traitors they are. Down with the Horde council.
Dragon ball? No we are reaching levels of power that are only discussed and theorized within metaphysics. If jailer went against all gods of destruction combined he would snap his fingers and they would either serve him or die, with the power and knowledge of sepulcher he will reach Nigh-omnipotence. From the brokers writtings in that journal research first ones are like beyound all dimensions, reality, and outside of concepts like death,life etc. Story is getting more phylosophycal and we are nearing the compeltion of the cycle, that can be used to revamp the world in the game, which is genius writting.
For an expansion that takes place in the afterlife, Shadowlands doesnt feel metaphysical enough. Everything is just the same as in the living world just with word anima stuffed everywhere.
Also WoW characters focused narrative isn’t best way to handle this kind of “big topic” stories. Look at StarCraft 2, where they implemented that cool idea - unviverse evolution as a means for creation of new gods - and than just focused on personal dramas of few characters and their arch-nemesis. Who btw wanted to break the cosmic-cycle and whole multi-verse just because he was unhappy with his role in the whole thing (being turned into massive cosmic walrus-squid hybrid didnt help either).
Sounds a lot like Jailer. It’s good to know that some things never change. Like war, and blizzard’s recycling of plots from their other games.
That conclusion would have been great. IF Blizzard will try delivering some brand new world, with new characters and stories, in a size of a entirely new game of course. Despite what people say or think, I believe World of Warcraft is still worth pursuing as a business and as an mmo too. You just need new approach to it. I am sure this will come as heresy to many, but I for once am tired of Azeroth.
The powercreep is real I feel and the stakes get higher and higher but all those intricate little details get lost in the process…
What I would like from a narrative standpoint is reflecting back on things and seeing how our actions have actually shaped the land we protected and all those new stories we could tell…
Just to give you an example, there is a passion project to show how vol’dun may have changed since the defeat of the faithless, with a fully revamped zone and more, but trust level forbids me to put any actual images or links here so sadly I can’t directly show you what i mean.
Its WORLD or Warcraft though… so give us more of our world.
It’s like going to a Warhammer Fantasy fan who loves his armies and the setting but you tell him if he wants to play with the others its Age of Sigmar or bust.