Why Blizzard's Story-Telling Has Deteriorated

[cFortyfive]

Is it just for the next magic helmet? Is it just to kill the next dragon? It has to be the story.

Turns out he couldn't have been more wrong.

[Deleted]

Story Telling, and Story itself never was a strong point of the Warcraft Franchise. A lot of lazy tropes and shallow black/white Issues. The Books are deplorable, for the most part. Especially what Knaak and Christie Golden are pumping out is unreadable trash. No, for good Story telling you have to look elswhere - but fortunately, there are really a lot of very good fantasy books that fill that Void .

WC3 was just a very good RTS, I didn't play that for the Story as well.
I like World of Warcraft for the way I experience my own small part of the world story, I'm just a lone adventurer, who travels through a dangerous world - and sometimes groups up with other adventurers to battle the evils of the world . That's what I like about it.

[Irian]

Metzen very much has a strong "dude bro awesome" vibe when it comes to storytelling, and he always has. I don't necessarily think this is always a bad thing, because I think a lot of the cliche "badass" moments and character design are largely inspired by him, but as far as story goes, the Rule of Cool is his bible.

That being said, I think WoW's primary story issue is simply the format. People not only will not let Blizzard tell the story they want (how many times has it been obvious that they did a 180 because of angry player feedback?) but the Alliance/Horde feud is so tired and outdated at this point that I don't even think the hard "red = dead" fanatics enjoy it anymore. The game will never throw anything at us that will allow the Horde or Alliance to truly be better than the other, and the game always has to adhere to this strict MMO format of having two factions that are constantly fighting and neither can be canonically superior.
This is why it's funny to me when people criticize Blizzard for making so many good characters neutral; what are they supposed to do? Make an awesome character and have them only able to be seen by half of the playerbase? Divide them in the same way that they divide a lot of good content? Instead of looking at the game from an "I'm Alliance and it sucks because Blizzard likes Horde and gives Horde all our cool shit" perspective, I look at it more from a "Oh great, that's another cool thing we won't have because this stupid faction system that they're unwilling to budge on".

[Undeadprotoss]

I believe is because the lore need to fit with the MMO theme.In Wc3 you play with Arthas,Thrall,Tyrande and more throughout all the campaigns,you see their story and reasons,you see the conversations and understand what the character is thinking.

On a MMO you are another person,From Vanilla to the Cata revamp you were no one important and you are tasked to do X Quests while the Npcs are talking and doing their own thing.

Im pretty shure if they made the Campaign were Arthas burned the boats in WoW.You would be tasked by Captain Falric too.

Kill 12 Undead in the Woods.
Rescue 6 Peasants
Cut down 10 Trees

And when you finish the QUests Arthas would be with the mercenaries burning the boats,he give his speech and you and the npcs kill the mercenaries in cutscene.

I sometimes wonder how the story of Warcraft 3 could have been told in an MMO setting. Faction stories especially, could be very difficult, unless they tolerated building up major characters but largely just allowing them to be prominent on one side.

There's a whole world of craftiness one should engage in in order to properly involve the players, but I've noticed recently that not as much attention is put into making sure all aspects of a storyline, especially over an expansion, at least feel internally consistent. It's most obvious with WoD, wherein the whole time-travel story and it's implications are more or less ignored. The expansion then makes it very hard to become immersed in, as the player has so many questions which do not even begin to be answered.

When I say placing story and gameplay on equal footing, I really mean that the developer decisions need to reflect that mentality, especially in an MMO, whenever they're given (or are able to create) a viable choice. Take Warlords of Draenor again as the biggest example. The whole story arc with the orc originally being a peaceful, shamanistic society on Draenor is just ditched completely, and I'm sometimes concerned that Chris Metzen and the other devs think the same nuance and subtelties will just be conveyed to the player otherwise (that the influence of the Iron Horde replaces the influence of demon blood). It dosen't though, if anything it corrodes the universe and what makes all of the races special.

As somebody who mains undead, I'm really unhappy over the direction the Forsaken have taken, they've gotten to a point where they've almost lost all moral greyness, save for a few sympathy-provoking scenes like Sylvanas riding with you and explaining her history. Now it's very difficult to argue that the Forsaken are not extremely evil, and that makes the game much less enjoyable for a lot of undead players, I think.

The same goes for the orcs, having the original backstory allowed you to project what you liked most about that race unto how you view the game in general, you create almost an idealized version of the game's lore, and that can be a good thing.

[Cows For Life]

I saw that thing on the front page. They're going to remove the entire quest line centered around the legendary ring because reasons. That should make it obvious that story is well down the list of things they care about.

The enforced status quo of the alliance/horde puts a real strain on any kind of useful story telling.
If they didn't literally have to in order to maintain the MMO, there is no way the factions would still be drawn in a two-way split across the same lines that they are now.

Characters constantly make wild shifts in behaviour or act in completely unprecedented ways purely to justify the continuance of this meaningless divide, which needs to always be reinforced for gameplay purposes.

Don't even get started about that. All of these neutral lore characters can speak to and be understood by both sides yet between players it's still BUR and KEK. It's stupid.

[Gadzooks]

I've started and stopped a reply to this thread a couple of times now. It's a complex issue, and a lot of great comments are being made. My thoughts:

I try not to use WoD as a standard when it comes to their writing. WoD was a worst case scenario for any writer - abreviated expansion that had the entire middle part chopped out because the leadership made a bad, bad call on how long Legion would be in the pipeline, and then everyone scrambling after the cut to make the whole mess make sense. Nobody could write their way out of that.

Another thing that really makes WoD's lack of writing quality really stand out was coming off an expansion that did extremely well in that department, MoP. MoP was very, very well done, in almost all ways - none of the quests or stories felt "wrong" or "off" to me, or felt incomplete and they all made sense. There were issues, like the short shrift the Alliance got on the lead up to SoO (Look! I'm a ninja cat!), and that they threw the transitional story into WoD in a poorly written book, but overall, the story was strong. WoD was fractured, unfocused, at times made no sense, had the middle part ripped out, and had the most unsatisfactory ending they've ever pulled off.

Why?

Well, couple of things:

1. The issues from the leadership's miscalculation on their scheduling for Legion tanked the entire thing, and they barely recovered from it.

2. Metzen stepped down as Creative Director, and ended his day to day influence on the game. It's a lot easier to keep things focused when the main story guy has his creative fingers in all aspects of the game, so he can refocus and solve conflicts in story as they go.

3. His replacement, Kosak, is not a good writer, or, to be more precise - he may be good at writing on a small scale, but he's no "big picture" guy. Metzen is the big picture guy- Kosak has always struck me as the one who writes the "meaningful" quests and lore, like the one in MoP when you hold the ceremony for the dead panda who fought with you. There is talent in the writing team, some o ftheir best work is seen in MoP, but they got hamstrung with the issues over WoD, so they have a better opportunity to redeem themselves with Legion. I hope.

4. Redemption. It's a crutch Metzen loves, but it's getting beyond old. You can build meaningful characters and story without having to redeem them. This whole "flawed hero" is old, stale, and overused in Hollywood, too. It's ONE perspective of a character, but not the only one. But here we go again, and redeeming Illidan, when I don't think that character needs to be redeemed. It could be far more interesting to have a "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" story, than "he's just misunderstood". It's trite, cliched, and they gotta reign Metzen in with it. The redemption nonsense even made it into the movie.

5. They're not professional writers. Writing at a professional level, like, selling millions of books, is HARD. They're not trained, seasoned professionals, and they're hamstrung by the "We're not writing novels here" attitudes from devs. (That was a comment by Tigole, back in TBC I think...) Over all, they've done a good job working under conditions and limitations a real author would reject. But you can tell they don't have the chops at times, they struggle with a lot of issues that could only be solved by a talented author. I really think they need to bring a couple of big authors in as a consultant to smooth out their writing and stories, give them some new ideas and twists to work with, and shoot down the memes and tropes that they keep falling back on. Imagine what Tad Williams or Larry Niven or Mercedes Lackey could do with the WoW universe. And hire some decent authors for the WoW books, please. The hacks they use might be cheaper, but I won't touch them with a ten foot pole.

6. Like it's been said, the artificial Alliance/Horde conflict is holding them back.

7. Moana's comments about compartmentalization are very spot on.

8. The WoW team doesnt take chances anymore. That's a good recipe for mundane, mediocre, run of the mill story. There's a lot of hubris and complacency running the ship - I think the game needs to be handed over to a whole new creative team with fresh ideas and a willingness to take chances. The current team is too status quo, and the game is dripping with it.

9. The creative leadership of the game doesn't know what to do with it. They (spoiler) kill off two faction chiefs as a cheap stunt to get "feels" to kick off Legion. I think this is a decision they'll regret - they build up characters...and then just kill them off. The whole point of WoD was to go back and get to know the orc leaders...but all we did was kill them. They kill off characters people love, like Cairne, and ignore interesting characters like Wrathion. They're all over the map. They have Jaina go through this long, drawn out struggle...and drop it, and her story. Her chilling with her dragoin BF is NOT satisfying. It's the same mistake Jackson made with LOTR dropping the Cleansing Of The Shire - that was a massively important part of the story and the evolution of the hobbit characters - they returned as heroes, and saved their home, in the book. In the movie, theyjust come home, and are just another face in the crowd. No. The way the movie ends is unsatisfying. The WoW writers make mistakes like that all the time - like with the dragon aspects. They're our guardians, they develop and grow the characters to the point players revere and love them, and then "Oh, hai, we're done here, byeeeee!". It's just bad writing, and bad decisions. Players get invested - and often get no reward for that.

Well, that's all for now - I'm starting to nitpick, and I wanted to keep this more of an over-all commentary.

- - - Updated - - -

I saw that thing on the front page. They're going to remove the entire quest line centered around the legendary ring because reasons. That should make it obvious that story is well down the list of things they care about.

They did the same in MoP. Look, remove the reward, it's fine, I agree with making the reward unique and unobtainable after the fact - but removing the questlines is fucking idiotic. In MoP, the Wrathion questline is almost the entire end game story - it's what ties the whole thing together, and leads us into WoD. To cut that, for new players, is beyond rationalization. It's dumb. It's fucking dumb. And it's the same for the legendary quest in WoD - it's one of the main story arcs. So much for new players!

[Galbrei]

Blizzard's story telling has not deteriorated, it was never great to begin with. People just confuse world building and character design, both traits Blizzard excells at, with story telling.

[Undeadprotoss]

Blizzard's story telling has not deteriorated, it was never great to begin with. People just confuse world building and character design, both traits Blizzard excells at, with story telling.

Sorry, but Metzen is why the storytelling has never been amazing. His ideas, like the one quoted dealing with Raynor, are so hilariously bad at times you have to wonder if he's not trolling.

Story Telling, and Story itself never was a strong point of the Warcraft Franchise. A lot of lazy tropes and shallow black/white Issues. The Books are deplorable, for the most part. Especially what Knaak and Christie Golden are pumping out is unreadable trash. No, for good Story telling you have to look elswhere - but fortunately, there are really a lot of very good fantasy books that fill that Void .

WC3 was just a very good RTS, I didn't play that for the Story as well.
I like World of Warcraft for the way I experience my own small part of the world story, I'm just a lone adventurer, who travels through a dangerous world - and sometimes groups up with other adventurers to battle the evils of the world . That's what I like about it.

I have to disagree that the story and writing has never been exceptional. I think although the earlier stories definitely had SOME flaws, they were by and large, very enjoyable, compelling, and exciting especially when you consider the restraints they had to operate under when it came to technology and art.

Sure Metzen does a lot of rule of cool stuff, but I don't view that as a bad thing, in fact, I'd actually encourage it. I mean that in the sense of if you go back and look at a lot of the would be foundations for their modern games, like the initial drawings of the Protoss or the orcs, they were esentially "we put a badass spin on these concepts" they're doodles, but that's what makes them so pure. It's better that those origins come from a modest place because then you can actually take the big themes and characters in those games seriously, by first acknowelding the semi-absurdity of the situation.

Honestly though, Blizzard generally keeps things such as the pace of technology in their games fairly reasonable. Sure Warcraft has flying Zeppilens and sword-wielding guards at the same time, but by and large you see a lot of internal consistency, again, especially in the earlier content.

[Eapoe]

I'm not going to say it's amazing storytelling and lore associated to Blizzard, but I don't think it's as bad as the thread starters implications, or even as bad as the interviews with Metzen makes it seem. For example, with Starcraft 2 and Raynor's drinking issues, I always took that coming from his personal feelings of loss over Kerrigan and failings as a leader during SC. There's still cinematic a that tell a story thru the game, they just aren't sprawling 20-30 minute movie styled cinematics for all of them.
As far as WoW goes, the story is self contained, and while a single xpac doesn't have the major stylization of a single game, when taken as a whole, you have an ever involving story that contains many major characters (Arthas for Wrath, Deathwing and the dragon aspects of Cata, the whole story of the Pandaren for MoP, the continuation of the struggle of Garrosh and Thrall in WoD, and now the continuation of Gul'dan and Illidan in Legion) all encircling the relationship of the alli and horde. There's many smaller elements to consider as well, like the Defias trying to reclaim the glory and fear they used to have during the events of Cata, the struggle of the Pandaren vs the Klaxxi while thrown into a war between the alli and horde. Even the smaller ones of random, more minor characters such as Millhouse Manastorm in Deepholm.
As I said, these aren't Pulitzer winning story lines/arcs, but for what they are, there is a plethora of lore and storytelling still going on to be discovered in world quests, dungeons, and raids. People just need to open their eyes and realize it.

[Tenant]

Blizzard keeps their storytelling simple, above all else. They have excellent world-building, which was always their true specialty.

Take a look at Overwatch's cinematics to see that pattern continue in a new brand; the cinematics were criticized by a few for having cheap writing, yet beyond those shorts, they're planting the seeds for a big world like they have with all of their other properties; the shorts are largely only part of the grander scheme of world-building for Overwatch.

[Erazon]

I know it's been said, but personally I feel that the need for faction conflict has always been one of the biggest problems of WoW storytelling. Rather than think of new, creative ways to let players engage in PvP, we're stuck in a constant Alliance vs Horde cycle. At this point it's just like a damn teenage Rom-Com where half of the conflicts arise because of a dumb misunderstanding and a refusal to communicate.

Horde players are tired of their faction leaders making irresponsible or just plain stupid decisions in order to ignite conflict, and Alliance players are tired of Horde characters making stupid decisions but not being held accountable for them. The constant back and forth has honestly gotten boring, and there is so much potential for new PvP conflict that isn't necessarily tied to faction.

[Orby]

I been having issues with Blizzards storytelling since vanilla.

If Warcraft 3 was anything to go by I don't see Night Elves being based within the Alliance, I see the Night Elves as their own faction and that they only are in the alliance for gameplay reason, in Warcraft 3 they had every reason to hate the Alliance the same as the Horde. Even if they did join forces for both of them agaisnt the Burning Legion

I don't even like the idea of Blood Elves in the Horde, there's no way they should be joining them. Blood Elves once again are their own faction or apart opf the Illidari from TBC.

The Forsaken are another that have been put into the Horde for MMMO reason and cool factor, once agsin then the whole joining the Horde seems convioluyded.

I think the lore in Warcraft is fine, but the lore in WoW is slightly underdone. I look at the Chronicle book and see how amazing Warcraft lore is and how awesome it could be told, then I look at WoW. Maybe because its an MMO, there are too many restrictions on an MMO for storyline purposes. Which is why I am still begging for a Warcraft 4 an RTS can tell a better narrative than an MMO can.

Blizzard games as a whole used to be all about gray areas, there were no good guys or bad guys everyone was a dick, Starcraft is the prime example of this. Reynar isn't a hero, play the first Starcraft and find out.

Have Blizzard fallen overboard on storytelling? slightly, I still think there is alot of salvage, I find more comfort in the side storylines in WoW than the main ones. Alot of lore in WoW makes me frustrated like the end of Cata and WoD and then there is still a lot of lore that keeps me happy like the Chronicle book.

[hachidori]

Most of Blizzard's talented employees left a long time ago. Some of the new talent involved with art and music remain very good, but everywhere from the writers to the gameplay designers are little more than C-grade material.

The difference between classic vanilla or BC quest writing and the quest writing right now is astounding.

[Deleted]

Blizzard's story telling has not deteriorated, it was never great to begin with. People just confuse world building and character design, both traits Blizzard excells at, with story telling.

Dont forget the cinematics.

Blizzards 3-5 minute shorts are genuinely superb, always have been and have never faltered a step.

The actual storylines are very variable. Obviously the arthas plot is one of the best in all of gaming history, but theres been all sorts of dross all along the line.

[lockybalboa]

What do you expect when they have writers like metzen

[Jingoism]

Metzen is a drug addled hack with a corruption fetish, his creativity peaked long ago and now he's just running on fumes.

[Gadzooks]

What do you expect when they have writers like metzen

Metzen only does the big picture now, Kosak runs the story department now.

- - - Updated - - -

Most of Blizzard's talented employees left a long time ago. Some of the new talent involved with art and music remain very good, but everywhere from the writers to the gameplay designers are little more than C-grade material.

The difference between classic vanilla or BC quest writing and the quest writing right now is astounding.

At the top, there really hasn't been much change - most of the big names are still around - Frank Pearce is gone, Pardo is gone, GC is gone - But Afrasiabi is there, Haazicostas, Robinson, Stockton, etc.

The difference is job titles, and one other big change, which I'll get to in a moment. Afrasiabi was in charge of questing in TBC - and lets be honest, he nailed it. He and his team did a great job. He got bumped up for Wrath, but the quest team was still strong. Questing hasn't really been an issue up through MoP - but the wheels fell off in WOD - and one potential reason is Afrasiabi was bumped to creative director, to replace Metzen.

Now, the other big change:

Kosak.

With a shiny new title, "Lead narrative designer", for WoD. It's no cooincidence, to me, that questing fell apart here. Now, granted, WoD got gutted halfway through, so even a talented narrative guy would have trouble patching the pieces together to make sense, but what Kosak did, couple with comments he's made on Twitter, and in interviews and Q&A's, I don't think he's a good match for the job. Under his direction, the game became stale, uninteresting, confused, muddled, lacked the sparkle and wit and fun of previous expansions, and became a slog. Parts of it stood out, like Shadowmoon Valley, but the rest? Stank on ice. Missed opportunity after missed opportunity, dialog and plots that don't ring true or just fall flat on their face, nothing memorable or fist pumping or even mildly entertaining.

I'm waiting to see how Legion plays - so far, I'm not seeing rave reviews. There are good people working at Blizzard on the WoW team, and their talent can hopefully overcome bad leadership under people like Kosak.

[stgeorge78]

It's obvious that Blizzard has abandoned storytelling - their 3 newest games have zero storyline whatsoever. They've abandoned Diablo 3. Starcraft 2 is essentially done (and it appears their Nova experiment is failing horribly) and about the only storytelling they have left is in Warcraft and even that has been neutered beyond belief. I believe their goal was to transition "story" to other media like movies and books and while the books make a bit of scratch money, it's definitely not going to be a pillar of the company. And with the movie bombing (don't talk to me about China revenues - most of that has turned out to be faked), that was pretty much the last opportunity for Blizzard to exercise the old story bones in their body. The old generation of story tellers (the Metzens of Blizzard) are tired and on their way out. The young generation don't give one shit about story, they only care about gameplay. And the success of Overwatch just reinforces the notion that story is irrelevant to modern gamers.

A sad day when you realize more and more story-based elements are being tossed out of games, single player campaigns are dying, narratives and great characters are meaningless. Blizzard knows this and they are going to cash in on it by not having to build out crazy amounts of cinematics, not having to wrack their minds trying to think of reasons why their characters are doing what they are doing, and people will still keep forking cash over to them.

[Zaqwert]

The WoW storyline hasn't suffered as much as the non-Warcraft title games.

Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2's stories were embarrassingly awful and cartoonish in every way, even for video game standards.

- - - Updated - - -

Metzen is a drug addled hack with a corruption fetish, his creativity peaked long ago and now he's just running on fumes.

THis is part of it too. The guy's creatitivy ran it's course a long, long time ago. Blizzard needs some fresh blood.

Someone said Blizz has been "dadified" and that's kinda true.

They need more 20 and 30 year olds in the company in positions of power (as they were in the glory days) and less 50 year olds.

[MoanaLisa]

Questing hasn't really been an issue up through MoP - but the wheels fell off in WOD - and one potential reason is Afrasiabi was bumped to creative director, to replace Metzen.

The one thing that people usually have to say about Warlords was that the questing was good to great. There's a lot to talk about with the wheels falling off of various pieces of the game in Warlords but questing isn't one of them that comes up very often.

The only criticism I have of it is that it was too short. But that was apparently a deliberate decision so that there would be no delay in getting geared up for raiding.