Should The Next Expansion Be More Dark and Gritty?

[dope_danny]

Something i noticed recently is wow has lost its emphasis on death being a big deal.

Back in vanilla you could come across a corpse hanging from a tree and it was shocking, because death was something intimidating in azeroth then. The threats were far more numberous and so many more individuals died with names and faces even if we forgot them after a quest.

No we will walk through siege and most wont even notice things like the troll woman impaled through her stomach to the directions signpost in the entrance to org. We are too busy to kill dozens of people for purples.
-and actual people now, far more often than titanic automatons or undead or demons. Just people. Something we do far more now than ever before and so little emphasis is put on it anymore.

I know it sounds like a bleeding heart complaint, but everyone remembers walking past those hung corpses in tirisfal when they encounter them. Can the same be said about the hundreds of random npc bodies they add in post phased areas to show "shit got real" in pandaria?

[Hitei]

Something i noticed recently is wow has lost its emphasis on death being a big deal.

Back in vanilla you could come across a corpse hanging from a tree and it was shocking, because death was something intimidating in azeroth then. The threats were far more numberous and so many more individuals died with names and faces even if we forgot them after a quest.

No we will walk through siege and most wont even notice things like the troll woman impaled through her stomach to the directions signpost in the entrance to org. We are too busy to kill dozens of people for purples.
-and actual people now, far more often than titanic automatons or undead or demons. Just people. Something we do far more now than ever before and so little emphasis is put on it anymore.

I know it sounds like a bleeding heart complaint, but everyone remembers walking past those hung corpses in tirisfal when they encounter them. Can the same be said about the hundreds of random npc bodies they add in post phased areas to show "shit got real" in pandaria?

Probably shouldn't assume you speak for other people.
The hanging bodies in Tirisfal were just that, hanging bodies. They had no purpose besides "Hey this zone is a "dark" zone filled with the undead so there are dead people hanging from trees."

They had a hell of a lot less impact than finding Evie Stormstout's body.
Or Suna finding her husband's body and then forcing an entire camp of Yaungol to massacre each other, and then walking through the camp as buzzards and wild dogs eat the bodies, tracking her down and killing her.

[Transmigration]

Yes MoP has some "darker" storylines, the enslavement of the Pandaren, the Alliance-Horde conflict and Garrosh's dark path.

But so much of this expansion has been a bit too much, Valley of Four Winds is like tellytubby land with oversized carrots and bouncy rabbits, silly monkeys calling each other silly names in the dungeons, and most of the pandaren are very jovial and cartoonish.

I realise that Blizz is trying to cater to all audiences but isn't the game age 15+? I'm sure that even 15 year olds don't find the Hozen funny.

Let's get back to some high fantasy, I want to see dragons tearing each other apart in the air above a plundered dwarven mountain fortress again.

While I am a big supporter of bring the grit and darkness, I think older people are more entertained by the goofy shit than the teenage crowd. They're in that stage where nothing amuses them unless "it's badass because that's what's cool and rabbits are gay."

Some author quote out there sums it up, but I'm not going to mutilate it or look it up.

[stumpy]

This is like before Diablo III's release, when people said it was dumbed down and kiddy because there weren't giant flaming pentagrams in any of the screenshots.

[apepi]

No. It depends on the expansion and its mood whether it is dark, not whether people are tired of pandaland.

[Mekh]

While I am a big supporter of bring the grit and darkness, I think older people are more entertained by the goofy shit than the teenage crowd. They're in that stage where nothing amuses them unless "it's badass because that's what's cool and rabbits are gay."

Some author quote out there sums it up, but I'm not going to mutilate it or look it up.

You mean this one?

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

― C.S. Lewis

[Jerichoholic Ninja]

10 bucks says all these people who thinks MoP isn't "dark & gritty" because it's too colorful are the same people who thinks Wizard of Oz is really a movie for children...

[Verdugo]

10 bucks says all these people who thinks MoP isn't "dark & gritty" because it's too colorful are the same people who thinks Wizard of Oz is really a movie for children...

Its hard to call it dark and gritty when you dont see it affect anything in the world.

Except those shitty daily quest givers that fully deserved it!

[Deleted]

Disclaimer: this is opinion.

For me, I enjoyed Mists through 5.0 but it's been a little frustrating since. The game is good, but the theme is tired and not as melodramatic as I am used to with Warcraft.

I like demons and fallen titans and maniacal eredar. It's cliche, but it's comforting. It gives me something to fully get behind rising against.

Sha and Mogu and Killiks (Mantid, Jeff Goldblum, whatever) do not generate the same need in me to take something down.

Garrosh should have been good, but the u turn they made in first making him kind of awesome in Cataclysm and looking like they were going to build a great hero out of him and then going "Nope, evil" in one fell swoop with Tides of War kind of ruined it for me. It was too sharp.

Mists has had better storytelling, but the nature of the game with the gap between each piece of the story makes it disjointed and leaves it quite easy to over extend progressing a character and have it come off as unbelievable.

Their work with fleshing out the new races has been wonderful, I just don't give two shits about them, but I can appreciate how well the quest designers and writers have told those stories. I hope they can translate it to the traditional Warcraft characters in the next expansion.

And give us more stuff like the Burdens of Shaohao. That does a fantastic job of giving us story and is accessible to everyone.