What was the point of hiring Christie Golden?

[Lupinemancer]

She's a massive Alliance fangirl. All she cares about is making the Horde look like giant villains and making Anduin look like the golden boy with impenetrable plot armor.

What's wrong with her liking the truth?

[Beerbill Society]

To be fair, I have seen Metzen of all people say she is a talented written, so I firmly believe he wouldn't just say that for no reason.

I think her talent lays in making the one dimensional characters have an actual personality, for example Jaina redemption story looked a pretty attractive point of BFA.

I don't like all her characters, Anduin is a example of this since he can't out growth his naivety, but I guess it's hard working on with what she has and the liberties she is allowed to make, the lore is huge, it's already there and people (myself included) get pissed off when it's changed. Anduin in Vanilla was just a random recolored NPC with no more than 2 lines and a weird wand, so I guess he improved in some way.

[GrimReaper673]

Hurrr durrr woman writer bad! Need big angry man story! Big angry man! I am small man, need story about big angry muscle orc to project into! Toxic masculinity good hahah afuck sjws? Why don't girl wanna touch my dick???

@sarahtasher, dat you?

[Harbour]

Another possibility for why we dont hear much about CG now is that she has schedule.
You all know that WoW team works ahead of current game. When we played WoD, WoW team has already been working on Legion. When we played Legion, they worked on BFA. Im pretty sure, the part of WoW team working on 9.0 right now.
And they cant start their work ahead of the story they want to build the expansion upon.
So its pretty much given that Golden finished her writing for BFA and she is most likely writing the story for 9.0 or even 10.0 right now.

[MikeBogina]

So Knaak's thing was that he made his characters too OP, didn't know how to use female characters, besides attaching them to the main male leads and reused the shit out of the same plot devices like crazy.

Golden's isn't that she makes her characters too OP with power, but wraps them in gundam size plot armor and makes them the moral compass of the universe.

[Mehrunes]

Focus on a united narrative since Legion which has been kept into BFA. Until relatively recently, the story has been about short narratives with almost nothing connecting them. Still interesting, but a total mess when attempting to read them together as one big story.

As an example of it in BFA, Jaina's arc this expansion, which extends all the way to Warcraft III.

Though I would accept some of the minor canonical differences between War of Thorns in-game and in the novels in the spots where they intersect as counter-evidence. For example not having a child night elf model, or the retreat from the barrier being less dramatic. They could do better with that sort of thing.

But Golden has barely nothing to do with Legion except some tidbits at the end. And she was hired as permanent writer for Blizzard too late in development process of BfA to have a significant impact on it either.

I defined both success and skill, and you were replying to me. Many people disagree with both of us as concerns E.L. James' skill at writing, and accuracy about the BDSM community isn't necessarily required for her completely fictional novel. Her skill is debatable, and if you're wanting to debate with me you're not going to get much in the way of pushback as I mostly agree that her storytelling is abysmal and her work vapid. But she's very successful, all the same - that can't really be debated at all.

In regards of her skill you only said you can't say she's objectively bad and then you immediately shifted the topic to irrelevant points about her popularity. At which point you asked me a question on how else I'd define success... Hence my reply... Also, not only was the point about accurate portrayal secondary to her not being able to do even the most basic task of writing, i.e. performing research, but to say the accurate portrayal of the lifestyle isn't required when that's the whole narrative theme of the book is 50 shades of bizarre.

Yeah and BFA is Garrosh 2.0

In what convoluted way is this supposed to constitute a reply to my post?

[MikeBogina]

To be fair, I have seen Metzen of all people say she is a talented written, so I firmly believe he wouldn't just say that for no reason.

I think her talent lays in making the one dimensional characters have an actual personality, for example Jaina redemption story looked a pretty attractive point of BFA.

I don't like all her characters, Anduin is a example of this since he can't out growth his naivety, but I guess it's hard working on with what she has and the liberties she is allowed to make, the lore is huge, it's already there and people (myself included) get pissed off when it's changed. Anduin in Vanilla was just a random recolored NPC with no more than 2 lines and a weird wand, so I guess he improved in some way.

But those are Alliance characters. How is she developing Horde characters? Baine is more and more a plot tool for the Alliance and Sylvanas is becoming more of a mustache twirling villain.

Her "Talent" seems to only apply to the Alliance, which is one of the issues... she's not a Horde fan, like her predecessors

[Niter]

We should bear in mind that game design decisions, however good or bad they may be, trump lore and storytelling at Blizzard.

I believe the writes are hired to make the the stories more interesting, to add another layer to characters or write about a characters' past. Who does what, when and how has been up to the devs, not the authors.

Writers are people who are there to fix and try to make sense out of whatever the devs decide for the game. It has always been this way. The story in Classic did not suffer much because it had barely evolved from WC3. Outland brought some crazy things and retcons that sacrificed story for gameplay (I'm not saying if they were good or bad, just stating the reason why things happened). WotLK was also full of extra stuff that made it to the game because of the devs, but storytelling was easier in this case because Arthas's story is the best Blizzard have ever put out. Cataclysm was awful story-wise. Pandaria was actually quite good at adding more story, and lots of new things regarding the Old Gods and such worked beautifully in this universe. Everything past that point was horribly written, presented, and gave no sense of either urgency or respect for the antagonist. Legion is probably the worst offender, in that they turned the biggest and baddest wolf around into stray, toothless dogs and left the Warcraft universe without its greatest antagonist.

I believe that everything positive we have got, story-wise, and all the interesting flavour, have come from Golden and her team. Everything else is just a dev thinking 'yeah, that is so cool! let's do this!' without any regard to lore, the impact of whatever story they came up with, and then left the writers to try and salvage whatever was left.

[Aucald]

In regards of her skill you only said you can't say she's objectively bad and then you immediately shifted the topic to irrelevant points about her popularity. At which point you asked me a question on how else I'd define success... Hence my reply... Also, not only was the point about accurate portrayal secondary to her not being able to do even the most basic task of writing, i.e. performing research, but to say the accurate portrayal of the lifestyle isn't required when that's the whole narrative theme of the book is 50 shades of bizarre.

Not quite, I said you can't objectively say she's unsuccessful, and that a great many don't consider her skillful to boot. Our metrics on those score are entirely subjective - and even though we can both trot out a panoply of things she got wrong, or just plain sucked at, it's kind of not of consequence when our subjective views on the matter don't really matter either. You can debate and argue about skill forever and make zero headway, but success and sales margins are metrics you can't really debate at all.

[Freshouttajail]

She was supposed to be the one who salvaged the WoW story moving forward, however the story has arguably gotten much worse and more bland and predictable since her tenure at Blizzard. And she has been there for a while now, so she would more than able to leave her mark on the story by now.

So what was the point of hiring Christie Golden? Do you believe that she has another agenda that she is pushing?

That was the goal? Never heard there was a goal to hire her other than shitting out random bullshit merch for fanboys to buy.

[mojojojo202]

To be fair, I have seen Metzen of all people say she is a talented written, so I firmly believe he wouldn't just say that for no reason.

I think her talent lays in making the one dimensional characters have an actual personality, for example Jaina redemption story looked a pretty attractive point of BFA.

I don't like all her characters, Anduin is a example of this since he can't out growth his naivety, but I guess it's hard working on with what she has and the liberties she is allowed to make, the lore is huge, it's already there and people (myself included) get pissed off when it's changed. Anduin in Vanilla was just a random recolored NPC with no more than 2 lines and a weird wand, so I guess he improved in some way.

She might be a very talented writer, but it is a skill that doesn't cross mediums very well.

Just because she writes good novels (taking that on reputation, I haven't read any) doesn't mean she could write a screenplay, a TV show, short stories, a documentary or as part of a game. Games are even harder to transition to/from because of their inherent interactivity, your audience experiences the story as a character, not as a bystander as in nearly all other mediums.

[sarahtasher]

My heard hurt just by pointing out, but you DO know that Christie Golden is not the one who decide the general orientation of the story ?

[Mehrunes]

Why must the wow community find someone to pour hate into, hate the game, not the game makers, sheesh.

But if the game is hate-worthy and given the fact that it obviously did not make itself, why should the makers of a hate-worthy game get a free pass for the abomination they brought upon this world?

If you take out the faction war and dont listen to the bias loud mouths, the general game story is not so bad, especially given when and how it was established compared to what else is out there in this genre of gaming.

Vanilla and TBC barely had a story as it is. WotLK, while it had its moments, ended with nonsensical "there must always be a Lich King because the Lich King dying means the Scourge will run amok" even though WoW's setting already established that even significantly damaging the Lich King (the second example happening in the exact same expansion) breaks significant parts of the Scourge away from the Lich King's sway.

Cataclysm didn't even bother to mesh the faction war and Deathwing theme and the last patch was a disaster on all counts, especially with things Thrall becoming Green Moses with a dash of Goku, Deathwing almost completely ignoring the Dragon Soul despite being obsessed with it for ten millennia and only sending lowly mooks after it or Deathwing predicting the raid will go get the Focusing Iris even though Kalec thought of it on the spot 5 seconds before we went there and despite that he didn't order his minions to teleport it to the bottom of the sea to fuck us over.

MoP started with the premise of "Garrosh is the end boss" and then convoluted its way to the Horde rebelling, where it gave races rebellion reasons as amazing as Rommath and Aethas not dying in a ritual they knew full well was going to be dangerous. Even though a patch after the rebellion started we actually got a great reason to rebel, i.e. Garrosh using a heart of an Old God. Then the expansion ended with probably the single worst WoW book of all time (lo and behold, written by Golden), where the entire premise of the book turned out to be bogus as the trial was nothing more than a moralizing sham on the part of Celestials and the whole book was reduced to Blizzard convoluting its way to start WoD.

WoD is a disaster so ginormous even Blizzard had to finally admit their storytelling shortcomings, which ended with them scratching away an entire content tier and rushing to the ending. Which was nonsensical "Draenor is free". Legion reduced the Legion, a multiversal threat steamrolling entire worlds, to a Scooby Doo mumbling idiot of a villain. And BfA is just BfA.

Add to that constant retcons, gameplay trumping lore all the time which results in nonsense, Blizzard treating rule of kewl as some golden standard of writing and them constantly forgetting their own story.

And what else is out there in this genre of gaming? SW:ToR. FF14. GW2. All vastly superior in this department to the joke that is WoW.

its interesting that when most of these guys critique her it generally orbits the idiot filled planet of "WELL SHE DOESNT LIKE MY FACTION SO F HER".

This isn't even true in this very thread...

i mean heck they talk as if they are some great God gifted writing genius, while someone actually employed by another company is absolutely crap.

This is fallacious on multiple levels.

Wrong. So far it goes like this Alliance good, Horde bad(minus Baine). Blizzard has done a tremendous job, at sucking the fun of all Horde related story, by making their players feel like crap on each step of the way. But we are supposed to root for those, who betray us to their alliance buddies instead, This plot is biased and one sided from each perspective. This topic from the US Forums covers it the best.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...pc-shame-tally

Ignoring the topic of that thread, holy fuck, the new template of WoW forums is awful. Who thought putting an entire thread on one page to scroll through was a good idea?

[Mehrunes]

She might be a very talented writer, but it is a skill that doesn't cross mediums very well.

Just because she writes good novels (taking that on reputation, I haven't read any) doesn't mean she could write a screenplay, a TV show, short stories, a documentary or as part of a game. Games are even harder to transition to/from because of their inherent interactivity, your audience experiences the story as a character, not as a bystander as in nearly all other mediums.

A great example of that being J. K. Rowling. Who didn't quite get the memo that writing books isn't quite the same as writing screenplays, which resulted in Fantastic Beasts 2 cramming way too many storylines into one movie. With obvious results.

[Mehrunes]

Well, if it was not obvious, I said what I said to satisfy your desire that story is shit. You just won't see it otherwise.

I am not sure how else to see this except "Hey, I am on alliance side. Horde maneuvered us so well and I fucking hate it! Christie Golden writing is shit".

Have a nice day.

Except the part you quoted has jack shit to do with Horde maneuvering anyone into anything. And just lol at you trying to weasel out of the argument by trying to paint me as Alliance player. If you can't see anything other than that (especially from that part of my post), invest in new eyes, because I sure as hell am not one and you're seeing things that don't exist in the real world.

So yeah, I am having nice day because what you just wrote is beyond hilarious.

[Hotmail]

Nowadays WoW is supposed to be a Heroic Fantasy that even your grandma can enjoy. No amount of gifted writers can save us from this cheese:



At this point, we're just piling MacGuffins on top of MacGuffins to defeat heavily retconned villains. John Carmack's famous quote about video game stories comes to mind.

[united]

I remember how hyped people were when she was officially hired

[iamthedevil]

Most likely all of this expansion was already laid out so she'd be with the group working on the next expansion.

[Volitar]

Idk she writes the books so Blizzard probably thought why not just include her into the ingame lore too. Blizzard is pretty SJW these days and she fits into that pretty well.


I'm not really a fan of the story of WoW but honestly the thing that makes me hate the lore more than the lore itself is the fucking TIMEGATING OF LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
Doing 1 quest at a time for 4 months will make any storyline feel like dogshit.

[Beerbill Society]

But those are Alliance characters. How is she developing Horde characters? Baine is more and more a plot tool for the Alliance and Sylvanas is becoming more of a mustache twirling villain.

Her "Talent" seems to only apply to the Alliance, which is one of the issues... she's not a Horde fan, like her predecessors

To be fair, many Blizzard's employees are openly fans of Horde, i have a problem with that, but apparently people don't. Maybe the whole reason she exist is to keep things even instead of one sided.

For one, I think Danuser is way more harmful for Horde storytelling than her, but that is a outsider opinion.

- - - Updated - - -

She might be a very talented writer, but it is a skill that doesn't cross mediums very well.

Just because she writes good novels (taking that on reputation, I haven't read any) doesn't mean she could write a screenplay, a TV show, short stories, a documentary or as part of a game. Games are even harder to transition to/from because of their inherent interactivity, your audience experiences the story as a character, not as a bystander as in nearly all other mediums.

And I completely agree with this, but you have to take in consideration that most of the time "ours" (gamers) standards are pretty low, basically we are willing to take a quest from a random NPC in a road that gives no context whatsoever and ask you to kill 5 boars and there is nothing wrong with that mind you.

But I guess that only this is shallow, gaming have become a huge part of entertainment industry, it's relatively new if you compare to movie industry, and it have changed aggressively every couple of years now.

I guess they realize that this kind of one dimensional random NPC won't cut for the long run and have to go for alternatives, Golden is pathfinding this, writing deep characters in a new medium, we may not like how she have done it so far but they deserve some kudos for trying something new.