They write this game like it's a TV series or movie - but cba to make the effort

[Beloren]

It's so weird, why didn't they just stick to the classic format and follow on the story of the races, with leaders playing roles in epic quests, rather than this narrative structure.

don't get me wrong, it's good to actually do a story, and a god one, and many of their story premises have been good. the problem is EXECUTION in game. No where near enough cinematics, audio, not enough effort to actually flesh some of the strands out, to make it compelling as a video game in an MMO setting.


Yes, they've done the best given.. but it's not good enough for this standard imo, other games out right do a far better job, because they make the effort.. how many times have we seen warcraft mess up it's lore just for a cool feature or make things accessible? In every one of those situations if effort was made, they could have come out with an interesting scenario to hold up the integrity of the lore, but they'd rather either just pretend there is no conflict or just retcon over.


When they failed to adjust for TBC/WotLK in the levelling up process when cataclysm was released and level 1-60 was changed, I lost respect for them, they didn't even try.

it's taken a complete overhaul to actually have a viable path now. I n Shadowlands, you can at least choose where you go fro 10-50 and the default is the most recent expansion. That worked, but it was such a joke.

This game is a great game, great elements, but for all the really cool things, it's a mazing how simple things just either ruin it or yank you back.. could be so much more blizz, so much more..

[Arikara]

It's turned from being a story about the actual world of Warcraft, to being a reality TV series featuring Warcraft characters doing increasingly inane things, hoping to draw the attention of players to the next great spectacle.

There is a particular saying: Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People. Essentially, WoW has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of focusing on the shenanigans of a broad range of different flavors of people. It's a disappointing decline.

[Amariw]

It's turned from being a story about the actual world of Warcraft, to being a reality TV series featuring Warcraft characters doing increasingly inane things, hoping to draw the attention of players to the next great spectacle.

There is a particular saying: Great Minds Discuss Ideas; Average Minds Discuss Events; Small Minds Discuss People. Essentially, WoW has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of focusing on the shenanigans of a broad range of different flavors of people. It's a disappointing decline.

Showing off characters journeys could have been interesting, if written well, and without abandoning world development (which they kinda did in legion and bfa, beside Suramar). The problem is it rarely is nowadays.

[Aresk]

They could've done a better job, but the ship has sailed on that one. They'd have to reverse the draenei/eredar retcon to salvage the lore they had, and that would invalidated draenei and light-forged draenei player characters. At this point, we can just hope things increase in quality from here instead of delivering any further retcons.

[Lady Atia]

They could've done a better job, but the ship has sailed on that one. They'd have to reverse the draenei/eredar retcon to salvage the lore they had, and that would invalidated draenei and light-forged draenei player characters. At this point, we can just hope things increase in quality from here instead of delivering any further retcons.

I don't get the hate for the Draenei/Eredar retcon ..... no one would like to play the ugly gollum-things from Warcraft III, Draenei look so much better.

Also - adding new lore isn't automatically a retcon. For example the new Frostmourne lore is an addition, not really a retcon as no one really knew from where the blade and helmet came (and Kil'Jaeden isn't called Deciever for nothing, neither are the Nathrezim trustworthy beeings ....).

[Gaidax]

It's just not that kind of a game. There is a ton of lore and stories, but it's not a CRPG. They don't do huge loredump books, long-winded conversations or interactive slides ingame like in Pillars of Eternity and so on here.

Warcraft always was more action and less talking around.

They made some effort last expansions with those WoD zone stories and additional campaigns like Class Hall/War/Covenant, but it's important to recognize that the stock audience for WoW is not terribly interested in being lost in all the mountains of mumbo-jumbo, heck I'd wager most of the players barely even know what's going on aside from recent events. They just want to login, kill some bads that did booboos and log out. This is what Blizzard is targeting ingame and for those who want more - there are books and so on.

It's really has less to do with "cba to make the effort" and more with realizing who your audience is.

[Aresk]

I don't get the hate for the Draenei/Eredar retcon ..... no one would like to play the ugly gollum-things from Warcraft III, Draenei look so much better.

Also - adding new lore isn't automatically a retcon. For example the new Frostmourne lore is an addition, not really a retcon as no one really knew from where the blade and helmet came (and Kil'Jaeden isn't called Deciever for nothing, neither are the Nathrezim trustworthy beeings ....).

Oh, I fully agree that one can add new lore without being a retcon. My issue with the eredar retcon is that it took something dangerous and scheming and manipulative, like the eredar and nathrezim, and made them into simple pawns. The original lore had the eredar and nathrezim corrupting Sargeras. These were beings so cunning and insidious that they were able to turn a titan against its true purpose. In the current lore, they joined the big bad because they were shortsighted or otherwise did not wish to face total annihilation. That's the change that I have an issue with.

On the aesthetic front, I think broken look perfectly fine for character models. I'm not advocating that Blizzard change all the models, because people already have their characters and made them the way they want them; to change the spirit of what they are would be cruel. I'm saying that I would have preferred that, when draenei were first discussed as a playable race, the people in the room that said, "But those are just eredar!" dug their heals in a little harder and kept the two races distinct.

[Lady Atia]

Oh, I fully agree that one can add new lore without being a retcon. My issue with the eredar retcon is that it took something dangerous and scheming and manipulative, like the eredar and nathrezim, and made them into simple pawns. The original lore had the eredar and nathrezim corrupting Sargeras. These were beings so cunning and insidious that they were able to turn a titan against its true purpose. In the current lore, they joined the big bad because they were shortsighted or otherwise did not wish to face total annihilation. That's the change that I have an issue with.

Well, fun fact, the new Shadowlands lore implies that the Nathrezim did infact corrupt Sargeras.

On the aesthetic front, I think broken look perfectly fine for character models. I'm not advocating that Blizzard change all the models, because people already have their characters and made them the way they want them; to change the spirit of what they are would be cruel. I'm saying that I would have preferred that, when draenei were first discussed as a playable race, the people in the room that said, "But those are just eredar!" dug their heals in a little harder and kept the two races distinct.

I guess we would have gotten rebel "Eredar/Argusians" instead without any broken/draenei connection at all *shrugs*. My points stays, no way Blizzard would have used ugly Broken instead of the nice Draenei models - being able to play as "good Archimonde" is too much of a hook for players^^ (that said, I'm all in for them to be added as customization options!).

[Powerogue]

Think of it this way: Ever since WotLK, they've done cutscenes to tell dense storytelling in a few minutes where deemed necessary/cool.

These cutscenes involve building special models for the characters that show up in them that have improved animations and physics (individual chin physics for EVERY Gallywix chin! Money well spent!) As an inevitable result, they will focus on only a handful of characters per expansion, which also helps the players as they won't have to remember as many names/faces to understand the expansion's main stories.

It doesn't have to be the faction leaders, but it's understandable why they're big contenders as they can represent their respective races and generally already have highly detailed updated models.

I think the Shadowlands route is probably their biggest improvement to story coherence while leveling so far, though I'm with Taliesin on how it could be improved.


TL;DR we should have a main story questchain culminating in a mini-instance of fighting the expansion's big bad for every expansion bracket.

[Malira]

It's just not that kind of a game. There is a ton of lore and stories, but it's not a CRPG. They don't do huge loredump books, long-winded conversations or interactive slides ingame like in Pillars of Eternity and so on here.

Warcraft always was more action and less talking around.

They made some effort last expansions with those WoD zone stories and additional campaigns like Class Hall/War/Covenant, but it's important to recognize that the stock audience for WoW is not terribly interested in being lost in all the mountains of mumbo-jumbo, heck I'd wager most of the players barely even know what's going on aside from recent events. They just want to login, kill some bads that did booboos and log out. This is what Blizzard is targeting ingame and for those who want more - there are books and so on.

It's really has less to do with "cba to make the effort" and more with realizing who your audience is.

Exactly. Like I've been playing FFXIV and the story is great but it almost feels like a movie more than a game sometimes. Lots of long talky cutscenes - and yes, focus on a main cast of characters that your character nods along to. They could never do this kind of storytelling in WoW because the playerbase would just skip through it.

There's a reason why the sparse cutscenes are so important, they need to tell a Lot of story in 4 minutes. Outside of that, WoW tries to tell the story through environment and voiced dialogue - ever noticed that after accepting a quest the npc will usually summarise the quest text in one or two lines of dialogue? They're trying to project as much story onto the player as they can as they are running around killing boars.

It's a challenging way of telling stories and as Blizz has been attempting to do more long term storytelling it hasn't really worked to their strengths. They've generally been better with telling stories over a half an hour questline, a single dungeon/raid, or a month-long weekly campaign (and those can often feel janky played weekly).

They also have a very... LOST-style storytelling, where they like to keep a lot of loose ends around to be picked up later when they need new ideas. This is both a good thing because it keeps long term storylines, but in practice it also leads to lack of just... tie-ing up stories just in case they need to resurrect them later, and plot points being left hanging for literal years (like we're only just now finding out what Sylvanas was up to in Stormheim over 4 YEARS later)

[Beloren]

I've always maintained that minor characters and their journeys are far more interesting and make for far better world building than watching Jaina deus ex machinaing on a big ship

Like Taylor, Nazgrim, Bridenbrad all those little guys are more fun to follow

I mean Jaina's eux ex machina can be quite cool, but not if tha'ts what you see all the time !!. The bread and butter should be the races championed by their minor characters and you, leading to the rare big moments where the big guns can step in, it's another reason why the world threats seem like such a joke now, so use to them, and they are supposed to have happened every 2 years?

lol

- - - Updated - - -

Exactly. Like I've been playing FFXIV and the story is great but it almost feels like a movie more than a game sometimes. Lots of long talky cutscenes - and yes, focus on a main cast of characters that your character nods along to. They could never do this kind of storytelling in WoW because the playerbase would just skip through it.

There's a reason why the sparse cutscenes are so important, they need to tell a Lot of story in 4 minutes. Outside of that, WoW tries to tell the story through environment and voiced dialogue - ever noticed that after accepting a quest the npc will usually summarise the quest text in one or two lines of dialogue? They're trying to project as much story onto the player as they can as they are running around killing boars.

It's a challenging way of telling stories and as Blizz has been attempting to do more long term storytelling it hasn't really worked to their strengths. They've generally been better with telling stories over a half an hour questline, a single dungeon/raid, or a month-long weekly campaign (and those can often feel janky played weekly).

They also have a very... LOST-style storytelling, where they like to keep a lot of loose ends around to be picked up later when they need new ideas. This is both a good thing because it keeps long term storylines, but in practice it also leads to lack of just... tie-ing up stories just in case they need to resurrect them later, and plot points being left hanging for literal years (like we're only just now finding out what Sylvanas was up to in Stormheim over 4 YEARS later)

That's a good defense, it's probably why i haven't entirely ditched this yet, still for how they draw people in, and then seemt o hit this virtual ceiling making you crave more, the lack oti is disappointg.

But yeh, theyare focused around telling a lot of story n as little time/space as possible. They should use voice dialgoue more, which granted they have been. Or release more material to flesh out what is going on, and tell other stories .. But they don't want hte body of lor eto be so huge, they can't navigate to tell new stuff, so they've locked themselves in.

The ceiling for them would always be video games, but they should have used their popularity to grow into a multi media franchise, TV and films are hugely more profitable and well known and would draw people to the franchise and thus games. They also have a much longer lifes span when established. Should the video game fail, that's it for warcraft, though they have other IPs or can have a few years break and come back.. WoW has been 2 decades, most of these guys are going to be retirement age in the next 10-20 years.