Why does this game feel like a soapbox marvel heroes clash?

[Very rare pepe]

go read your dark fantasy books. Or play WH/40k
Its not a game for you.

Who is it a game for? Children?

[Dancaris]

Who is it a game for? Children?

For anyone, who can be invested to that game. Your grimdark is already here - genocide, racism, raping, world wars, killing innocents and other stuff. But isnt prominent part of the game. Even player char is a bigger mass murderer of all WoW history.
But you can keep asking for WHammer or DS story to WoW. But you must know that not everyone wants that. And if you says that ITS ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE WOW - you are delusional.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The infantile bunch of Twitter posters that also write for WoW on the side is incapable of the type of writing you're looking for. Good writing in gaming in my opinion can be found in the old BioWare games, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk... Definitely not the current monkeys writing for WoW.

The problem isn’t the writers they even hired the head writer of whicher/cyberpunk on 2019 the problem is the direction/story those writers are being given by the team leads to work worth.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/01...joins-blizzard

[Raven]

That would seem too Morally Grey™ for Danuser & co., since all we've got since he's in charge are annoying Mary Sue's such as Jaina or (especially) Anduin, or the utter carfire that is Sylvanas.

Yeah only problem is you know the tiny issue with him getting promoted after the Shadowlands story already was decided, but who cares about facts when you can have opinions.

[username993720]

And how its bad? Because you dont like it?

Because it's World of WARcraft.

I would have to disagree with that.

Going all the way back, Vanilla was good enough in the sense that the quests made the world feel fleshed out, but there wasn't really an overarching story to it. As soon as they tried their hand at that in BC though, things went down hill faaaaaast. BC's writing was horrendous. I'd argue that it was far and away the worst expansion as far as story coherence and the way that it was presented. Wrath was a drastic improvement over that, but taken as a whole, it still sucked pretty hard.

So WoW's story has always been pretty terrible, regardless of who was writing for it.

Yes, but the themes were not that corny.

[Very rare pepe]

For anyone, who can be invested to that game. Your grimdark is already here - genocide, racism, raping, world wars, killing innocents and other stuff. But isnt prominent part of the game. Even player char is a bigger mass murderer of all WoW history.
But you can keep asking for WHammer or DS story to WoW. But you must know that not everyone wants that. And if you says that ITS ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE WOW - you are delusional.

I don't think or believe in any of what you have just said, i don't care if it's darker or not, nor do I think WoW is genuinely able to be saved at this point and especially not by the story lmao. My point is, the story, in the last 2 expansions specifically and there are tons of lame examples, make for such a bad, torrid, directionless story that I don't think anyone enjoys it, my reference to children here comes specifically from their new direction to take words like 'Bitch' out of the game as if we aren't all fucking adults left playing this game. They are going more Disney for some reason and I am not sure why when their audience isn't that.

[Irian]

Yeah OP, I feel this strongly. I don't feel like I'm playing a Warcraft game anymore, I feel like I'm playing some bastardized spinoff that uses the characters we know as puppets to tell their shitty fanfic.

I know a lot of people will say they don't care about the story, and don't pay attention to it at all, but in my eyes there's such a night-and-day difference between the kind of writing we used to see in this game in classic or wrath compared to today. It's comedically bad, hamfisted and - and I hate using this word - cringy, with characters not acting in character at all if the situation needs it, and personalities bending over backwards to support a frankly bad and childish story about possibly the worst afterlife lore I've seen in a fictional universe, period. Story has never been the focus of WoW but it provided a backdrop that made some shit like Siege of Orgrimmar feel so much more meaningful to me than, say, Sanctum of Domination ever could.

To me there's no real recovery at this point unless they just completely undo the entirety of Shadowlands or simply pretend it didn't happen. BfA was bad but its self-contained story made it fairly harmless (other than for Sylvanas fans...); Shadowlands completely ruined a good half or more of the ongoing stories in the game and opened way too many Pandora's Boxes that never should have been opened.

[Zentail]

Fire these writers already.

Please no. I love the writing in this game. Everyone that dislikes it can't give me a reason why it's so bad and then also provide another story that doesn't have the same fault.

I also don't believe you're following the story in any way, shape, or form.

I wish we could get more nuanced characters again, but this whole thing just feels like an avengers movie.

The context you're referring to here is present in 100% of all movies, books, TV shows, and games in the world. That means no stories are good to you, and that's definitely a you problem to figure out. The same reason people hate avengers movies is because of giving into pressure, not that they're actually bad. Remember, top-selling stuff is not bad. You just don't like them. If they were bad, they wouldn't be top-sellers.

I like characters like that. Characters who aren't perfect. Who have their own emotions, who aren't black or white.

We have this. In just about every character. Sylvanas is the definition of not perfect. She was gaining emotion back from the domination magic that she's been missing, and now that she has it entirely, we "don't like her", right? Jaina isn't perfect. She's caused a lot of problems directly because of her emotions. Genn isn't perfect. He was willing to start massive scale wars to avenge his king because of his emotions. Bolvar isn't perfect. He was cocky about his position assuming meant he was powerful when, in reality, he was pathetic and weak and it resulted in the tearing of reality above Icecrown. Tyrande abandoned her entire race of people for revenge.

Wherever you're getting this "perfect" and "emotionless" from is certainly not from WoW.

Seeing Geyarah swoon all over Sylvanas and being pumped to go to war suddenly changing her attitude when Sylvanas was the bad guy in BfA will never stop make me realise how awful and stupid the writers are.

This isn't what happened. She stayed a loyalist. She didn't shift he motives until Sylvanas blatantly called out the horde. This wasn't a "suddenly changing attitude" moment. This was a "your favorite person in the world called you garbage to your face" moment.

The only semi-valid point you've made is the bloodshed that used to occur in WoW. Dark? No. WoW was never really that dark. Not any more or less than it is today. Bloody? Yeah, it was a hell of a lot more bloody back in the day. But in the way that it was bloody, BFA was hyper-bloody as well. We're only really missing that bloodshed this expansion.

You can hate WoW all you want, but I swear people hating the story are hating it with no reason and showing they clearly aren't following it well, or at all. Sometimes I think most of the people aren't even playing the game that complain about it (which is probably true). Just last week, there was a massive ragefest about a mount on the WoW store in 9.2, a mount that is not a store mount and clearly people don't read before making their opinions. It was the 9.2 Mythic+ 2000 score mount. Your whole post sounds like the person that made that thread about the mount.

[Rexosaurus]

Yes, but the themes were not that corny.

Well they didn't really have any themes at all, so I'm not really sure that I'd consider that a win.

If you prefer darker settings or stories then whatever, that's fine. But if you think that a story sucks, or is somehow immature, simply because it has hopeful themes and dialogue, then I would say that it says far more about your personal preferences than it does about the story itself.

The quality of WoW's story would be just as poor as it is now if they infused more "grimdark" elements into it.

[Soon-TM]

Yeah only problem is you know the tiny issue with him getting promoted after the Shadowlands story already was decided, but who cares about facts when you can have opinions.

Danuser was Afrasiabi's second in command by the time SL's story was being written, so I find it really hard to believe that he had no participation or opinions whatsoever. Furthermore, it isn't as if writers haven't been making !@#$ up as they go since at least WoD LOL.

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

For once I agree. They seem cookie-cutter and annoying. And if I hear “heroes, I need aid!” one more time…

In general, it’s the small side quests that I’ve noticed have the best writing, the most emotion. There are gems in there but the principal acts are a slog this time around.

yep i agree
My dude Darsithis, it will keep happening until Steve is gone. he's become very ignorant and selfish on twitter to anyone who doesnt share the same views as him. same with everyone else close around him. the only one that can handle criticism well is golden. she gets too much shit put on her than she deserves. she's innocent, same with terran.

[Magnagarde]

yep i agree
My dude Darsithis, it will keep happening until Steve is gone. he's become very ignorant and selfish on twitter to anyone who doesnt share the same views as him. same with everyone else close around him. the only one that can handle criticism well is golden. she gets too much shit put on her than she deserves. she's innocent, same with terran.

Most people on this forum, who saw through his Nathanos self-insert a few years back, knew which route the story would go under someone like him.

Couple this with the fruitbowlism and the fact that they seem to be taking inspiration from comics/movies somewhat based on comics and this is what Warcraft ends up with.

[Super Dickmann]

The story is founded upon Thrall and Jaina teaming up with night elves to fight a poorly characterized but extremely powerful barechested teal man who wants to destroy the world. Said teal man is said to be behind the Lich King and Kel'thuzad but is massively upstaged as a character and a dramatic presence by them. The dreadlords, his main executors, are more interesting than he is and take a more active role in corraling the story into place. Thrall and Jaina are helped by Tyrande who's initially hostile but after some ribbing learns the value of love and peace and they all hold hands as the bad man explodes in a pastoral land. The climax of this story is called Eternity's End.

I'm not describing Shadowlands, but WC3. The issue isn't that the writers aren't being 'true' to the original material, if anything they're far too true to it. It's that unlike when the game started out when the writers knew in large part what elements to keep and what to ditch (Keep the orc retcon but flesh it out more, revert the Alliance into actually being part of the story), they kept only the arch-WC3 story about coming together and holding hands helmed by a cast that's bland as dishwater. However, RoC was buoyed by the Arthas plot and the multitude of perspectives, including the parts borrowed from Starcraft where you're in the villain's shoes bringing them close to their goal. Also, where RoC followed that up by putting Jaina and Thrall on the shelf in TFT with a story based around characters and groups that could go into conflict where everyone is morally iffy and WoW followed it up by sidelining them and focusing on the world itself, the new expansions expel everything except that already weak RoC framework that could only work once. It's all of one, none of the other, and that's why it fails.

[Kallisto]

Danuser was Afrasiabi's second in command by the time SL's story was being written, so I find it really hard to believe that he had no participation or opinions whatsoever. Furthermore, it isn't as if writers haven't been making !@#$ up as they go since at least WoD LOL.

You can't just make shit up in WoW and put it in the next patch or even the next expansion. We have actual interviews with Ex-blizzard people, some of which are considered in high regard like Metzen who were in Bliz for years. Metzen retired in the first weeks of Legion, in his interviews since retirement he mentioned he wasn't even in the blizzard HQ for around 6 months prior to that. Which means it was still WoD era for those playing.

In the same interview he was saying how those working on wow had already in place many cinematics for BFA, those from the start and end of the expansion. Why would they be mostly done by then? Because unlike how the memes are saying "Blizzard copied a stone from FFXIV", these assets and cinematics and story writing take a long ass time to do. Cinematics were being worked on, voiced and polished 4 years before we even were able to datamine the patch they were on.

Story wise if all the writers were sacked today and replaced by the greatest writers ever to existed, we'd not see any of that until 12.0 realistically. Maybe 11.0 at a push. That's how long certain aspects of the game and cinematics take to do, and you can't even do the cinematics until the story is in place.

[Kralljin]

In the same interview he was saying how those working on wow had already in place many cinematics for BFA, those from the start and end of the expansion. Why would they be mostly done by then? Because unlike how the memes are saying "Blizzard copied a stone from FFXIV", these assets and cinematics and story writing take a long ass time to do. Cinematics were being worked on, voiced and polished 4 years before we even were able to datamine the patch they were on.

Yeah, that's why the BfA cinematic is so utterly random, right?

It's supposed to depict a moment in the Battle for the Undercity, yet that moment isn't actually there in the battle for Undercity the player goes through.
Especially Saurfang being rallied by Sylvanas shouting "For the Horde" is in hindsight pretty hilarious, considering that Saurfang already straddled the fence at this point by calling out Sylvanas for Teldrassil and leaving Malfurion alive.

...disregarding that BfA didn't have a proper "ending" cinematic, unless we talk about that one that even Blizzard delisted on their youtube page.

And that even assumes that the writers are completely unable to make changes on the fly, i'm not buying it for one second that Shadowlands was supposed to be this "3 act story", sure, Shadowlands only had two content patches planned from the start...right.

[DeltrusDisc]

I rather enjoy watching Jaina struggle with NPCs right after the expansion where she literally raised a sunken ship from the bottom of the ocean, made it fly, and attacked the Undercity with it. Seems legit.

Right? This is the crap that just takes me out of the suspension of disbelief and stop giving a shit. Consistency? What is that?

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

And what were the underlying themes?
Hope:

Peace:

Unity:

Forgiveness:

Calmness:


Hardly brutal and gory. MoP was darker than this.



What? Where did you get that from? We're talking about the story.

You killed everyone in Teldrassil including babies and children. Committed genocide upon your own people and then the entire planet. I sacrificed my humanity and mental stability to obtain vengeance for them and now that I have failed to kill you, for that, I forgive you -- Steve Danuser's writing

- - - Updated - - -

Most people on this forum, who saw through his Nathanos self-insert a few years back, knew which route the story would go under someone like him.

Couple this with the fruitbowlism and the fact that they seem to be taking inspiration from comics/movies somewhat based on comics and this is what Warcraft ends up with.

That's what happens when you hire all of your lead workers from California. You end up with virtue-signaling in the game

[sunxsera]

Sorry but none of the characters in this expansion or the previous one feel real at all. They all lack personality and depth and the writers just write them alongside the story goes. I freacking lost it when Bolvar, Lich King and leader of the Scourge, was getting berated by his daughter.

This is just silly at this point. How the fuck is this even a +12 game? The writers think this is witty or funny or something? Or would make me go awww?

How do these people get into a game called "World of WARCRAFT" and then write it like its a hello kitty adventure.

I wish we could get more nuanced characters again, but this whole thing just feels like an avengers movie.

I wish they wrote it as bloody and grim as it used to be. No mercy. Stormwind knights charging into Medivhs chamber to slaughter him? Hell yeah, Blackmoore being a racist piece of shit but also having a conflicted background that turned him into the miserable man he is? Yes please.

I like characters like that. Characters who aren't perfect. Who have their own emotions, who aren't black or white.

Seeing Geyarah swoon all over Sylvanas and being pumped to go to war suddenly changing her attitude when Sylvanas was the bad guy in BfA will never stop make me realise how awful and stupid the writers are.

I hate these writers, they are incompetent, they are inept. They just write what's cool and trendy at the moment.
Mark my words if, if Opera soaps got big again, all our characters would be singing duets with eachother.

Fire these writers already.

totally agree

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

Well, looking at the twitter pages of the WoW writers... yeah. They think such stuff is high art to aspire to.



Unfortunately there is pretty much no chance of that happening, and even if they were fired it's not like Blizzard would acquire good talent, let alone actually give them creative control over Warcraft.

careful, danuser might block you on twitter and call to get you cancelled. he's a very ignorant and prideful man

[Evaddon]

I wouldn't agree with everything you said, but yeah they have a huge problem with tone in the games...
Like, you have Wacraft CGI Cinematic Tone, Warcraft Book Tone, World of Warcraft tone. All of these are completely different while trying to tell the same story..that's the main problem with the story telling other then that and few cases of poor writing/jumps in logic the story isn't as bad as people like to make it out to be

Now World of Warcraft has NEVER been "brutal"...the most brutal thing in game is literally the cinematic of Nathanos getting decapitated, and that was just a few months ago