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

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

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.

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

siege of orgrimmar
karazhan tombs
auchwhitz in hillsbrad
all forsaken and scourge themed zones
etc

[Evaddon]

siege of orgrimmar
karazhan tombs
auchwhitz in hillsbrad
all forsaken and scourge themed zones
etc

I mean...if that's brutal to you, I've seen/read some fucked up shit in my time then lmao

[Liarparadox]

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.

Yeah I agree. These writers are just dogshit. I honestly think, really, no joke, they are worse than say junior high writers. Anything good they touch turns to shit. I'm very sure even decent grade 8s could write better than what we've gotten over the last few xpacs. Shadowlands is especially bad, though I really don't think BFA or Legion was all that much better. It's very sad. They've ruined pretty much every characters I cared about. There are a few left; but at this point the universe is so ruined the apathy has already started to set in on the whole thing. When an mmo has fucked up gearing, character prog, and story....well, there's not too much left. I swear the friends I've made online are the only reason I'm still around.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Now World of Warcraft has NEVER been "brutal"

Do you mean "dark" or "gorey"? Because Warcraft has always been dark since day 1. The first game is about alien invading and committing genocide. The third game shows the world said invaders massacred and the few survivors who hung on. The Ride of the Horde novel gives you a look at the massacre of the Draenei, not to mention that one road paved with millions of bodies...

In Day of the Dragon, a book that came out two decades ago, Alexstraza was raped by the Dragonmaw Clan so her children could be enslaved and murdered. Thaddius from Naxxramas is made up of dead women and children who are still alive and screaming for help. Also that quest from Duskwood about the teacher who crushed on his female student and then murdered her family. Also the Forsaken who took captives and then performed live experimentation upon them in the Undercity to create the Blight and more Abominations, not to mention Sylvanas raising people from the dead and enslaving them and wasn't any better than the Lich King. And so on.

If you mean "gorey", then WoW has been gorey. You have lots of dismembered and gutted bodies, mostly with the undead.

the most brutal thing in game is literally the cinematic of Nathanos getting decapitated

Arthas shanking his dad, Uther being torn apart by ghouls, Garrosh being crushed, or Varian and Gul'dan being disenchanted didn't count?

I mean...if that's brutal to you, I've seen/read some fucked up shit in my time then lmao

If you're looking for Berserk levels of in your face gore all of the time, then you're not going to find it in WoW. I'm hard pressed to think of any video games that do that besides horror games like Resident Evil.

[Swnem]

because its easiert to write story like this, that can be enjoyed even by people who arent lore-interested.

I mean look at animes. They start "small" and every arc need to top the arc before. More explosion, more might, more BAM PUFF KAPAAAAUW!

But maybe we go back a little bit, cause the team also says, that they trying to get away from this cosmic battles.

I think you are using "enjoyed" very loosely in this case.

[Nerovar]

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.

Maybe it's just me but putting these stories in a little box that is very far removed from the original context in order to apply some 'interesting' twist to it feels like the exact opposite of being true to the original material.

[Super Dickmann]

Maybe it's just me but putting these stories in a little box that is very far removed from the original context in order to apply some 'interesting' twist to it feels like the exact opposite of being true to the original material.

It's almost verbatim the same story structure, premise and plot beats down to not even swapping many of the names out, with the same characters learning the same lesson in a thing called the same way. But without the context of starting out with Arthas' human journey and the follow-up being accepting that the story of those people is concluded and moving on with the still active plot threads like Illidan, Arthas etc, it's massively more hollow. TFT and I'd argue Cataclysm as well worked in large part because it asked "and then what", acknowledging that there were consequences to the cheesy resolution versus the bland baddie of the hour while still letting those who beat the baddie have their happy ending. SL focuses entirely on the arch nonsense involved, forgetting that no one actually cared about Archimonde and that "competing powers set aside their differences to team up" loses whatever narrative power it had after you've done it ten more times.

I.e, it fails for the same reason the Abrams Star Wars movies or the new Ghostbusters fail.

[Soon-TM]

Maybe it's just me but putting these stories in a little box that is very far removed from the original context in order to apply some 'interesting' twist to it feels like the exact opposite of being true to the original material.

The hamfisted parallels between WC3 and SL feels like someone trying to wear a shirt they used when they were a child, and then being completely oblivious to the fact that it doesn't fit anymore.

[Super Dickmann]

The hamfisted parallels between WC3 and SL feels like someone trying to wear a shirt they used when they were a child, and then being completely oblivious to the fact that it doesn't fit anymore.

They did the same in BFA with the Jaina-Thrall arm-rubbing cinematic while remembering Nordrassil. The writing team has hung onto the RoC night elf campaign like its the holy grail for a decade and constantly remake it, considering it either their magnum opus or their predecessors' crowning achievement. This has carried across games and creative teams. Starcraft II annihilated its entire setting and any future for the franchise by being a WC3 remake forgetting that WC3 itself is just Starcraft I with an extra race tacked on who's impact on the end plot is meaningless (the Orcs).

[dope_danny]

It feels like story is just more and more of an afterthought honestly. Like between the grinding renown and such to seperate it how much story is there in 9.1? like outside of the raid you have 2 minutes of walking to korthia, a couple more minutes of missable characters like jaina and uther talking and the rest are those "tha-not is claiming the infinity sigils!" soft-scenarios.

Is there anything else bar getting heckled by raid bosses like its a random story mission in Destiny? in the only story update in a full year?

WoW has turned into a game where an expansion might legitimately have 3-4 hours of max level story and the world just exists as busywork in some fashion to funnel you towards instances. Because nothing says "world" of warcraft like 5-20 people in a sealed instance fighting the same enemies every week for 9 months, right?

The character is now nothing more than a stagehand organising the set pieces to then stand back and watch increasingly shallow characters spout dialogue that feels like the exposition filler marvel comics put in italics to let mouthbreathing readers know this is to catch them up to why they are doing a different raid now and thats not an rpg. Thats barely more than some gacha games give you in infodumps.

[username993720]

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.

Because some dev let his kid play it.

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.

Yeah, because i don't remember old Horde Orcs talking about hope, peace and love. They're Orcs, for christ sake.

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

See? Even you agree that it's cringy.

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

Then, you haven't seen Lords of War.

[Engal]

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

And Varian being reduced to Ashes? No?
We don't even know if Nathanos was " decapitated " because we didnt see anything. She maybe just sliced his throat, we don't know.

[Magnagarde]

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

They don't have the "courage"(it is a sad fact of the gaming industry's reality that creativeness is at an all-time low) to write anything even remotely Warcraft anymore. Imagine if the current writers were the ones to tell the story of Lordaeron's interment camps; the second morning half of their developer teams would walk out of the studio, carry some signs of protest, cause a meltdown on some social media platform and probably trace it to a "racist incident" that happened in 2009 in Blizzard's backyard cafeteria.

It is no wonder that many of the people responsible for making Warcraft what it was, having taken inspiration from some of the most creative fictional universes, left the company already. I can't imagine having to work in an environment like that. While Danuser is clearly unable to pick up the reins for the franchise's direction, there a lot of compounding elements that contribute to Warcraft being turned upside down.

The more I've seen of the franchise in the past couple of years, the more I feel like Warcraft has a problem with quasi-artists riding the fanbase like mules which are meant to make their wishes and visions happen financially, while at the same time moving completely away from what the franchise is all about. It seems as if Warcraft is slowly turning into a myriad of smaller, personal projects and ideological viewpoints coalescing together behind a well-known brand in order to get said projects/ideas sold, with the only thing selling them being the Warcraft brand itself. Warcraft should be no one's personal blog.

[Nraktja]

Of course. The previous mythos and worldbuilding of the Warcraft universe took inspiration from Lovecraft mythos and Greek mythology in terms of literature. It wasn't mindblowing granted, but it wasn't pretending to be. Danuser is obsessed with grand "epic narratives" and is narcissistic enough to think he's concluding years of narrative or some such, using flowery words such as "we planned this as a drama in 3 acts" (As if anything he wrote thus far could be taken seriously as any sort of an impressive play at this point, lmao. Talk about an overinflated ego). He takes inspirations from epitomes of literature such as Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universe, creating his own Thanos lite and cosmic adventures.

Aren't you all excited to adventure with Av- I mean, Jaina, Thrall, Anduin and tune in to the next soap opera episode of "Will Sylvanas finally be turned from her evil ways and reedem herself? Has Anduin sparked change in her? Will she help us defeat the Big Bad in the epic conclusion of the latest episode of World of Sylvanascraft?"

[Magnagarde]

Of course. The previous mythos and worldbuilding of the Warcraft universe took inspiration from Lovecraft mythos and Greek mythology in terms of literature. It wasn't mindblowing granted, but it wasn't pretending to be.

The major problem with the Warcraft franchise right now is that Danuser(and/or whoever else is in on it) seems to be rushing and burning through everything relatable to the fans of the franchise, in order to be able to kickstart his "own thing". To start his own thing, he has to end everything that fans can relate to. That's what I'm getting from his "closing the final chapter of this part of the Warcraft saga". I see it as "getting this over with so I can do what I want to do".

On the other hand, as you've stated above, Metzen went with ingredients everyone already loved and made a cake out of it; was it a revolutionary cake by substance? Definitely not. Did it combine the most beloved ingredients? It definitely did and that's why there was something for everyone who picked it up. Couple this with the amazing RTS and MMO experience it was embedded into and that's how Warcraft became as popular as it was. He took inspiration from Warhammer, LOTR, Lovecraft's work, greek mythology and worldwide folklore, combining it into something that everyone found something for themselves in.