Is lore completely destroyed?

[florclorbromiod]

Yes. The moment we stepped into Alternate universe(s). And even started bringing armies from there into our world (mag'har orcs).

FF14 did this too and supposedly their lore/story is great

[Super Dickmann]

Sargeras had years of characterization behind him. Zovaal has been built, redesigned and will be looted in a matter of two years, and has literally nothing interesting about him that's not been lent by someone else. His actual armor is basically the end mob of Torghast, he's wearing the Tarragrue.

I wholeheartedly agree on the campiness. This whole story is taking itself way too seriously when the scale is completely ass backwards by now. Hell, I'll raise your runeblade point and use the Azshara cannon to fire all the Azerite collected by Magni to stall the inevitable and try and save the day.
Warcraft started with a Warhammer bootleg, why not taking some more FF7 along the way.

Sargeras had zero characterization behind him. He's as textbook and generic as they get. He has about as many character traits as the Bald Man, arguably fewer since at least the Bald Man is assmad about his family or determinism or something. Yet Sargeras is an exponentially better character because they knew what they wanted out him. He was a devil figure who wanted to kill everyone for reasons that were easily followable. Sargeras appeared little but always had a purpose behind those appearances which suited the needs of the plot at the time. There was no attempt to make him anything but a giant angry man who wanted to kill everyone everywhere and in that role he did his job perfectly. There is no Sargeras scene or line that I think let him down or was out of place and that's in large part because I don't remember a single line of his. I do remember though how he pulled out a giant sword and stabbed the planet and how we were shown characters being shit-scared of him over the course of fifteen years. He had narrative weight because of exposure.

The Bald Man's ultimate plan makes more mechanistic sense. If you look at it in a spreadsheet, the steps he takes in Shadowlands measurably bring him closer to the attainment of an objective that the narrative structurally provides for. But nobody cares and why should they? He's a complete non-entity with none of the gravitas of Sargeras. The writers can't decide if he's a Luciferian figure rebelling against the divine order with the charisma to boot, if he's Skynet trying to enslave everyone out of efficiency, a giant angry guy who wants to destroy the world, if he's hammy or enigmatic, driven by personal betrayal or cosmic injustice. He's written in all these ways in different scenes and consequently he has no voice, no coherent throughline. Everything about him screams a different focus and as a result produces nothing. He's an abject failure as a villain and I really want to write an autopsy on this when all of 9.2 is out and there's a complete picture to work with.

[Garretdejiko]

Yes, Warcraft must only ever have anything to do with either Arthas or the Burning Legion. Ever. Even the slightest hint of an original idea spells doom[.

Are you implying that Arthas is an original idea?

FF14 did this too and supposedly their lore/story is great

Their alternate universes or reflections have been developed since ARR, and they don't conflict with their afterlife concept. Plus, you can't bring armies from another reflection without sacrificing the same amount of souls in the Source. Not to mention the complicated proccess of transporting souls with someone who can cross between shards.
It's kinda funny, every FF expasion makes the past ones better, cause you get more knowledge and exposition of the things teased in the past, whereas in wow, shadowlands screwed up with the afterlife concept beyond repair and now everything is 3D printed.

[lordjust]

Just look at DC and Marvel, there's your answer. They have done more retcons in a single reset then all of WOW's changes combined.

The difference ist that DC and Marvel clearly label their resets as different versions. Every Marvel comic series is their own series and are unrelated to other series even if they have characters of the same name. Blizzard does a similar thing with hearthstone which is a different warcraft universe from the RTS and MMO. With shadowlands they try to force a reset into an already established universe instead of expanding on old lore.

[Tarba]

Lore was stupid since vanilla. Cumulating in stupidity with BC.

[Dioporco]

Yes, Warcraft must only ever have anything to do with either Arthas or the Burning Legion. Ever. Even the slightest hint of an original idea spells doom.

AH YES ORIGINAL IDEA!


The Jailer/Thanos collecting the sigils/stone to redo reality.


This is fresh.

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FF14 did this too and supposedly their lore/story is great

Because they did in the proper way and the results are pretty much solid as you can see.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Its just gotten too complicated, so its easy to predict malaise from the reader.
It was the same way with basically every story I have been into.
The stories get more and more complicated, but the same effort goes into resolving them, so they become less satisfactory by default.

Obviously we can't keep dealing with all the same minor stuff we dealt with in Classic, and all the major bad guys were killed off within the first 3 expansions, so what does anyone think was going to happen?

[Myradin]

Blizzard has no plan, and its ultimately the problem. Especially mixed with how they don't seem to properly control how much info they give the player.

Players are perhaps overexposed to the lore sometimes, such that we're given knowledge no one on azeroth would know (origin of sargeras for example). So when the writers get a new idea, they change it, which causes problems they didn't need to even have if they only told us what we should know. A good example is oh so infamous draenei retcon, which ultimately has no weight on the narrative, but because they wanted to fill a manual for wc3 with lore, they told us the eredar were original demons who corrupted sergaras.

Other times they don't tell us anything so we're stuck scratching our heads as to motivations until its unveiled to be something dumb after all hype for it is gone.

Expansion stories are much like the 'systems' people rant about today. They pretty much exist in isolation beyond the current habit of having the end of the previous expansion just coincidentally trigger some other totally unrelated thing.

You'd think with an IP as stable as wow, they could probably plan out their narrative and how they want to tell it, but they clearly don't.

FF meanwhile slowly unveils its story, and while it feels like some retcons happened, because they didn't tell us how everything worked upfront, and things still feel mostly consistent, we don't notice the change.

Blizz also seems to like destroying things rather than building things. So the lore doesnt feel like it progresses much. Rather characters die and cities get destroyed but nothing really comes to replace them. So many main npcs are from a game 20 years ago and the story can't move on them from. Instead they're shoehorned into situations and are slowly ruined.

[Hitei]

I'll put it to you like this, caught up with a friend tonight and we got to talking about Warcraft, he hasn't played since WoTLK, and his girlfriend has never played, over the space of about an hour of just talking shit and explaining what's happened in the storyline his girlfriend said "That sounds like a C grade movie and dumb as hell" and my friend who played WoW said "Im glad I left after WoTLK cause it doesn't even sound like warcraft anymore"

People can go in circles and argue individual points and stories, motivations, etc. but the objective fact is that the Lore of Warcraft now is a dumpster fire of terrible stories, plot convenience, contrivance, and just straight-up shitty writing from people who shouldn't be allowed near a fantasy setting, you can argue subjectivity all you want but everything pre cata(some of cata was ok) was point A to point B all the way to Z and an ending, now, however, the story pacing and writing is almost schizophrenic in that it jumps from wildly different thing to different thing and ignores its own story in favor of pushing the current narrative further.

Ah yes, who could forget such quality, A to B to Z writing as "we need to build and host a jousting tournament in this hostile frozen wasteland where we should be struggling to secure supply lines, because we have to figure out who the best people to go fight the Lich King are". Taking place, of course, after the completely disconnected and unrelated plot line raid where we fought a living god attempting to take control of literal existence, in the same instance where a magical computer program made of stars tried to beam launch codes to the other living gods out in space so that they would turn on the magical "self-destruct and rebuild world" machine they built into the planet; right after we fought the android, gnome demigod trying to build voltron in his giant workshop.

How totally """"grounded"""". Your friend made the right decision, WotLK was definitely WaRcRAfT and not at all a dumpster fire of terrible stories, plot convenience, contrivance, and just straight-up shitty writing. And this new expansion where we fight god-like beings trying to use technology to threaten existence doesn't sound aNyThINg like the good old days of straight-forward narrative.

[darkoms]

It helps to remember that the Titan to Old God power relation back then was something else. In the Knaak books about the War of the Ancients it's mentioned that the Old Gods together could defeat Sargeras. Titans back then weren't planet-sized and their power was a lot more vague while Old Gods were more directly outside the powers at the time, with the Twilight using both Light and Shadow magic. Mists, with its references to the Pantheon being dead and the final Titan was likely the first expansion written with the post-Chronicle idea of the Titans as world souls living in planets and the Old Gods as just being fragments of a bigger thing. So N'zoth being sealed because they couldn't beat it but had to lock it up was written under that premise.

They sealed all the Old Gods, but N'zoth is the only one they could not defeat, what's the point? How would they have sealed it if they hadn't won first? Throwing a prison on him and hoping it works?

Even then, the power level was odd at best, because from the book in Silithus, we also knew that the accidental Titan beat C'thun so badly that the other Titans considered him dead, even though the Titan himself died in the process.

[qwerty123456]

Well the expansion took Elune from being an ethereal, unknowable, wise, and mysterious God who created a child based on her and Malorne to a half retarded possibly robot that got dicked by a deer so the lore around Elune was completely destroyed. I'd say all the other lore is probably 25-95% destroyed.

[TheFirstOnes]

eyyyup
for example, Dave Kosak, in the developer chat 2012: "N’zoth is still lurking. The Titans couldn’t defeat it… maybe someday we’ll get our chance? Don’t expect to hear anything about him in Pandaria, though!"

Funny considering 5.4 fucks that guys old ramblings up
Also that in itself isn’t much of a factor as even now only one Titan defeated an Old God, but that’s not at all due to his power against them

Also tbh, this was also around the time they struggled to differentiate Titans from the Keepers, etc. Cause now we know only few Titans actually exist…for the moment

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Well the expansion took Elune from being an ethereal, unknowable, wise, and mysterious God who created a child based on her and Malorne to a half retarded possibly robot that got dicked by a deer so the lore around Elune was completely destroyed. I'd say all the other lore is probably 25-95% destroyed.

Kinda hate this argument when you consider wtf happened with the Titans years prior lol

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Blizzard has no plan, and its ultimately the problem. Especially mixed with how they don't seem to properly control how much info they give the player.

Players are perhaps overexposed to the lore sometimes, such that we're given knowledge no one on azeroth would know (origin of sargeras for example). So when the writers get a new idea, they change it, which causes problems they didn't need to even have if they only told us what we should know. A good example is oh so infamous draenei retcon, which ultimately has no weight on the narrative, but because they wanted to fill a manual for wc3 with lore, they told us the eredar were original demons who corrupted sergaras.

Other times they don't tell us anything so we're stuck scratching our heads as to motivations until its unveiled to be something dumb after all hype for it is gone.

Expansion stories are much like the 'systems' people rant about today. They pretty much exist in isolation beyond the current habit of having the end of the previous expansion just coincidentally trigger some other totally unrelated thing.

You'd think with an IP as stable as wow, they could probably plan out their narrative and how they want to tell it, but they clearly don't.

FF meanwhile slowly unveils its story, and while it feels like some retcons happened, because they didn't tell us how everything worked upfront, and things still feel mostly consistent, we don't notice the change.

Blizz also seems to like destroying things rather than building things. So the lore doesnt feel like it progresses much. Rather characters die and cities get destroyed but nothing really comes to replace them. So many main npcs are from a game 20 years ago and the story can't move on them from. Instead they're shoehorned into situations and are slowly ruined.

FF is a heavily story based universe. Warcraft isn’t, hell outside of WC3’s bs with Arthas, people gotta realize this shit makes fuck all sense compared to its predecessors

[Soon-TM]

BC, or even WotLK may have been a dumpster fire when it came to lore (especially the former), but at least they were far less pretentious. SL is in the same boat, only that now they pretend that they are "closing a chapter that started with WC3" or some bullshit in that vein.

In other words, SL is the same pig, but with lipstick and a wig. If I'm forced to go with a pig, I'd very much take a vanilla pig instead of this abomination.

[Super Dickmann]

BC, or even WotLK may have been a dumpster fire when it came to lore (especially the former), but at least they were far less pretentious. SL is in the same boat, only that now they pretend that they are "closing a chapter that started with WC3" or some bullshit in that vein.

In other words, SL is the same pig, but with lipstick and a wig. If I'm forced to go with a pig, I'd very much take a vanilla pig instead of this abomination.

TBC quite literally ends with a guidance counselor telling the blood elves about a really awesome guy called Jesus whereupon they completely change their behaviour and ditch 99% of their prior identity. There is no criticism that can be levied at SL be it retcons, worldbuilding, reliance on side materials or preachiness that can't be levied at TBC with more force. With the caveat that SL is a more coherent plot in terms of technical execution.

[Syegfryed]

TBC quite literally ends with a guidance counselor telling the blood elves about a really awesome guy called Jesus whereupon they completely change their behaviour and ditch 99% of their prior identity. There is no criticism that can be levied at SL be it retcons, worldbuilding, reliance on side materials or preachiness that can't be levied at TBC with more force. With the caveat that SL is a more coherent plot in terms of technical execution.

while tbc ditch 99% of their identity bfa and shadowlands easily ditched 99% of wow lore in general, that seems way worse.

I can see something simple as the people from wc3 who went to outland becoming villains and all, even if wasn't done right, it seemed more believable than something that happened in bfa and shadowlands, as someone who went straight from the rts to TBC/wtlk, since i skipped vanilla level in bgs.

Imo, the zones were also much more fun and brought interesting tidbits of draenor, the maghar, lost alliance people, brokens, ethereal dragons, prominent horde x alliance themes, it was something we could relate and felt "yep, warcraft".

Shadowlands you can't relate, in bfa they are there, but their identity messed up anyway.

[Super Dickmann]

while tbc ditch 99% of their identity bfa and shadowlands easily ditched 99% of wow lore in general, that seems way worse.

I can see something simple as the people from wc3 who went to outland becoming villains and all, even if wasn't done right, it seemed more believable than something that happened in bfa and shadowlands, as someone who went straight from the rts to TBC/wtlk, since i skipped vanilla level in bgs.

Imo, the zones were also much more fun and brought interesting tidbits of draenor, the maghar, lost alliance people, brokens, ethereal dragons, prominent horde x alliance themes, it was something we could relate and felt "yep, warcraft".

Shadowlands you can't relate, in bfa they are there, but their identity messed up anyway.

Dude, please, TBC made the Light come out of spaceship-flying jigsaw pieces. It also retconned the same bit about Sargeras that people are currently pretending to be assmad about. The bolded part is the only reason it isn't burned in effigy. The lifecycle you describe is how a lot of people went into the franchise as it was during the game's boom period so people are more ready to cut TBC slack and treat it as a default when in practice it committed the same narrative sins levied at Shadowlands, except worse and matched it with sheer incompetence. If you don't go into the franchise through that route you've no emotional attachment and don't see it as the status quo so you're less willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

[Syegfryed]

Dude, please, TBC made the Light come out of spaceship-flying jigsaw pieces. It also retconned the same bit about Sargeras that people are currently pretending to be assmad about. .

you think that is worse than what they did with like, almost all the races, the afterlife concept and retro-activelly putting the Janitor as the mastermind of wow all along? come on now.

Even the overall plot of tBC being bad the rest was pretty much decent and we could swallow it easily, Shadowlands is clearly worse in every way.

Like, i could feel connected with the game by doing hellfire or nagrand, tibids of grons and black dragons in bladeedge mountains and all, but what the fuck im supposed to do with blue man group, renascence vampires and scourge 2: electric bugalloo? where are all the afterlives we always saw from our races? also, nota single thing about alliance x horde, while TBC had.

we were more emotionally attached to tBc because, at least, felt warcraft, yeah they did kaelthas dirt, Illidan villain, i take all of then ten times instead of this Sylvanus worship of danuseur, sorry.

[Super Dickmann]

we were more emotionally attached to tBc because, at least, felt warcraft, yeah they did kaelthas dirt, Illidan villain, i take all of then ten times instead of this Sylvanus worship of danuseur, sorry.

I've zero expectation of convincing you or anyone else that your feelings are wrong and that you somehow weren't invested in something you're obviously invested in. For a hell of a lot of people, the first two expansion following on from WC3 are how they got into the franchise. The franchise at the time was a booming and many, many people got into it when all of TBC's changes were already in, from draenei to naaru. The people who will cut the same slack for Shadowlands don't exist because the franchise is at a fraction of its sales and where a lot of people go into it during TBC a hell of a lot fewer got into these days. I didn't follow that route into the franchise, which is why I can't muster any outrage or pretend that there's some Warcraft je-ne-sais-quoi to be found in helping space ghosts kill Galactus as a one-off quest mob in a land torn apart by factories made from repurposed spaceship parts that's missing when I'm instead helping sin-drinking vampires read Galactus' crimes back to him in hell. I wouldn't expect to flip the page on my WC2 manual and find either looking back at me, suffice to say.

This is also why I can't take as granted @Jovok 's argument that Shadowlands is especially bad because it destroys what came prior or plucked characters out of their environment for the sake a of preachy, retcon-laden mess, whereas TBC isn't. I do not believe that when I wrapped up the TFT campaign that the natural environment to end Kael's quest to find salvation for his people's needs was to become a crack addict on a pink spaceship and that what Arthas really did when he destroyed the Sunwell to revive Kel'thuzad is have it reincarnate as a busty farmgirl who ends up porked by a dragon. There is no substantive difference between retconning Sargeras to have been played by the dreadlords in TBC or legitimately the exact same extent of a retcon to them present in Shadowlands. No more so than that Shadowlands represents a disrespect for the Nathrzim as an independent council of manipulators from WC3 who were willing to take over the Scourge on their own terms even after writing the Legion off, yet killing off dreadlords as unnamed fodder mobs hanging right out in the open in your third quest upon entering Outland does not. When I think new Horde content going on from the classic RTS what I did not envision was helping a meme redneck character kill Zul'jin off alongside high elves because the redneck wants to loot him for valuables. Prettying up a pig and dressing up new, terrible ideas as old, better ones while using them for cover to build your own, terrible story is bad I entirely agree and if that's in SL's DNA then it's TBC's entire family tree.

This is also why what you bring up as TBC's greatest advantage compare to Shadowlands is actually why it's much worse. It's for the same reason that BFA is uniquely wretched and why Mists, despite being probably the best constructed and told narrative and worldbuilding the game ever did was ultimately terrible. It's the consequences and the end state it leaves. At the end of TBC we've massacred every TFT character and taken the scythe to the WC2 characters to go with it. Those angles are closed, fair enough. I totally agree with you that you can basically ignore most of the windchime nonsense, spaceships etc. What you can't ignore are the blood elves permanently being in the Horde despite having jack to do either narratively or thematically, something that's recurred over and over in stories since. When Shadowlands wraps up, the characters it's exhumed and shit about the Bald Man being behind everything that ever happened can be entirely ignored. The only differences between the end of BFA and the end of Shadowlands will be that Tyrande will have become a peacenik, functionally already the case and that Anduin will be sad. Everything else may as well have never happened. Cosmic bald men, infinite legions and Thrall breaking the space time continuum to steal a necklace make a splash and vanish, nobody caring before they happened or after. Consequences for the playable factions last.

[Divada]

I don't think WoW's lore is destroyed. It's an underwhelming mess, but a legitimately great writing team could turn it around. I think big-picture lore needs to take a backseat to story for a while. Give us thoughtful storytelling like Arcane, with a razor sharp focus on character and consequences. Makes us care again. Because personally speaking, I don't really give a toss about anything or anyone in SL.

[Syegfryed]

I've zero expectation of convincing you or anyone else that your feelings are wrong and that you somehow weren't invested in something you're obviously invested in.

i mean, its pretty simple, in tbc i fought with, and along side with, orcs, trolls, taurens, blood elves(same if i played as alliance), the outland factions, that consisted of factions we knew, against enemies we knew, doing something bad against our allies while killing the enemy faction in process.

In shadowlands is, again, blue man group, edgy vampires, scourge 2.0 and night elf 2.0 that is not rly night elf, we never saw then before, they are crap and we have no motivations to help then.

For a hell of a lot of people, the first two expansion following on from WC3 are how they got into the franchise.

don't get me wrong, i like cata and mop as much, if not even more, MOP was the first expansion i played serious, still think final was crap.

Hell i felt even more attached to wod storyline, even being as shallow as a cup of water and ruining charactes like orgin.

This is also why I can't take as granted @Jovok 's argument that Shadowlands is especially bad because it destroys what came prior or plucked characters out of their environment for the sake a of preachy, retcon-laden mess, whereas TBC isn't. I do not believe that when I wrapped up the TFT campaign that the natural environment to end Kael's quest to find salvation for his people's needs was to become a crack addict on a pink spaceship and that what Arthas really did when he destroyed the Sunwell to revive Kel'thuzad is have it reincarnate as a busty farmgirl who ends up porked by a dragon. There is no substantive difference between retconning Sargeras to have been played by the dreadlords in TBC or legitimately the exact same extent of a retcon to them present in Shadowlands. No more so than that Shadowlands represents a disrespect for the Nathrzim as an independent council of manipulators from WC3 who were willing to take over the Scourge on their own terms even after writing the Legion off, yet killing off dreadlords as unnamed fodder mobs hanging right out in the open in your third quest upon entering Outland does not. When I think new Horde content going on from the classic RTS what I did not envision was helping a meme redneck character kill Zul'jin off alongside high elves because the redneck wants to loot him for valuables. Prettying up a pig and dressing up new, terrible ideas as old, better ones while using them for cover to build your own, terrible story is bad I entirely agree and if that's in SL's DNA then it's TBC's entire family tree.

Sargeras don't even show up, they can flip flop his origins but the result is the same, tottaly different from retro-activelly inserting Janitor as Thanos mastermind.

Yeah, kael wanted salvation from his people, and where did he think he found? with a half-demon and feeding on fel magic, that seemed pretty obvious where things would end, yeah, fallen prince that hunger for power is outdated, but it made much more sense that sylvanas in this expansion, the first i can swallow.

TBC lore Isn't bad because it didn't made sense, it was bad because even it made sense, could have being done better or handled better, by example, it makes sense why the horde would go against zul'jin, the amani and the horde back then end their relationship pretty hard, and after years they gave two shits about it, now since they are allied with elves, it make sense why the horde would defend their allies.

would make a better lore that that the horde reunite with the amani, to fight the elves, because instead, ogres joined the horde and elves alliance? fucking yes, but the earlier still made sense anyway even sucking.

This is also why what you bring up as TBC's greatest advantage compare to Shadowlands is actually why it's much worse. It's for the same reason that BFA is uniquely wretched and why Mists, despite being probably the best constructed and told narrative and worldbuilding the game ever did was ultimately terrible. It's the consequences and the end state it leaves. At the end of TBC we've massacred every TFT character and taken the scythe to the WC2 characters to go with it. Those angles are closed, fair enough. I totally agree with you that you can basically ignore most of the windchime nonsense, spaceships etc. What you can't ignore are the blood elves permanently being in the Horde despite having jack to do either narratively or thematically, something that's recurred over and over in stories since. When Shadowlands wraps up, the characters it's exhumed and shit about the Bald Man being behind everything that ever happened can be entirely ignored. The only differences between the end of BFA and the end of Shadowlands will be that Tyrande will have become a peacenik, functionally already the case and that Anduin will be sad. Everything else may as well have never happened. Cosmic bald men, infinite legions and Thrall breaking the space time continuum to steal a necklace make a splash and vanish, nobody caring before they happened or after. Consequences for the playable factions last.

i still stand that:

- at least tbc didn't ruined the factions and most of the characters there, it actually introduced new ones and strenghtned faction fantasy, like adding Garrosh, Drannosh and the long lost maghar tribe, what shadowlands did to the horde? even by adding elves, everything else felt the horde became more horde, while in BFA, we actually became red alliance

- While i hate elves and their players, i can see how this was better than putting a dead elf as warchief and then completely ruining it in the end by making a council with a bunch of dipshits. Elves in the horde break the common fantasy tolkien stereotype, dead elf warchief and "horde council"? it breaks the Horde as whole.

- we can't rly ignore Janitor since we is responsible for everything, every time we discuss something now we will have to remember it was this egghead that played us this whole time.

- Even hating Sylvanas i can see what this did with her was more moronic than the whole tbc crew imo, and theya re shoving all over our faces like she should aprreiate her and what they did it, thsi can't rly be ignored, but, vash? i can ignore that.