What could be done to repair the narrative?

[McNeil]

I don't think the lore can be salvaged. It would require a whole new team but even they would lack the knowledge and passion that the OG's had, so it would be better for the new team to write something new and let all WC3 characters retire. What should at least be done to keep the game going for a few more expansions:

- The Jailer fails to destroy the universe, but he will succeed to cause major damage to Azeroth, causing the Azerothians to plan an escape to another planet
- The Jailer gets imprisoned again and will become a much better written villain for the future
- Most major lore characters will have their arcs ended, either dead or settle somewhere in peace
- New lore characters will be made, representing races that don't even have many characters at all (looking at the Forsaken who don't have anyone but Voss)
- The Alliance and Horde are no more. All races will have a clean slate to find new allies and everyone will at least be neutral with each other

[shoc]

A time skip forwards might be the only way. Literally bury the current story, turn it into a relic of the past.

[Mungho]

I don't think the lore can be salvaged. It would require a whole new team but even they would lack the knowledge and passion that the OG's had, so it would be better for the new team to write something new and let all WC3 characters retire. What should at least be done to keep the game going for a few more expansions:

- The Jailer fails to destroy the universe, but he will succeed to cause major damage to Azeroth, causing the Azerothians to plan an escape to another planet
- The Jailer gets imprisoned again and will become a much better written villain for the future
- Most major lore characters will have their arcs ended, either dead or settle somewhere in peace
- New lore characters will be made, representing races that don't even have many characters at all (looking at the Forsaken who don't have anyone but Voss)
- The Alliance and Horde are no more. All races will have a clean slate to find new allies and everyone will at least be neutral with each other

Hey, that's an idea I had quite awhile ago. Azeroth wakes up because of the Jailer, and as a result, almost every thing on the planet dies. A small group of each player race manages to get on the vindicaar because of a vision of Velen's, and they look for a new world.

[Demsi]

Focus on smaller self contained stories.

I'm so goddamn tired of grand overarching stories that just ends up fighting some big bad cosmic force, that's somehow even bigger and badder than the previous one. It's the worst parts of shounen mangas/animes and i'm sick to death of it

[Lothaeryn]

Nothing can be done, its already the cool thing to complain about the story so what ever story they create people will complain.

- - - Updated - - -



Good one, hire Michael Kirkbride becouse Daggerfall, Morrowind and Obilivion didnt have any story issues

They had far less than Warcraft ever did; no one is infallible, after all.

[cparle87]

Well I think you're totally within your rights to still discuss the game even if you quit and moved on. A lot of us want WoW to be better again even if we're not playing anymore.

I think the perception is that most of us who left for FF14 want WoW to die. I don't. It's better if there are multiple really good MMORPGs for the market as a whole. And I keep up with WoW still because I'm still totally willing to return if the game becomes better again. And a lot of my frustration stems from people applauding tiny little fixes to major problems as if everything is solved.

Like putting a band aid on the stump of your arm that was just cut off and then thinking you're okay. I get why people do it, they've made their entire personality revolve around World of Warcraft. They likely are like a lot of us, introverted and having made a lot of lifelong friends through WoW and are scared if you stopped playing that you wouldn't have those friends anymore.

But as someone in that situation, I can say that wasn't the case for me. In fact when my friends and I stopped playing we began playing tons of other things together instead and I'd even say we're closer than ever.

But when people pretend tiny fixes solve the game it frustrates a lot of us because in their desperation to not lose that part of their identity, they're passively letting Blizzard off the hook and teaching Blizzard again and again that they can just feign the very surface level of change and it will be seen as acceptable. Rather than make substantial changes to the game to actually, truly, fix it.

For example, sure it's nice that you can (finally) swap covenants without penalty, but that doesn't fix the game. It's just a nice change that should have always been there. But I see people like Taliesen or Bellular make videos bombastically claiming some major change has been enacted.

So... you left before the first raid tier was done. Never even hit level cap. And you expect us to take anything you say as valid? "You'll come back if the game becomes better?" You didn't even play the game.

I also find it funny you go on this tirade about players letting them off for allegedly not fixing the game when you don't know the first thing about it.

And finally I love the ingratitude of this. This one really steams me. Blizzard does something to make something easier. Rather than be happy you dismiss it and go "it should've been like that from the beginning." What an ass. News flash. Shit is always toughest to do at the beginning of the expansion and then gets made easier. It's ALWAYS been like this so stop acting.

[Drindorai]

So... you left before the first raid tier was done. Never even hit level cap. And you expect us to take anything you say as valid? "You'll come back if the game becomes better?" You didn't even play the game.

I also find it funny you go on this tirade about players letting them off for allegedly not fixing the game when you don't know the first thing about it.

I love that defenders like yourself will just ignore that people can't just see the entire goddamn story of WoW these days without even playing the game. There's about what...2-3 hours of actual story progression during the leveling experience and then MAYBE 30 minutes per patch?

And finally I love the ingratitude of this. This one really steams me. Blizzard does something to make something easier. Rather than be happy you dismiss it and go "it should've been like that from the beginning." What an ass.

Ingratitude!? I'm paying for a fucking product. I'm not going to lick Blizzard's feet because they did something that should have been the default from the beginning and the one and only reason it wasn't done was because they wanted to make you waste time if you wanted to actually switch covenants. That was it. And thousands and thousands of comments of feedback about how that was a bad thing were just wholesale ignored during the alpha and beta. I was in it and was watching people say it all the time. Blizzard's response was to trot out some bullshit about choices mattering in a RPG when they've dismissed that very idea since the beginning in favor of "gameplay > story."

So spare me from the idea that I should give them credit for them fixing their own intentionally broken system.

News flash. Shit is always toughest to do at the beginning of the expansion and then gets made easier

Wow huh it's almost like intentionally making a system overly punishing for no reason other than to make people waste more time is fucking bad game design and shouldn't be encouraged.

World of Warcraft really has just trained people to expect whatever Blizzard shits out as the acceptable norm. And that's sad. If it only affected you I wouldn't give a shit, but this godawful mentality is why the game is in its current state. Because no matter what they do, people will come out and defend it because they clearly only play WoW and don't even realize that there's other ways of doing things that are better.

Imagine actually telling a paying customer they should be grateful that a billion dollar company slightly reverted a shitty business practice after over a year of near-universal feedback that it was bad. That really got me, well done.

Your entire comment was just blind defense of a shit product sprinkled in with some implied "Wait and see, they'll fix it, promise!" bullshit. Plenty of us have been waiting for years and aint seen shit yet. But I'm glad them fixing a busted ass system that they busted apparently is enough for you.

So either the only options are to keep paying for a game we hate, which then people like yourself will just barf out, "GOD IF YOU HATE IT SO MUCH JUST QUIT ALREADY" or we actually DO quit and people like yourself then just go, "YOU AREN'T EVEN PLAYING IT HOW CAN YOU CRITICIZE SOMETHING YOU'RE NOT PLAYING?!"

What a nice system you have for ignoring all criticism.

[Trumpcat]

Agreed with op and to answer the title question: what they can do is what they've always done. That is selectively ignoring lore and writing each expansion as a separate story that is seemingly connected to the rest, but if you go about analyzing it it doesn't add up or make sense. So this time around maybe forget about Alliance heroes going neutral, forget about the Horde being a joke.

Also we don't know what the next expansion is about.

[DatToffer]

The thing with a story is that you still can find good in the bad.

Even if the main story is shit, there's interesting pieces in the worldbuilding. The secondary quests, the flavor texts and npc dialogs.

WoD story was said to be a nonsensical disaster, but it gave Orc Clans actual identities, it elaborated on Draenei culture and their involvement in Draenor's life. It even gave ogres a cool History.

From vanilla to bc, people thought we did not see enough of the heroes and faction leaders, that the villains were not very well introduced. Basically the stories were that we followed a trail of clues and walked through an army of goons, in order to get to the villain. It worked, but was a pretty slow pace and you didn't see much involvement from the villain and thus didn't feel much involved yourself in trying to defeat them.

Since wotlk we've seen more and more apparitions of our heroes and villains. I think now it's up to the point where we are kind of at the backseat of the story, while the npcs have taken the wheel and drive like crazy on the Highway of Cool. And now I think we have the opposite frustration. We have to watch powerlessly while heroes try and fail, get corrupted, do shit stuff, get away with it...

So if you want to save the narrative, I think we should get back to a more grounded main story (and I'm not saying grounded in the sense of less cosmic proportions), one closer to the world building. A story that works with the universe and does not need to break rules after rules to seem epic or engaging. A story where we'd actually feel threatened ? And not like we're seeing heroes struggling around us, while we go on with the plot armor of the Chosen One. I think they should also just stop trying to go with the rule of cool and go with the established rules of the universe and the guideline of their characters history. Include the npc heroes in ways that make sense for them, not making them narrative tools by changing their motivations and personalities when needed.

[Zora-Prime]

IMO, the story and lore are fine. It's the storytelling and how the show the story that is completely awful.

Nobody wants to play detective and have to piece together the narrative from the games, books, comics, cinematics, tweets, etc...
That is why there are always inconsistencies with the story, it's because 5 different people are trying to write the same character.
It is ridiculous how they chose to tell the story.

[dope_danny]

Honestly? i think they should have put legion after cataclysm and ended the game with pandaria. The horde and alliance finally come to blows with siege, it ends without one side wiping out the other and the player plants a new tree in the ruined vale as the ghost of the pandaren emperor gives a speech to horde and alliance players about "what is worth fighting for" to bring everything full circle while leaving villains and story hooks for future games.

But we all know what happened instead as it followed the Gears or Halo route into "Still profitable enough to make significant money even if its logically ran its course" zombie IP territory where a series shambles along even after its resolved all its threats, trying to introduce increasingly one note and out of nowhere "bigger bads" like an episode of Dragonball GT. WoW still makes enough money so WoW 2 or Warcraft 4 simply won't happen.

In general i think writers need replacing. Its harsh but you have people doing work that have themselves said on twitter they never played WoW either before or as research for the job and just browse a wiki or something and the rest is their own personal headcanon fan fic insertions or in Danusers case a seriously unbalanced fetish for sylvanas while self inserting as nathanos that i've only seen this bad before with Ken Penders Sonic comic OC's or Toriyama with Lightning in FFXIII. Its invasive, creepy and adolescent even for a franchise about orcs with shoulder pads the size of minis fighting things from a dragonforce album cover.
And i don't mean some internet armchair "hire the fans!" because thats just as bad. They just need competent writers that have experience with the setting. A christie golden is fine to pull a karen travis and fart out some "you can ignore it and nothing changes" book but unlike stuff like FFXIV Blizzard has bizarrely decided the game gets 30 minutes of story in game per patch and the rest is in novels. But they aren't a chris metzen doing it as a passion project who not only knows the worlds history and characters but will write a proper narrative rather than the mcu cliff notes that makes expansions like shadowlands as a whole feel like a macro version of uldums disappointment.

Logically how do they fix the current issues? well its cheap but beyond some "it was all a dream/vision" i don't know. They pulled back the curtain on death. In a game already running on apocalypse fatigue from 20 years of "no THIS is the world ending big bad, the rest was all prelude, swer on me mum 37th times the charm!" who cares about the apocalypse when it means going to be a gorm farmer in ardenweald or something?

I think they need some form of reset. Technically you could do a soft uncataclysm with the infinite dragonflight. Maybe they exist because the characters undid the jailer and sylvanas and bfa and shadowlands never happened but that creates a paradox and thats where devourers come from and they start bleeding into azeroth and its our fault and that leads to the infinite murozond deal? the characters remember but theres no tree burning, rastakhan wasn't killed, the night elves aren't an endangered species. But even then that feels cheap in a "different writer tries to right the ship" kind of way.

Personally? i think they need to shelf the cosmic shit. It does not work. Its eye rolling at best, cringe at worst. Nine times out of Ten people remember the smaller scale but notable questlines in WoW. The Legend of Stalvan, Darrowshire, Arthas' heart under Icecrown, The Witch Girl in Drustvar and so on. The jailer will be a loot pinata in the next patch and after that nobody will care and few did to begin with. The moment the next expansion hits it ends up as more filler people can use chromie time to avoid and how many people will go "boy i'm really in the mood to replay bastions levelling story" the same way people do Drust'var or Spires of Arak or whatever? probably not many because its trying to be all cosmic all the time and when it does pull a "my tools were left in the gorm mines go get it" stuff the dissonance is immense.

I think the writers think the players want to be captain marvel or superman but the players want to be constantine or gerolt instead.

Maybe the hard answer nobody wants is that simply it can't be salvaged in any satisfying way. Danusers team salted the earth and poisoned the well. This is Warcrafts legacy now forever. Please clap and subscribe.

[Soikona]

The only way to repair is to go back to what they were good at. Less of the big story and more on the smaller stories. WoW was never about having a good story, it was about having a shit ton of them, meaning anyone could find something they like!

[Raven]

Well I think you're totally within your rights to still discuss the game even if you quit and moved on. A lot of us want WoW to be better again even if we're not playing anymore.

I think the perception is that most of us who left for FF14 want WoW to die. I don't. It's better if there are multiple really good MMORPGs for the market as a whole. And I keep up with WoW still because I'm still totally willing to return if the game becomes better again. And a lot of my frustration stems from people applauding tiny little fixes to major problems as if everything is solved.

Like putting a band aid on the stump of your arm that was just cut off and then thinking you're okay. I get why people do it, they've made their entire personality revolve around World of Warcraft. They likely are like a lot of us, introverted and having made a lot of lifelong friends through WoW and are scared if you stopped playing that you wouldn't have those friends anymore.

But as someone in that situation, I can say that wasn't the case for me. In fact when my friends and I stopped playing we began playing tons of other things together instead and I'd even say we're closer than ever.

But when people pretend tiny fixes solve the game it frustrates a lot of us because in their desperation to not lose that part of their identity, they're passively letting Blizzard off the hook and teaching Blizzard again and again that they can just feign the very surface level of change and it will be seen as acceptable. Rather than make substantial changes to the game to actually, truly, fix it.

For example, sure it's nice that you can (finally) swap covenants without penalty, but that doesn't fix the game. It's just a nice change that should have always been there. But I see people like Taliesen or Bellular make videos bombastically claiming some major change has been enacted.

Diffrence betwen discuss the game and pop in now and then for the good old LOL Wow is dying post.

[Drindorai]

Diffrence betwen discuss the game and pop in now and then for the good old LOL Wow is dying post.

Yup my 6 paragraph post was definitely just a mindless, "Wow is dying" post. You nailed it.

Maybe if you believe that you won't have toe acknowledge any issues with the game.

Goddamn some of you are just hilarious.

[Raven]

Yup my 6 paragraph post was definitely just a mindless, "Wow is dying" post. You nailed it.

Maybe if you believe that you won't have toe acknowledge any issues with the game.

Goddamn some of you are just hilarious.

Yeah go ahead and point out where i said your post was one of those. but if you feel targeted its probably a reason why.

[Drindorai]

Yeah go ahead and point out where i said your post was one of those. but if you feel targeted its probably a reason why.

You literally quoted my giant post to say that lol

[Super Dickmann]

A note should be put in the writers' office reading "THIS IS A GAMEPLAY-FOCUSED TWO-FACTION MMO", with all priorities coming from there. Chief of them the main cast need to take a long vacation to Belize and the game needs to nix serial escalation, while ending the message mongering that the gameplay cannot sustain.

With more technology has come the ability to feature the main characters more often and the more this happens the more the story has shifted to their personal drama over worldbuilding. This by itself works against the advantage of a game where the principal attraction is the world, but it's made worse by how they're dull as dishwater and have had nearly every possible story about them told and re-told. The gyrations the plot undertakes to include them takes attention away from the meat of the game, which is the setting and the many varied groups and people it includes, suborning the story to the interpersonal dynamics of a couple of planks with googley eyes attached. Shadowlands is the epitome of this where every character short of Sylvanas, Anduin, Bolvar and Tyrande has no reason to be in this story and at best consumes screentime while adding nothing to themselves or the plot.

At worst, they're actively detrimental, like how Draka is there to meet Thrall, despite this already having been done in WoD and Draka never having any definable personality, but since Thrall is there, she's there to interact with him, which drags the story she's in, namely Maldraxxus down with it because it centers around a charisma black hole at the expense of the world around it, with the inclusion being completely artificial. Cut Thrall and cut Draka and you suddenly have a great deal of space free. Focus on them also means they become proxies for their races, which is fine in an RTS but terrible in a game where the worm's eye view is the whole conceit. When Shandris and Darion don't blink when they're put in the crucible of all creation in 9.2 and just tell you to go collect 8 asses from the platonic ideal of a bear, this cheapens them since their role could easily be replaced by a vending machine or a signpost. But it also weakens the weight of the area because the only proxies we have for how regular people would react to something this earthshattering are these trite husks who don't even care because the plot, being focused on soap opera personal dynamics, means they must constantly fixate on Anduin. Their presence is a net drag on screentime and narrative weight. They are a pox and eliminating them wholesale from this expansion's story improves it even if they're replaced by nothing at all because they don't constantly water down any engagement with the world they inhabit to whether a given object brings us closer to saving another one of the bland Hivemind.

From there, serial escalation is the next target to remove. Deathwing is a giant dragon who has ending the world as his attack. By contrast Garrosh is an orc with an axe who runs a major political faction. One however is still talked up to this day despite his evil plan being flat out said to be bound for failure in a side story and him being individually weaker than any other endboss. His boss fight is also better than Deathwing's by a country mile. All WoW expansions have upped the power of the end boss relative to the previous one, with the exception of BFA and Mists and BFA barely counts as the end boss would still destroy the world if he wins. Constant escalation defuses any threat by default because everyone knows perfectly well that Deathwing or the Jailer won't unravel reality, nuking the stakes, but even if done acceptably, like Legion, it demystifies and shrinks the setting. Once you've put the Titans in as helpers for an end boss, they're definable and done as plot points. You get a bang and then nothing and if you escalate you come to the point where the only way to further up the stakes is to make the end boss destroy reality. The only step from there is to end the multiverse or whatever and such a threat is so abstract that it's impossible for people to invest. Beyond all its narrative shortcomings, serial escalation is completely pointless in light of the format of an MMO. In a tv show or book series going from fighting Satan to capping bandits is nonsensical, but in an MMO the gameplay difficulty is completely divorced from the story power of the threat and is purely based on creative design and number tweaking. An end boss could conceivably be anything and anyone. The format has an inbuilt cure to make sure that the hole the writers wrote themselves into is elementary to escape. Nobody was crying when we went from fighting demons in space in TBC or Legion to killing pirates in Wrath/BFA. This power of the format leads into the other point to improve the narrative.

An MMO cannot change too much. Status quo is God. Whatever we do we will always be killing things to become better at killing things and the world will only change as much as the budget allows. A villain will never end reality in 9.2 because 10.0 will need to be sold. MMOs have no defined end. MMOs with a fraction of WoW's playerbase are chugging along to this day and still putting out new content. To that end, planning with a definite end in mind or permanently closing off plot threads is pure stupidity. Inserting messages about the morality of violence and war in a game premised entirely around them is doomed by default. Mists and BFA to a much longer extent spent a long time telling you about the power of friendship and what means of war were right and wrong, but at the end of the day PvP was still part of the game and so was fighting people. In terms of overall villains people mocked the shit out of "There must always be a Lich King", but Metzen was right and they were wrong, because by not closing down the Lich King the way the Old Gods or the Legion were definitively shut down, they remained an element that could be used and reused providing a larger spectrum of conflict. You could spin a whole story about how raising one guy necromantically is worse than the Holodomor, but beyond the dubiousness of that story beat as a whole, it can by definition do nothing about how at the end of the expansion you'll still be raising people as part of your rotation if you're a Death Knight and your gameplay loop is based around getting better at doing it. A warlock will always be sucking out people's souls to summon demons from hell no matter what the narrative has to say about these things and thus the narrative should at its best encourage the conflict that the game is built to support, from as many angles as possible for the largest variety and at worst shut the fuck up and let me kill. This means opening as many factions as possible and closing as few as possible, it is in favor of heterogenity in racial makeup and relations instead of fusion into a lawful good mass and it is embracing the violence that is at its core instead of moralizing at it emptily with no means to follow up.

Virtually every narrative fault has come from trying to ape another medium or force the story into an angle that it as a gameplay-first MMO can never support. From mystery boxes to stories about how war is hell and universal tolerance, all of them have failed and will always fail because the game doesn't have and never will have the tools to support them. Keep the medium and the game's goal and limitations in mind and the rest will sort itself out. Do not and be condemned to constant failure.

[Varodoc]

1) Give more spotlight to the Ren'dorei, who represent the most unique and interesting Alliance race. Resourceful, conniving, devoted to the cause, but also ruthless and methodical in their approach.

2) Develop characters like Magister Umbric who have been introduced recently and are in desperate need of new lore and a new model.

3) Stop focusing only on the WC3 characters, stop focusing only on Tyrande, Sylvanas, Jaina, Thrall. These people already had 20 years of lore development, stop giving them the spotlight and dedicate time to newer characters already. I'm going to roll my eyes if Jaina will once again accompany the players in raids in the next expansion.

[Aucald]

Let's drop the game vs. game tangent discussion and return focus to what could be done to fix the narrative of WoW specifically.

[owbu]

This would help me enjoy the story again:

Put most of your time into word building, not into twists. That world is Azeroth, not the seventeen planes of existance or whatever.

Do not try to actively fix the mistakes of the past. You don't have the time to make BfA make sense. The main cast has too much baggage and needs to take a vacation. They are all in purgatory or whatever and will be back in the future having learned something. The B-Cast is taking over for now.

Keep characters mostly the way they are or give a few of them one arc which changes them by a bit. Leave that character as is for a couple of years afterwards. No more Thral/Jaina Jojos.

Make easier stories. You are not Game of Thrones. You are the MCU without the jokes. Declare what the next Xpac is going to be about. Actually make it about that topic.

No more mystery boxes you dont actually know the answer to.