Warcraft story has always been silly and based on parody.

[Ardenaso]

post this in Hiveworkshop and see their reaction

[Combatbutler]

Things didn't start falling apart till the devs started taking things too serious. I'm not saying they shouldn't try for consistency, but the heaviest retcons always come from them trying to undue their over the top roots in some way. I'm not saying they can't be serious, but they've been leaning into it far to much and ignoring that you cant keep doing that with an setting with such an exaggerated, everything (art style especcially). They often seem to be embarresed about how corny the lore is and wanting to make it "super srs" which just, doesnt work. Its why the Zovaal thing just ended with everyone pointing and laughing.

This is essentially the problem, their very foundation was rotten from the start, since they never actually cared enough about their universe to create a solid baseline and build upon it, always drifting in whatever direction they pleased and it has created an entertaining train wreck, with abysmal consistency and storytelling.

In essence a highly entertaining train wreck

[Toppy]

This is essentially the problem, their very foundation was rotten from the start, since they never actually cared enough about their universe to create a solid baseline and build upon it, always drifting in whatever direction they pleased and it has created an entertaining train wreck, with abysmal consistency and storytelling.

In essence a highly entertaining train wreck

Also true, Warcraft, at no point, did much world building and it shows. A lot of their "world building" relies on knowledge of fantasy tropes to carry it. For instance, Stormwind has no culture other than "Looks vaguly medival" nor does the Church of LIght whose entire lore boils down to "Well they look like fantasy catholicism."

So then you get weird moments like Night Elves who LOOK like feral wood elves crossed with dark elves. But... arent really portrayed like that in the lore. Their druids are noble savages and their none-druids are kingdom elves with a moon fetish that (used to) dress down.

[Combatbutler]

Also true, Warcraft, at no point, did much world building and it shows. A lot of their "world building" relies on knowledge of fantasy tropes to carry it. For instance, Stormwind has no culture other than "Looks vaguly medival" nor does the Church of LIght whose entire lore boils down to "Well they look like fantasy catholicism."

If you look at the races, not a single one deserves the actual title of culture, not one is actually fleshed out. They are all just cheap tropes and references

So then you get weird moments like Night Elves who LOOK like feral wood elves crossed with dark elves. But... arent really portrayed like that in the lore. Their druids are noble savages and their none-druids are kingdom elves with a moon fetish that (used to) dress down.

The night elves are just such a joke if you take a closer look at their supposed society and culture, I mean holy moly whatever little base information was given about them at the start, which wasn't much, has been trashed into oblivion at this point.

Remember they are "nocturnal" XD

[Iain]

This is essentially the problem, their very foundation was rotten from the start, since they never actually cared enough about their universe to create a solid baseline and build upon it, always drifting in whatever direction they pleased and it has created an entertaining train wreck, with abysmal consistency and storytelling.

In essence a highly entertaining train wreck

WoW classic started out with plenty of open threads. Lots of factions that tried to pursue their (admittedly highly similar) agenda of world domination. The problem then is that Blizzard started resolving these open threads at a faster rate than they entered new ones. We beat the Scourge, the Legion and the Twilight Hammer. The Void remains untapped and for fresh factions we got the Drust and an evil Light force. Thematically these three don't cover that much ground either.

In hindsight one could question the wisdom of vanquishing these forces in the first place. After all, the game wouldn't have been worse if some remnant of the Scourge, Legion or Twilight Hammer remained festering in the background to come again. I get that expansions need a grandiose finale, but even that can be achieved without exterminating the villains.

All in all, it seems indeed that the Warcraft material isn't vast enough to justify how wastefully Blizzard has been dishing it out.

[Combatbutler]

WoW classic started out with plenty of open threads. Lots of factions that tried to pursue their (admittedly highly similar) agenda of world domination. The problem then is that Blizzard started resolving these open threads at a faster rate than they entered new ones. We beat the Scourge, the Legion and the Twilight Hammer. The Void remains untapped and for fresh factions we got the Drust and an evil Light force. Thematically these three don't cover that much ground either.

In hindsight one could question the wisdom of vanquishing these forces in the first place. After all, the game wouldn't have been worse if some remnant of the Scourge, Legion or Twilight Hammer remained festering in the background to come again. I get that expansions need a grandiose finale, but even that can be achieved without exterminating the villains.

All in all, it seems indeed that the Warcraft material isn't vast enough to justify how wastefully Blizzard has been dishing it out.

These problems were there from the get go, the entire world for example is ridiculously small, lets give each race a city and call it a day. Hmm some minor settlements used to be somewhere else, just move them etc.

The foundation of the whole thing is just shoddy and has always fallen apart the moment you actually look at it.

[Saltysquidoon]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p.../TheEvilPrince

Its one of the bigger literature tropes.

Arthas isn't an evil prince trope, hell even the page you linked on the wiki argues he isn't one. Arthas is the reverse king arthur/fallen chosen one archetype. Also, the reason it worked so well is:
1. it's legitimately solidly written,
2. because warcraft's lore had been so clearly stolen from preexisting ips and based on tropes at the time everyone was expecting it played straight and no one saw the subversion coming; and;
3. interactivity is something you just don't get from passive mediums.

Also, I would argue noble save orcs aren't that original of an idea since they weren't like that till WCIII and DnD/Pathfinder both exist.

[Schmilblick]

At least it was good, now it's totally crap.

[Iain]

These problems were there from the get go, the entire world for example is ridiculously small, lets give each race a city and call it a day. Hmm some minor settlements used to be somewhere else, just move them etc.

The foundation of the whole thing is just shoddy and has always fallen apart the moment you actually look at it.

Yeah I can only agree. WoW needs more redundancy. As funny as that may sound.

[Varodoc]

Arthas isn't an evil prince trope, hell even the page you linked on the wiki argues he isn't one. Arthas is the reverse king arthur/fallen chosen one archetype. Also, the reason it worked so well is:
1. it's legitimately solidly written,
2. because warcraft's lore had been so clearly stolen from preexisting ips and based on tropes at the time everyone was expecting it played straight and no one saw the subversion coming; and;
3. interactivity is something you just don't get from passive mediums.

Also, I would argue noble save orcs aren't that original of an idea since they weren't like that till WCIII and DnD/Pathfinder both exist.

Yeah... from reading that page, it seems like that trope refers to villains like Scar from Lion King. So villains who plot and scheme to get the throne and get rid of all other heirs.

Arthas obviously does not fit this trope, since he was the only heir to Lordaeron, and he was never concerned with getting rid of potential political rivals. The only time he abused his power was when he stripped Uther and his paladins of their ranks, and he did that not because he wanted to get the throne and they were some kind of threat to his claim (according to that trope), but because they refused to "protect the land of Lordaeron", as Arthas rationalized it in his head.

Arthas is literally a "Darth Vader Clone" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...arthVaderClone

But I still find him original because you'd assume that a clone would get redeemed, like Vader himself. And many thought Arthas was indeed going to be redeemed in Shadowlands. Instead, in the end, he never gets his redemption. He never even appears in the first place, unless you see the 35 anima as "Arthas".

That's why I partly like what they did with Arthas in SL. Obviously not the "gets turned into 35 anima and erased from existence" part, because that's objectively bad. But I do not really think that he needed any kind of redemption. His story was over in WotLK and it ended in tragedy.

[Amariw]

Yes and no.

Yes, the stories of warcraft were rarely if ever masterpieces. The best parts usually had a lot of silliness involved, and it's not in my top 10 stories, probably not top 20.

But what they did exceedingly well since warcraft 3, and failed to do since around legion, is make a captivating world.

You have some outstanding characters, but some super flat ones. What made the games stand out is that i wanted to find out what happened to entire races. I wanted to know what drove sargeras crazy, what the maelstrom will end up doing, why the naaru and voidwalkers looked similar in tbc, and how the night elves will adjust to no world tree.

In other words, the games gave you a chance to experience the history of a world, not just a few characters.

My best story memories are often from quests or expansions that revealed a glorious past, like wotlk and pandaria, rather then quests describing the status quo-bound present.

When they stopped delivering an interesting world, the story became much more dull.

There's only so many expansions we can have where nothing changes the status quo to realize the story is gonna stand still. Alliance and horde will never win or lose. Night elves will survive past the destruction of teldrassil, as will the forsaken after sylvanas being gone. Its possibly in the nature of a long lasting mmo, or maybe it isn't but either way it hurts immersion.

There were some exceptions that managed to make me awed for a bit (like divine bell mop questline where jaina banished blood elves), but at the end of the day everything returned to how it was and we've been around long enough to not believe that's gonna change.

Thats why dragonflight might be interesting if it explores and adds cool background, but unlikrly to be if its barebone details like shadowlands, or if it describes a war which is gonna assuredly end in a tie like BFA.

[Thelxi]

A parody lol, but yeah it's never been about originality be it story or gameplay.

[Berndorf]

In all honesty gamers always expect too much from video games story wise. By the time video franchises are successful enough to hire 'professional writers' there's usually not much that can be done to make it better and usually what they do is destroy all the old lore in the name of 'doing it the right way' and we end up with what wow lore is now.

[Saltysquidoon]

I'm mean wciiis story is 'well written' it's no 18th century Italian epic poem (its metzens homebrew dnd campaign with warhammer minis) but actions have consequences, motivations a consistent nothing just happens because the plot says so. Hell, wow has plenty of zone stories like this.

It's not unrealistic to expect wows marquee story to be at least coherent.

[Toppy]

I'm mean wciiis story is 'well written' it's no 18th century Italian epic poem (its metzens homebrew dnd campaign with warhammer minis) but actions have consequences, motivations a consistent nothing just happens because the plot says so. Hell, wow has plenty of zone stories like this.

It's not unrealistic to expect wows marquee story to be at least coherent.

Should note I never said the old stories are bad. Just exactly as you're putting it: not super amazing. They're fairly standard stories and only stand out as super duper amazing if you arent familiar with amazing stories.

[Daronokk]

Things didn't start falling apart till the devs started taking things too serious

No, the total opposite. The game started falling apart when they couldn't tell a decent story but resorted to stupid shit like Kingslayer Orkus, Johnny Awesome and Harrison Jones and the Temple of Uldum.

[mickybrighteyes]

The community loves Sylvanas and Vereesa and hardly ever complain about them. Alleria is literally the only one who gets so much hate from the community (for some reason), which is why I mentioned only her.

I mean, whenever Sylvanas and Vereesa commit mass murder, the community cheers for them (let's not pretend every Horde player wasn't making jokes about Teldrassil). But the community gets mad about Alleria just coming close to a fount of Light.

All 3 sisters get hate... Sylvanas prolly the most despite your assertions about Alleria (entirely due to how the story has revolved around her for the last... too many... expansions). You have a fixation on Alleria, and get to taste more of that hate largely due to you being a void elf stan account. But acting like she's some unique thing when she's one of THREE elven maiden archer leaders who nabbed a noteworthy human dude and got a storyline centered on them and their lover is laughable. Hell. Vareesa might be unique because she DOESN'T have some cosmic level force at her call (unless they turn her into WoW's very on Dom and make her a demigod of Family).

Also people got mad at how they portrayed a war hero from the second war being totally oblivious about historical events concerning her people... blissfully unaware of why Sunstriders aren't in charge and acting like a regent lord she likely knew back during events with amani troll fighting is now running things acting as a diplomat who knows better than them....

[Toppy]

All 3 sisters get hate... Sylvanas prolly the most despite your assertions about Alleria (entirely due to how the story has revolved around her for the last... too many... expansions). You have a fixation on Alleria, and get to taste more of that hate largely due to you being a void elf stan account. But acting like she's some unique thing when she's one of THREE elven maiden archer leaders who nabbed a noteworthy human dude and got a storyline centered on them and their lover is laughable. Hell. Vareesa might be unique because she DOESN'T have some cosmic level force at her call (unless they turn her into WoW's very on Dom and make her a demigod of Family).

Also people got mad at how they portrayed a war hero from the second war being totally oblivious about historical events concerning her people... blissfully unaware of why Sunstriders aren't in charge and acting like a regent lord she likely knew back during events with amani troll fighting is now running things acting as a diplomat who knows better than them....

Alleria is such a blatant mary sue that her defenders wound me.

- - - Updated - - -

No, the total opposite. The game started falling apart when they couldn't tell a decent story but resorted to stupid shit like Kingslayer Orkus, Johnny Awesome and Harrison Jones and the Temple of Uldum.

That was going to far into an extreme agreed. But hell even in those cases the problem was they were being jokey while at the same time trying to make t hem serious (except Johnny Awesome). Like Harrison Jones had world ending threats. Kingslayer Orkus tried to force a sad end when you just cant with that character. I never said serious is in and of itself bad, just that they are trying too hard to be serious and forcing it or mixing extremes.

Orkus would have worked if they didnt also make him a joke beforehand. Likewise he would have still worked if they also hadnt made him a hero at the end. would have been like if they had introduced Muradin in WC3 as some drunken lout who sends you on a mission to get his favorite beer mug when you first meet him. His death would have later been meaningless because he was just some silly drunk. Yeah we had Dwarves who ARE like that, but they werent made a main character but rather side pieces. Or if they had made Grom talk and act like Orcish Blademasters who are, lets be honest, silly as hell speaking in engrish and having katanas for some reason.

It would destroy the moment at the end of the campaign if Grom goes "Thrallu, you have shaved hour preoples honoru" like the Orcish blademasters talk.

[Friedrich]

The constant rewriting of the story is kind of getting tiresome. We need to have important moments set in stone and evolve the story from there, not "recontextualise" the main story over and over again.

And I also resonate with the idea that WoW going all DBZ and every expansion "OMG WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" kind of setting is tiresome. We can very well be introduced to new zones and get involved and absorbed in the local conflict that can be totally insignificat for the Alliance and the Horde.

And one thing bugs me, how the hack are we able to breathe on Outlands?

[deenman]

At least it was good, now it's totally crap.

na,now its just in your face,before it was hidden or non existant,but it was never good,in fact in many ways its gotten much better in how its delivered