Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

[Naruto is stooopid]

You have stumbled upon a common phenomenon of modern media.

Make the old villains sexy, cool, good guys, who the audience wants to win.

Modern media has lots of Vampires, werewolves, witches, dragons and other legacy "monsters" that while traditionally were almost always the villain or antagonist are now the hero.

The shape of water, Hellboy, Twilight, and the stupid tween Disney monster shows are some low hanging examples of this.

[stross01]

The game's over-arching plot has been about genocide and extinction for almost 20 years now.

Are you willfully ignorant, dead inside, or just being a shitposter?

- - - Updated - - -

Modern media has lots of Vampires, werewolves, witches, dragons and other legacy "monsters" that while traditionally were almost always the villain or antagonist are now the hero.

Morally ambiguity has always existed since the first word was spoken. It's not modern, outdated, or an ancient fuckin' relic. It's been here all along.

[DatToffer]

And I am saying there is a massive demographic that loves to play sims or things that are cutesy. WoW had always had some content for that demographic. If the internal data shows there is a chance to capture more of that, prepare to walk the ducks around.

The target audience is facebook users ???

[Nymrohd]

The target audience is facebook users ???

yikes but yes? At least for those quests.

[Foulfrost]

...people come in to say it was always like that, that being bad is actually good, that it's refreshing to be a different kind of bad, and so on.

...Also we had 4 tonally dark expansions back to back, and the second we get something like mists with a somewhat more calm tone everyone starts freaking out jeez...

...[/I] WoW was always the Disney/Pixar of fantasy worlds.

After Legion, BfA, and SL i'm quite over the edgelord stuff, thanks.

I might be a clown for bothering to reply but you three just proved my point by saying exactly what I pointed out people default to saying.

No decent discussion can be had about the tone and construction of the lore, it almost seems. WoW had light-hearted moments sure, and levity. But the vast chunk of the lore and main plot was pretty dark. Roads made of skulls, demon armies, undead hordes, slavery, genocides... and a goblin gizmo that nobody knew what it was for until it exploded and all the goblins cheered because that's exactly what they hoped it was for.

Now all that grit is gone, the tone and characters are mellow and weak, the writing in some places is worse than bad ERP with a rando online.
Warcraft was a balance between the gritty darkness of Warhammer and the levity and fun of well... Warcraft. Now it's lopsided. It's World of Tumblr and it shows when you read the dialogue and look around. A jarring departure from a world with some teeth to become a safe quirky world for children. I have to add to this though, that it's been flimsy nonsense for almost a decade now so people can be forgiven for not noticing the gradual change.

But no it wasn't always so one-sided, no that isn't a working model for Warcraft and no I don't expect EtErNaL dArKnEsS and edge everywhere but this different kind of flavour of bad is as much a palette cleanser as a bottle of bleach.

[username993720]

Oh no we got an expansion with no slavery, carnage, decapitation, corruption, treachery and rape.

Whatever shall we do now with our lives.

Fucking edgelords.

Sorry, mister huggy bear. More rainbow dragons for you.

Have you played this expansion at all?

They are corrupting baby eggs, trying to burn the alive
You have lying on the ground and hanging from hooks dragon corpses.....

So either you are
a.) blind
b.) blind
or
c.) blind

Because there plenty of examples in this expansion of your things.
- slavery: the boss talks about it a lot. their whole points is not being slaves to titans.
- carnage: look at seb/wrath place....their are corpses of dragons everywhere.
- decapitation: nope, but we have people burning alive
- corruption: see eggs again, or chrome dragons story
- treachery: in valdrakkan their is a whole story line about it. And the boss feels betrayed be the rest .

So please play the game and look at the story and the terrain. because it is there in game.

Like i wonder if you have even played DF...

Not this kind of slavery. But, actual chains and torture.
Are the corpses impaled or mutilated?
Not eggs turning bad. Look at Onyxia. Her Visage form was actually used to infiltrate Stormwind and collapse it from within. So was Deathwing's and Lordaeron. Now look at the visages of the Dracthyr, like they're pulled out of FF14.

[unbound]

Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

The game has pandas as player characters. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

[Nzx]

I might be a clown for bothering to reply but you three just proved my point by saying exactly what I pointed out people default to saying.

I mean, it's pretty easy to win an argument if you just point out some common forms of rebutting your poorly made points and then claim victory because people responded the way you said they would. It's a fact that Warcraft has always been this way, of course I'm going to say that - but then it's the only part you respond to, because it's the only part you have an answer for.

No decent discussion can be had about the tone and construction of the lore, it almost seems.

Probably not, no. Because the two sides of the discussion essentially boil down to "this is how it's always been" and "is blizzerd WOKE?!???? tumblr???? DAE scalies??".

If you're coming to WoW because you want dark, gritty fantasy, do you also go to ketchup when you want hot sauce? WoW isn't dark fantasy, it doesn't want to be, and it doesn't advertise itself that way. It's fantasy for everyone, that's an intentional choice. If you want dark and gritty, go elsewhere - the problem you'll face is that within this genre it's been tried before and failed massively because the number of people who want what you want is tiny. There are plenty of games in other genres that fit though - Darktide just came out and it's about as gritty as it gets. Go play that instead of complaining about a game not being something it never intended to be.

[Nadiru]

You have stumbled upon a common phenomenon of modern media.

Make the old villains sexy, cool, good guys, who the audience wants to win.

Modern media has lots of Vampires, werewolves, witches, dragons and other legacy "monsters" that while traditionally were almost always the villain or antagonist are now the hero.

The shape of water, Hellboy, Twilight, and the stupid tween Disney monster shows are some low hanging examples of this.

It's not that modern, honestly. The core theme of King Kong (1933) is that Man is the real monster and we're closing in on its centennial.

[Razorice]

Is this MoP? I'm pretty sure we've had these threads pop-up every other day or so in MoP.

[ArenaDk]

And Cata questing as a whole has been criticized for being too reliant on pop culture references since it came out.

Hey found someone who never did cata questing. Cata has a over average references but keept them either short or really worked them into flashed out lore characters over time. Redridge is a good example of that but people see one thumbnail and be like : waaaaah RaMbO in my wow

[stross01]

Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

The game has pandas as player characters. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

Yeah, fuckin pandas!

Cows as player characters is fine.
Cats/bears as player characters is fine.
Wolves as player characters is fine.
The entire art style of the warcraft universe being cartoon is fine.

Not panda though for some reason.

[Geckoo]

WoW has always been more inclinded to be family friendly than serious stuff. From the art style to the tone even when treating some darker themes. I do agree that they humanized the dragons too much for my taste, some of that can be explained in the sense that they are tryng to make their allies more welcome in their home, but the issue comes when their nature feels reversed. And by reversed i mean that instead of feeling like dragons that take humanoid forms for our convenience it looks like it is the other way around and are just powerful <insert visage race> that can transform into dragons.

I hope that at some point with the flights truly restored and their aspectral powers returned we get to see them being more threatening, but so far as i said, they just like humanoids with humanoids life and silly issues that happen to be able to transform into dragons.

[RahEndymion]

It's weird.

I am really enjoying DF personally despite having to make some changes to how I'd typically approach the game. As some have said, I think the tone is actually quite refreshing.

That being said, there is definitely a noticeable change in content that I think is separate from the 'tone' of the expansion. I think the whole reddit/furry/scaly thing is overdone at this point but you can see the sort of 'bubblegum' aesthetics that are very popular with that community throughout the expansion. As well as that, there is a determined focus on cute, 'floof' meme culture.

While not necessarily a problem at all, it is definitely understandable that long time players who grew up with 'power metal' wow with cheesey dad jokes and Metzen's touch on everything would notice this difference. I'd argue both are equally family friendly, equally cheesy / low brow and of their time.

It feels a lot like the game was a kids game pretending to be adult and has grown into an adults game pretending to be for kids.

[Elder Millennial]

Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

The game has pandas as player characters. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.

Goofy gnomes and literal cow people. That ship left the shipyard being family friendly. It shipped PG12.

This whole thread is goofy.

[Dalinos]

Goofy gnomes and literal cow people. That ship left the shipyard being family friendly. It shipped PG12.

This whole thread is goofy.

You remind me of what I tell my raiders when someone says "X is too hard". My response is always "Man look at the damn box of the game, it says 12+, you're a grown ass adult, solve it".

[username993720]

The corpses are mutilated, yes...

And the Dracthyr Visage form looks unique because they are unique. Every other Dragon takes on a normal Visage.

"Unique"

Suddenly Visage is not meant for blending in with the mortal races but to show off your swag -_-

[Kralljin]

Redridge is a good example of that but people see one thumbnail and be like : waaaaah RaMbO in my wow

Bloody fitting that you pick Redrige.

A crucial point in the Redrige quest is that you have to convince John J. Keeshan in the first place to help you out.
Which he refuses, because, according to him

Finally I break out and head back to my hometown and what do I get? People spitting on me, protesting me, calling me a baby orc killer and all kinds of vile crap!

Just to be clear, we're talking about Lakeshire here, a town that has been threatened by Orcs since pre Vanilla (as Stonewatch Keep was destroyed sometime before Vanilla) and those citizens that have formed a militia to protect themselves against the Orcs have spat on John J. Keeshan because...he killed Orcs?

This doesn't make any sense whatsoever, it's just there to draw a Rambo parallel.

And then there's this Meta humor such as a Paladin remarking that he sometimes waking up one day and that the light got some weaker (get it? Pallies getting nerfed?) or that he should stop being a Pally and start focusing on just being a Warrior (get it? he's rerolling?)

If you didn't have enough of Meta humor, i can also point you towards Hillsbrad, with characters such as Johnny Awesome (a reference to Twinks, as in being a femine male and a boosted Alt), Orkus (overleveled character in a lowlevel that actually bought all their stuff) and Dumbass (utterly incompetent player).
Or the Durnholde Syndrome, because the two Orcs you rescued during Vanilla didn't develop an attachment to their captors but to their literal chains.

Finally, let's not gloss over Westfall and its extremely dated references to CSI:Miami, with a character spouting one liners and putting on shades multiple times.

[Kharnath]

Chromatus will return...
Galakrond will rise...

I would rate both above individually at a power level & menace beyond any we've met in game to date including deathwing.

[loras]

In Dragonflight. We have all these friendly dragons we deal with, a few who aren't so friendly but none that are truly terrifying. Dragons are supposed to be awe inspiring, terror inducing entities that radiate power, not your next taxi upon a quest-leg.

Look at movies like Dragonslayer from the 80's where it actually felt like Vermithrax (the name of the dragon antagonist), was something to be feared. When his anger was incited he bathed the countryside in blood and fire.

(Spoilers)

Look at season 2 of the new animated series Vox Machina in the first episode I was like now that's how dragons are supposed to be, as I watched a maruding band of 4 chromatic dragons obliterate the capital city.

All the while not sounding ANYTHING like the disney-fied dragons in WoW "Your monuments shall fall! Your civilization erased! Here me insects! You live out of mercy! Fight or flee and you forfeit that mercy!" All the while each dragon launched it's personal devestation upon the city and it's people.

One Dragon literally breathed gouts of poisons gas melting some from the inside. Yet another belched acid breath literally melting the castle ramparts. The frost dragon launched volleys of tremendous ice shards ripping apart the countryside. The leader's flame breath put Deathwing to shame. his fire basically turned into a giant molten beam of destruction vaporizing the main castle to it's foundation.

If anything close to this happened in WoW I honestly wouldn't know what to do. But instead we have nice dragons in WoW who help us plant flowers and find new homes for frogs...

You're confusing the drakonids for dragons, don't do that.
I mean at some point we literally help Ysera devastate an entire invasion force of primalists.

Admittedly they only show her destroying the added primalist structure and ice, but that's because WoW can't really handle terrain alteration very well, so it uses it very sparingly (though recalling Legion's highmountain area does make me think it should have been used more often in Dragonflight, but perhaps it leads to more technical difficulties in conjunction with dragonridung that they'd rather sidestep for now).

That's not to say that i don't disagree entirely; The dragons have a hard time feeling like dragons, in part for their, even by warcraft standards, overly human portrayals, but it's not helped by their simplified technicolor-ish new looks either.

The bronze did retain enough personality, as did the blacks and even the blues, but they don't really show it outside of their respective strongholds.
The greens and especially the reds are just meme-y.

Perhaps a more direct "mea culpa" from the dragons explaining their past aggressive, bestial and territorial tendencies would have made it all more easy to swallow.
After all humans too can regress naturally towards similar behaviour if the situation is "just right,", war and adversity remind us of this.

Explicitly explaining what could cause something similar in a dragon would go a long way, and perhaps make their interactions with i.e. the djaradin more believable.