Should WoW take cues from Game of Thrones S1 on how to write Humans?

[Tarba]

GoT is pure pulp garbage, I’ll never understand its popularity

Well people with personnal desires and different personalities who search for and get power for their own. It's hard to grap when you can only understand a blond prince savior of the universe by the power of love like every major character in wow.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Subverting our expectations by churning through characters while never really caring about them anymore isn't going to fix WoW's poor writing. The biggest issues of WoW's writing are pacing and consistency.

The writing itself wouldn't even be this bad if they showed it better ingame, but everything they do is rushed, has no time to settle, to stand on it's own. And the worst part: Blizzard can't do it any better because they cultivated a customerbase of ADHD spergs with the attention span of flys.

The only thing Blizzard actually can do is stop writing with the final event already being determined and then somehow botching the story and characters to reach that nonsensical goal. Stop building up a character to overcome a giant hurdle in their story only to let them repeat the same misake minutes later. e.g. Thalysra.

[XDurionX]

Blizzards writing has always sucked (yes, w3 too) and cannot compete with "serious" writing. Most players don´t care about stories anyway. Stories in games are like stories in porn.

[EbonBehelit-]

If they killed Anduin, noone would expect it.

Killing off your protagonists without proper setup or reason, after you've spent time and effort in giving them a character arc, is terrible writing -- and no, even GoT doesn't do this.

[Kemsa]

Kultirans were inspired by GoT. With the Houses and their "loyalties".

But talking about Stormwind Humans, well they pretty much are the "standard" human warriors of the Light and Gods heaven trope.
The true bad ass humans are actually the Northern Eastern Kingdoms ones. The Lordaerans, the Gilneans, the Alteracians and in general the Arathians.
From Big giant barbaric (just like Croman), warriors blessed by the the Titan Tyr who fall, Troll killers forging the Trollbane legacy and the great Kingdom that later became the Syndicate. Those are the really good "humans" in the lore of Warcraft. Then you have the legacy of Iron and Stone from the Vrykul tribes and the gift of Flesh on the Howling Fjord storyline.

And then you have Stormwind Humans... who you know.... Gryphons and Light and lets get sex with an orc and oh.... our king is dead, Orcs are destroying everything... maybe we should ask for help to the Northern Kingdoms???

[Otimus]

WoW should stay the course of being light hearted mid-teens-to-early-adults aimed goofy-sort-of-serious fantasy that riffs off of pop culture, because if it isn't that, it's going to feel tremendously out of place. Like when all the Halo games, for example, went from being a certain thing, to basically being glorified overly serious fanfiction. It's already sort of teetering on that edge as is.

Warcraft = Warhammer with fart jokes and references to Star Trek, with a big gulp of Lord of the Rings and a side of saturday morning cartoonery and comic books.

[ercarp]

Isn't that what they tried to do with BfA? It didn't work.

Also no, I respectfully disagree. I don't think the Warcraft universe needs to be Westeros in any shape or form, as much as I love both. Keep them separate. Warcraft has always been a little bit goofy and over-the-top, and that's what makes it Warcraft.

[dess]

If they killed Anduin, noone would expect it.

And this is good writing to you? The unexpected... dun dun dun!

[ThiagoTorres]

GoT is pure pulp garbage, I’ll never understand its popularity

sex scenes, thats all

[Thage]

Seems like Blizzard struggles to write human beings in a compelling manner.

Game of Thrones also struggled to write characters in a compelling manner, that's why Martin kept the body count high. When everyone involved is an unlikable asshole, it's hard to care about the story, and that's already a struggle the lore team is grappling with in WoW; making it moreso isn't going to fix anything.

[Hastis]

If they killed Anduin, noone would expect it.

Anduin cannot die until he is old and he will be taking part in final battle against burning legion

[Theangryone]

Or maybe, just maybe, anything that they have/could/would do to make the Alliance not so squeaky clean and uninteresting would be meltdown inducing for their player base.

[rowaasr13]

Or maybe, just maybe, anything that they have/could/would do to make the Alliance not so squeaky clean and uninteresting would be meltdown inducing for their player base.

Apparently it was interesting enough to lots of people before all this stupid endless war shit started, so I don't see why it must be changed to appease brooding edgelord minority and piss off everybody else.

[justandulas]

Are people really saying game of thrones sucks compared to the wow writing? Hardcore drugs are bad

[Nebron]

Seems like Blizzard struggles to write human beings in a compelling manner.

No, they already tried it in Battle for Azeroth with Sylvanas - and it went terribly wrong. In BfA they went the path of multiple plotlines going on at once, and it became too hard for Blizzard writers to control.

1) Sylvanas and her mysterious plans;
2) Anduin and his struggle with the legacy he was left with;
3) vengeance of Tyrande - by the way, the worst plotline in BfA, both cheest and fan-fictional; who the f*ck is a Night Warrior?? Like, the shit has never been established in WoW's lore and Blizzard come up with a random ritual making Tyrande a Night Warrior and nobody really knows what the hell that means - it's just a fancy title... whatever;
4) Saurfang struggle with honor - he's entire storyarc has been focused on the realisation of being an Old Soldier who seeks only honorable death in the name of peace and freedom, yet it has been watered-down into "For Azeroth!" bullshit;
5) Thrall's comeback;
6) Jaina's family stuff and lust for revange;
7) Bwonsamdi, Rastakhan, Talanji stuff that had no finale whatsoever;
8) Vol'jin episode that literally had no sense, but Blizzard realized that by mistake they opened another doorway into an ambitious storytelling with these "Loa whispers"... which most probably was just for the dialog. But yeah, players looked deeper into that, so Blizzard decided to use that stuff;
9) Old Gods scheming, Xal'atath and all that Void stuff - fun, but with no clear direction. It became much more in your face than in previous stories. Old Gods became much more visible threat, that Yogg Saron per se;
10) Azeroth, Magni, Titans...
11) all the other stories like Zul, G'huun, Gorak Tul, Lilian Voss, Calia Menethil XD, Derek Proudmoore, Baine...

God damn, there was A LOT of story, can't say. But the drop of quality was proportional. And that was a HUGE mistake. They need to focus on a few storylines and develop them in the expansion rather than begin multiple ones so that people get lost and confused aswell. Not to mention that 80% of them simply have no sense and are cheesy as hell. Most of them are all about For Azeroth. Give me a break...

[Lodreh]

Should WoW take cues from Game of Thrones S1 on how to write Humans?

No. We don't need inbreeding or political backstabbing to make the story compelling.

[Weatherwax]

Seems like Blizzard struggles to write human beings in a compelling manner.

Honestly imo they should hire Richard K. Morgan to write the story and fire everybody else currently doing it.
A Land Fit for Heroes is better fantasy than Game of Thrones ever dreamed of being and more suited for the MMO genre.

[justandulas]

No. We don't need inbreeding or political backstabbing to make the story compelling.

Some political backstabbing with deaths is just what wow needs

What wow doesn’t need is faction unification and cliche good guys vs bad

[Darknessvamp]

Well that would require them to write some notable members of Stormwind that actually have grievances with how Anduin is doing things instead of just merging into an amorphous blob of yes men or not existing. Genn (arguably still human) and Tyrande (not human but the only actual example) showed some potential of this over Darkshore but then Anduin manipulated their conversation into being the one who was "right" and then allowed them to go to Darkshore anyway with the help of the "champions" which made him even more "right". Can't exactly have conflict over ideals and desires if everyone just agrees.

[Krille]

Are people really saying game of thrones sucks compared to the wow writing? Hardcore drugs are bad

Yes. You should read some of the recent interviews with D.B Weiss and Benioff, they are admitting they had 0 clue what they were doing. They also wrote the entire thing themself, them 2 and said it was a mistake. So yes, GoT writing is trash, the actors made that show and GRRM. So if anything Blizz could take note from GRRM.