Should WoW take a Darker direction?

[Razion]

No, right now I'm vibing for a nice vacation. Places that are whimsical and fun.

A zone for Halloween, like in Kingdom Hearts. A zone for Christmas, like in Banjo Kazooie. Splashing around from tropical Echo/Kezan Islands - killing crabs, killing sharks, ankle-high crystal-clear water, fighting off and befriending natives. Zones with giant cozy wooden cottages in an autumn fall-themed zone with giants and lots of beasts for hunting.

After all the melodrama of recent tree-burning and city-razing, it'd be nice to have something more light-hearted.

[Alkizon]

What, you mean you didn’t hear how cute the sounds of the screams were? Or how cute Saurfang died at the hands of Sylvanas? What about the cute way in which Rastakhan watched his city get sacked and realized he sold his souls to Bwonsamdi for nothing. Yeah, WoW is definitely just a cute game. It directly competes with Hello Kitty and Pokémon in terms of cute, fuzzy, adorable feels.

Here it’s more likely not the plot, but, again, the style: if characters don't behave and appearance don't look according to events, then whole point, whole intrigue, whole drama is lost even if being one. Clown slipping on banana peel won't cause pity, only laughter (even if viewer subsequently finds out that fall was an accident and led to physical trauma of single father, whose performance was a significant financial element in functioning of his three children, who didn't have enough time to grow up possibility of their "participation" in earnings, etc., etc.). Style is everything. Drama turns into black humor and silly pathos when serving everything not properly... There is no sympathy, no empathy, no emotional return, and therefore there is no effect to which you're trying to appeal, just reason for jokes. It’s difficult to make adult (it’s easier with children, especially if it’s something with which they grew up for a long time, it's connected with mechanism of imitation, training, experience in this age; which, however, only benefits following example) to empathize with grimy plush ugliness that can't be associated with equal (intellectually, comparable needs and problems) creature in framework of a simplified toy world, and it’s almost impossible to frighten/disturb.
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example: people laugh, at those who are offended by changing appearance of their characters, but there is nothing funny here, fact only proves that people were related to their characters' appearance, there was empathy, this was taken away from them - emotional bond is broken, person can't help but feel such a loss, as a result of which there're detached from game's plot, and then from game itself in general
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All that person can get out of here will be jokes (well, or if make reference to modern culture, then something like memes, but here again: some of them will make fun of situation, while others of appearance). Yes, person will be able to participate "detached" later in discussion of how all this “sad” or “could be dangerous, unpleasant, difficult to handle”, but that's another story. There is no idiology, no connection with plot. We can try to attribute this to oversaturation, which sounds quite plausible, but after all, almost every day there is something that has great potential to upset/anger/make us happy, then it’s not so “gray” as devs doing now, probably problem isn't in that.

ps. I’m not saying that you are wrong, but rather pointing out that it’s not so simple with theme.

How exactly was it not dark enough when your Alliance player had to see the devastation wrought by the Horde, slowly being pushed back as resources and options dwindled, and finally realizing it was all for naught as you get to see firsthand how you cannot hope to save everyone even just in Darnassus, and knowing that all those you failed to save were killed in the blaze.

Even beyond that, there are quests of the Horde enslaving the furbolg tribes, blighting Lordanel and of course the cinematic of Sylvanas forcing Delaryn to watch as she kills all those she loves for no better reason than her own amusement.

Min-maxers can't be worry by trip, they worry only by destination, no time for plot, it's all about getting stuff, they don't see story, they don’t care about appearance, they see only numbers but in view of connivance of these people (namely, they are, mostly, your current devs) and discrepancy of plot with stylistic component in game is obtained, they don't understand "emotional component", and all they know is "stupid"/superficial humor - hence such style (not that it's absolute truth, but attempt to approach issue rather a little ironically).

[Sondrelk]

So basically the gist of what some people are saying here is that a game being dark and mature has nothing to do with dealing with dark and mature themes like hopelessness in the face of death, PTSD, soldiers realizing they are on the wrong side of history or even blood sacrifices, eldritch horrors or what is going to happen in 8.3 with player corpses strewn wantonly about everywhere.

The only thing that makes something dark and mature is making the graphics gritty and grimdark, and adding skulls and occult symbols everywhere.

[Aleloron]

Unsure - I like darker tones at times, but I don't think that's in Christie Golden's wheelhouse.

Neither is writing above a second-grade reading level but she keeps plugging away; Bless her heart.

[Talrath]

They could go for a more darker storyline, but instead of impulsive actions (burning if teldrassil) they have to make a story that puts alot of emphasis on something that is going really bad.

An example would be, you find an object which you find quite odd but you dismiss it. When you keep questing you find another piece of the puzzle and you start investigating to the point you find out about the abhorred plan. Take war of thorns, it would have been better if Sylvanis's plan was to burn the tree and we as alliance players find out about it and rush to destroy the siege engines, but we are too late and get killed aswell. She tries to raise you but just like what hapoend to voljin, an entity prevents sylvanis to raise you and you get resurrected when its safe. Then you get to see the burning of teldrassil. The horde player gets deceived aswell, he only finds out about the burning of teldrassil when hes in the woods putting night elves in chains. There the sylvanis loyalist start to execute the night elves in cold blood, the horde player gets his first choice, be loyal to sylvanis or saurfang. Kill night elves or save them. Both of them give different ingame cinematic.

Blizzard could do a dark them as above but instead they dont know how to write a normal story. So the question shouldnt be if they should go for a darker theme because they would ruin it aswell. The question is, can blizzard write a cohesive story and whose story writing can save blizzards lore.

Also, blizzard HAS to make it more time consuming to reach max level why??? They try to tell a story with only a few quests, and most of them are stupid quests about killing some pigs or sheeps. Blizz should make mainquests that arent only 20 quests big but about 50 big. By doing this, they can truly give a nice experience to the players about the lore.

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Also, if you look at final fantasy 14, you can see that by doing the mainscenario quests you can get to max lvl without doing any other sidemissions. This is how you let the player experience the story telling. Its all in the game and not in a book or something.

[Sondrelk]

They could go for a more darker storyline, but instead of impulsive actions (burning if teldrassil) they have to make a story that puts alot of emphasis on something that is going really bad.

An example would be, you find an object which you find quite odd but you dismiss it. When you keep questing you find another piece of the puzzle and you start investigating to the point you find out about the abhorred plan. Take war of thorns, it would have been better if Sylvanis's plan was to burn the tree and we as alliance players find out about it and rush to destroy the siege engines, but we are too late and get killed aswell. She tries to raise you but just like what hapoend to voljin, an entity prevents sylvanis to raise you and you get resurrected when its safe. Then you get to see the burning of teldrassil. The horde player gets deceived aswell, he only finds out about the burning of teldrassil when hes in the woods putting night elves in chains. There the sylvanis loyalist start to execute the night elves in cold blood, the horde player gets his first choice, be loyal to sylvanis or saurfang. Kill night elves or save them. Both of them give different ingame cinematic.

Blizzard could do a dark them as above but instead they dont know how to write a normal story. So the question shouldnt be if they should go for a darker theme because they would ruin it aswell. The question is, can blizzard write a cohesive story and whose story writing can save blizzards lore.

Also, blizzard HAS to make it more time consuming to reach max level why??? They try to tell a story with only a few quests, and most of them are stupid quests about killing some pigs or sheeps. Blizz should make mainquests that arent only 20 quests big but about 50 big. By doing this, they can truly give a nice experience to the players about the lore.

How exactly was it not dark enough when your Alliance player had to see the devastation wrought by the Horde, slowly being pushed back as resources and options dwindled, and finally realizing it was all for naught as you get to see firsthand how you cannot hope to save everyone even just in Darnassus, and knowing that all those you failed to save were killed in the blaze.

Even beyond that, there are quests of the Horde enslaving the furbolg tribes, blighting Lordanel and of course the cinematic of Sylvanas forcing Delaryn to watch as she kills all those she loves for no better reason than her own amusement.

[SkyTides]

The game is limited by its age-rating, and the current art/graphics style doesn't really work well for genuinely dark stuff.
Plus many NPCs who may end up being involved in dark situations don't have their story realized very well in-game since they do not appear in cutscenes or have closeup shots of their plights (except for the big fancy main cinematics).
Its not like FFXIV or Elderscrolls where you get to really see things close up and personal.

[Sondrelk]

The game is limited by its age-rating, and the current art/graphics style doesn't really work well for genuinely dark stuff.
Plus many NPCs who may end up being involved in dark situations don't have their story realized very well in-game since they do not appear in cutscenes or have closeup shots of their plights (except for the big fancy main cinematics).
Its not like FFXIV or Elderscrolls where you get to really see things close up and personal.

I am pretty sure it was nice and up close when i was running around frantically trying to save the last remaining civilians in Darnassus.

[Eapoe]

Here it’s more likely not the plot, but, again, the style: if characters don't behave and appearance don't look according to events, then whole point, whole intrigue, whole drama is lost even if being one. Clown slipping on banana peel won't cause pity, only laughter (even if viewer subsequently finds out that fall was an accident and led to physical trauma of single father, whose performance was a significant financial element in functioning of his three children, who didn't have enough time to grow up possibility of their "participation" in earnings, etc., etc.). Style is everything. Drama turns into black humor and silly pathos when serving everything not properly... There is no sympathy, no empathy, no emotional return, and therefore there is no effect to which you're trying to appeal, just reason for jokes. It’s difficult to make adult (it’s easier with children, especially if it’s something with which they grew up for a long time, it's connected with mechanism of imitation, training, experience in this age; which, however, only benefits following example) to empathize with grimy plush ugliness that can't be associated with equal (intellectually, comparable needs and problems) creature in framework of a simplified toy world, and it’s almost impossible to frighten/disturb.
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example: people laugh, at those who are offended by changing appearance of their characters, but there is nothing funny here, fact only proves that people were related to their characters' appearance, there was empathy, this was taken away from them - emotional bond is broken, person can't help but feel such a loss, as a result of which there're detached from game's plot, and then from game itself in general
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All that person can get out of here will be jokes (well, or if make reference to modern culture, then something like memes, but here again: some of them will make fun of situation, while others of appearance). Yes, person will be able to participate "detached" later in discussion of how all this “sad” or “could be dangerous, unpleasant, difficult to handle”, but that's another story. There is no idiology, no connection with plot. We can try to attribute this to oversaturation, which sounds quite plausible, but after all, almost every day there is something that has great potential to upset/anger/make us happy, then it’s not so “gray” as devs doing now, probably problem isn't in that.

ps. I’m not saying that you are wrong, but rather pointing out that it’s not so simple with theme.

This is simply (a) not true, and (b) a misrepresentation of the argument. Simply look at any anime with a cute style but dark, horror themes such as Corpse Party. There have also been numerous cartoons that feature some dark and morbid episodes here and there.
Animaniacs have an episode where Skippy and Slappy Squirrel watch Bambi and Skippy freaks out. It’s an entire episode dedicated to dark humor and real life drama involving children discovering death for the first time. Yes, it has laughs and is a cartoon, but it’s actually a pretty serious episode with dark undertones when viewed as an adult.
Your clown example is flawed in the fact that it is under the idea that the person laughing doesn’t know it was an accident and caused trauma until later. That’s not the theme, that’s the circumstance. Going even a step further, it’s akin to the program Jackass, where we know people are getting hurt and laugh because that is what they are there for and the basis of what they do. If they were random people that just happen to get caught on camera being gored by a bull we tend to have a different response. Even a rodeo clown getting hit causes the more apt “oooh” or “oh my god,” rather than a laugh.
Fact of the matter is, regardless of how cute something is there can always be dark thematic elements and story arcs.

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The game is limited by its age-rating, and the current art/graphics style doesn't really work well for genuinely dark stuff.
Plus many NPCs who may end up being involved in dark situations don't have their story realized very well in-game since they do not appear in cutscenes or have closeup shots of their plights (except for the big fancy main cinematics).
Its not like FFXIV or Elderscrolls where you get to really see things close up and personal.

Age rating aside, are you glossing over the genocide that was Teldrassil? The Culling of Stratholme?
As mentioned to the other person I just responded to, there’s examples of children’s cartoons having dark story arcs.

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They could go for a more darker storyline, but instead of impulsive actions (burning if teldrassil) they have to make a story that puts alot of emphasis on something that is going really bad.

An example would be, you find an object which you find quite odd but you dismiss it. When you keep questing you find another piece of the puzzle and you start investigating to the point you find out about the abhorred plan. Take war of thorns, it would have been better if Sylvanis's plan was to burn the tree and we as alliance players find out about it and rush to destroy the siege engines, but we are too late and get killed aswell. She tries to raise you but just like what hapoend to voljin, an entity prevents sylvanis to raise you and you get resurrected when its safe. Then you get to see the burning of teldrassil. The horde player gets deceived aswell, he only finds out about the burning of teldrassil when hes in the woods putting night elves in chains. There the sylvanis loyalist start to execute the night elves in cold blood, the horde player gets his first choice, be loyal to sylvanis or saurfang. Kill night elves or save them. Both of them give different ingame cinematic.

Blizzard could do a dark them as above but instead they dont know how to write a normal story. So the question shouldnt be if they should go for a darker theme because they would ruin it aswell. The question is, can blizzard write a cohesive story and whose story writing can save blizzards lore.

Also, blizzard HAS to make it more time consuming to reach max level why??? They try to tell a story with only a few quests, and most of them are stupid quests about killing some pigs or sheeps. Blizz should make mainquests that arent only 20 quests big but about 50 big. By doing this, they can truly give a nice experience to the players about the lore.

- - - Updated - - -

Also, if you look at final fantasy 14, you can see that by doing the mainscenario quests you can get to max lvl without doing any other sidemissions. This is how you let the player experience the story telling. Its all in the game and not in a book or something.

Except Blizzard literally does a main story quest that extends over an entire zone with multiple sub quests involved. Even the zone wide main story then links up to the overarching story of the entire xpac. I’m not sure why people gloss over this instead of trying to discuss the minor quests that occur in each zone as if that is the only story.
Blizzard, while flawed, apparently writes well enough that people still talk about things to this day. Hell, it was debated what Syl’s ultimate goal was up until it’s reveal recently. People still debate the prophecies from Il’gynoth and N’Zoth, waiting to see what happens. I’m not saying they are award winning writers, but there has definitely been enough to get people talking.

[Alkizon]

Eapoe
snip

I talked about adults (these things scare children but not adults), and I talked about your specific examples, but even if you take those that you have cited now, there is still no return in general. Does style look gloomy enough? Yes! but it doesn’t cause "something" that it should (although I'd hide behind fact that I didn’t use semantic absolute closures like “nobody”/“never”, etc., with pointing out that this is done differently for different cases, but don't really need such save here, there are certain laws of horror genre, but they also impose certain restrictions on appearance, it's classic - if you don't associate plot with your participation, this won't affect you, unless author decides to use shock content, which is another separate method)

Coherence of plot and style is important and you can't deny it, but devs just doesn't take it into account, that’s what message was about. "Acting and reacting" is important, but they can't happen in vacuum - writers use words, filmmakers use frames to describe stuff on focus and around it. If you try to watch movie, or read book without these elements, nothing good will come of it, it'll happen as class book.

As for skulls, crosses and other superficial paraphernalia that people mentioned above... this can also be lodge in very different ways.

KOUNTERPARTS
Are people wanting a darker tone/atmospheres and settings? Or just darker toned story lines?

Asked same question

[TwoMana]

I’d like more memes. I think that would be good direction

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Are people wanting a darker tone/atmospheres and settings? Or just darker toned story lines?

[CaptainV]

Id actually say imho no, because we've had 2 consistant dark expansions:

Legion: King Varian died, Vol'jin died, Illidan sacrificed his way back, Sargeras stabbed Azeroth, countless hundreds died in the war against the legion.
BFA: Sylvanas legit genocided the Night Elves, destroyed her own city, is responsible for the ressurection of Delaryn after she had no hope, and Derek, Killed Saurfang, Tyrande embraced dark powers to fight her.


Imho, Shadowlands should be the *last* dark expansion, we dont need another dark expansion after Shadowlands, infact id argue the next thing we need after Shadowlands is a Break from constant world ending threats.

[Sondrelk]

Are people wanting a darker tone/atmospheres and settings? Or just darker toned story lines?

Going by the amount of evidence we are trying ot give on dark atmosphere and mature themes being shown in game i am starting to feel confident what people want is just making hte game look more like Diablo.
Ironically i think some players will look at Shadowlands and think Maldraxxus or Revandreth is the darker zone despite (at least from what we already know) Ardenweals will be the darkest zone in theme, given it will deal with Tyrande having to accept the death of her people and the Night Fae leader being forced to sacrifice parts of her realm in order for other parts to survive.

[huth]

Coherence of plot and style is important and you can't deny it

Yes, you can. The dissonance can even enhance the effect. See Crapsaccharine World.
You're looking at things from the PoV of a child, not an adult, putting superficial appearance before what is actually going on.

WH40k is effectively not actually a dark story, because it takes everything to such ridiculous extremes that you can't take it seriously anymore. It actually managed to become darker by lessening the Grimdark in recent editions.

[TheFirstOnes]

No. It's already dark atm. Hence, why Sylvanas isn't beat down yet and why Illidan earned his "victory" over a ton of others. The "Darkness" out cloaks all. Disgusting.

[Alkizon]

huth
Yes, you can

No you can't It's about coherence and not about "dissonance" (dissonance need own coherence, because it's result, not method). Moreover, I'm not saying that plot should be neglected (who's looking through child's eyes and where, after that here). It's about coherence, to enhance emotional effect of presence, empathy, but coherence doesn't imply polarity (only if may be author’s idea was made you lean back on chair and look at everything not with "character’s eyes on the world", but with your own and at the screen, as something abstract). Extremes everywhere is bad for "presence" (no need to push, need to interest, play on curiosity - people get tired of "bread and circuses" method quite quickly, what actually happens) effect, sarcasm/cynicism or boredom is feeling to which you appeal here as viewer, I have said it many times “too much/strong is bad, lack also bad” = balance = consistency/coherence. Question remains, specifically what they tried to show, what kind of return they expected to have, this is the whole question. Do situation perceived, as it should when "people don't give damn about stuff", does this exactly what they wanted? That exact question I tried to ask here in "they are" link.

What are your personal feelings after going through chain? "let's go further, party is waiting!", "Let me, I need to go!", "authors stupid b*ds, what a nonsense...", or did you think about characters in sense of events and settings, not as about "characters", but literally, what would you do in this case and so on?

MoanaLisa
I think it's really hard to care about story if you don't care about the characters in the story. With just a few exceptions most of the lore characters that Blizzard spent years building up are dead. Worse, they were killed off for effect and shock value in an attempt to make Legion 'epic.' They've put some new characters out there but if you think about it there's not a lot of time for introduction, back story, and the rest of the details that make up a character that people can really care about. That makes those characters pretty disposable.

Story-telling in an MMO is awkward anyway. It's done mostly through quests. Patches can add a bit here and there but those are typically infrequent. The way expansions are structured the best story-telling seems to be with smaller stories and smaller characters. That's not sufficient to carry an arc through multiple expansions so you're left with watching some NPC acquaintances gin up drama that is difficult to care about because you don't really care that much about them.

The big bet on putting all of this on Sylvanas may or may not pay off but imposes limits on just what you can do with story creation. It's now all sort of one-dimensional.

...as for 40, absurdity in many places is precisely caused by "fanaticism", it's emphasizes everything, it's same in real life (works like intended), I don't see much dissonance there. Faith is a very controversial matter. But if we start going deeper there now, then we’ll leave right away from the topic. I don’t need 40 in style for this game, but Shrek is also unpleasant for me to see here.

[Talrath]

How exactly was it not dark enough when your Alliance player had to see the devastation wrought by the Horde, slowly being pushed back as resources and options dwindled, and finally realizing it was all for naught as you get to see firsthand how you cannot hope to save everyone even just in Darnassus, and knowing that all those you failed to save were killed in the blaze.

Even beyond that, there are quests of the Horde enslaving the furbolg tribes, blighting Lordanel and of course the cinematic of Sylvanas forcing Delaryn to watch as she kills all those she loves for no better reason than her own amusement.

It happened to fast, the battle itself in lore took a few days, but ingame you knew nothing about the new introduced characters except that they are a night elf or somewhat. You cant get attached to the ''person'' Delaryn because you didnt know anything about her and thats what makes it less dark, it seems like she was just a random npc. Blizz keeps failing in storytelling ingame when its about impact, the only thing that they are good at are inciting discussions about how illogical their writing is. Now compare it to ff14, there an important character died and because square enix made the story in a way that you would connect to this ''person'' people got quite sad that he died but they understood why he died bravely.

[Soeroah]

Unsure - I like darker tones at times, but I don't think that's in Christie Golden's wheelhouse.

You gotta be kidding me.

[Kithelle]

I remember when Naxx was released back in the day and Blizzard released a short story describing Kel Thuzad's first experience there (like in the trailer). There was a part of the story where a married couple were trapped in a cell together and one of them slowly turned undead and eventually ate the other one alive. It was really dark. That kind of thing does not happen in today's WoW. I'm a big fan of WH40K so I really like dark and depressing, I don't think WoW should go way too far in that direction but it should be pulled back a little from the Marvel-esque story-telling.

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And yet it doesn't feel significant or sad, does it? It's like when you're watching say the Avengers and they're fighting in New York. The purpose of those scenes is to show the heroes fighting a cool battle against aliens, showing off their abilities and strength.

Those scenes could have been portrayed through the eyes of a child who's mother is slowly dying underneath the rubble of a ruined building. The fighting going on could be shown as frightening and horrible instead of cool.

It's not so much about the events that take place in WoW, it's about how they are portrayed. And the portrayal is seldom or I'd even say never dark.

Umm...sure maybe if you're emotionless...I sure as hell felt sad when I saw a child crying for their parents after seeing corpses on the ground or impaled to a wall by spears after the Horde bombed a town unprovoked.