Do you think the writers are "incompetent"?

[tangers58]

What's your standard? They are no world class storytellers and much of what came after WC3 TFT ruined a lot of what came before.

They retcon without hesitance. Chronicle is the biggest insult to players. Paying for seeing them ruin previously established lore with their new nonsense that they think is creative.

And when they went "there is only one Legion across infinite timelines", they completely lost it.

What about Azeroth being a Titan? Why are we even fighting for the world soul? Best case is the thing awakens uncorrupted and shakes us all off like a bunch of fleas, worst case is it gets corrupted and turned into a dark titan. There is no hope for us. Unless we kill the world soul, like Sargeras wants to do.

The story at this point requires you to be a buffoon to like it and be invested in it.

Just look at how stupid the Horde members look, when they just accept Sylvanas as warchief and then are surprised at her betrayal.

Big time incompetent. They are constantly reconning, and seem to have a terrible case of too many cooks making one dish. I've unfortunately read quite a few Christie Golden books since her Star Wars work was mixed in with the overall storyline of the franchise at the time, and hers were straight up garbage every single time.

It seems fairly obvious that there is no one in overall control of the storyline, or at least no one that is interested in actually doing their job. Leaving the story with a massive number of contradictions and the retcons I mentioned before.

[Raisei]

Yes. They are completely incompetent.
Swtor has an awesome writting while being a mmo. So it's not a matter of game type.

Their main stories are awefull.
The way they tell it in the game is awefull.

They are completely incompetent.

Some side quest are nice, still. But rest is garbage.

SWTOR has been an MMO when it came out, now it is a single-player game with online functionality. The comparison falls flat because you are comparing apples and oranges:

SWTOR explicitly focussed on story (as this is BWs forte) and in exchange the actually playable content is A LOT less then what WoW offers, because WoW focusses on gameplay.
SWTOR has now after many years like what 8-10 raids with some of those having only 1 boss even. Compare that to WoW with 4-5 raids per expansion with 7-10 bosses, not to mention the 10+ Dungeons coming with every expansion.

Yes, SWTOR has a more defined story, but they cut everything else for that, they simply discarded their raiding community several years back and stopped producing raids (not that they came out and said that, they strung people along for more then 2 years with vague promises of new group content that never came true to this day). This was the reason why my entire guild was fed up and came to WoW.

It depends what you want from a game. If you want a good story and no content, SWTOR is your thing. If you actually want to play with a guild and DO THINGS then WoW with it's constant stream of excellent content is your poison, even if the story isn't perfect.


To the OP:

I am absolutely loving the arrogance in this thread. Every second poster thinks they could write better and thus have any buisness calling WoW's writing team incompetent.

I think just like with people complaining about game mechanics it comes down to them not liking the direction of the story. The writers are not doing what these masters of literacy think they should do, so they are obviously incompetent, because as a poster on a random internet forum they understand so much better how things should be!

[Zuben]

At the level they're operating you'd think there was only real talent. No, I think plunders like BFA are more about mismanaging and miscommunication, or even a matter of ego.

[Exxord]

No, I don't think the single writers are incompetent. You're not gonna be hired by a big company like Blizzard for such an important position if you're not at least a bit good. BUT, those writers needs a figure that knows the lore and had a clear idea of what should happen next and how it connects with the present/past, and tell them what type story he wants from them and where the story should go next. And I think someone like that don't even exist atm.

[VinceVega]

Or do you think that the writers are doing okay, but think that book writing just doesn't work for an MMO?

I have my opinions about the writers, but I honestly think that book writing has to go, and that Blizzard should hire world designers and quest designers again, that make up a story through the lense of world building.

Chris Metzen never wrote much books, but it was thanks to his vision and other developpers at that time that Azeroth was shaped.

I think Blizzard just needs to drop the whole novel thing. I don't think making Warcraft books that post set the game works at all.

Sure you could hire writers to write the Warcraft universe after the story is set ingame maybe? But I just don't think that books work for MMO's

You are just miffed, that in the newer books your dreaded SJWs got a voice. Which you made abundantly clear in your other thread.

Novels for games never quite work. Becuase 80% of people don't read them... at LEAST! Probably even more.
So for them the story ingame doesn't make sense if their are major plot points only in the book.
So the last novel does not have major plot points. And i liked it. It was a good book with interesting characters but did not make the story ingame difficult to follow.

Of course they could just write book of past events in wow. But you always would know how it ends. Which is kinda annoying when you are reading a book.

[HitRefresh]

Writers are fine.
They are certainly not nobel prize nomenees but fairly competent writing MMO story filed with fantasy tropes.
It's the lack of direction and supervision that drags it all down, nobody is able to say "NO" to the writers. Some lore descisions after Metzen just blow my mind. Like, was the "Dark Mirror" in any way nessesary for the story?
Afrasiabi is the true hack across the whole creative team.


Afrasiabi's job is to oversee the Danuser with his team and enforce the rules. He was unable to do it for 3 expantions. Why would it change now?
Considering that major f-ups happened in big expantion plotpoints and not in the isolated questlines, it's not a stretch to conclude that he was directly involved in the worst writing during his time as creative director.

He's not creative director anymore according to the credits

He was also absent from BlizzCon

[Verdugo]

You are just miffed, that in the newer books your dreaded SJWs got a voice. Which you made abundantly clear in your other thread.

Because adding literal butt pirates is such a progressive writing.

Blizzard is about as progressive as Disney, just some token representation to impress the masses, then bootlick a dictatorship that routinely commits crimes against humanity.

[Arrashi]

Because adding literal butt pirates is such a progressive writing.

Blizzard is about as progressive as Disney, just some token representation to impress the masses, then bootlick a dictatorship that routinely commits crimes against humanity.

Yo, a little organ harvesting never killed anybody. Rimworld taught me that.

[Combatbutler]

[MENTION=658024]
Face it, who's in charge of systems for example is in a more senior position than who's in charge of creative. There is enough quality they produce to make me believe they could do a much better job with everything if they were allowed too.

You make it sound like blizz had a well thought out story before, the answer is no they never had, it was all made up along the way, barely holding together.

Metzen did not try to uphold old lore, he is the very reason much of the original cosmic order was thrown out of the window, changing the eredar to shove the new draenei in for the rule of cool.

[VinceVega]

Because adding literal butt pirates is such a progressive writing.

Blizzard is about as progressive as Disney, just some token representation to impress the masses, then bootlick a dictatorship that routinely commits crimes against humanity.

Well yeah... kinda.
More progressive than saying "In the world of azeroth homophobia doesnt exist.", and then adding nothing.

"literal buttpirates" hm? I get the feeling people would whine about that no matter what they do.

Representation is representation. No matter the intention. And what has china to do with ANYTHING in this thread?

[Veliarne]

I'm wondering how many comments criticising the competency of the writers come from the lack of story of patch 8.3 and how N'zoth was handled. Zone stories were solid, war campaign was average, Nazjatar was ok. I used to think that only zones' stories were nice until i recently rolled some alts and could play the whole story of Nazjatar (except the "earn 3000xp on your follower" quest) and the war campaign without time-gating. Made for a more fluid and overall better story. Also, all this is quite subjective, and calling somebody incompetent because you didn't like the story...seems kinda unfair.

[ipoststuff]

I don't think writers have enough freedom with the story. WoW story has to keep going expansion after expansion like a long running sitcom.

[Thundering]

I don't think writers have enough freedom with the story. WoW story has to keep going expansion after expansion like a long running sitcom.

More like the current writers don't know the current lore well enough and is not invested in it either.

[Coldkil]

I'm not qualified to say if they're competent or not at their job.

What i see from current WoW lore is that there's so much material and so many leads available and then we're always down to the same old "horde and ally hate each other but there's this super evil guy we have to join efforts to beat so we can get back at our beating each other". I do not really like that, especially after MoP that was all about "why are you fighting" and paradoxically BfA that was supposed to be centered on the HvA conflict only to pull out a "it was me all along" move at the end.

Gonna bash BfA a little more just because it's the latest and freshest in my memory: why the hell all the HvA leads were just abruptly stopped in favor of the old god theme which is huge enough to be a whole expansion by itself.

See, what i don't like at all of the "modern era" WoW is that inconsistency is everywhere, and not only about the main story. Actually, world building, side quests, side characters are well planned and inserted in the context. It may be because it's a very small story with a short lifespan so it doesn't have enough hooks to really grapple into the main lead.

Main story instead is a mess. I basically like the characters, some are bland, some are better but overall i'm fine with them. What i don't understand is why every single time they start lots of things without actually ending a single one and cutting most of them with no explanations. The amount of regular retcons to adapt old story to new leads just because it's how it is. An most important, the fact that everything is presented as the new big thing that will change history forever but in the end it's just "kill this guy or world explodes".

What i feel from this is that new ideas are treated just as a "we need a new story that lasts two years for this xpack" with everything after being completely disconnected. I don't feel a world is building up, it looks like someone is trying to superglue Duplo blocks on a house made with Lego.

- - - Updated - - -

More like the current writers don't know the current lore well enough and is not invested in it either.

Both of your post and quoted one. They don't know and don't care about knowing it, cause once you did the 2 years expansion cycle, it's time to shoot out another chapter that doens't have to be connected at all. It just needs to be new and flashy.

[KSM899]

No they are not.

But they need to find the balance that tells a good story in an MMORPG and across all other mediums.

At least now we have new characters, seeds for future story chapters and stories that continue across expansions, which is good, are they good stories or not that's a different thing.

I do like what they are trying to tell, although I don't like how it's being told and not the story direction itself.

[Super Dickmann]

I don't think writers have enough freedom with the story. WoW story has to keep going expansion after expansion like a long running sitcom.

If BFA is any indication, it's the opposite - the writers have too much freedom to create absolute dross that the game doesn't have the mechanical ability to follow through on and the devs don't want. The BFA marketing campaign was better than the actual story put out in as much as it represented a product people actually wanted.

On-topic, Writing fun pulp fantasy isn't all that hard, but you need to know that's what you're writing and you need to actually want to write it. Sappy message-mongering narratives at odds with the purpose of the game will fail regardless of technical skill - there are a lot in their stable - Stackpole, Brooks, even Golden and Danuser haven't been off-base at all times, their writing is on a perfectly servicable level for what the game is. What it isn't servicable for are the stories they're trying to tell. There are conceptual problems more serious than any shortcoming in terms of continuity or respect for prior material, which let's face it, was retconned for ages.

[Feanoro]

I'm wondering how many comments criticising the competency of the writers come from the lack of story of patch 8.3 and how N'zoth was handled. Zone stories were solid, war campaign was average, Nazjatar was ok. I used to think that only zones' stories were nice until i recently rolled some alts and could play the whole story of Nazjatar (except the "earn 3000xp on your follower" quest) and the war campaign without time-gating. Made for a more fluid and overall better story. Also, all this is quite subjective, and calling somebody incompetent because you didn't like the story...seems kinda unfair.

I would suggest you take some time to read more on this forum, there are some very good analyses as to exactly what was poorly handled.

[schwarzkopf]

My 9y old nephew wrote a pokémon fanfic the other day. His characters were more consistent than wow's.

Hyperbole is a good way of convincing people you are wrong - job well done there.

[Vorkreist]

D3 had some pretty good story writing, as did Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm (I'm not including LotV cause it felt like it just went into a strange territory with the main purpose to be preventing SC3 from ever being a thing).

The only sane way you could say something like that is if you never touched any of the previous games. D3 and SC2 have taken a giant dump on how amazing the story was for first Diablo and Starcraft games.

[DingDongKing]

Anyone looking to WoW novels for high quality fiction forgets that these are more tie-ins for marketing purposes than hard-nosed literature.

Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed reading the novels myself. But I take them with a huge pinch of salt. Ditto for the game's lore. Always enjoyed it, but never held it to any higher than a bar that it's meant to be at. The lore plays third fiddle to gameplay and theme parkery.