Isn't one of them in love with Plot Armor McCorpsebride? That guy should get shit-canned.
Isn't one of them in love with Plot Armor McCorpsebride? That guy should get shit-canned.
Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory
Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
When we both of us knew how the end always is...
The writers for the zone storylines usually deliver pretty good stuff. They might not be perfect, but they are very good. Whoever is responsible for the overarching storyline (so in BfA the war campaign as well as the Magni questlines that öead the player from Kul Tiras to Nazjatar to the Nzoth assaults) as well as the persons who write the main storyline including Sylvanas atm are clearly working in a field that is way, way above their capabilities.
It's still reaching. Being a military veteran doesn't necessarily make you patient. Garrosh was a military veteran who led many armies, but he was certainly not patient. Same thing for Tyrande.
The complaint would be valid if it was established that Tyrande is a patient person. Then Yes, A Little Patience scenario would be inconsistent with Tyrande's previous characterization. But she was actually shown to be hot-headed in WC3.
The writing is pretty good if you don't take every single story beat as far out of context as possible, but the people on these forums don't seem to possess that ability at large, so the result we get is people who at their maximum potential couldn't match a self-published smut writer saying professional writers are incompetent.
I wasn't even planning on saying "oh well it's just because it's an MMO". I'm just going to say that Varian spent a lot of time with Anduin in-between WotLK and MoP, and very clearly that affected him deeply. If in WotLK Varian was violent and ruthless, by MoP he was more patient, careful, and wise. He refused to weaponize the Sha powers, he tried to earn the trust of his allies, he even allowed Garrosh to receive a proper trial for his crimes. It's made evident that spending time with his pacifist son truly helped Varian become a more rational person. It would be inconsistent characterization if the scenario was just an isolated moment of Varian inexplicably acting wise, but then later events confirm that he is truly changing.
Last edited by Varodoc; 2020-09-08 at 07:11 PM.
I imagine the writers are reasonably competent, but they have to obey the whims of the corporate suits who want plot point X and Y because they think it will draw attention - with no concern for continuity or common sense.
No, i think this community is.
The current writers are definitely the worst ones so far. Them doing retcons left and right every other day without a care and as such making it impossible to actually know wtf happened in the story because it could be changed the very next day is objectively bad writing. They don't think any further than 5 minutes into the future AT MOST, since they tend to clearly write themselves into corners all the time, "solving" those by using even more retcons.
Then you see that they are completely out of touch with their audience, because they are always completely surprised if players do not like the characters they want to shove into your face at every opportunity or actually do not want to betray their own faction AGAIN. They cannot fathom the possibility of the players having completely different reactions to their stories than whatever it is they imagine. Then they want to push their own stupid agendas, like making Sylvanas a feminist though never once in her life has she in any way been oppressed for being a woman (nor anyone she knows or cares about) or making the entirety of BFA a preschool morality lesson that you should not wage war in a game that completely revolves around war. Also sometimes it feels like they want to admonish you for playing Horde.
It's also not helped by the writers having attitudes like wanting to hear criticism, but only if said criticism is positive (which not only is NOT criticism, it's actually detrimental to the writer because it only reinforces the bad aspects of their writing). Because for some reason whenever you say something bad about their writing, they consider it an attack on their person and the people criticizing, even with good intentions, are considered hateful.
Re: the retconning it's doubly sad since APPARENTLY Blizzard actually have a job position called "Loremaster" or some similar BS whom the writers supposedly consult when writing a piece of lore to check if it would contradict any piece of established lore. Given their track record, these loremasters either 1.) don't exist, 2.) are constantly drunk or high, 3.) never show up for work or 4.) are just completely ignored. There's also their unwillingness to do the simplest of researches about the characters or races they're supposed to write about.
While all of the above is bad (and there are tons of other reasons I didn't mention aswell), the biggest issue with their writing is their clinging to the "rule of cool" and ignoring any bit of lore, no matter how well established or the implications it would bring with it, just to have some sort of "epic moment" (which oftentimes isn't even epic, but quite cringeworthy).
In the eyes of the hypercritical, zero foresight WoW community that hates everything Blizzard does or doesn't do: Fuck yes.
In the eyes of anybody able to look at the game's story from a detached, pragmatic viewpoint: Not even close.
Sadly, about 95% of the people on this forum fall into the former group so this thread will serve as little more than an echo chamber for super unique opinion that WoW's story has sucked ass since the culmination of WotLK.
I would bet it's not the writers but the people running the show.
I'm generally a devotee of the idea that WoW story-arcs (and expansions in general) have had a pattern pretty close to a basic sine wave since the beginning. They rode an initial high crest with Vanilla/Classic, and then sort of stumbled with TBC. WotLK was a return to form and general praise, and Cata sort of went down again. MoP was rising arc, WoD took a steep descent back down. Legion brought us back up through the surface, crested, but then went back down with BfA. If the general pattern holds then Shadowlands ought to be pretty good, heralded as a return to form, and generally positively received. There is a slow and inevitable march toward entropy as the game ages and its playerbase dwindles due to burnout, lack of interest, and just sort of aging out of gaming entirely. Nothing to do be done there, though, as that is the fate of all IP's in the general sense.
"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see." ― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
They are in the sense they can't write good stories for shit. But they're competent in the sense they do everything in time and consistently. And that's pretty much the most important part. All that WoW's story needs to be is servicable. They won't hire "good" writers because there's no need for that. For better or for worse.
A retcon isn't inherently bad. Writing retcons on a daily basis, even if it completely invalids lore that's been well established for decades, just to make a point or think it makes a scene "cooler", definitely is.
Are you honestly trying to tell me releasing 3 books that are being sold as definite canon, only to be retconned not even a year later and to be labeled as "it's just an ingame view of the titans on the history unfolding" is actually great writing?
Imo what makes Blizz writers incompetent is they have such a terrible habit of adding new lore or characters with retcons.
I think that’s one of the main issues most people have with their writing.
not!
you can notice many things if you invest a little time and read about the wow universe outside the game
the number of existing characters, plus the addition to each patch, is not something they can do well without freedom, time and good communication between all the teams that work with the game
the impression I have is that they don't have enough freedom and time
it seems to me that activision at some point wanted to end the warcraft franchise and then they went back
You make it seem that the only reason for a job to be done poorly, is by its own will
I think book writing for an MMO to further the story is a problem when there are events that take place in the books that should happen in the game. I think my preferred delivery of WoW's story will always be via the game world, and I'm someone who reads 50-75 books a year. I'm an avid reader, but WoW books almost always feel very dated. They feel like 90s Dragonlance books. They do not feel like they've evolved past that either. When I was 10-11, Dragonlance books were awesome. But we have guys like Joe Abercrombie telling stories now and, more to WoW's speed and preferred audience, guys like Brandon Sanderson.
In terms of the writers being 'incompetent', I don't know that for a fact because I've never seen any of these writers approach a project without the severe and immense "series bible" constraints that exist within the Warcraft universe. They take no chances, they do not innovate, and more importantly and more egregiously, they do not seem to have an overarching narrative in mind because they've had many, many cooks in the kitchen. Since the writing process at WoW is "collaborative", it's not hard to imagine that taking any risks has a lot of red tape associated with it. I suspect that many of the writers currently working on WoW are competent, but not particularly inspired in a way that's going to revolutionize the game world or the story. And even if they did, the *way* the game is written is designed in such a way that quest chains are written by multiple people, to varying degrees of success.
You can use tropes and still tell a good story. You can subvert tropes and tell a good story. I don't think BFA has been particularly effective at either and I feel that the WoW "universe" is starting to show its age badly. I think that they need to get someone who is a planner and a plotter who can work out this "unified cosmic" structure they are attempting instead of pastiching the way they've been doing.