WoW's story needs to go back to being more like Exile's Reach

[Makabreska]

We did have stuff like this in BfA. After you defeated a goddamn World Soul in Legion you move to uncover a political plot involving pirates in Boralus, a witch coven in Drustvar, we attack/defend a Zandalari city in an old school battle etc. Even Nazjatar was pretty tame. The problem with this is, you can't really do it entire xpac. There needs to be an escalation.

[McNeil]

BFA zones had a much more grounded story than we used to have with expansions like SL, Legion and WoD. We explored continents on Azeroth that has been in lore for a long time, we got to meet the natives and were back to dealing with threats such as corrupt politicians, pirates, Alliance/Horde, local wildlife, some Old God and witchcraft influences. It felt like a fresh breath of air after dealing with intergalatic space battles on Argus and dealing with literal God's. BFA gets a lot of flack but this is the one thing they did right, the questing was actually solid (though no one liked getting weaker after each level which is why the leveling experience was brought down).

Exile's Reach story was very basic which is fine for newcomers who just started the game. The whole point of it was that a completely fresh character starts out on their adventure which won't be the case for those who have been playing for much longer.

[Lochton]

I found the Exile's Reach story intro to be more compelling than just about any Shadowlands stories outside of maybe Revendreth. Exile's Reach feels grounded and relatable. You're a soldier with a small makeshift camp, rallying some allies and scouting the zone. You then deal with an Ogre problem and uncover some use of necromancy that ends in a fight with a dragon. The whole time I got that old school DND adventure vibe and enjoyed it quite a bit.

When you do something like Shadowlands, the story deals with eternity, ghost people, civilizations that persist in the afterlife on these pocket dimension islands... hard to really give a shit tbh. I like vampire stuff so Revendreth was enjoyable, but everything else is so out there it feels like background noise.

We need to get back to MoP style storytelling imo.

Honestly, I agree with you.

Though, furthermore so, I believe the player needs to get knocked off the pedestal in expansions. We already have it sorta in Shadowlands, "Who?" moments. I believe the player should never reach above being the 'champion' or 'soldier'.

[justandulas]

Wow does a lot of things well, but story telling isn’t one of them. The writing is legit painfully bad, it’s impossible to give a crap about it

It’s way too disney story, safe and always good wins and we’re all good. We can’t play villains or morally grey characters, bad guys always lose, and it repeats ad nauseum. It legit makes the Disney channel look hardcore.

The writing staff should have been fired the day MoP was suggested. The original writing staff from vanilla-wotlk had a more grown up narrative

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Exile's Reach is more grounded because it's simple.


That's really there all is to it. You shipwreck --> rally friends --> explore, discover --> uncover bad guy's plot --> sabotage bad guys --> kill bad guy boss. Exile's Reach could have been an animated made-for-TV movie on the Disney channel.

[Teriz]

I do believe that the next expansion will be back on Azeroth. Blizzard doesn't tend to go off world for two expansions in a row, but we will be on Azeroth for multiple expansions.

I'm thinking Dragon Isles or Undermine/Catacombs next.

[Nerovar]

It’s hard to see how to make it go back to something like that.

The same old world/universal threats still exist in some capacity.

One way I can see it happen is if the add a backside of Azeroth with undiscovered land filled with normal mortals and villains that are not cosmic power levels bad guys.

The threats may still exist but that doesn't they need to bother Azeroth every 1-2 years.

[Daronokk]

You realize the original story of warcraft is an interdimensional alien invasion right?

Nope, that was added in Warcraft 2.

The backstory for Warcraft 1 is simply, "no one knew where these creatures came from".

[Nobleshield]

We need to get back to MoP style storytelling imo.

IMHO we need to go back to MOP style everything. Storytelling, gameplay, class/raid design. Everything since has been steadily downhill.

[Lasombria]

It might work to have a second "adventurer" track of questing. You might have some level capping at various points, and stories with more local focus. Maybe just an "adventurer" quest line each zone at its level bracket. Seems worth pondering.

[Kokolums]

they cant go back unless they do a fork off of wow classic before BC. the current storyline is littered with universe-sized threats its pointless.

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To be fair, sans all the Azerite business, BfA was very down-to-earth, especially Kul Tiras.

the writing in kul tiras was terrible. most of the characters were portrayed as stiff and constipated. even the pirates were written that way. not down-to-earth in any way whatsoever.

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It might work to have a second "adventurer" track of questing. You might have some level capping at various points, and stories with more local focus. Maybe just an "adventurer" quest line each zone at its level bracket. Seems worth pondering.

thats sounds like a typical blizzard solution that would be worst-of-both-worlds and solve nothing.

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bfa taught us that the writers dont know how to write a pirate to save their lives. its sad and hilarious.

[willtron]

I found the Exile's Reach story intro to be more compelling than just about any Shadowlands stories outside of maybe Revendreth. Exile's Reach feels grounded and relatable. You're a soldier with a small makeshift camp, rallying some allies and scouting the zone. You then deal with an Ogre problem and uncover some use of necromancy that ends in a fight with a dragon. The whole time I got that old school DND adventure vibe and enjoyed it quite a bit.

When you do something like Shadowlands, the story deals with eternity, ghost people, civilizations that persist in the afterlife on these pocket dimension islands... hard to really give a shit tbh. I like vampire stuff so Revendreth was enjoyable, but everything else is so out there it feels like background noise.

We need to get back to MoP style storytelling imo.

Entirely why I would like classic to turn into WoW 2/OSRS style, which it never will. But would be nice.

[Dhrizzle]

Wow does a lot of things well, but story telling isn’t one of them. The writing is legit painfully bad, it’s impossible to give a crap about it

It’s way too disney story, safe and always good wins and we’re all good. We can’t play villains or morally grey characters, bad guys always lose, and it repeats ad nauseum. It legit makes the Disney channel look hardcore.

The writing staff should have been fired the day MoP was suggested. The original writing staff from vanilla-wotlk had a more grown up narrative

You did play in the last expansion where Horde players took part in genociding the Night Elves, right?

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On top of that TBC and WotLK had way more of a straightforward good vs evil story ("Disney" as you'd call it,) MoP was where we started seeing more shades of grey in how the Alliance and Horde act.

[Lane]

Even if Blizzard just added roles where you could choose between hero or mercenary would help. I hate being "hero/champion" all the time. I would love it if the faction leaders would address me like we had to approach Arluin in Suramar. We hear you're awesome, we need your help, "pay my price". Also, more quests from people who don't know or care who we are and are just looking for day labor. We don't have to be notorious and everything we do doesn't have to have a cosmic impact.

I'm still team revamp though. I think at this point we've spent so much time elsewhere that we need to focus on EK & Kalimdor. Centaurs could have had an uprising. I still feel like we got ripped off in Cata with Uldum, I would love to have more Tol'vir and Qiraji interaction/lore. Even though I hated the execution of the Living Story in GW2, I liked the idea behind it. The devs could focus on a couple zones per patch to 'rebuild' instead of doing it all at once, ideally with a neutral storyline that won't lock us into a timeline. I haven't figured out what the raids would be in such a scenario, but there's plenty of fodder for dungeons, WQs, basically the rest of the end game we've been used to since Legion.

[Darkeon]

Pandora's Box.

It's out of the box, nothing we can do and definitely go back to that, in current WoW.

Only thing that can happen is to hope that they either hire new Storytellers or that the current ones magically get some sort of decent skills and enjoy the story-telling monorail with a side of loot-hamster wheels and overdosed systems that is retail.

[Kokolums]

Arguably the biggest problem with the Shadowlands lore is that it *feels* like they started out with ideas for systems and gameplay mechanics *first* and *then* cobbled together a mish-mash of new lore characters to fit those systems (Winter Queen, the Arbiter, the Primus). These are not characters that are loved by the writers at all but serve the systems in place and are to be totally discarded when the systems go away.

It even feels that way with existing lore characters. Rescued are Thrall and Baine and Jaina, what the hell do we do with them, oh let's dump them on Oribos in the meeting hall, they can sit on the floor or something.

[shise]

You realize the original story of warcraft is an interdimensional alien invasion right?

And yet, it is not.

It all happens in very down to Earth, normal lands and questing. The Burning Crusade came to Azeroth and we then went into the Outlands. The Outlands have the same spirit and essence as Azeroth.

Ever since WoD we started going into a completely different game.

[Cosmic Janitor]

bfa taught us that the writers dont know how to write a pirate to save their lives. its sad and hilarious.

Yes and no. It was the usual bullshit americanized disney version of priates. It was exactly what most people expected tbh, maybe not enough polished characters like a jack sparrow (they used up all their sass on bwonsamdi apparently, flynn was just a sad knock-off), but certainly within the genre. If you expected anything else other than that shit it's on you. As far as Kul Tiras goes I was actually glad that the main faction wasn't just another captain hook clownshow and they tried to make them at least seem somewhat functional as a nation of seafarring people. Each faction also had a political plot, a mystery plot and a mystical plot. That was by far the most grounded stuff we did since MoP.

Anyway, the good that BfA did with the zone plots was sadly undone by the overarching rubbish story of a nonsense war and the natural desaster/cosmic level threats after the first patch (just story wise, systems were dogshit from beginning to end). But it goes to show that you can do non-cosmic level stuff, even at this point in the games life cycle. If they had actually toned down some of the surrounding stuff they could have achieved even better results (Azerite was an entirely unneded plot, especially with the poor execution and boarderline abandonment of it).

Personally I think a few more of these types of settings would be welcome, but at the end of the day much like most other sane people here I know that Blizzard's writers are beyond redemption and they will never be able to come of with a decent story and then execute it in a way that actually engages you. There is even an argument to be made that they probably shouldn't even try to do so, as it would be pearl before swine anway. Riding the line between the saturday morning version of the bastard child of warhammer and warhammer 40k is probably enough; some elves, some green roid monsters and comically disfigured humans is all they need to keep this thing afloat after all. The eldritch horrors and the planet eating beasties come with the territory.

[Oneirophobia]

The issue is that WoW's writing team is convinced that they're true geniuses who can go toe to toe with the best writers out there (they're not),so they want to make some deep intricate story to show their talent.

If they were actually good,it'd still feel off for WoW,but they're not.

Going back to something simpler like Exile's Reach would be better for the game,and would work even with the current writing team honestly

I think it's a "too many cooks" issue in that they trip over each other trying to be either consistent with the story and missing that mark repeatedly, and because of the turn-over and constant team switching they have to pick up where others left off, and they're compelled to try to "do something" to the story to make it their own, stand out in the company, and make a mark.

It's just not a good recipe for a solid story. I think the last "hey this is a pretty good plot!" moment we had was Suramar. In general, Legion was pretty good story. Didn't fancy the messiness of how demons respawned and how unclear the functioning of that was, definitely had its shite moments but it was otherwise uncommonly solid as far as WoW goes.

BFA was just... Rough. Some hidden "okayish" gems here and there with things like the Blood Trolls and Uldir, the Drust and so on, and Shadowlands looks like it's emphasizing the weak points of Legion's demon respawning crap by demistifying how death functions, but we'll have to wait until the story is over before we can make a fair judgement. Personally I think tackling the function of death for a storyline is an extreme risk that should be avoided, especially as an expansion that isn't intended to conclude the franchise, but here we go.

[Naiattavain]

I found the Exile's Reach story intro to be more compelling than just about any Shadowlands stories outside of maybe Revendreth. Exile's Reach feels grounded and relatable. You're a soldier with a small makeshift camp, rallying some allies and scouting the zone. You then deal with an Ogre problem and uncover some use of necromancy that ends in a fight with a dragon. The whole time I got that old school DND adventure vibe and enjoyed it quite a bit.

When you do something like Shadowlands, the story deals with eternity, ghost people, civilizations that persist in the afterlife on these pocket dimension islands... hard to really give a shit tbh. I like vampire stuff so Revendreth was enjoyable, but everything else is so out there it feels like background noise.

We need to get back to MoP style storytelling imo.

the cancel couture made Chris Metzen retire and leave blizzard permanently. i don't know how we are going to go back to a mop style story telling. putting the cart before the horse there. you guys are so out of touch with reality none of this makes any sense.