Recent writing has been dubbed "the worst ever" by the community & mainstream media

[loras]

That is how i feel when i see a thread that has X,Y,Z influencer's opinion video about how things should or should not be.



Tell you what we can do next.
Let's all grab hands and jump of the ledge like lemmings.


The amount of influence these people have on the community is just scary.

While i agree wholeheartedly, even such pointless talking heads can have a point.
The truth doesn't stop being true just because a liar told it.

[Dhrizzle]

Warhammer 40k's origin story, The Horus Heresy is the only example of galaxy-multi-dimensional-bargain-with-gods stakes are handled well. This is because the setting, despite its absurd scale is grounded in all the best that fiction has to offer.

The amount of characters, mainly the primarchs, are vast, but they're also highly distinct, extreme personalities, larger than life. They all have a completely unique, well argued, perspective and they're willing to sacrifice everything in order to assert this perspective. Even though the entire galaxy-spanning conflict is split along two factions, just like in WoW, the various philosophies within each faction are often at odds with each other to the point where the characters have as much to fear from their friends as they do from their enemies.

This is something WoW lacks. Sylvanas is merely an antagonist for the sake of being an antagonist. The lore constantly has to bend around her to accommodate her highly whimsical motivations.

The protagonist don't have an actual personality. Thrall is Jaina, Jaina is Anduin, Anduin is Baine, Baine is Bolvar. They are never disagreeing on anything, their wants and desires are identical. They look different but they're the same entity.

Ultimately, The Horus Heresy got away with these giant celestial odds because it was written as a tragedy. The Horus Heresy explained why the 40k universe is such a miserable place in constant strive. It desolved the universe order and everything is conflict.

WoW on the other hand, constantly has to let he player know they've won. They saved the universe time and time again. Every bad guy ends up dead with loot to be distributed. Order and peace restored to the land, the peasants can sleep sound knowing the dragon is dead.

By constantly putting the universe at stake, while at the same time being obviously unable to change it in a major fashion, the game has limited its story potential to repeating the same stale story over and over again.

You're saying that a piece of fiction developed over dozens of books in twenty years and fully explored in a series of 50+ novels is more well realised than a story that is being told in snippets in an interactive environment to facilitate gameplay?

- - - Updated - - -

Sadly i find myself agreeing almost entirely with the PC gamer article.
For some reason they decided to go off the deep end around halfway through Legion. :/

At least we got a nice cinematic of Sylvie's BF getting decapitated by Tyrande.

The worst part of it though is that the smaller storylines really aren't bad most of the time (though understandably some people get embittered over them by association).

I thought they went off the deep-end with WotLK when they revealed most of the Alliance races were robot helpers built by a race of space giants and given a disease that made them fleshy by cosmic tentacle monsters.

[Ivarr]

You're saying that a piece of fiction developed over dozens of books in twenty years and fully explored in a series of 50+ novels is more well realised than a story that is being told in snippets in an interactive environment to facilitate gameplay?

I'm saying that, with a bit of effort and talent, they get to be the same thing.

[Biomega]

I agree entirely that the worst thing about Shadowlands is the premise.

Or rather, how they handled the premise.

Conceptually, it sounds intriguing - what DOES happen when you're in the realm of death, how does causality work in that case, what is the deal with souls, etc.

Except we got none of that.

SL has nothing to do with death, mechanically. NOTHING. WHATSOEVER. It's just another continent like it is in every expansion, we still go around collecting bear asses, and so on. We KILL things in the realm of death, and somehow it seems they, uh, DIE there. And we do, too. And are resurrected the same way we are elsewhere. The exact same way. Absolutely not a single fucking thing is different.

All "Death" is is a storytelling McGuffin, and not even a particularly smart one. Anima is just Azerite, except instead of Horde/Alliance collecting it the Jailer was. Big Bad Guy with a huge faceless and disposable army, that doesn't consider us a threat and will get his asses kicked for his troubles thank you very much. NOW WHERE HAVE I HEARD THIS BEFORE?

It could not be more generic. It being in the realm of death has not mattered one bit so far.

[BrintoSFJ]

this. its always funny to me when people praise the whole kultiran arc in BfA, bc it was a just bad.
granted, not as bad as the whole sylvanas/horde bs, but still bad.

The story of BFA was really really bad until the Nazjatar arc and then it went downhill with Nzoth but I am willing to give the Nzoth ending the benefit of doubt as it is actually a non-ending of old gods as we have seen in many conversations among npc and then the conversation between Turalyong and Alleria.

[Ivarr]

Conceptually, it sounds intriguing - what DOES happen when you're in the realm of death, how does causality work in that case, what is the deal with souls, etc.

What interested me was the opportunity to explore all the different concepts of the afterlife that every race has. It was an opportunity to deepen the World of Warcraft lore, make it more nuanced. It's just that this did not happen. The Shadowlands is its own thing that nobody knew about and it got tacked onto the existing lore without actually interacting with it.

[zhero]

It always puzzles me why people who (presumably) play video games are so eager to slag off games journalists for not being "proper" journalists, like they don't consider gaming to be a "proper" hobby and instead of quitting decide to attack people who might take it a bit more seriously than they do.

because 'gaming' journalists often don't know what they are talking about.

[peepeepoopants]

The problem with Shadowlands story is how badly it has retroactively fucked the entire story of Warcraft. Sargeras, who was the ultimate evil for the majority of the game, was actually just a bitch. So were the Titans. Lich King was just a pawn. The Warcraft games don't really make sense anymore. The Warcraft 3 scourge campaign is now just all of the Jailer's underlings fighting each other, just because. This is the problem. In a world that was making tenuous sense at best, they've set what little logic there was on fire.

[mysticx]

The problem with Shadowlands story is how badly it has retroactively fucked the entire story of Warcraft. Sargeras, who was the ultimate evil for the majority of the game, was actually just a bitch. So were the Titans. Lich King was just a pawn. The Warcraft games don't really make sense anymore. The Warcraft 3 scourge campaign is now just all of the Jailer's underlings fighting each other, just because. This is the problem. In a world that was making tenuous sense at best, they've set what little logic there was on fire.

Yeah, the "It was dreadlords all along!"-thing undermined almost all of the WoW lore, most of known history was just a bunch of dreadlords playing 4D chess with each other, apparently.

It's like there was this lore brainstorm-meeting, somebody asked "Why would the players care about the Jailer? He hasn't done anything they care about.", and Danuser just grabbed a sharpie and penned in "Dreadlords did it all", triumphantly declaring "There, now he's done *everything* they care about!"

[Austilias]

When we consider Shadowland's writing alongside the implications of its various retcons, then it is undoubtedly the worst ever seen in WoW.

[Pheraz]

That is how i feel when i see a thread that has X,Y,Z influencer's opinion video about how things should or should not be.



Tell you what we can do next.
Let's all grab hands and jump of the ledge like lemmings.


The amount of influence these people have on the community is just scary.

Oh yes. Really horrible. Tali is much more neutral on things and also more intelligent.
SL story is really bad and even though 9.1 is better than the initial launched X-Pac it's still not very good but I can still enjoy the game and there is simply no MMORPG outside of wow that I can enjoy. FF style is really horrible for me, the new Amazon MMORPG looks also not good. Let's just hope this X-Pac doesn't last so long

[FAILoZOFF]

The plot is hot garbage, obviously, but not the worst ever, it's hard to unseat BFA and in terms of pure writing incompetence on all fronts TBC still towers over the competition with ease.

To be perfectly honest WarCraft lore and story was always bad, cringe and illogical. It didn't really start with tbc, cata, WoD, BfA and not SL. Problem is that they they kinda knew it and were well aware its thrash and so they did not push it that hard under spotlight like they started doing once they somehow came to conclusion that sht they are doing is worth exposing.
Besides such story narrative style (global scale wold ending threats) should have no place in MMO anyway imho.

[Tamurello]

Plot was okish up to and including MoP, not Tolkien but OK

It has been a hot tub of manure since with the possible exception of Legion which was basically TBC part 2

[peepeepoopants]

Oh yes. Really horrible. Tali is much more neutral on things and also more intelligent.

I had watched one or two of Tali's WoW videos on YouTube so I tried watching one his streams. It was just painful. He looked like he was on the edge of crying and was sucking on some serious copium. Some of my favourite points he made:

• Bobby Kotick is a great CEO - despite laying off staff so he can get larger bonuses
• If you un-sub from WoW you are punishing female writers by not playing through the stories they wrote
• Rabbit girls in FFXIV are sexist

If that's your bar for intelligence, then hey man, all the best to you. But he is WoW-shill incarnate. He will defend the state of the game and Blizzard no matter how bad it gets because he makes his living by doing so.

[Sondrelk]

To be perfectly honest WarCraft lore and story was always bad, cringe and illogical. It didn't really start with tbc, cata, WoD, BfA and not SL. Problem is that they they kinda knew it and were well aware its thrash and so they did not push it that hard under spotlight like they started doing once they somehow came to conclusion that sht they are doing is worth exposing.
Besides such story narrative style (global scale wold ending threats) should have no place in MMO anyway imho.

Let's be honest here. Cata is in many ways the high water mark for WoW expansion plotlines. Deathwing acted like one would expect, his allies were defeated in sensible ways, noone made drastic out of character decisions, and the pacing was perfectly reasonable in that we started by defeating Deathwings allies, lieutenants or others that took advantage in the mayhem before finding a run of the mill macguffin to defeat him.
The only real mark against it was the overreliance on Thrall, otherwise the plot had no real egregious leaps of logic, neither in plot or character.

And if Cata is the peak of writing, then really the writing was never that special. Mostly it trundles along on its camp value and over the top spectacles.

[FAILoZOFF]

I agree entirely that the worst thing about Shadowlands is the premise. The moment it became canon it already did the worst of the damage it was going to do by fucking over death. It is fundamentally, conceptually bad irrespective of any execution purely by removing death as the capstone of any character and instead adding an addendum to it.

BFA on the other hand as you say had among the best premises they've ever done only to completely ruin not just the premise but every single other aspect it touched, torching all remaining plot threads and turning the factions into indistinguishable grey goo. BFA did its damage in escalating order from its pre-release book BTS onwards, becoming worse and worse with every predictable, inevitable turn of the plot.

They should have never touched (that is not adding these spheres at all, in the first place) things like alternative universe, alternative timeline or recent afterlife. That's just asking for trouble with any further story they might go for.

WoW had cool settings in terms of world, races, some characters, minor stories. But whole aspect of its cosmology, time travel and now afterlife is just trash. Afterlife while it was under the veil of unknown and speculation was good as well, but once presented in its full... shape.... meh and I personally don't like any part of it.

[Ezyah]

The whole afterlife plot was doomed from start anyway.

On another note, we almost got rid of asmongold and his chimps, plz let him go.

[Kralljin]

P.S and slightly off-topic while Azshara herself was great, Nazjatar itself was abysmal and dealt the deathblow to the naga as a threat when what should've been a gigantic underwater metropolis consisted 60% of overground ruins, inexplicably revealed as a surface area so that the naga are more vulnerable to attack. This with not one but two irritating support races, with those gilblins going on about friendship being a walking argument for Azshara being right.

To be fair, despite Shadowlands being a complete asspull, it also managed to tarnish very substantial elements of pre existing lore, it however wasn't material that could be used for future content.

But i agree that BfA's biggest sin was throwing so much pre established lore into a dumpster fire.
Between Kul Tiras, Zandalar, the faction war (and revisting Horde vs. Alliance Battlefields all over Azeroth), Nazjatar and the Black Empire, a more "conservative" could've turned that material into 2 (or even 3) expansions easily.
At this point i just feel like that the writers just wanted to remove any potential plotpoint that still exists on Azeroth so that even to option to focus on anything else but the cosmology chart is nonexistent.

The sad part is really, when you look at BfA and simply *remove* 8.3, nothing changes.
Literally nothing, the ending of fourth war in 8.2.5. had a bigger impact on the story than the defeat of N'zoth, because he did achieve nothing when he was freed and we had to expend nothing to defeat him.
Whenever they will pick up that void / old god story again, it will feel massively tarnished simply because they had to throw one of the oldest villains established in WoW under the bus because they scheduled an additional patch for BfA.

[Super Dickmann]

They should have never touched (that is not adding these spheres at all, in the first place) things like alternative universe, alternative timeline or recent afterlife. That's just asking for trouble with any further story they might go for.

WoW had cool settings in terms of world, races, some characters, minor stories. But whole aspect of its cosmology, time travel and now afterlife is just trash. Afterlife while it was under the veil of unknown and speculation was good as well, but once presented in its full... shape.... meh and I personally don't like any part of it.

Or rather, how they handled the premise.

Conceptually, it sounds intriguing - what DOES happen when you're in the realm of death, how does causality work in that case, what is the deal with souls, etc.

That part is an element of the premise as the game simply can't sustain anything else. It's less based on any kind of actual religious exploration of the soul and more on planar level D&D shenanigans where the afterlives are physical places and while there's peculiarities to the inhabitants you can still fight and kill them. Complete with campaigns based in hell. That is where it comes from. It's not really anything that's somehow drastically new or terrible in fantasy, it's tried and true tropes, but it was alien to the Warcraft setting which for the longest time did actually have a more esoteric attitude towards death.

In as much as setting a WoW expansion in the afterlife I'm hard pressed to imagine treating it in any other way than the above given the number of gameplay obligations you have to keep. You still need to kill and collect things, you still need to remove bosses, you still need vegetation, minerals and animals for herbalism, mining and skinning, etc. If you commit to this angle, you simply must use a D&D style approach and this is one of the many reasons why the premise fundamentally fails and should not have been done even if I'm one of the people who thinks the execution is by no means in the ball park of the worst Warcraft has produced.

To be perfectly honest WarCraft lore and story was always bad, cringe and illogical. It didn't really start with tbc, cata, WoD, BfA and not SL. Problem is that they they kinda knew it and were well aware its thrash and so they did not push it that hard under spotlight like they started doing once they somehow came to conclusion that sht they are doing is worth exposing.
Besides such story narrative style (global scale wold ending threats) should have no place in MMO anyway imho.

It's not whether the story is bad in a general sense. It's pulp fantasy it's never going to be Shakespeare. It's whether it can fulfill the premise it sells us on and whether the story enables and enhances the main gameplay beats. It's true that what sets apart current day terrible storytelling from the bad storytelling of yesteryear is mostly the focus put on it. The constant escalation of threats has indeed fucked them as they've now killed every threat and must now continually escalate. The one time they didn't escalate was Mists, coincidentally their best told story, despite its terrible consequences but they've shied away from it since.

[FAILoZOFF]

And if Cata is the peak of writing, then really the writing was never that special. Mostly it trundles along on its camp value and over the top spectacles.

All you said is correct and I agree with you. However... you say like it a bad thing that cata was "simple". I mean, Its not like I wouldn't appreciate deeper and more "sophisticated" story, BUT if they cant deliver such, I'd rather have a simple one, coherent, logical and one that does makes me cringe everytime I am trying to recap it.
Its OK for me for the story to be simple, its just there to give us reasons to go out and do and kill things after all, it just doesn't have to be "4th dimension chess play" while they can't even do a tick tack toe.