Is there a [Lore] ripcord to be pulled?

[Amarys]

A lore ripcord would literally be.

We lose, zovaal goes and unmakes reality, it goes horribly wrong.

We wake up time skipped on azeroth. the world has changed.

I for one would love to see that.. well as long as they get more competent writers. I doubt Blizzard is brave enough to do that though.

[Progenitor Aquarius]

I honestly don't know what are they going to do with the story. It seems to be interesting, but you never know the plot will develop. I'm really hopeful though. I think they should have things planned as they released the Shadowlands. It would seem like they had the story prepared back in the Legion.

[Skirdus]

Story doesn't improve until they remove the people at the company responsible for its current state.

You know exactly who I'm referring to

[Powerogue]

That Sylvanas no longer exists. Her soul has been fully merged with her good side now. Now she will probably become much more stoic, constipated, and a hero. its in her blue eyes.

Sylvanas's eternal punishment: trapped on The Maw Toilet.

[Iheartnathanos]

All too often, I think people confuse 'lore' and 'narrative'.

'Lore' is really the background information that makes the setting feel alive. Narrative is the overall plot. I firmly believe that expansions such as BFA and WoD which have garbage overarching narratives have excellent lore - think of, for instance, the wonderful religious conflict of the aarakoa in WoD, or the richly realised cultures of the Zandalari and Kul Tirans (which, I personally believe, has no match anywhere else in Blizzard's body of work. We know more about these cultures than Stormwind humans for fuck's sake). For me, MoP represented a triumph of both lore and narrative.

Shadowlands seems like a dire failure of both narrative and lore. Blizzard can easily course correct narrative by telling better overarching stories, but the wound on the lore left by the bullshit they are pulling with the afterlife and the nathrezim is hard to heal.

Not many people talk about this, but the speed with which the current creatives dispatched THE two most important over-arching evils (sargeras and N'zoth) to make way for The Jailer, a meaningless villain with almost no foreshadowing, is Shadowland's greatest sin.

You can fix the narrative, but patching the lore back up will be hard.

[pewpmeiser]

The narrative of the expansions/patches are honestly one of the last things they work on. They have tons of lore to pull from, but how they connect things is just firing from the hip.

[Nzx]

No, because who gives a shit about the storyline in this game?

Seriously, half of the people who post here are massive weeb anime fans, how can you possibly judge the story of this game when your ideal entertainment medium is power fantasies of high school boys who want to look like Dante from DMC and have girls throw themselves at their feet just for existing? Get real.

[Ardenaso]

the only lore ripcord at this point is make a "WoW 2" where it goes back to Vanilla; no more retcons and no more forced stuff

[Th3Scourge]

What they should do is fire Danuser because he is a fucking hack that can't write for shit

The worst part is that he thinks he's way smarter than he actually is. The bald-headed fuck butchered the lore

[mysticx]

A lore ripcord would literally be.

We lose, zovaal goes and unmakes reality, it goes horribly wrong.

We wake up time skipped on azeroth. the world has changed.

"Time-skipped on Azeroth" would mean a world revamp, and we all know how well the previous one went over (Especially since Blizzard's idea of "Revamp" is "Just wreck everything"), are there still beautiful places left on Kalimdor or EK?

[Felrane]

Zovaal attemps to remake the universe in his image, he fails and is wiped from reality completely. Nozdormu shows up and uses the last of his power to hold reality together long enough to send us back in time to right after N'zoth defeat but falls to the Infinite in doing so. Sylvanas is captured right away and executed. With the help of Odyn/Bolvar/Bwonsamdi open a portal to the Shadowlands and execute Denathrius and undo the drought he was causing. With Zovaal being wiped out means no more Arbiter so we get to work with the Covenants to create a new one out of their shared Anima along with all the other Gods of Death that exist. Then we peace out back to Azeroth closing the gateway forever!

[Soeroah]

"The story is too full of retcons, you know what it needs, a huge retcon" is a position that I'll never understand.

If you're just annoyed with the direction of the story, fair enough, but the kind of retcons that undo lore aren't the solution to that.

[Shadowferal]

They'd have to take the game offline for a year to fix the story. Toss everything out back to WotLK...hmm... Cataclysm wasn't too bad, and the tonal shift that was MoP I found fairly amazing. (Although I'd rewrite Garrosh more fairly) To me All else after that would be the big teaser, because nothing should be the same.

[Soon-TM]

No, because who gives a shit about the storyline in this game?

Seriously, half of the people who post here are massive weeb anime fans, how can you possibly judge the story of this game when your ideal entertainment medium is power fantasies of high school boys who want to look like Dante from DMC and have girls throw themselves at their feet just for existing? Get real.

Imagine posting in the Lore subforum just to lecture everyone about how nobody cares about the story

More OT, I think that while WoD was the very moment when they jumped the proverbial shark, the harm it actually did to the Warcraft universe was quite limited. BfA and especially SL will be far more poisonous - imagine e.g. going back to Azeroth as a spiritual leader (priest/shaman/monk) and having to tell your followers that almost everything you taught about the afterlife is factually wrong.

[Nraktja]

I wish. As people have said already, they have a huge opportunity with it if it's "remaking reality" they're gonna go for. They could do timey-wimey alternative timeline shit they pulled with WoD and this time apply it to the *current* timeline to alter it, not make the events that happened a branch like in WoD. I would love nothing more than the shitshow of BfA and SL to have never existed but a part of me says, again as people pointed out, the same people will *still* be in charge of the lore and I would not trust them with my pot of basil, let alone a whole narrative encompassing multiple characters (which they have done a sufficient job enough of butchering by now).

So. A *true* lore ripcord would be the entire replacement of the narrative team, starting with you-know-who, and then place the bricks from there. But I see a little chance of it happening unfortunately.

So, back to saying fuck the canon and accepting my headcanon when it comes to WoW Lore, especially everything post-Legion, as has become popular in WoW fandom nowadays when people realized that Shadowlands story is going fuck-all.

[Paperfox]

I read somewhere once that no idea is bad, if you want proof there was a meetings someplace where someone pitched a movie about Sharks and Tornadoes.

Blizz: Challenge accepted!

[Super Dickmann]

No. To perform surgery on the narrative you'd have to go back multiple expansions and it's exponentially easier to use the current setup and the Blue Man's Thanos snap to edit whichever parts of the story the current writing staff don't like. Suppose you make all of Shadowlands a hallucination and Sylvanas strokes out off-screen. Now you're at the end point of BFA where the factions and all their major characters are identical clones of each other who've come to an absurd peace and you've killed the last Old God in a side patch. You could go back to the end of Legion and do BFA: Actual Faction War edition, but given the company is currently focusing on making harem staff be unisex I somehow doubt they'd have the chops to tell such a narrative. Go any further back and you're in such towers of storytelling like killing every WC3 TFT character on a glowing neon spaceship run by jigsaw pieces because they went insane off-screen, or helping put together multi-coloured pieces of Thrall and ruining the space time continuum so he can shoot a laser beam at a dragon.

Given both the skill of the writer staff even more so now that Brooks, one of the best in their stable, is out and the quality of the narrative well before then, lol TBC, lol Green Jesus, lol the lessons of Pandaria, such changes would be mostly turning the narrative even more towards what the current staff enjoy. There is however a higher chance for them to go hammier with it, so more Legion-tier stabbing the planet and less of Sadfang/Sylvanas pondering whether chopping/shooting children is wrong.

[Sondrelk]

Well for one the idea that you can pull the ripcord on the lore like you did with covenants is meaningless to begin with. The old lore is still there, you cannot change the way the content is consumed in the same way you could change covenants to be freely swappable.

As for major retcons I am of the belief that doing so would just be infinitely worse than simply trying to make the best of what we have.
N'zoth was defeated in a patch that felt bolted on, that isn't going to change by having it all be a dream. You can still come up with some mumbo-jumbo to allow us to fight him again, but for real this time, but it would then be better to do so within the framework we have over just tearing it down to start again.

[username993720]

No. They believe this progressive bullshit is the epitome of modern fantasy storytelling.