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  1. #101
    Bloodsail Admiral Smallfruitbat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidax View Post
    Ditto.

    Danuser is just yet another name in a long list of "people that kill WoW and need to be fired now".

    We're playing this game for 2 decades soon. Much of it is just BS that anyone with a lick of sense can see through.
    The big difference is that I don't think any of those others were posting pictures of themselves on Twitter with statues in the background of Sylvanas captioning them 'the Warchief wants me to get on with work' or whatever it was he said. I agree, the sky is permanently falling in the world of warcraft and there's usually some poor sod who gets the blame for in unnecessarily. But Danuser doesn't help his own case in the slightest.

  2. #102
    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidax View Post
    We're playing this game for 2 decades soon. Much of it is just BS that anyone with a lick of sense can see through.
    The age of a franchise should be a reason for raised expectations, not an excuse for lowered expectations. Dune exists for 6 decades and Lord of the Rings exists for 7 decades. The longer a franchise goes on, the more material and established lore it gets to draw from.

    The problem is that WoW's story is incenstuous. It's not allowed to expand because its authors believe in 'character-driven' stories while clinging onto these established characters for dear life.

    Add to them fully having bought into Bobby Kotick's faith in episodic content for all his games and you got a universe kept in a straightjacket with nowhere to go.

    WoW needs to move from character-driven stories to world-driven stories. This is something George RR Martin understoods. Yes, A Song of Ice and Fire is heavily character-driven. But it's also characters being forced to respond to not just their environment but to millennia of history seeping into their reality. In his book 'The World of Ice and Fire' he lays out the entire timeline. Generation after generation of power grabbing and backstabbing without any preference for any character, all of them stuck in this political meat grinder.

    Blizzard forgot that their main product is a world, it says so right in the name.

  3. #103
    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    The age of a franchise should be a reason for raised expectations, not an excuse for lowered expectations. Dune exists for 6 decades and Lord of the Rings exists for 7 decades. The longer a franchise goes on, the more material and established lore it gets to draw from.
    Dune doesn't really count since everything except arguably the new movie past the first six books, or if I'm being especially biased, God-Emperor is condensed walrus dribble.
    Dickmann's Law: As a discussion on the Lore forums becomes longer, the probability of the topic derailing to become about Sylvanas approaches 1.

    Tinkers will be the next Class confirmed.

  4. #104
    God Emperor is the pinnacle of the series but I get the controversy.

    Still, the world of Dune is ripe of taking. Nobody can say 'wel, it's done, we can't do anything with Dune anymore because we exhausted every possible idea.' That's because the world of Dune is so much more than the story that's written inside of it.

  5. #105
    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    God Emperor is the pinnacle of the series but I get the controversy.

    Still, the world of Dune is ripe of taking. Nobody can say 'wel, it's done, we can't do anything with Dune anymore because we exhausted every possible idea.' That's because the world of Dune is so much more than the story that's written inside of it.
    Oh, to me God-Emperor is the best book by a large margin too, but I'm naff about the last two Herbert books too. They're fine, but weren't really necessary and the dead horse that are the sequels go without saying.

    The world is open for usage, but I'm of two minds on you since so much of Dune are also the hard to visualize ideas, genetic memory, predestination and so forth. It's one of my major quibbles with the new movie in that faithfully recreating the events that take place and the sheer visual spectacle doesn't recreate the flow or point of the story.
    Dickmann's Law: As a discussion on the Lore forums becomes longer, the probability of the topic derailing to become about Sylvanas approaches 1.

    Tinkers will be the next Class confirmed.

  6. #106
    Quote Originally Posted by Super Dickmann View Post
    It's one of my major quibbles with the new movie in that faithfully recreating the events that take place and the sheer visual spectacle doesn't recreate the flow or point of the story.
    Couldn't agree more. There's a youtube comment I made a couple of years ago saying that it wouldn't be possible to adapt this book faithfully. I still keep getting notifications by people saying that this comment aged poorly because Dune is a great film. Yes, it's a great film, I loved it. But it didn't succeed at adapting the book. The individual parts can be faithful at times but there's a ton of layers that made the book so great, that are completely missing.

  7. #107
    Quote Originally Posted by Bloodbayne View Post
    Ghostcrawler wasn't a story guy and nobody said that about Metzen...he's like the father of all the starting lore from Warcraft 2 and 3 basically. Couple of others in there but yeah, your response doesn't make much sense if you know what you're talking about.
    Again I point out Game Directors are historically usually in charge of the WoW story. Danuser isn't even a Game Director.

  8. #108
    The Unstoppable Force Gaidax's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Smallfruitbat View Post
    The big difference is that I don't think any of those others were posting pictures of themselves on Twitter with statues in the background of Sylvanas captioning them 'the Warchief wants me to get on with work' or whatever it was he said. I agree, the sky is permanently falling in the world of warcraft and there's usually some poor sod who gets the blame for in unnecessarily. But Danuser doesn't help his own case in the slightest.
    Or people need to get a tiny bit less cringe. nitpicky and stalker-like. I mean bruh, that is your issue there? A frikkin' twitter post or two?

    So he likes a specific character, big whoop - did not stop her from being yeeted into the maw after she realized she was a major fuckup and a pawn all along.

    /shrug

  9. #109
    Never. Any new characters are gonna be designed by an algo and all the old likeable ones are too stereotypical now.


    Were gonna keep getting BFA book quality writing.

  10. #110
    The Unstoppable Force Gaidax's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    The age of a franchise should be a reason for raised expectations, not an excuse for lowered expectations. Dune exists for 6 decades and Lord of the Rings exists for 7 decades. The longer a franchise goes on, the more material and established lore it gets to draw from.
    When Lord of the Rings and Dune were established they were established as an epic tale, not as a pixely RTS game with a story amounting to "medieval aliens invaded medieval fantasy country, go kill each other or something".

    The problem of Warcraft in story department is that it succeeded with WoW far beyond whatever creators thought or planned for. That's why you had the wild days of TBC where writers clearly did not have a concrete long-term plan with their heroes and salad of stuff they had on hands that suddenly blasted off.

    And that is why it took them years to put this on the rails of some sort of coherent story and universe (that various cringe people incessantly whine "retcon" about). The whole chronicles effort (started by your resident god and savior Metzen), was an attempt to transition from "instant lore" to something with a structure and a plan.

  11. #111
    Immortal Darththeo's Avatar
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    The story of Warcraft was never "good", it was passable and generic fantasy fluff.

    There is nothing wrong with fluff, but if you bother to look at the stories Warcraft had told, they really all fall under that category. The story isn't necessarily worse now outside of the fact they have gone "bigger" in a lot of expansion. Like Legion we defeated the Burning Legion ... then went back to faction conflict which felt like a step backwards because they were setting up the next big thing Journey to the Realms of Death ... which is a cool ass concept, but doesn't really work for the Warcraft universe because there was very little explored there.

    Now for me, the next expansion, Dragonflight or whatever, feels like a step backwards to set up another "big" story to explore. Do I really care about the Dragonflight after my character literally journey to the realms of the afterlife? Why would they care?

    At this point, the story will get better if they stop trying to do a "bigger, cooler thing than the prior things" and just focus on telling a fun story to follow.
    Peace is a lie. There is only passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power.
    Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall set me free.
    –The Sith Code

  12. #112
    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidax View Post
    When Lord of the Rings and Dune were established they were established as an epic tale, not as a pixely RTS game with a story amounting to "medieval aliens invaded medieval fantasy country, go kill each other or something".

    The problem of Warcraft in story department is that it succeeded with WoW far beyond whatever creators thought or planned for. That's why you had the wild days of TBC where writers clearly did not have a concrete long-term plan with their heroes and salad of stuff they had on hands that suddenly blasted off.

    And that is why it took them years to put this on the rails of some sort of coherent story and universe (that various cringe people incessantly whine "retcon" about). The whole chronicles effort (started by your resident god and savior Metzen), was an attempt to transition from "instant lore" to something with a structure and a plan.
    Dune, indeed, hit the ground running. But keep in mind that the Lord of the Rings is merely a spin-off of The Hobbit which never had any aspirations beyond being a children's story either. It's only after The Hobbit that Tolkien started fleshing these ideas out.

    Warcraft's original setting wasn't inherently limited. It was a generic and derivative fantasy world that, again indeed, needed a lot of work fleshing out. And all of that material is still there. All Blizzard has to do is stop treating these zones as a single story that a player courses through once, and instead start regarding them as living territories, constantly at odds with the factions and the whims of the world surrounding it.

    Blizzard occasionally plows a zone into something new. As a little treat. But the moment they start doing that comprehensively, the overarching plot starts to breathe as well.

    Quote Originally Posted by Darththeo View Post
    Now for me, the next expansion, Dragonflight or whatever, feels like a step backwards to set up another "big" story to explore. Do I really care about the Dragonflight after my character literally journey to the realms of the afterlife? Why would they care?
    If Blizzard is willing to forget this expansion exists for the sake of the rest of the setting, then so am I. Gladly.

  13. #113
    The Unstoppable Force Gaidax's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    All Blizzard has to do is stop treating these zones as a single story that a player courses through once, and instead start regarding them as living territories, constantly at odds with the factions and the whims of the world surrounding it.
    World of Warcraft is a game first and foremost, not a novel or a TV show.

    You ought to keep it in mind and set your expectations accordingly.

  14. #114
    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidax View Post
    World of Warcraft is a game first and foremost, not a novel or a TV show.

    You ought to keep it in mind and set your expectations accordingly.
    I would stay it's a world first, a game second, and absolutely, a novel or tv show all the way down the list of priorities.

  15. #115
    The foundation of every game is a story. A story that should make sense.

  16. #116
    Quote Originally Posted by Iain View Post
    Dune, indeed, hit the ground running. But keep in mind that the Lord of the Rings is merely a spin-off of The Hobbit which never had any aspirations beyond being a children's story either. It's only after The Hobbit that Tolkien started fleshing these ideas out.
    No, this is a gross oversimplification. The ideas for Middle-earth had been something he had worked on and off his entire adult life. He was notoriously perfectionist and constantly revising things, which is why the majority of his works weren't completed or published in his lifetime. The Hobbit started out as a story for his children, yes, but quickly became set in the world he had been creating. Unlike The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings was firmly placed in Middle-earth from the beginning of its writing and pulled in concepts and characters (like Sauron) who were decades old. His aspirations were to create English heroic mythology like the Norse and Germanic he had studied his entire career.

    There's reams of evidence and scholarly papers on this, including his own letters discussing his intentions, and The History of Middle-earth series published by his son, Christopher. That series attempts to organize his papers to document and demonstrate the evolution of his ideas. Even this post is far too brief to really get into it.
    Quote Originally Posted by Alex86el View Post
    "Orc want, orc take." and "Orc dissagrees, orc kill you to win argument."
    Quote Originally Posted by Toho View Post
    The Horde is basically the guy that gets mad that the guy that they just beat the crap out of had the audacity to bleed on them.
    Why no, people don't just like Sylvie for T&A: https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...ery-Cinematic/

  17. #117
    Quote Originally Posted by Fabled View Post
    Except we haven't gotten anything 100% Danuser until Dragonflight, BfA was all Afrasiabi fallout, and Shadowlands moreso. Everything else has been picking up the pieces. That said, I'm not a fan of Danuser myself, but I'm slightly hopeful, as thin as that thread is at this point.
    Yeah, I have to admit, I'm really curious how Dragonflight's story will fare. I don't have a high opinion of Danuser either, but I'm completely open to the possibility that he was constrained by Afrasiabi.

    A bonus of cross-faction play might be that players can become detached from the faction stories, and thus the factions actually allowed to do things without worrying achieving a 1:1 parity that's hampered the narrative since vanilla. Whether they'll take advantage of that possibility remains to be seen, but they seem open to shaking things up from how the old guard ran things - for better or worse, maybe.

    What I'd really enjoy seeing is just more worldbuilding, though. I'd like to know about the people and places we're interacting with, rather than just experience the story happening "in the moment" we happen to visit.

  18. #118
    It's true that Tolkien wrote short stories, amongst which the introduction to the Hobbit, and many of which relating to this fictional Nordic world. But it was only later that he decided that this Hobbit was living in this same world and consolidating these works together into the Hobbit.

    As a diversion from these weighty labors, Tolkien composed stories and sketches for his own children. About 1930, one of these beginning with the idle sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” became more and more involved as Tolkien defined hobbits and created adventure for one particular hobbit. Gradually it became clear to Tolkien that Bilbo Baggins’s adventures took place in the same Middle-earth as his high heroic tales, but during a much later era
    https://images.randomhouse.com/teach...0345534835.pdf

    Even still, there was no actual War of the Ring before he finished the Hobbit. The ring was just a magical item that rendered the wearer invisible. All of the lore of the rings, also set in this realm of collected works about a fictional Nordic realm. Came about after:

    FOREWORD (To the Fellowship of the Ring)

    This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it. It was begun soon after The Hobbit was written and before its publication in 1937; but I did not go on with this sequel, for I wished first to complete and set in order the mythology and legends of the Elder Days, which had then been taking shape for some years. I desired to do this for my own satisfaction, and I had little hope that other people would be interested in this work, especially since it was primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues.
    When those whose advice and opinion I sought corrected “little hope” to “no hope,” I went back to the sequel, encouraged by requests from readers for more information.
    This is not to disparage Tolkien. Far from it, it shows that his world was in constant flux, a living thing that grew and evolved over time. It shows how simple concepts can expand into rich textured tapestries that people can get lost in.

    World of Warcraft can still be like that. Despite anything that's been written before.

  19. #119
    Herald of the Titans Sluvs's Avatar
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    If we are going to be honest, the only really good stories in WoWs universe was Arthas and MoP. Everything else was mediocre.

    Always prioritzing shock value over actual development.

    Always creating new stuff instead of building upon what already exists.
    I don't want solutions. I want to be mad. - PoorlyDrawnlines

  20. #120
    The Unstoppable Force Gaidax's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Shadowferal View Post
    The foundation of every game is a story. A story that should make sense.
    Really?

    There are plenty of great games with token story, Warcraft itself started as such. Game wins by having interesting and catchy gameplay first, story shmory - vast majority of players don't give a damn, so lets get that fable out of the way there.

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