Do you think the writers are "incompetent"?

[A Chozo]

Yes

Nerubians have a distinct, ancient architectonic style
The Scourge blended that style into their own, which is what we see in places like Naxxramas and your regular Scourge buildings before Saronite
...But now, Maldraxxus is the birthplace of that style - so now what, the Nerubians' style being that similar is a coincidence?

This type of discrepancy happens too many times.

And I agree with you about the novels thing, but IMO if they made some recap of the novel happen in-game it would fix lots of problems.

[ek0zu]

The fact that noone cares about the story the past decade speaks from itself

[Mehrunes]

Considering they hardly care for consistency, they will never be able to write a good overarching story, not to mention they write extremely shallow and have shoddy world building.

You yourself mentioned in a recent thread they don't have even the basics of world building covered. As such I'd say "shoddy" is way too much praise for their world building.

1.) WoW is an ancient game that cleaves to older traditions of writing. By which I mean that people often forget that WoW is itself a product of the early aughts, a time when story in gaming was only starting to rise to the relative prominence it has now. Held to the standard of some modern games or indie darlings with cerebral plots and compelling storylines WoW does fall somewhat flat. It relies more on the age of its own IP than any kind of internal narrative richness, and the story is more akin to older games where the narrative is more sketched than belabored - until later expansions it more left the world-building aspect largely to the players' collective imagination. I think the newer writing team is trying to "update" WoW's story in a sense to the more modern conventions, but obviously they are somewhat hamstrung by the older lore as well as deep-set loyalties in the WoW fandom.

Oh, please. Pretty much all the classing D&D-based cRPGs are older than WoW and they blow its writing quality out of the water. And given how WoW's writers completely disregard old lore whenever it's inconvenient to them writing their "modern conventions" masterpieces, the old lore isn't really what hamstrings them in that department.

2.) The playerbase is highly resistant to change or progress in the story of beloved characters. You see this one over and over - there is a definite sense that players do not want their favorite characters to change or progress, regardless where that logical progression may lead. Sometimes I think this is down to just the nature of MMORPG's in general, where there is an expectation of a less dynamic world that is paradoxically juxtaposed with a desire for organic change. The expression of this basically comes down to the translated sentence: "Oh, I want new content, I just don't want anything to fundamentally change." This resistance to change takes many forms, but in the lore department it often takes the appearance of protectionism toward certain characters, or of the world itself. It is the primary reason why I think the Cata revamp was received so poorly, because it essentially ended a world the playerbase was enamored of and replaced it with something updated and new, but not the same as what was.

WoW has never seen anything resembling logical progression. Entire continents are thrown into lore limbo whenever they are irrelevant to the current story and when they return to those zones after some time they can't do something as basic (and crucial to logical progression) as asking themselves "what would have logically happened since the last time we focused on this zone" question. They randomly retroactively change the motivations of key players of their current plots just so they can get them where they need them for those plots to even function, even if they have to throw internal monologues to the garbage.

When you yourself write "much books", I wouldn't exactly judge the writings of others. Also, yay, another Overlordd whine thread! You are really on a roll these days kiddo!

What if I told you that not all languages have a split between "much" and "many" like English does? The OP is not guaranteed to be a native English speaker or to be proficient in it as their second+ language. As such, the logical link between them making such a mistake and their ability to judge the writing of others that you tried to construct here doesn't really exist.

[InfiniteCharger]

The reason the story went off a cliff is because of choices made in making the MMO.
Many of the complaints I believe stem from that: changing demons to corrupt draenei, merging races into factions, faction stories trumping race stories, etc, factions teaming up against big bad as much as they fight, no clear resolution to the faction conflict, etc.

In the RTS each race was its own distinct faction with a rich lore and history of its own right. Having so many races in the RTS with such a deep lore made the world building much better.

Also, another big impact of going from MMO to RTS is continuity/consistency in story from one expasion to the next. In the RTS, characters and plots stayed consistend from one chapter to the next, creating compelling character arcs. Now they are just mining the lore and twisting it to justify new concepts for new expansions and not really resolving any open stories from previous ones. Each expansion is pretty much stand alone and hardly ties in with the expansion prior to it. This is why WOTLK was the pinnacle of the entire franchise in terms of storytelling and game play.

[Malira]

I think they're not *great* writers, and also MMO storytelling over 15 years is difficult.

Like, the example I've seen for "good MMO storytelling" a lot is FF14, and I've been playing the for the last few months and so far can say its tropey but solid. However, that kind of storytelling wouldn't work with WoW's world or playerbase. So far for me FF14 doesn't feel like a World, it feels like a story I am being railroaded through. While World of Warcraft was always a... World. You choose which zones to level in, which quests to do etc. Plus, if they tried to force WoW players to play through all the plot to get to the end, there would be riots. FF14 tells you at the beginning what sort of game it is. Right now in WoW it feels like the writer's are trying for FF14-style main plotlines you need to level through (like the war campaigns, the cape quest etc) while also allowing new players to jump in at the end. It... hasn't really worked.

Also they suffer from the same problem superhero comics suffer from. Characters that have been around for literal decades, with whatever character arc they originally had long over (for the RTS characters anyway). Keep them the same, people get bored of them. Have them change too much, people get mad that this isn't the character they fell in love with anymore. Add an absolutely massive cast and they need to balance character focus which leads to its own problems - how many characters have people criticised for being overexposed or sidelined? It doesn't help that some of the writers have obvious favourite focus characters - and have interpretations of them that don't gel with the playerbase.

There's a reason why a lot of the best writing in the game is in individual questlines and zones - it has a beginning, middle and end, and the player can feel like the main character with their questing buddies. Once it gets to whole expansion plots they run into more difficuties, especially as they try and balance different zones, plots and themes so players don't get bored of "too much orcs" or "too much green". And this isnt getting into multi-expansion character storylines, where just like eras of superheroes the characterisation changes according to the plot/theme they want to tell.

People harken back to a time when the writing was great, but honestly I'd say it was just unambitious - and stuff like Burning Crusade shows how terrible early WoW writing can be. You can't have stuff like the RTS since that's effectively a single player storyline focused on individual characters rather than a World. Now Blizz is trying to be more ambitious with their storytelling, maybe for their own reasons, maybe to feed an audience which demands more meaty plots in video games.

This is a lot of rambling with not much point but basically: MMO storytelling of WoW's style is hard in the hands of good writers. And blizzard's writers are average basically.

[Kyphael]

Too many cooks in the kitchen and they try too hard to have too many soap opera-like plots instead of focusing on gameplay.

[Aucald]

Oh, please. Pretty much all the classing D&D-based cRPGs are older than WoW and they blow its writing quality out of the water. And given how WoW's writers completely disregard old lore whenever it's inconvenient to them writing their "modern conventions" masterpieces, the old lore isn't really what hamstrings them in that department.

Both subjective and also I wasn't referring to just WoW, but its RTS roots all the way back to the early 90's. I also wouldn't call the old Gold Box D&D-based CRPG's masterful cases in writing, either; generally they relied on the person already knowing the world in question first and sketched a basic story on top of the gaming system.

WoW has never seen anything resembling logical progression. Entire continents are thrown into lore limbo whenever they are irrelevant to the current story and when they return to those zones after some time they can't do something as basic (and crucial to logical progression) as asking themselves "what would have logically happened since the last time we focused on this zone" question. They randomly retroactively change the motivations of key players of their current plots just so they can get them where they need them for those plots to even function, even if they have to throw internal monologues to the garbage.

That's something that happens in *all* MMORPG's, though - if a specific region isn't germane to the story, well, nothing basically happens there insofar as current content is concerned. After a few expansions the world itself becomes too massive to consistently update with every major movement of the story - that's an unrealistic expectation on its face, unless you want fallow periods that last years while the developers attempt to bring everything up-to-date any time a major event occurs. As for "random retroactive changes" I would agree this has happened, but I think it happens a lot less than most people claim. More often the claim is made when a character changes in a manner that a specific player doesn't like (e.g. Garrosh going evil), but when said change is both consistent and realistic with the story being told.

[Flurryfang]

I don't think they are incompetent writers, they are just not given much to work with and are maybe not that experienced working within the limits of an MMO.

I also think its a bit bad, that there is currently no "lead story writer" for the entire game. When you look at stuff like books, short stories, the Afterlife videos and the ingame story, its clear that there are multiple visions when it comes to telling the story of WoW. It became especially clear when they made Lords of War in WoD, where the short stories / videos told a completly different story compared to what was told in-game.

So yeah, there are problems with the writer team, but the primary problem is just that there is not a clear "1" vision for the story of WoW, and that the story is not a big priority in WoW, when it comes to content.

[Greengrim]

I don't mind the writers being incompetent. Goofing up here and there. I don't mind the weak plots and the strange twists.

WHAT I DO HATE HOWEVER, is the freaking slow pace at which the story is developing.

[Selah]

I think they do well given the difficult task they have of writing books for an MMO. Christie does a really good job and I've been really enjoying her books mostly. However, Madeleine Roux isn't a good fit for this game. Shadows Rising was... a travesty of a book. Lines like Turalyon accepting "the darkness in Alleria's heart" felt like something off of Tumbler account and not a New York Times best seller. It's sad too, because that couple could be a legit and interesting way to create a microcosm of the void and light and they can work together. Instead, it's a Twilight book in WoW.

[Powerogue]

It really, really depends. You have to keep in mind both Old Soldier and Med'an are "written by Blizzard."

I generally have a more positive view than the cynics here because I have a wider Willing Suspension of Disbelief and go into everything trying to enjoy it instead of trying to hate it. Still, I'll criticize them when they actually deserve it.

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

The fact that noone cares about the story the past decade speaks from itself

Why are you speaking for me?

[Sluvs]

I don't think they are incompetent. I just think they can't translate their storytelling well into the game. I also think this cosmic scale sucks.

The Shadows Rising book was pretty good. It shows that they know their characters and their world. But an MMO is not a book and when an event happens, we expect the world to react, but more often then not, the reactions is anemic and quite annoying. It also bugs me that they have a tendency to retread old stories.

[Aucald]

The fact that noone cares about the story the past decade speaks from itself

The demographics and traffic of this very subforum belies that pretty strongly.

[Sluvs]

E.G.: I thought Legion was pretty good lore wise, my biggest issue came with BfA. It bothers me that it was MoP but without the charm and heartfelt storytelling.

[Pakheth]

Incompetent? No, I don't think so. Flawed? Certainly. Much of the regular frequency of criticism I think stems from a variety of sources that don't really have much to do with the quality of the writing, though; which while a definite hostage to gameplay mechanics and "rule of cool" type storytelling has been pretty consistency from the get-go (all the way back to its roots in WC1's lore). I've identified what I think of the three central pillars of criticism when it comes to the Warcraft universe's writing and popular criticism from the playerbase.

1.) WoW is an ancient game that cleaves to older traditions of writing. By which I mean that people often forget that WoW is itself a product of the early aughts, a time when story in gaming was only starting to rise to the relative prominence it has now. Held to the standard of some modern games or indie darlings with cerebral plots and compelling storylines WoW does fall somewhat flat. It relies more on the age of its own IP than any kind of internal narrative richness, and the story is more akin to older games where the narrative is more sketched than belabored - until later expansions it more left the world-building aspect largely to the players' collective imagination. I think the newer writing team is trying to "update" WoW's story in a sense to the more modern conventions, but obviously they are somewhat hamstrung by the older lore as well as deep-set loyalties in the WoW fandom.

2.) The playerbase is highly resistant to change or progress in the story of beloved characters. You see this one over and over - there is a definite sense that players do not want their favorite characters to change or progress, regardless where that logical progression may lead. Sometimes I think this is down to just the nature of MMORPG's in general, where there is an expectation of a less dynamic world that is paradoxically juxtaposed with a desire for organic change. The expression of this basically comes down to the translated sentence: "Oh, I want new content, I just don't want anything to fundamentally change." This resistance to change takes many forms, but in the lore department it often takes the appearance of protectionism toward certain characters, or of the world itself. It is the primary reason why I think the Cata revamp was received so poorly, because it essentially ended a world the playerbase was enamored of and replaced it with something updated and new, but not the same as what was.

3.) Factionalism. Probably the most consistent source of player disharmony and anger - just the notion that the story, the writers, and/or the developers themselves have a pronounced favoritism toward one faction or the other. Accusations of bias from either side telescope out into players heaping scorn on the story itself for enabling said biases, electing totems who represent "all the problems with WoW's writing," etc. etc. This issue is exacerbated many times over by the fact that the factions are forced to exist in a relative state of balanced status quo by the game mechanics themselves, and so there can't be a way for either competitive faction to essentially "win" within the narrative. One faction loses a major city, the other faction must lose one, etc. etc. This of course also bleeds into the other two pillars accordingly, as victory or defeat must also spell change to those characters involved, and must also manifestly change the world or else feel meaningless in the long term. This is itself, in my eyes, the ultimate narrative failure of BfA itself - a convoluted story-arc of war and conflict spanning the world of Azeroth, which ultimately is forced to end in detente and resumption of the effective status quo.

Is the story of the Warcraft universe flawed? Certainly. But I also think it's more or less fine for what it is. It *could* be more than that, but I think it would take a writing team with, let's face it, a lot more mechanical and technical skill to "fix" the issues with the story than the game currently has. It would also involve some significant subtextual retcons to bring about, which if I were to guess is what is likely coming - but for good or bad I can't really say.

I think you sum it up well so kudos to you.

[Wyattbw09]

Is this another roundabout post were what the OP really means is OMG they put Drakka in a cinematic I am going to lose my mind thread?

WOW writing is fine? I get hating on Cristine Golden is all the rage these days, but most of that is straight up nonsense. People watch way too much of The Quartering and that brand of crap.

If you really want to see what a transition for good writing to bad writing looks like, go read the last few Magic the Gathering novels compared to their stuff before that. That is writing gone in the absolute wrong direction.

[ThatsOurEric]

They need a single head writer to oversea the story. I'd get rid of the rest.

[Arrashi]

Calling them incompetent is an insult....to all incompetent people in the world.

I find it hilarious that such massive company as blizzard can't hire few proffesional writers. Then again, they can't hire proffesional artist to draw their comics either.

[Goldielocks]

People need to understand that being able to write and being able to criticize are different skills. The various critics you see on the internet would not necessarily be able to write their own movies or TV shows. The opposite is true as well. I’ve seen this comment at least twice already in this thread.

But do I think they’re incompetent? Sort of. Not in creativity, but in more technical aspects. They don’t care about story cohesion, focus too heavily on ensuring the lore is second to gameplay experience, and have been lacking in some common sense (follow through on buildup):

This universe has many, many retcons. Sometimes it works, others it doesn’t.

I think the fact that Blizzard warps the story around player experience is worse. MMO storytelling mostly suffers because of this. You can’t have a faction truly win. Progress stagnates is when “favoritism” is thrown around.

For some reason, Blizzard thought it would be a great idea to gimp Whispers of N’Zoth. After all that build up of Ny’alotha, we don’t get to explore it? A LOTR rip off ending cinematic? Barely any new content without reused areas? Seriously? Goddamn 8.3 sucked.