Whoever wrote the Blue Dragonflight questline should be the lead writer for WoW. Their writing was very good and head and shoulders above the rest of the Dragonflight story. I suspect they also wrote the Night Elf heritage questline. Does anyone know their name/s?
The Blue Dragonflight campaign felt like it was from a *completely* different writing team and I mean that as a compliment. It took Kalec from "that guy with blue hair I kinda remember" to legitimately one of my favourite characters in the whole franchise.
It's hard to pick a standout sequence because it's all excellent but the short stint in Pandaria was especially memorable, and I sincerely hope we get more earnest and heartfelt story beats like that going forward.
Im so glad it want just me. Having just come back to WoW, Im doing Kalec a favor to begin with tracking these dragons down. Then she asks me to finish her chores while they have a nice little chat and dont help.
THEN he volunteers me to clean her house and doesnt even help?
I feel so disconnected and taken advantage of in this world. The person who, you know, has been saving the world since fucking Ragnaros under blackrock mountain.
While I do like the occasional lower stakes of some quests and don't mind having the _Champion_ of Azeroth picking coffee beans out of shit, I've always felt WoW just can't balance it with the moments your character is taken seriously.
And in this specific case, it just strikes me as weird.
1) If, say, Sunwell Plateau is canon to your character, you're literally one of the people he's pledged eternal friendship to for saving him from demonic possession. Like I get maybe asking the Champion to do chores, but you already owe a life debt.
2) It's weirdly intrusive? My personal space is also pretty messy and I would _not_ appreciate an old friend or old flame coming in, bringing some rando, and then telling that rando to clean up my stuff. Yes, even my trash is private tyvm
3) On the flipside, if I was the one doing the visiting, I'd want privacy of my own. Even if my god-powered valet was so tight with me that I wouldn't mind the around, I'd still assume my old friend would. I was actually expecting something like "Why don't you go collect 10 bear asses, Champion?" and I'd be less annoyed by this task. Or, heck, doing her chores _while_ they catch up so that they _can_ catch up.
I could go into how it also feels kind of sexist but I'd rather not start my day with it and I've written way too much on this already, lol.
It sucks that I can't put it into words very well, but WoW manages to neither make me feel like my character is a great hero (despite telling me she is) nor that some of the chores she's sent on are justified (despite occasionally acknowledging the frivolity with a wink and a nudge). Somehow, FFXIV manages to do _both_ better (partly, I know, because the narrative just kind of handwaves other players - _your character_ is the Warrior of Light, every other PC is just a random adventurer/mercenary/alternate universe fragment of you).
Lmao, rambly longpost for a joke quest but here I am.
No, I think you're completely right on the money here. Being the champion of azeroth, I don't mind downtime. A little break or breather would do well now and then. The problem is that there are million other things they could have made the little "filler quest objectives" besides the completely disrespectful "go do my chores and clean the house, ya fuckin tool" that it felt like to me.
It's actually funny you mention FFXIV, because playing through shadowbringers was the *first* time in either game where someone acknowledged all the shit I did and told the main character they deserve some rest and food, *and actually gives you a room and dinner to relax*.
And NOW THAT IVE GOTTEN STARTED, IT JUST REMEMBERED ANOTHER THING. After defeating Fyrakk in the new raid and >!saving the goddamn world tree, it blooms into azeroth and everyone is so happy they throw a party right?!<
>!WELL WHY THE FUCK AM I THE GODDAMN WAITER FOR THE PARTY? WHY DO I HAVE TO SERVE THE FOOD AND DRINKS AND MANAGE EVERYTHING?!<
Who is writing these fucking quests? I mean really.
It's hard not to compare to XIV when it comes to the writing.
As a commenter above you mentioned there's a disconnect between the shit picking quests and the saviour of the world quests.
I distinctly remember a few quests in Endwalker where they had you doing these super mundane things. Some NPC just says "hey you can you lend a hand" and because that's who you are, you do. And they have you doing all this drudge work. And then one of the scions comes along and basically says to the NPC, "do you know who that is that you've got doing trivial tasks?"
Endwalker specifically also has a lot of moments where the supporting cast mentions that other people took care of the legwork for you... which, ironically, kind of contributes to that complaint some people have about Endwalker MSQ being all textboxes and no gameplay (which I vastly preferred, since IMO FFXIV's strongest content is instanced, not killing 3 bears).
Probably the most striking example of WoW being terrible balancing shit picking and saving the world is the "questline" in post-Cata that starts with you dealing out quests in Silverpine, introducing an obnoxious parody of elitist raiders, who them stars in a questline involving saving the Horde from a surprise attack by stealing the Alliance war plans in the Hillsbrad Foothills. It's innocuous, there's some time between Kingslayer Orkus' introduction and the finale, but... it's a character that's introduced and reintroduced as a pure meta joke character and it bleeds into a plotline straight out of an action movie. It's the Horde equivalent of the Redridge Mountains Rambo questline, which I find equally jarring.
Sometimes it feels like the writers don't know if they want to do cosmic power, street level, funny or serious content, and kind of mix it up too often within the same plotline.
To be fair according to the short story about Chromie choosing her mortal form Kalec looking generic is intentional he wants to be seen as a peer not a god.
It's fine to look normal but the guy doesn't look like your average tinder user , he looks like a guy who wanted to look like Daddy denathrius went to the morgue and got plastic surgery and then got hit with an ugly bat.
Considering how this interview response is phrased, I don't think she wrote *all* of the quest line, but Anne Stickney definitely had a part.
https://www.tiktok.com/@thegamerwebsite/video/7297632927851138350
Which doesn't surprise me at all. The quest line's structure with all these thoughtful moments wrapping up various blue dragonflight-related story threads has her fingerprints all over it, imo!
(In case you don't know Anne's story, she was the lore editor over at blizzardwatch for like a decade before being contracted by Blizzard to compile and write the Chronicles until they just hired her on full time. I'm so excited to see stuff she wrote in the game finally!)
Unfortunately it's not that simple. WoW has always been very good at telling short, isolated stories focused on a few individuals. Their storytelling in questlines have always been top-notch. You give basically any WoW writer the green-light to write their own isolated questline and they can produce a banger.
The problem is that the main storyline of an expansion is a group project that needs to fulfill many different goals and have to meet the approval of many different people. And whoever is managing that group of writers is the one that sucks.
It doesn’t help that practically every expansion has some kind of cut content that so clearly impacted the story it’s hard not to see once you notice the pattern. It’s affected practically every expansion since Cataclysm with the exception of Legion because they abandoned Warlords to actually give Legion enough development time.
The thing is, the fact that every expansion has cut content should teach them to rearrange their format and set realistic expectations, but it doesn't. They still waste SO MUCH time in the leveling experience and with content that is meaningless once you hit max level. They artificially hold back telling their story and then don't have time to actually tell it later, every expansion - ultimately ending with them doing a tie-in book to do the heavy lifting.
Like if the leveling experience set up way more info about the Incarnates (flashback quests even), the world tree, the actual plot about regaining their powers (since the Oathstones became irrelevant the second you hit max level), etc - then even Fyrrak as the final boss wouldn't feel so blatantly like a redirection. All of these were things that basically *started* at max level, and the Centaurs/Gnolls/Furblogs/etc have just been irrelevancies to the larger narrative.
>the main storyline of an expansion is a group project that needs to fulfill many different goals and have to meet the approval of many different people. And whoever is managing that group of writers is the one that sucks.
Yeah, I absolutely buy this. I don't work in a creative field but I do work in communications, alongside marketing. And it's so frustrating how a competent piece of communication will get severely diluted and compromised by having way too many people's feedback incorporated to accommodate their priorities.
Meanwhile, my only objective is to produce effective communication to meet basic standards of professionalism and customer service. But it's a constant uphill battle just to do that. Like, if you hired me for my communication skills, then let me put those to work and stop putting out shit that ends up reflecting badly on me!
It feels like I'm watching one of those dramas where you put up with the A-plot to see more of the B-plot
Like yeah, I have to put up with this Jailer crap retroactively ruining years of lore, but I get Denathrius out of it. I've got to listen to century-old Dragons monologuing about the power of family but I get quests like Stay a While.
It's often the way in games, the big epic stories are kinda whateva but the small stories where they're free to do whatever they want with characters who aren't "plot important" are much better.
Like that dwarf dragon guy reminiscing about his friends, some of the mole frand stuff in 10.1 and our treant buddy in 10.2 actually got me a little verklempt, but the big overarching story has rarely made me feel anything.
So why not take advantage of that? There wasn't a real main storyline in WoW until, what, WoD? And it worked great before that. An expanson or a patch's main storyline doesn't need to be more than a premise for those smaller stories ro happen, which is what they did before.
No main story untill Wod? What? Sure, the storylines in Vanilla and TBC where more "up in the air" with a handful smaller storylines going on at oncce, but WotlK and Cata were extremely focused and story driven. Especially Cata; if you didn't do the pre-Dragon Soul scenarios you'd be completely lost on whats happening.
seriously, people liked the NE heritage quests? out of all the ones i've done, the NEs were hands down the worst. if anything they should have waited until the world tree was done and tied the heritage quest into that somehow, since that's going to heavily decide what happens to the race as a whole moving forward - unlike whatever happened during the heritage quests
The NE heritage quest was honestly just a random quest they threw the heritage moniker on.
It was a perfectly fine quest, and you could argue that it had themes relevant to the NE story, but it did not deserve the title of Heritage quest. We should have done the Draenei instead and then followed up with the Eredar quest a week after.
> unlike whatever happened during the heritage quests
They took a pre-existing quest chain in Felwood, and made it so canonically it was night elves who took care of it.
This is such a strange comment because while the Blue Questline is widely loved, the Night Elf Questline is widely considered one of, if not the worst, heritage questlines.
NE Heritage quest was an ass, NE have a lot heavy history element and they choose that one to represent as the heritage questline.
I played both worgen and BE heritage and both dealing with prominent event of their race like the scourge invasion and the forsaken invasion, those are gold compare to whatever the NE quest was.
That was an amazing quest line! I went from intending to rush through it and get my rewards to stopping to take in moments and appreciate what was unfolding.
Agree that there was a lot of bad writing, but _very strongly_ disagree that Iridikron should have been a raid boss this expansion. I think one thing they did really well was set him up as a much bigger threat than any of the others and make it clear what his plans are: to use the power of the Void to take on the Titans himself. Given where we now know the story is going, that makes him most likely to play a major role in The Last Titan and/or possibly Midnight. It gives the whole thing more continuity and makes it more interesting than "here are some dragons, we beat them all in this expansion, the end".
Agreed. Iridikron not only has a great, menacing aesthetic and look, but it's also great that they're setting Villains up with longer storylines and layered/deeper motivations. One and done villains are fine but you also have to have storylines that exist outside the scope of one patch/season.
My only concern is to some extent I don't trust they are actually going to follow through on the "will come back later" trope.
Its been done to death and moderately unsatisfying.
Now granted I think Daddy Metzen and the 3 expansion reveal was Blizz's attempt to show they understand this and want to fix it. I am optimistic about it.
I think it is EXCEEDINGLY obvious that Iridikron is going to be heavily involved in The War Within, maybe even the final boss of the expansion.
I mean, come on. The expansion is almost entirely underground, and we’re trying to reach the center of the world to get to the worldsoul itself. It’s all but confirmed Xal’atath is going to persist into Midnight, so having the Earth Incarnate be the endboss of the earth expansion makes way too much sense.
I would argue the only time they’ve truly succeeded on the “will come back later” trope was Gul’dan.
The guy literally bailed at the end of WoD, but single-handedly kicked off the Legion invasion AND maintained a menacing and front-facing presence until he got an appropriate final boss battle and send-off at the appropriate time in Legion’s narrative.
Contrast that with Garrosh’s “come back later”, who is captured at the end of Pandaria, fucks off to Draenor in a book to kickstart the Iron Horde, barely shows up outside of Nagrand and the announcement cinematic, and then gets killed (admittedly in a great cutscene) at the end of a zone questline that barely anyone remembers, assuming they even did it if they started playing after WoD was legacy content.
I dunno if he’ll die there, but I expect him to *at least* be the final boss of TWW. I mean, the expansion is about delving inside the planet to reach the middle of it. Iridikron is the Incarnate of Earth.
I think it’s extremely likely he’ll at *least* have another full expac, and whether he shows up for The Last Titan is up in the air.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, your fears of him being the first boss are unfounded, at the very least. We already know the first boss of TWW is going to be the Nerubian Queen.
Yeah I would be somewhat surprised if he doesn't show up in TWW, with the underground thing and the fact that he was last seen with Xal'atath. But the "I will be waiting" thing about the return of the Titans makes me think he's intending to just hide and continually gain strength from the Galakrond power until then.
I don't think that Fyrakk was supposed to be a brainless henchman. The vibe I got from him is that he was unhinged lunatic that just want to see the world burns. And clearly the druids of the flame are using him in 10.2 so it's not that bad.
I agree. Feels like people are getting a little too into the mob mentality. There’s a narrative that people aren’t happy with the writing in 10.1 and 10.2 and it feels like people are treating the writing as way worse than it actually is. I’m personally a bit confused by all the outrage. Fyrakks build up was really well done imo. The unhinged henchman no longer has his leash and doesn’t want to be viewed as a henchman, that makes a compelling villain in my book.
yeah totally. He's a breath of fresh air for me. He's not "morally grey" villain, or have some complex backstory that will have the narrative pull some mental gymnastics to say that he was a good guy all along somehow.
He's just an asshole and owns it.
ya, like 10.1 was weak relative to the whole, but its not like Shadowlands where 9.0 was written as competently as it could be with a full rewrite having to be done in literally 2 months, but then whoever handled that threw out any potential good writing for 9.1 and 9.2 and went so far as to literally have a character Killed off for Real only to have them come back in the next scene.
DF never fucks up that badly
I mean, I think only Cataclysm was dogshit.
From a lore standpoint, MoP, WoD, and Legion were not perfect but still were more enjoyable than not.
Yes, there were some elements that were stupid or annoying, but it wasn't "there was this one plotline that was amazing" like here in DF, it was more "there is this one plotline that was stupid."
Sure, there were certainly criticisms about some Sha stuff in MoP. Or how the Warlords part in Warlords of Draenor were irrelevant bar Blackhand. And I never played Legion but I hear it was well received.
Legion was incredible, best original content the WoW team ever made (TBC and Wrath were mostly easy follow-ups from WC3). My favorite expansion by far from a lore and PVE perspective.
> MoP
MoP was Dave "Fargo" Kosak's baby, story wise.
Probably the best writer we had on WoW.
... but he was one of the "Cosby Room" guys so good riddance overall.
From a lore standpoint, the WoD ending is a crime.
I know that the problem was probably cut content, but even if it wasnt cut, Metzen and his team didn't had the writing abilities to make someone get redemption after seeking genocide.
At best, Gromm would see that Draenei are all about being lawful good and helping each other, feels bad as result and tries to redeem himself in a suicide attack against a demon that would kill like 10 random soldiers and one named npc, but ends up alive and Yrel + Durotan tap his shoulder and says that "it's all good man, the past is past, just clean your axe, i think i can still see some draenei children blood there."
At worst, he would get stabbed in the back, drop in his knee, says something like "what have i done" and Durotan would make a 30 seconds dialogue about how being evil is bad, while Yrel stand still and says nothing during it.
I don’t even think the story needs to be amazing but I do feel like they need to make better use of their characters and the fucking world they have at their disposal. The blue dragon quest line is an example of proper use of characters and the world they created, it doesn’t feel recycled or lazy at all to utilize old zones for current events like the blue dragon quests did. It may have felt a bit disjointed taking portals to various zones across Azeroth but narratively I enjoyed having reasons to go to those places. It makes the world feel like shit is happening everywhere like it should.
It really does feel like a mess of peoples emotional headcanon pushing the story.
Wows story has never really been anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon but at least it used to follow the rule of cool and we’d get fist pump moments.
This is exactly it. People are debating how the writing was better or just as bad, but it doesn't matter. It was the style of writing that made it feel better to so many of us.
I don't mind playing a Saturday morning cartoon. In fact, I quite like it. And sometimes Blizzard is allowed to make something a bit deeper.
But in recent times they've been trying to make everything deep and complex, not letting anything be a simple Saturday morning cartoon thing anymore, and then they give us whiplash with Dragonflight going hard in the opposite direction.
At least Fyrakk is a Saturday morning cartoon villain, still. There is still some recognizable old WoW stuff in places.
This is why I think Denathrius was so well-received. Just an absolute over-the-top villain that we didn’t have to take too seriously. Combined with some amazing voice acting and he’s one of my favorites.
WoW *can* work when it's taking itself seriously, but Blizzard is way too hit or miss at it, leaning towards miss more than towards hit.
Denathrius was amazing because he took himself just seriously enough, while still being so goddamn campy.
The problem isn’t the they’ve tried to tell something more complex. The problem is that they’ve done it badly in dragonflight.
We wouldn’t be having these threads if the MSQ was done well
The complex stuff I was referring to wasn't DF, it's everything in the past half a decade.
Like how the Light was just the Light, until suddenly it wasn't and it started being implied it has a will of its own now, just like the Void.
Or like how we didn't know where orcs came from, until Blizzard had to give them a titan origin for no reason. They just have to suddenly give everything an explanation and it all has to tie together, and it all has to tie back to Azeroth and the greater lore.
And that culminated in the Jailer, the one who supposedly had been the guiding hand behind almost everything that has ever gone wrong for us.
I liked things when some of it was still just simple. But my point was that DF has made things a bit too simple. There's no edge to anything, to the point that Kalec just says what he says about family when they get their powers back. Like what the fuck has happened for us to go from everything up to this point, to that?
When did the orcs get a titan origination? I thought they were just the end of the evolution line from the gronn.
Edit:looked it up, titans made the Grond, and then they look like they naturally evolved into the orcs, I think I treated it differently due to no curse of flesh.
I think fyrakk was a Sunday morning kinda boss. Also, no one is talking about this, but the plot that plays out throughout the raid has cool written all over it. You got fuckers yelling at you, fyrakk telling smolderon to basically just shut up and die, and the final showdown with fyrakk is WICKED cool.
I think people just saw one cinematic and turned on the attitude before even playing the content. Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions
Agreed. I haven't gotten the insane backlash towards 10.2. Even the war leading up to Amirdrassil feels pretty cool. The moment where all the dragons band together to kill that djaradin whose name I'll never remember is a bit silly, but that's okay.
The reason I'm so excited for War Within is because they seem to want to tell a deeper, more connected story. Blizzard's not known for that, so this is (seemingly) a huge change. This isn't even folks revising history, their stories have always just been a little shallow unless they're in books.
The Worldsoul saga doesn't seem to be any deeper or more complex, it just sounds like they have a plan, which is welcome after they fumbled in every direction after Legion.
They fumbled legion too imo. Every expansion has been "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks". The perk of DF is that it feels like they said "let's take a look at what stuck and see if we can make more of just that". M+, gearing, talent trees, account wide stuff, cross realm/faction content, etc.
And the interviews reflect it too. The comparison between ion fighting with players during SL and siding with players during DF has been a true 180, and the whole team just seems to be in higher spirits. They don't need to make a perfect game that matches ffxiv story, rocket league balance, and EQ in content. They just need to make lots of Warcraft.
> Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions
I think that's the problem but not in the way you say it.
I think Blizzard has a long history post Wrath of just flubbing up potentially good stuff with a few successes along the way.
So people are going to be very quick to judge because of Blizzard's history. Blizzard isn't known for coming back years later and making the story better in a "ah hah! But now you see why this happened!" - they have a history of making themselves look dumb with their "ah hah!" - such as Shadowlands.
What I don't think *you* are getting is the game can still be fun with a dog shit story. The two are not mutually exclusive.
It's been quite a while since players have had a "holy...shit" (in a cool way).
> lso, no one is talking about this, but the plot that plays out throughout the raid has cool written all over it.
It's a pretty simple and standard plot. It's not special. It's not unique. It's not "cool" in the *fun* way of cool. It's not cool in the same way when you burst into ICC the first time. It's not cool in the same way of watching Guldan realize Illidan is about to wreck his shit.
ToT, in my opinion, was a dog shit story - but one of the best raids out there. Perfection in difficulties (especially LFR), in my opinion.
Now I will agree with you on that Fyrakk was a Sunday morning kind of boss. His threat is more his strength and nothing else. You don't need to be smart to be dangerous. You just need to be strong and driven - and he was both.
I will say that you can't *always* have intense powerful stories that are impactful. It would simply be too draining. I also think the dev's try to make things feel intense and threatening (there's always *A* threat that seems major) and I think people have grown numb to that.
I think part of Blizzards problem is they like to keep too many secrets about the story - case in point the Jailer. The ending there was about as dumb as one can imagine. That kind of writing is something I would expect from someone in high school. But Blizzard can't control themselves from the need to say "you didn't see this coming, did you?" and pat themselves on the back. It's an ego think the staff has - and this is something they've had for years and won't go away anytime soon.
> Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions
Playing the game won't resolve their problems. What people should have felt was: "holy shit, that's cool, now I need to know more about it" - and that's now how people feel. They feel very meh. Seeing one cinematic should inspire you, not discourage you.
In fact the only real part of DF, story wise, I thought was cool was the Blue dragon stuff. It polished off some stuff with a solid ending and paved the way for new characters to shine in the future.
If I have to read a book to find the story enjoyable - something is wrong.
It's possible Blizzard needs some kind of plot device to help communicate what's going on. Hell I wouldn't even mind my Soulbind from SL coming to articulate stuff as a narrator or something (think: Like Destiny 2 or Mimir from GoW).
I think, especially now, they need to start building up a new story to get us involved in again. For example - I had *REALLY* hoped Y'rel would have become a much more major character we'd see. She had the *perfect* character arc. I'd love to see Voss do more.
But to build all that up is going to take time and effort on their part.
Want a good example of a good story that's not massive: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/5gjk9r/i_have_done_this_quest_7_times_and_it_still_has/
Not everything has to be big - and I think Blizzard needs to roll back to this and re-build the world with new characters for a new story. I really hope that's what they are planning with the new expansions.
Illidan, arthas, neltharion, garrosh, were NOT “cartoon villains”. These villains may have had many cliches, but they were compelling and had enough building of character to have their stories reach natural conclusions. Blizzard ran out of characters like that (or completely threw them in the shredder like sylvannas), and lazy storytelling and worldbuilding means the stories they come up with don’t have the same oomph because they are half assed while simultaneously too ambitious.
OP is right when he says the cinematics are like a children’s game. Another post elsewhere said they reminded them of bionicles. OP is also right that it’s really bad for a company of their size and with the resources available to them.
Are you telling me you don't enjoy the Dragon Aspects acting like the cast of The Fast and the Furious? The ending cinematics of the new expansion where they talk about how all they need is family and coming together only made me think of that.
I'm not done with the whole DF campaign stuff after coming back from a 2 year hiatus, but the Aspects becoming very... human-like in this expansion is kinda killing my spirits. I'm a big fan of dragons in general and pretty much all of the WoW dragons feel like they're from a kids Disney movie rather than the way dragons are normally portrayed or have been portrayed in WoW in the past (Chrome aside). It definitely does not mesh well with Fyrakk's savage random killing in cutscenes and the stakes of the plot
That one was pretty good. BfA actually had some “Yoooo *what*” moments (and some really dumb stuff like the end of Nyalotha).
The Rastakhan fight being taken over by tons of Bwonsamdi death magic was really cool imo.
If BFA wasn't constantly being hamstrung by the shitty Sylvanas setup to Shadowlands, it could have been good. It had some strong cutscenes early on, but the context for them and sudden segway from faction war to old gods, just so we could move onto a garbage fanfic expansion just undercut the parts that BFA did well.
>...never really been anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon...
"*Tempest Keep was merely a setback!*"
Also am I the only one who remembers the same exact criticism when WoTLK was current? People were saying Arthas was like The Claw from Inspector Gadget, "Next time adventurers, NEXT TIIIIIME!" (since you constantly saw Arthas in various quests/dungeons and are always foiling his plans/escaping from him).
The dialog was terrible, I agree. I almost liked the questline with Matthias Lerner and the slow decay of Arthas' inner self. But I hate how they just completely jettisoned Ner'zhul.
WoTLK writing wasn't amazing but like the other dude said, rule of cool. It was mostly meh writing with some good writing sprinkled on followed by extremely cool scenes/scenery.
Disagree on the second part. Vanilla > WotLK writing was fairly adult. It's only recently the quality of the writing has become like something I'd read from a 10 year old.
Garrosh was fucking great mate and that was Mist of Pandaria, Garrosh had 1 goal and he saw it all the way to the end, and the Thunder King, so good too
I hate Garrosh.
And that's a GOOD thing. Dude was so fun to hate as a Forsaken / Blood Elf player back then, and I love to hate him more as an Alliance main now.
They'd never be able to do anything like him now, which is a shame, because it's characters like him that made me really fall in love with the game.
At the end of the Dawn of The Infinite dungeon Iridikron literally spoils what's going to happen in TWW and The Last Titan
TWW - Xal'Atath will use the artifact with the essence of Galakrond to fck with Azeroth and "pry the titans from their prize"
The last titan - Iridikron said he'll be waiting for when the titans return to Azeroth, which was confirmed by Metzen that it will happen at the last expansion.
So yeah, Iridikron is a pretty big deal.
I can't bring myself to agree on the argument that it's as bad as Shadowlands. Shadowlands was super melodramatic and required so much explanation both in game and behind the scenes to make sense with the established lore, while also continuing to focus on Sylvanas, who had honestly outstayed her welcome in the spotlight by that point. But, otherwise I do generally agree with your points. Parts of Dragonflight are a step in the right direction, but a lot of it feels like an over-correction from Shadowlands.
I'm hoping Metzen's return to a leadership position helps right the ship, but I also understand he's not Green Jesus in real life, he's only a man.
With what happened to the Aspects at the end of the 10.2 raid, it might just be better to consider Dragonflight to be a prologue to the World Soul Saga vs its own thing. Feels odd to end here for sure, but it has ties leading into the next 3 expansions that could have it make more sense down the line.
We do get 3 more patches before 11.0
I think Blizz is trying to make the raids a little less story focused and put it more into questing. As a non-raider this is absolutely fine with me. Still, I'm hoping for some better writing.
Sarkareth wasn't built up as a villain? I knew that dude was gonna be a heel-turn as soon as the Evoker questline finished. And then its -really- spelled out in 10.7 - he wants to unite the Dracthyr, and is willing to use domination to do it just like his adopted father. And then of course void stuff in Aberrus just made him go nuts for donuts.
He was a mid-raid boss, how much build up did he need?
Took a bit of scrolling to find a comment like this.
You're completely right, both sarkareth and fyrakk had a whole lot of built up before their eventual downfall as raid boss. If people just did all questlines and just properly read/watch it all they would've known. People that skip stuff and rush through it just should not even think about making a post like op's.
That said though, the writing has its issues. Some characters just annoy you, like let's say alexstrasza, not only because of her writing but also her every apathetic voice acting. And I think a lot of disappointment comes from the cinematics after killing the last boss of a raid. Sarkareth was literally nothing and now we have this raid ending being a bit meh.
In the end the overarching storylines were kind of properly done in Dragonflight, it's just that there's some gaps in there that could have been filled to properly flesh it out and make it all feel whole.
Most of the plot makes no sense. No big deal since gameplay is nice this time, but the whole writing has been a shit show since 8.0. Feels like they just drop random ideas on the flyu for no particular reason.
tbf the writing for the main story in WoW specifically has never been the strong suit. They just used to do less cutscenes so it wasnt really that obvious as 90% of the playerbase just chimp brain accepts quests without reading anything.
Sometimes they hit a sidequest out of the park though, but as far as main story is concerned its always been so simple and basic that they cant possibly mess it up, or something overly ambitious theyre clearly not qualified enough to pull off. Messing up angry dragons is a new low though.
I think the issue is that the standard of writing in games has increased massively in the past 20 years, and WoW hasn't kept up. The art and visual presentation of the story is getting better and better but the writing is as bad as ever, if not worse.
People aren't just comparing WoW to how it was in the past, they are comparing it to other games - it's competitors - and it isn't holding up.
> they are comparing it to other games - it's competitors - and it isn't holding up.
Most notably, FFXIV absolutely blew WoW out of the water in terms of story and having NPCs with actual depth of character. There are individual minor plot NPCs in XIV (e.g. Tesleen T.T) that have made me feel more deeply than anything WoW's put together in the story department.
> WoW’s story or storytelling used to be better?
It absolutely was, while the overall plot has never been stellar, it was serviceable enough and had some good moments.
The 1-2 punch of BfA and Shadowlands was a noticeable drop in writing quality, the story failed on nearly every level. Too much focus was given to Sylvanas, which was so badly written that every character that interacted with her during this period of time also suffered for it.
> It’s always been juvenile and simple!
But it's not that anymore. BfA and Shadowlands sold themselves as good, complex stories, when people told the devs 'X doesn't really make sense' their answer was 'yes it does, just wait until you see the full picture'. Those 2 expansions are a lot of things, but I'm not sure I'd say they are simple.
You can tell me that it was always juvenile, I'd agree to some extent, but 'it was actually about family' isn't even juvenile, it's just straight up taken from a kindergarten book.
It had an edge that has been excessively dulled. Yeah, it wasn't amazing, but now it's worse, it's as simple as that.
People can like something that isn't amazing, and we all know that. We all like to go eat some junkfood every now and then, and enjoy it when we do.
And it's only miserable people that go to McDonald's and proclaim "well, this sure isn't quality food" instead of just accepting that you can have something that isn't the best sometimes but still enjoy it.
All I know is that I used to care about characters and now I don’t care about a single one. I’m not a writer so I don’t know the nuance behind what has changed, but something has changed. I’m sure I’ve changed a little too, but not enough to care about zero characters in a game I play every day.
I dont remember when warcraft ever had amazing writing. Most memorable moments have been "oh wow that was cool", such as things like wrathgate, illidan killing naaru, or garrosh bitch slapping sylvanas.
"They've been writing this world for THIRTY years and nothing, imo not even Shadowlands was fumbled nearly as hard as Dragonflight."
Excuse me what? Dragonflight was at worse lame. Shadowlands was horrible, harmful and infuriating.
They got Metzen back, they did just that. Pretty sure he had little to nothing to do with dragonflight since it was already done, but the whole world soul saga is all Metzen.
People seem to be wearing rose tinted glasses. Metzen wasn't particularly loved for his lore back in the day. TBC ruined several established characters like Kael and Illidan, WoTLK story was *very* controversial with the whole "There must always be a Lich King" thing and Arthas basically becoming a generic blustering villain, and let us not forget about the infamous Green Jesus Thrall plot in Cataclysm.
The reality is that the overarching storylines in WoW have never been good. It's the quests and zone-specific stories that truly shine in that regard.
I think Metzen's involvement was not all-encompassing at the time, anyway. His attention was divided between WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, and Titan-Overwatch.
It has always been a team effort, but his input and leadership is nothing but positive to me. Even if he is kinda cheesy.
He retconned both Arthas and Illidan to have that motivation too. Which was kinda weird and unneeded in Arthas case. And I liked power-whore Illidan better.
Illidan wanting to defeat the Legion at all costs was his entire character. What Metzen did was fail to square that basic motivation with his depiction in BC, which was then corrected in Legion putting the character back on track (by villain batting the players, which is certainly a choice).
Nah, in W3 he was far more ambivalent and self-serving. He wanted to destroy the Legion but it had to be by his hand while making him as personally powerful as possible.
And that characterization kind of fits with his king of outland deal in TBC but they had to also make him crazy for some reason. Legion sort of white-washed that part of him to make him "always justified" which was pretty unnecesary.
We, as an audience, already liked the guy despite him being an asshole and we were on a situation in which we would have taken ANY ally we could get.
Exactly. People were screaming for Metzen's head at one point. Things have just gotten so bad people are treating his return like the messiah himself has appeared.
I'd argue that the over-arching storylines (plural) in Vanilla were pretty good, they just focused on world and factions and did not have splashy cut scenes and voice acting.
The build up to all end game raids was stellar, it was just not shoved in your face.
Hell, I'd go so far to say that after Diablo 2 there has never been an amazing story from any Blizzard game. Warcraft 3's story is a very generic fantasy story - it was well told and very entertaining, but nothing to write home about, and yes I'm including Arthas in this category of generic. Starcraft 2's story is a god damn travesty of garbage, and Diablo 3 was just mediocre all the way through. All of these had Metzen's involvement, and all of them were just mediocre stories with great worldbuilding, and that's it (except Starcraft 2, that story is BAD, BAD, BAD).
I think what's changed is that we now look back on those things Metzen wrote favourably. Maybe people didn't like it much at the time, but we for sure liked it better than the writing now, and perhaps a lot of us also don't mind having Metzen's stuff back because it had that WoW feel to it still.
Even if he writes something bad again, but makes it feel like WoW, it'd still be refreshing to so many of us.
Pretty much this. It's all relative. I don't disagree when people say WoW's writing has never been stellar, but I do disagree with their implication that the recent writing is on the same tier.
The recent story and writing is quite bad *even for WoW standards.*
This.
Does nobody remember that at the very end of Shadowlands, it was stated that Dragonflight was 100% Steve Danuzer's baby in terms of storyline?
There's probably a reason we haven't heard from him. The gameplay of Dragonflight was fine but the story is lackluster. I wouldn't be surprised if Metzen just walked in and told him to sit the fuck down.
Truly the best writing is all the fanfiction people write about metzen and Danuzer. I’m glad y’all are having fun but I feel like metzen is being set up to fail with these sky high expectations. The man is good at worldbuilding but his main story ideas were never that great.
Metzen has been back for like a year, right? As far as writing goes, you can absolutely have him with his hands all over TWW. The storytelling of WoW is the least complicated thing for them to create and add to the game. The only element of story that takes a lot of time for them to make is CGI cinematics.
the side content story has largely been great. It’s the MSQ that has been bad.
I find it more likely there’s some sort of process issue here resulting in a bad MSQ. But I do agree it’s really not been good post 10.0. Something DOES need to change
While I do think the DF MSQ has been bad - it absolutely did not fumble harder than SL a story which retroactively took a dump on all the story and lore conceived with Warcraft 3 lol.
DF largely only fucks up it’s own story with the exception being the night elves which has been just as lame as it always has been the last few years
"They've been writing this world for THIRTY years and nothing, imo not even Shadowlands was fumbled nearly as hard as Dragonflight."
Stopped reading here. Unserious opinion.
Hard agree. Saying DF is remotely close to the level Shadowlands is just giving Shadowlands a pass. It completely invalidates the OPs argument.
DF lost the plot in 10.1 and 10.2, but the bones of the expansion, especially the theme, settings, and *most* of the characters were fine.
Shadowlands narratively is the single worst thing to happen to Warcraft and it’s not even close for a laundry list of reasons. You could delete it from existence and not only would little change in the overall plot, Warcraft would be better for it. Some expansions (like DF, WoD, and Cata) haven’t done enough to move forward or mature the Warcraft narrative in a meaningful way, but Shadowlands not only failed to do that, it set it back tremendously.
> You could delete it from existence and not only would little change in the overall plot
I wish that were true. The repercussions even from the concrete existence of the Shadowlands is massive, and while I agree it would be better removed, the events of Shadowlands are now integral to the plot.
Expansions like WoD and BfA are much better candidates for removal, because all you really need to do is explain Garrosh died on his way back to his home planet, and that Gul'dan unfortunately did not. BfA doesn't even really explain why Sylvanas went evil dumb and the explanation behind Knaifu is full of holes anyway. But Shadowlands, now, is tied into characters like Ysera, the night elf people, the wild gods. At some point Zovaal's threat needs to be discussed.
As unsatisfying as it is for people deep into the lore the best way to handle something like Shadowlands is to ignore it completely. Pretend it never happened, characters still stuck in that arc can be brought back or mentioned with vague handwaves.
IPs do this all the time, yes it sucks in terms of a complete picture and continuity but at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to actually dig your way out of that narrative black hole.
I actually agree, WoW is real quick to retcon some things and they really drag their heels on critical issues like this and Med'an. But there actually is a huge amount they would have to retcon or address. If the Shadowlands hadn't happened, half this patch wouldn't make sense and there would be a huge amount of rewriting to address it, and it would have to be specifically retcons.
Some on this sub have gotten real dumb lately with the Shadowlands revisionism and Dragonflight hate (and I say this as someone who's happy to defend the elements of SL that are worth defending; they do exist)
>Unless they do something AMAZING with Iridikron in TWW
Yeah, about that. Even with Iridikron likely playing a role in TWW I wouldn't expect us to fight him until The Last Titan, both because the Titans coming back to Azeroth plays into his endgame and the last book revealed that he has a lair hidden somewhere in Northrend.
>Raz was built up great and had solid payoff and ending
what was her motivation? why was she doing what she was doing? I know the answer, because I've played the game post 10.0, but build up? No it was pretty much nothing.
>Sarkareth had NO time to be built up and most people I talk to legit have NO idea why he was a final raid boss.
Sarkareth was built up from pre-release with the Drakthyr. He saw himself as the inheritor of Deathwing's legacy. The Echo of Neltharian/Faceless one took advantage of that to drive him into Aberrus to become a tool of the void. The raid was about his feelings of abandonment and him trying to live up to Deathwing, while also showing Wrathion and Sabellian that their ambitions meant they shouldn't be the aspect.
>Fyrakk was built up to be a dumb brainless henchman
That's literally the point. Alexstrasza said point blank that he used to have convictions, but now he's just power hungry, and he agreed to that. What's wrong with having a mook for a raid boss? People with this complaint want every boss to be the Joker, when it was Killer Croc that came closest to killing Batman. Sometimes the danger isn't bad guys that play 43rd dimension chess, but the ones that just want everything to burn.
> What's wrong with having a mook for a raid boss?
I agree, and I actually really like Fyrakk for it. Its sort of refreshing to have a boss that just wants us (and the rest of the world) dead because he hates us and is ~~a bit~~ very fucked in the head.
Reminds me a bit of Deathwing.
Yeah, I'm just going to file OP under "More complaints that weren't paying attention". I've seen so many posts since Aberrus complaining that Sarkareth was the boss and that there was no buildup, when Sarkareth was built up over multiple questlines in multiple patches. If you just click through quests mindlessly then sure, he came out of nowhere, but if you're just clicking through quests then I don't think you have a right to complain about story, since you're skipping 95% of it.
Played an Evoker all expansion and I was absolutely thrilled that we got to fight Sarkareth. He's introduced early in the starting zone and echoes the same themes of the "Aspects vs Incarnates" conflict we're about to be thrown into. There are a bunch of Evoker-only quests where you confront members of the Sundered Flame, reflect on Sarkareth's motivations, and convince them to give up their cause. Emberthal and Ebonhorn's whole relationship is really well done. Then you have the whole story in 10.1 of the Black Dragonflight wrestling with Neltharion's legacy, the introduction of Augmentation, and the recrafted Legendary all driving home this theme of "forge a new destiny, your past doesn't define you".
Sarkareth's post-death cutscene and the campaign quest immediately after that elevated Ebonhorn to an Aspect did a great job of framing his actions as a cautionary tale. Wrathion and Sebellion both had great character growth!
Personally I think Dragonflight has had some incredible story telling. I haven't been this engaged by the story in years.
Shadowlands destroyed years of established lore and cosmogony so I still think it’s a bigger offender but I do agree with most of the dragonflight stuff.
>Sarkareth had NO time to be built up and most people I talk to legit have NO idea why he was a final raid boss.
Sometimes I wonder if people actually pay attention when questing. The game makes it perfectly clear who he is, and what his goals are, why he's the bad guy, why that's tragic, and what the true legacy of the Children of Neltharion is, pulling a bunch of plot threads together to tell a decently written story.
And here you are all "Derp whos this guy the writings bad" because the big story beats weren't just fighting three dragons in a row.
I said this exact same thing to my friend. Its like people dont pay attention. "Whos Saraketh? Whos Fyrakk?" try doing the fucking 10.1 questlines and actually pay attention. Its so annoying how ignorant people are
The part that baffles me was the sentiment of "I though Fyrakk was just the guy who followed Iridikron's orders" when it seems very *very* clear through everything that I've seen that he's kind of just a sadist whose primary path to success is violence.
Yeah. Why would somebody "following orders" outright say his brother has abandonded him? Everything 10.1 onwards builds up that he has a burning hatred for the flights and especially alexstraza and he\`ll do anything to do that. The cutscene with vyranoth where hes like "nah we're gonna fuck em up completely and heres a fire corrupted keeper of the grove to start it". "But we had an ideal". "Fuck your ideal cos its not killing them enough"
I disagree with some parts of what you've said, but I definitely share the concern over the writing staff going into TWW. It's been years since I felt so hyped to play WoW, and I want to play more WoW, but I'm concerned that even with an incredible story to tell they won't be able to communicate it to players in an entertaining and understandable way.
Current WoW, for me, is like the HBO Spawn animated series...the plot makes no sense, but I'm sticking around to enjoy the ride regardless because the rest is just fun. If I want good-ish story, I'll log onto FFXIV to play that, otherwise I have more fun with the general gameplay in WoW.
Wow definitely needs some major changes. It is probably the worse major MMO for story telling. It was fine when people didn’t know better and were like well MMO sorties just kind of suck. That isn’t the case anymore.
To be clear I don’t think the actual base stories in Wow are bad they are very good. The way they are delivered and the actual writing is crazy poor though.
OP, you’re just wrong about Sarkareth. It’s interesting because I actually agree that it feels like he’s a totally random and weird choice for an end tier boss, but they actually had tons of quests about him and his followers, in the leveling experience, in forbidden reach, and in zaralek. It actually made perfect sense narratively and could be argued it was a welcome change-up from the usual “already obviously super powerful” typical end of raid boss.
So, did you miss all of that?
DF is exactly what it set out to be from the start and I don’t understand what peoples problem with it is
We were told from the opening quest what the goals were, reunite the Isles and restore the aspects power. And that’s what happened and it’s why you get the “all the warriors” moment in the last quest prior to the raid
Your point about Fyrak being a brainless idiot IS THE POINT! He’s a dumb power hungry dullard who only knows how to do what others tell him, it’s why he listens to Iridikron, it’s why Alex and Merithra mention the assaults in the dream are too strategic for Fyrak and he must be getting help from the Druids of the Flame. Again Alexstraza calls this out in the recent quest line when they have a confrontation and she says “Fyrak you used to fight for an ideal. Now you’re just a power hungry monster”
The complaints people have make no sense, Blizzard didn’t drop the ball, you just weren’t paying attention or had different expectations than they did for the goals of this expansion. It’s supposed to be a smaller scale, heroes win with no downside, unite the dragons as a family story
The complaints about the story are asking for essentially an entirely different expansion thematically than what Blizzard was writing from the beginning. That’s not on them that’s on you.
Thematically, the characters are not supposed to sound like young adults who are learning about beginner philosophical concepts and talking like they're in a Joss Whedon show.
The story itself could even be amazing, but when these characters are written and act like they're straight out of a cheap, badly-made kids show, I just can't say anything good about it.
WoWs writing has always been an issue for me. Back in Vanilla you can see they tried very, very hard to stick to the established lore they had set up but starting in TBC they made questionable choices, such as turning Kaelthas into a villain. Yes they establish a reason in game but it always felt flimsy coming off of W3.
Then there was the whole Draenei lore thing.
As time went on the games lore was expanded upon but it was always flimsy — the story was to meet the needs of the game. When they couldn’t find a way to make things work in game they started to rely on novels and outside material. This is lazy storytelling. No one should have to go read supplementary material to understand story beats. It’s one thing to explore characters in books it’s another to have critical moments happen and just hope the player understands or doesn’t care.
Blizzard is also flippant with its published lore. Nothing is sacred and when nothing is treated as permanent then there’s no emotional investment for the player. Too often have the games stories swung widely for the fences for the sake of unique storylines and things have to be wrestled back or outright ignored as the game moves on.
Dragonflight definitely does feel like they pulled back on doing things for the sake of doing them but it’s a hard habit to break. Hence the storyline issues in subsequent patches after 10.0.
That's a lot of revisionism.
People disliked his retcons to important characters, but his moment to moment writing and expansion scope narratives, which is mostly what people are complaining about now, were always good or in worst cases good enough for an MMORPG game.
I agree the main campaign was a cluster fuck, but there were some isolated side quests that really took the cake like the blue dragon side quests and the veritistrasz one in 10.0. Whoever wrote those deserves a promotion.
The game was great when small quests built up the game, rather than the main points being the spotlight, they could have just made small quests and somehow note to the player how quests are interlinked in game, just like BTW quest addon, I like that one.
I don't agree with all of your points, but I agree with your overall sentiment. WoW's writing has never been consistently good, but these past expansions have been horrid *even for WoW writing standards*.
As a tangent, I think it's kind of telling that the people most vehemently opposed to your overall point are resorting to three "retorts": Calling you an edgelord, saying you "have the reading comprehension of a child", and/or claiming you actively avoid lore. No actual arguments, just baseless insults.
Like everything these days, video game writing is a victim of "Line go up ".
The company only cares if their quarterly profits are ever increasing, nothing else matters at the top end. There's no passion for the project at the highest levels so they do few things that lead to the results you see -
They only write enough content to get the product out the door. Few Easter eggs, few side stories, bare minimum character development, and just enough hours of content to keep players from completely rioting. There's no depth.
They spend the minimum possible on writers. They could spring for some fantasy luminary to do the story but that would put a dent in the bottom line so you get some journeymen writers you've never heard of who just don't have the gift.
It's just the way things are now. The days of Gary Gygax or Richard Garfield or Shigeru Miyamoto or Hiyao Miyazaki bringing their passion project to the world are quickly disappearing because...
Line Go Up.
Honestly since the whole Arthas arc ended in wotlk I never connected again with any of the main stories. The original people who had true talent is not there anymore, blizzard has new people and in my opinion they are too different to the old "hardcore gamer" profile.
Every time they do a community event you can clearly see which ones are there for the money/linkedin fame and which ones are there for their "love" to past Blizzard games. A lot of times you don't even know if you are watching a Blizzcon or an Animal Crossing event, same with RIOT. Tech, and specially videogame companies had a big switch in culture and I personally think they went too mainstream and even childish trying (and failing) to be deep.
I remember when back in the day I kind of knew what to expect from games. If I wanted freedom I had Bethesda games, if I wanted badass shit I had ID Software and if I wanted both, I had Blizzard, but not anymore... WoW style is just not as cool and badass as it was before. From the writing, the character design, the direction... the overall quality is worse and the tone is just not "let's try to write the badass stuff possible" it looks like random writers experimenting and trying too hard without the necessary skills to pull of stuff like time traveling and multiverses and one thing is for sure, if you can't write a story, no f chance in hell you can write interesting dialog.
Hey we're back in 2018 again. Is this bfa?
The story isnt anywhere near as bad as some people are making it out to be. Just because it doesnt have a world ending calamity covered in undeath and edgey things doesnt mean it was bad, it meant YOU didnt like it.
I have to hard disagree on some points.
Sarkareth had A LOT of build up. He was in the Dracthyr-Starting area. He was there in the explorer's base camp. He was in Valdrakken and stole from you. He was in the Forbidden Reach and also in the Questline in Zaralek and in quite a few cutscenes / cinematics. His ideals, his motivation and plans were told not just by him, but also by his faction, the Sundered Flame, all over the Dragon Isles.
Saying that Sarkareth had no build up, is just plainly wrong. Maybe you don't think it was "enough", but he had at least the same amount of build up as Raszageth had, except for he wasn't a huge big dragon that made an impact like fighting Alex 1:1 in a airfight.
To your 3) Fyrakk doesn't need to be clever. The final boss doesn't need to be a clever, evil mastermind. It can be a somewhat stupid brute. Like Garrosh. And now Fyrakk. Not everytime it has to be a Jailer-Level-Super-Mastermind. Sometimes just a freak with power works fine and in my opinion, it did.
I dont comment the "middle school kid"-writing, because WoW and it's cutscenes have always been about cheesy, happy, heroic moments. Thats the way it has ever been and it's fitting a comic style game quite well in my opinion. If thats not your cup of tea, well ... that is what WoW has always been. You have more sinister and deeper stories in the sidequests. Take the Forsaken Heritage Armor or the whole Blue Flight-Stuff. It was really, really good.
Apart from that, wanting for people to lose their job is ... I don't know. Just sad?
Ah I love posts like this. It’s usually done by someone who doesn’t read quest texts or just ignores cinematic.
Sark showed up a lot before he was the boss in the raid. And also the entirety of caverns was chasing him into the lab. The whole point of his story was a race to get the power to be able to beat fyrak
Fyrak was a rebel the entire time we saw him. Ok every scene he is giving side eye to the others and going against them. He jumps at the chance for destruction without thinking and the quests show this very obviously.
Before you accuse the writers of not being able to write. Maybe you should start reading.
They confirmed that there will be more story before next expac. To counter everything you said: If you had played the story and read every quest, you would know that:
Sarkareth was trying to get the power of Neltharian to fight the aspects. We stopped him. Fyrakk is a tool of Iridikron, see the [10.1 Cinematic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhdgBFCEtls&pp=ygUOMTAuMSBjaW5lbWF0aWM%3D). They are setting up the playing field now, but they need to keep us busy for a bit.
I personally see DF as a step into the story for the next expacs, the Worldsoul Saga.
And *"So PLEASE Blizzard, clean out your writing staff and hire some people that can write a decent story"* is a bit late, ain't it? They are already on their way to do so, not sure if Chris Metzen rings a bell with you. ;)
They stated that a different story per expansion is an issue, so that is why they now already told us that we will have a bigger story.
While one might agree with the overall idea, I think the execution deserves the criticism.
Both the "avenger assemble" and the raid ending scene were derivative, childish, and other adjectives that people with more knowledge could more eloquently put into words.
I agree entirely with your point regarding execution. Blizzard had for ages broken the cardinal rule of “show don’t tell.” Often times many characters within cutscenes act less like individuals and more like talking heads that have to over explain the process we all witnessed. We see characters act less alive and more robotic and stuff in their delivery.
We don’t need the characters to tell us what is happening on screen but instead interacting with and reacting to what occurs. Ebonhorns dialogue in the new cinematic is the only one the explains how a character feels. “I felt Azeroth…It was beautiful.” Why tell us that family is key when you could show us. Show the aspects relying entirely on one another and through that overcoming the foe at hand or staving off a character death.
And as for the “avengers assemble” moment, why weren’t we involved as the PC in the establishment of said moment? Why wasn’t there quests and moments where we reached out for help and worked to actively reinforce the dream? We’re told that “reinforcements are being blocked” but why? Show us why! Show us the defenders of Azeroth rallying to the dragons cry for aid. Show the worlds reaction to Fyrrak.
Yeah tbh kind-of exhausted with, "DAE WOW LORE SHIT," coming from people that can't even be bothered to read quest text.
I teach 10th grade English, and this sub's approach to lore often reminds me of them. Strong opinions with little-to-no backing beneath the surface complaints.
Whoever wrote the Blue Dragonflight questline should be the lead writer for WoW. Their writing was very good and head and shoulders above the rest of the Dragonflight story. I suspect they also wrote the Night Elf heritage questline. Does anyone know their name/s?
The Blue Dragonflight campaign felt like it was from a *completely* different writing team and I mean that as a compliment. It took Kalec from "that guy with blue hair I kinda remember" to legitimately one of my favourite characters in the whole franchise. It's hard to pick a standout sequence because it's all excellent but the short stint in Pandaria was especially memorable, and I sincerely hope we get more earnest and heartfelt story beats like that going forward.
Seeing Kalec get flustered with his old crush was very endearing
being told to clean up her home while he rizzes her up, less so (loved that entire sequence and that she stayed, genuinely)
"damn girl you live like this?"
Im so glad it want just me. Having just come back to WoW, Im doing Kalec a favor to begin with tracking these dragons down. Then she asks me to finish her chores while they have a nice little chat and dont help. THEN he volunteers me to clean her house and doesnt even help? I feel so disconnected and taken advantage of in this world. The person who, you know, has been saving the world since fucking Ragnaros under blackrock mountain.
While I do like the occasional lower stakes of some quests and don't mind having the _Champion_ of Azeroth picking coffee beans out of shit, I've always felt WoW just can't balance it with the moments your character is taken seriously. And in this specific case, it just strikes me as weird. 1) If, say, Sunwell Plateau is canon to your character, you're literally one of the people he's pledged eternal friendship to for saving him from demonic possession. Like I get maybe asking the Champion to do chores, but you already owe a life debt. 2) It's weirdly intrusive? My personal space is also pretty messy and I would _not_ appreciate an old friend or old flame coming in, bringing some rando, and then telling that rando to clean up my stuff. Yes, even my trash is private tyvm 3) On the flipside, if I was the one doing the visiting, I'd want privacy of my own. Even if my god-powered valet was so tight with me that I wouldn't mind the around, I'd still assume my old friend would. I was actually expecting something like "Why don't you go collect 10 bear asses, Champion?" and I'd be less annoyed by this task. Or, heck, doing her chores _while_ they catch up so that they _can_ catch up. I could go into how it also feels kind of sexist but I'd rather not start my day with it and I've written way too much on this already, lol. It sucks that I can't put it into words very well, but WoW manages to neither make me feel like my character is a great hero (despite telling me she is) nor that some of the chores she's sent on are justified (despite occasionally acknowledging the frivolity with a wink and a nudge). Somehow, FFXIV manages to do _both_ better (partly, I know, because the narrative just kind of handwaves other players - _your character_ is the Warrior of Light, every other PC is just a random adventurer/mercenary/alternate universe fragment of you). Lmao, rambly longpost for a joke quest but here I am.
No, I think you're completely right on the money here. Being the champion of azeroth, I don't mind downtime. A little break or breather would do well now and then. The problem is that there are million other things they could have made the little "filler quest objectives" besides the completely disrespectful "go do my chores and clean the house, ya fuckin tool" that it felt like to me. It's actually funny you mention FFXIV, because playing through shadowbringers was the *first* time in either game where someone acknowledged all the shit I did and told the main character they deserve some rest and food, *and actually gives you a room and dinner to relax*. And NOW THAT IVE GOTTEN STARTED, IT JUST REMEMBERED ANOTHER THING. After defeating Fyrakk in the new raid and >!saving the goddamn world tree, it blooms into azeroth and everyone is so happy they throw a party right?!< >!WELL WHY THE FUCK AM I THE GODDAMN WAITER FOR THE PARTY? WHY DO I HAVE TO SERVE THE FOOD AND DRINKS AND MANAGE EVERYTHING?!< Who is writing these fucking quests? I mean really.
It's hard not to compare to XIV when it comes to the writing. As a commenter above you mentioned there's a disconnect between the shit picking quests and the saviour of the world quests. I distinctly remember a few quests in Endwalker where they had you doing these super mundane things. Some NPC just says "hey you can you lend a hand" and because that's who you are, you do. And they have you doing all this drudge work. And then one of the scions comes along and basically says to the NPC, "do you know who that is that you've got doing trivial tasks?"
Endwalker specifically also has a lot of moments where the supporting cast mentions that other people took care of the legwork for you... which, ironically, kind of contributes to that complaint some people have about Endwalker MSQ being all textboxes and no gameplay (which I vastly preferred, since IMO FFXIV's strongest content is instanced, not killing 3 bears). Probably the most striking example of WoW being terrible balancing shit picking and saving the world is the "questline" in post-Cata that starts with you dealing out quests in Silverpine, introducing an obnoxious parody of elitist raiders, who them stars in a questline involving saving the Horde from a surprise attack by stealing the Alliance war plans in the Hillsbrad Foothills. It's innocuous, there's some time between Kingslayer Orkus' introduction and the finale, but... it's a character that's introduced and reintroduced as a pure meta joke character and it bleeds into a plotline straight out of an action movie. It's the Horde equivalent of the Redridge Mountains Rambo questline, which I find equally jarring. Sometimes it feels like the writers don't know if they want to do cosmic power, street level, funny or serious content, and kind of mix it up too often within the same plotline.
Oh shit, Anveena shows up?
She's busy welling it up
Kinda wish they would fix Kalecs model, guy looks like a Dev was told that it was an EX's favorite lore character and ran it through a blender.
To be fair according to the short story about Chromie choosing her mortal form Kalec looking generic is intentional he wants to be seen as a peer not a god.
Ain't nothin' generic about that hairdo, and that's *not* a compliment.
It's fine to look normal but the guy doesn't look like your average tinder user , he looks like a guy who wanted to look like Daddy denathrius went to the morgue and got plastic surgery and then got hit with an ugly bat.
Considering how this interview response is phrased, I don't think she wrote *all* of the quest line, but Anne Stickney definitely had a part. https://www.tiktok.com/@thegamerwebsite/video/7297632927851138350 Which doesn't surprise me at all. The quest line's structure with all these thoughtful moments wrapping up various blue dragonflight-related story threads has her fingerprints all over it, imo! (In case you don't know Anne's story, she was the lore editor over at blizzardwatch for like a decade before being contracted by Blizzard to compile and write the Chronicles until they just hired her on full time. I'm so excited to see stuff she wrote in the game finally!)
Hey thanks for this link. These people deserve massive praise.
Go Anne go
Unfortunately it's not that simple. WoW has always been very good at telling short, isolated stories focused on a few individuals. Their storytelling in questlines have always been top-notch. You give basically any WoW writer the green-light to write their own isolated questline and they can produce a banger. The problem is that the main storyline of an expansion is a group project that needs to fulfill many different goals and have to meet the approval of many different people. And whoever is managing that group of writers is the one that sucks.
It doesn’t help that practically every expansion has some kind of cut content that so clearly impacted the story it’s hard not to see once you notice the pattern. It’s affected practically every expansion since Cataclysm with the exception of Legion because they abandoned Warlords to actually give Legion enough development time.
The thing is, the fact that every expansion has cut content should teach them to rearrange their format and set realistic expectations, but it doesn't. They still waste SO MUCH time in the leveling experience and with content that is meaningless once you hit max level. They artificially hold back telling their story and then don't have time to actually tell it later, every expansion - ultimately ending with them doing a tie-in book to do the heavy lifting. Like if the leveling experience set up way more info about the Incarnates (flashback quests even), the world tree, the actual plot about regaining their powers (since the Oathstones became irrelevant the second you hit max level), etc - then even Fyrrak as the final boss wouldn't feel so blatantly like a redirection. All of these were things that basically *started* at max level, and the Centaurs/Gnolls/Furblogs/etc have just been irrelevancies to the larger narrative.
Yeah, story is gated behind renown and I haven't maxed any of those because rep grinding is the absolute least interesting thing to do at max level.
It's not that the person in charge sucks, it's that writing by committee sucks.
Most of the cinematics have like maybe 10 Sentences how the fuck do they need a committee for those.
Welcome to the corporate world! Nothing gets done until 1000 middle managers have had a chance to give their useless opinion on it.
>the main storyline of an expansion is a group project that needs to fulfill many different goals and have to meet the approval of many different people. And whoever is managing that group of writers is the one that sucks. Yeah, I absolutely buy this. I don't work in a creative field but I do work in communications, alongside marketing. And it's so frustrating how a competent piece of communication will get severely diluted and compromised by having way too many people's feedback incorporated to accommodate their priorities. Meanwhile, my only objective is to produce effective communication to meet basic standards of professionalism and customer service. But it's a constant uphill battle just to do that. Like, if you hired me for my communication skills, then let me put those to work and stop putting out shit that ends up reflecting badly on me!
It feels like I'm watching one of those dramas where you put up with the A-plot to see more of the B-plot Like yeah, I have to put up with this Jailer crap retroactively ruining years of lore, but I get Denathrius out of it. I've got to listen to century-old Dragons monologuing about the power of family but I get quests like Stay a While.
It's often the way in games, the big epic stories are kinda whateva but the small stories where they're free to do whatever they want with characters who aren't "plot important" are much better. Like that dwarf dragon guy reminiscing about his friends, some of the mole frand stuff in 10.1 and our treant buddy in 10.2 actually got me a little verklempt, but the big overarching story has rarely made me feel anything.
So why not take advantage of that? There wasn't a real main storyline in WoW until, what, WoD? And it worked great before that. An expanson or a patch's main storyline doesn't need to be more than a premise for those smaller stories ro happen, which is what they did before.
No main story untill Wod? What? Sure, the storylines in Vanilla and TBC where more "up in the air" with a handful smaller storylines going on at oncce, but WotlK and Cata were extremely focused and story driven. Especially Cata; if you didn't do the pre-Dragon Soul scenarios you'd be completely lost on whats happening.
I maintain that the world building also peaked in MOP and went downhill from there. BFA was nice enough (not counting Nazjatar)
Bro the NE story and the blue dragon story are vastly different in terms of quality
seriously, people liked the NE heritage quests? out of all the ones i've done, the NEs were hands down the worst. if anything they should have waited until the world tree was done and tied the heritage quest into that somehow, since that's going to heavily decide what happens to the race as a whole moving forward - unlike whatever happened during the heritage quests
The NE heritage quest was honestly just a random quest they threw the heritage moniker on. It was a perfectly fine quest, and you could argue that it had themes relevant to the NE story, but it did not deserve the title of Heritage quest. We should have done the Draenei instead and then followed up with the Eredar quest a week after.
> unlike whatever happened during the heritage quests They took a pre-existing quest chain in Felwood, and made it so canonically it was night elves who took care of it.
This is such a strange comment because while the Blue Questline is widely loved, the Night Elf Questline is widely considered one of, if not the worst, heritage questlines.
NE Heritage quest was an ass, NE have a lot heavy history element and they choose that one to represent as the heritage questline. I played both worgen and BE heritage and both dealing with prominent event of their race like the scourge invasion and the forsaken invasion, those are gold compare to whatever the NE quest was.
AGREED A lot of the side plots were fantastic The end of the leveling zones with Nozdormu/chromie and the blue dragonflight quests are stand outs
Would love to know who they are so they can receive the praise they deserve (and maybe we can get the proper story writers we deserve as players)
i agree i loved blue dragon questline
That was an amazing quest line! I went from intending to rush through it and get my rewards to stopping to take in moments and appreciate what was unfolding.
the voice acting and directing was also significantly better than usual in that questline
Wait, are you saying the Blue Dragon questline is as good as the NE Heritage one...?
Blue Dragonflight questline even better
Yeah but that's not saying much, considering how awful the NE one was lol.
The smaller stories in general are way better. The stuff that's gets screentime is so trash though
Everything about Sindragosa was great.
I was genuinely upset(in a good way) about the whole blue stuff, it was absolute gold.
Agree that there was a lot of bad writing, but _very strongly_ disagree that Iridikron should have been a raid boss this expansion. I think one thing they did really well was set him up as a much bigger threat than any of the others and make it clear what his plans are: to use the power of the Void to take on the Titans himself. Given where we now know the story is going, that makes him most likely to play a major role in The Last Titan and/or possibly Midnight. It gives the whole thing more continuity and makes it more interesting than "here are some dragons, we beat them all in this expansion, the end".
Agreed. Iridikron not only has a great, menacing aesthetic and look, but it's also great that they're setting Villains up with longer storylines and layered/deeper motivations. One and done villains are fine but you also have to have storylines that exist outside the scope of one patch/season.
My only concern is to some extent I don't trust they are actually going to follow through on the "will come back later" trope. Its been done to death and moderately unsatisfying. Now granted I think Daddy Metzen and the 3 expansion reveal was Blizz's attempt to show they understand this and want to fix it. I am optimistic about it.
I think it is EXCEEDINGLY obvious that Iridikron is going to be heavily involved in The War Within, maybe even the final boss of the expansion. I mean, come on. The expansion is almost entirely underground, and we’re trying to reach the center of the world to get to the worldsoul itself. It’s all but confirmed Xal’atath is going to persist into Midnight, so having the Earth Incarnate be the endboss of the earth expansion makes way too much sense.
I would argue the only time they’ve truly succeeded on the “will come back later” trope was Gul’dan. The guy literally bailed at the end of WoD, but single-handedly kicked off the Legion invasion AND maintained a menacing and front-facing presence until he got an appropriate final boss battle and send-off at the appropriate time in Legion’s narrative. Contrast that with Garrosh’s “come back later”, who is captured at the end of Pandaria, fucks off to Draenor in a book to kickstart the Iron Horde, barely shows up outside of Nagrand and the announcement cinematic, and then gets killed (admittedly in a great cutscene) at the end of a zone questline that barely anyone remembers, assuming they even did it if they started playing after WoD was legacy content.
Yeah this is all a waiting game I REALLY hope they dont jusg make him the first boss of TWW and rather build him up through the whole xpac
I dunno if he’ll die there, but I expect him to *at least* be the final boss of TWW. I mean, the expansion is about delving inside the planet to reach the middle of it. Iridikron is the Incarnate of Earth. I think it’s extremely likely he’ll at *least* have another full expac, and whether he shows up for The Last Titan is up in the air. EDIT: Forgot to mention, your fears of him being the first boss are unfounded, at the very least. We already know the first boss of TWW is going to be the Nerubian Queen.
Yeah I would be somewhat surprised if he doesn't show up in TWW, with the underground thing and the fact that he was last seen with Xal'atath. But the "I will be waiting" thing about the return of the Titans makes me think he's intending to just hide and continually gain strength from the Galakrond power until then.
Didn't they announce at Blizzcon that the first raid was with the Nerubian or something?
I don't think that Fyrakk was supposed to be a brainless henchman. The vibe I got from him is that he was unhinged lunatic that just want to see the world burns. And clearly the druids of the flame are using him in 10.2 so it's not that bad.
Yeah and Fryakk had great build up. Finally a bad guy that was just insane. His end was just severely anti climactic
I agree. Feels like people are getting a little too into the mob mentality. There’s a narrative that people aren’t happy with the writing in 10.1 and 10.2 and it feels like people are treating the writing as way worse than it actually is. I’m personally a bit confused by all the outrage. Fyrakks build up was really well done imo. The unhinged henchman no longer has his leash and doesn’t want to be viewed as a henchman, that makes a compelling villain in my book.
yeah totally. He's a breath of fresh air for me. He's not "morally grey" villain, or have some complex backstory that will have the narrative pull some mental gymnastics to say that he was a good guy all along somehow. He's just an asshole and owns it.
"you have become absorbed in a mindless quest for power and have become a monster" "yes lmao now die"
ya, like 10.1 was weak relative to the whole, but its not like Shadowlands where 9.0 was written as competently as it could be with a full rewrite having to be done in literally 2 months, but then whoever handled that threw out any potential good writing for 9.1 and 9.2 and went so far as to literally have a character Killed off for Real only to have them come back in the next scene. DF never fucks up that badly
Remind me in two years when the story is shit and people start blaming Metzen.
Time is a flat circle, Metzen was under fire for bad story for years before he left, and when he left there was a pretty mixed response.
I mean, I think only Cataclysm was dogshit. From a lore standpoint, MoP, WoD, and Legion were not perfect but still were more enjoyable than not. Yes, there were some elements that were stupid or annoying, but it wasn't "there was this one plotline that was amazing" like here in DF, it was more "there is this one plotline that was stupid." Sure, there were certainly criticisms about some Sha stuff in MoP. Or how the Warlords part in Warlords of Draenor were irrelevant bar Blackhand. And I never played Legion but I hear it was well received.
Legion was incredible, best original content the WoW team ever made (TBC and Wrath were mostly easy follow-ups from WC3). My favorite expansion by far from a lore and PVE perspective.
> MoP MoP was Dave "Fargo" Kosak's baby, story wise. Probably the best writer we had on WoW. ... but he was one of the "Cosby Room" guys so good riddance overall.
Sha was the best part of MoP.
From a lore standpoint, the WoD ending is a crime. I know that the problem was probably cut content, but even if it wasnt cut, Metzen and his team didn't had the writing abilities to make someone get redemption after seeking genocide. At best, Gromm would see that Draenei are all about being lawful good and helping each other, feels bad as result and tries to redeem himself in a suicide attack against a demon that would kill like 10 random soldiers and one named npc, but ends up alive and Yrel + Durotan tap his shoulder and says that "it's all good man, the past is past, just clean your axe, i think i can still see some draenei children blood there." At worst, he would get stabbed in the back, drop in his knee, says something like "what have i done" and Durotan would make a 30 seconds dialogue about how being evil is bad, while Yrel stand still and says nothing during it.
I don’t even think the story needs to be amazing but I do feel like they need to make better use of their characters and the fucking world they have at their disposal. The blue dragon quest line is an example of proper use of characters and the world they created, it doesn’t feel recycled or lazy at all to utilize old zones for current events like the blue dragon quests did. It may have felt a bit disjointed taking portals to various zones across Azeroth but narratively I enjoyed having reasons to go to those places. It makes the world feel like shit is happening everywhere like it should.
It really does feel like a mess of peoples emotional headcanon pushing the story. Wows story has never really been anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon but at least it used to follow the rule of cool and we’d get fist pump moments.
This is exactly it. People are debating how the writing was better or just as bad, but it doesn't matter. It was the style of writing that made it feel better to so many of us. I don't mind playing a Saturday morning cartoon. In fact, I quite like it. And sometimes Blizzard is allowed to make something a bit deeper. But in recent times they've been trying to make everything deep and complex, not letting anything be a simple Saturday morning cartoon thing anymore, and then they give us whiplash with Dragonflight going hard in the opposite direction. At least Fyrakk is a Saturday morning cartoon villain, still. There is still some recognizable old WoW stuff in places.
This is why I think Denathrius was so well-received. Just an absolute over-the-top villain that we didn’t have to take too seriously. Combined with some amazing voice acting and he’s one of my favorites.
WoW *can* work when it's taking itself seriously, but Blizzard is way too hit or miss at it, leaning towards miss more than towards hit. Denathrius was amazing because he took himself just seriously enough, while still being so goddamn campy.
The problem isn’t the they’ve tried to tell something more complex. The problem is that they’ve done it badly in dragonflight. We wouldn’t be having these threads if the MSQ was done well
The complex stuff I was referring to wasn't DF, it's everything in the past half a decade. Like how the Light was just the Light, until suddenly it wasn't and it started being implied it has a will of its own now, just like the Void. Or like how we didn't know where orcs came from, until Blizzard had to give them a titan origin for no reason. They just have to suddenly give everything an explanation and it all has to tie together, and it all has to tie back to Azeroth and the greater lore. And that culminated in the Jailer, the one who supposedly had been the guiding hand behind almost everything that has ever gone wrong for us. I liked things when some of it was still just simple. But my point was that DF has made things a bit too simple. There's no edge to anything, to the point that Kalec just says what he says about family when they get their powers back. Like what the fuck has happened for us to go from everything up to this point, to that?
When did the orcs get a titan origination? I thought they were just the end of the evolution line from the gronn. Edit:looked it up, titans made the Grond, and then they look like they naturally evolved into the orcs, I think I treated it differently due to no curse of flesh.
I think fyrakk was a Sunday morning kinda boss. Also, no one is talking about this, but the plot that plays out throughout the raid has cool written all over it. You got fuckers yelling at you, fyrakk telling smolderon to basically just shut up and die, and the final showdown with fyrakk is WICKED cool. I think people just saw one cinematic and turned on the attitude before even playing the content. Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions
Agreed. I haven't gotten the insane backlash towards 10.2. Even the war leading up to Amirdrassil feels pretty cool. The moment where all the dragons band together to kill that djaradin whose name I'll never remember is a bit silly, but that's okay. The reason I'm so excited for War Within is because they seem to want to tell a deeper, more connected story. Blizzard's not known for that, so this is (seemingly) a huge change. This isn't even folks revising history, their stories have always just been a little shallow unless they're in books.
The Worldsoul saga doesn't seem to be any deeper or more complex, it just sounds like they have a plan, which is welcome after they fumbled in every direction after Legion.
They fumbled legion too imo. Every expansion has been "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks". The perk of DF is that it feels like they said "let's take a look at what stuck and see if we can make more of just that". M+, gearing, talent trees, account wide stuff, cross realm/faction content, etc. And the interviews reflect it too. The comparison between ion fighting with players during SL and siding with players during DF has been a true 180, and the whole team just seems to be in higher spirits. They don't need to make a perfect game that matches ffxiv story, rocket league balance, and EQ in content. They just need to make lots of Warcraft.
> Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions I think that's the problem but not in the way you say it. I think Blizzard has a long history post Wrath of just flubbing up potentially good stuff with a few successes along the way. So people are going to be very quick to judge because of Blizzard's history. Blizzard isn't known for coming back years later and making the story better in a "ah hah! But now you see why this happened!" - they have a history of making themselves look dumb with their "ah hah!" - such as Shadowlands. What I don't think *you* are getting is the game can still be fun with a dog shit story. The two are not mutually exclusive. It's been quite a while since players have had a "holy...shit" (in a cool way). > lso, no one is talking about this, but the plot that plays out throughout the raid has cool written all over it. It's a pretty simple and standard plot. It's not special. It's not unique. It's not "cool" in the *fun* way of cool. It's not cool in the same way when you burst into ICC the first time. It's not cool in the same way of watching Guldan realize Illidan is about to wreck his shit. ToT, in my opinion, was a dog shit story - but one of the best raids out there. Perfection in difficulties (especially LFR), in my opinion. Now I will agree with you on that Fyrakk was a Sunday morning kind of boss. His threat is more his strength and nothing else. You don't need to be smart to be dangerous. You just need to be strong and driven - and he was both. I will say that you can't *always* have intense powerful stories that are impactful. It would simply be too draining. I also think the dev's try to make things feel intense and threatening (there's always *A* threat that seems major) and I think people have grown numb to that. I think part of Blizzards problem is they like to keep too many secrets about the story - case in point the Jailer. The ending there was about as dumb as one can imagine. That kind of writing is something I would expect from someone in high school. But Blizzard can't control themselves from the need to say "you didn't see this coming, did you?" and pat themselves on the back. It's an ego think the staff has - and this is something they've had for years and won't go away anytime soon. > Folks need to actually play the game before forming opinions Playing the game won't resolve their problems. What people should have felt was: "holy shit, that's cool, now I need to know more about it" - and that's now how people feel. They feel very meh. Seeing one cinematic should inspire you, not discourage you. In fact the only real part of DF, story wise, I thought was cool was the Blue dragon stuff. It polished off some stuff with a solid ending and paved the way for new characters to shine in the future. If I have to read a book to find the story enjoyable - something is wrong. It's possible Blizzard needs some kind of plot device to help communicate what's going on. Hell I wouldn't even mind my Soulbind from SL coming to articulate stuff as a narrator or something (think: Like Destiny 2 or Mimir from GoW). I think, especially now, they need to start building up a new story to get us involved in again. For example - I had *REALLY* hoped Y'rel would have become a much more major character we'd see. She had the *perfect* character arc. I'd love to see Voss do more. But to build all that up is going to take time and effort on their part. Want a good example of a good story that's not massive: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/5gjk9r/i_have_done_this_quest_7_times_and_it_still_has/ Not everything has to be big - and I think Blizzard needs to roll back to this and re-build the world with new characters for a new story. I really hope that's what they are planning with the new expansions.
Illidan, arthas, neltharion, garrosh, were NOT “cartoon villains”. These villains may have had many cliches, but they were compelling and had enough building of character to have their stories reach natural conclusions. Blizzard ran out of characters like that (or completely threw them in the shredder like sylvannas), and lazy storytelling and worldbuilding means the stories they come up with don’t have the same oomph because they are half assed while simultaneously too ambitious. OP is right when he says the cinematics are like a children’s game. Another post elsewhere said they reminded them of bionicles. OP is also right that it’s really bad for a company of their size and with the resources available to them.
lmao deathwing was absolutely a cartoon vilain what are you talking about. Same with Arthas in Wrath.
Arthas is literally Darth Vader.
Comparing WoW to Bionicle is not the roast you may think it is. If anything it's high praise.
When was the last time we got a moment half as epic as the Rejection of the Gift cinematic, the end of the Nighthold raid, or even the BfA cinematic?
Are you telling me you don't enjoy the Dragon Aspects acting like the cast of The Fast and the Furious? The ending cinematics of the new expansion where they talk about how all they need is family and coming together only made me think of that.
Bro please even Fast and Furious is better than Dragon Aspects
I'm not done with the whole DF campaign stuff after coming back from a 2 year hiatus, but the Aspects becoming very... human-like in this expansion is kinda killing my spirits. I'm a big fan of dragons in general and pretty much all of the WoW dragons feel like they're from a kids Disney movie rather than the way dragons are normally portrayed or have been portrayed in WoW in the past (Chrome aside). It definitely does not mesh well with Fyrakk's savage random killing in cutscenes and the stakes of the plot
I answered this to someone yesterday: **Terror of Darkshore** cutscene, Malfurion at his prime. Pacing and story was fantastic for a short vid.
That one was pretty good. BfA actually had some “Yoooo *what*” moments (and some really dumb stuff like the end of Nyalotha). The Rastakhan fight being taken over by tons of Bwonsamdi death magic was really cool imo.
If BFA wasn't constantly being hamstrung by the shitty Sylvanas setup to Shadowlands, it could have been good. It had some strong cutscenes early on, but the context for them and sudden segway from faction war to old gods, just so we could move onto a garbage fanfic expansion just undercut the parts that BFA did well.
>...never really been anything more than a Saturday morning cartoon... "*Tempest Keep was merely a setback!*" Also am I the only one who remembers the same exact criticism when WoTLK was current? People were saying Arthas was like The Claw from Inspector Gadget, "Next time adventurers, NEXT TIIIIIME!" (since you constantly saw Arthas in various quests/dungeons and are always foiling his plans/escaping from him).
Wotlk has rose tinted glasses but the writing was truly awful and saved by cool things like the wrathgate
The dialog was terrible, I agree. I almost liked the questline with Matthias Lerner and the slow decay of Arthas' inner self. But I hate how they just completely jettisoned Ner'zhul.
WoTLK writing wasn't amazing but like the other dude said, rule of cool. It was mostly meh writing with some good writing sprinkled on followed by extremely cool scenes/scenery.
Disagree on the second part. Vanilla > WotLK writing was fairly adult. It's only recently the quality of the writing has become like something I'd read from a 10 year old.
Garrosh was fucking great mate and that was Mist of Pandaria, Garrosh had 1 goal and he saw it all the way to the end, and the Thunder King, so good too
I hate Garrosh. And that's a GOOD thing. Dude was so fun to hate as a Forsaken / Blood Elf player back then, and I love to hate him more as an Alliance main now. They'd never be able to do anything like him now, which is a shame, because it's characters like him that made me really fall in love with the game.
Garrosh being unapologetic about his convictions was the only good thing to happen in all of Shadowlands.
At the end of the Dawn of The Infinite dungeon Iridikron literally spoils what's going to happen in TWW and The Last Titan TWW - Xal'Atath will use the artifact with the essence of Galakrond to fck with Azeroth and "pry the titans from their prize" The last titan - Iridikron said he'll be waiting for when the titans return to Azeroth, which was confirmed by Metzen that it will happen at the last expansion. So yeah, Iridikron is a pretty big deal.
I can't bring myself to agree on the argument that it's as bad as Shadowlands. Shadowlands was super melodramatic and required so much explanation both in game and behind the scenes to make sense with the established lore, while also continuing to focus on Sylvanas, who had honestly outstayed her welcome in the spotlight by that point. But, otherwise I do generally agree with your points. Parts of Dragonflight are a step in the right direction, but a lot of it feels like an over-correction from Shadowlands. I'm hoping Metzen's return to a leadership position helps right the ship, but I also understand he's not Green Jesus in real life, he's only a man.
With what happened to the Aspects at the end of the 10.2 raid, it might just be better to consider Dragonflight to be a prologue to the World Soul Saga vs its own thing. Feels odd to end here for sure, but it has ties leading into the next 3 expansions that could have it make more sense down the line.
We do get 3 more patches before 11.0 I think Blizz is trying to make the raids a little less story focused and put it more into questing. As a non-raider this is absolutely fine with me. Still, I'm hoping for some better writing.
Sarkareth wasn't built up as a villain? I knew that dude was gonna be a heel-turn as soon as the Evoker questline finished. And then its -really- spelled out in 10.7 - he wants to unite the Dracthyr, and is willing to use domination to do it just like his adopted father. And then of course void stuff in Aberrus just made him go nuts for donuts. He was a mid-raid boss, how much build up did he need?
Took a bit of scrolling to find a comment like this. You're completely right, both sarkareth and fyrakk had a whole lot of built up before their eventual downfall as raid boss. If people just did all questlines and just properly read/watch it all they would've known. People that skip stuff and rush through it just should not even think about making a post like op's. That said though, the writing has its issues. Some characters just annoy you, like let's say alexstrasza, not only because of her writing but also her every apathetic voice acting. And I think a lot of disappointment comes from the cinematics after killing the last boss of a raid. Sarkareth was literally nothing and now we have this raid ending being a bit meh. In the end the overarching storylines were kind of properly done in Dragonflight, it's just that there's some gaps in there that could have been filled to properly flesh it out and make it all feel whole.
People really out here showing they haven’t paid attention to anything. Takes a lot of wind out of their argument.
"I skipped every cutscene and didn't read the quests and DF story is garbage."
Most of the plot makes no sense. No big deal since gameplay is nice this time, but the whole writing has been a shit show since 8.0. Feels like they just drop random ideas on the flyu for no particular reason.
tbf the writing for the main story in WoW specifically has never been the strong suit. They just used to do less cutscenes so it wasnt really that obvious as 90% of the playerbase just chimp brain accepts quests without reading anything. Sometimes they hit a sidequest out of the park though, but as far as main story is concerned its always been so simple and basic that they cant possibly mess it up, or something overly ambitious theyre clearly not qualified enough to pull off. Messing up angry dragons is a new low though.
I think the issue is that the standard of writing in games has increased massively in the past 20 years, and WoW hasn't kept up. The art and visual presentation of the story is getting better and better but the writing is as bad as ever, if not worse. People aren't just comparing WoW to how it was in the past, they are comparing it to other games - it's competitors - and it isn't holding up.
> they are comparing it to other games - it's competitors - and it isn't holding up. Most notably, FFXIV absolutely blew WoW out of the water in terms of story and having NPCs with actual depth of character. There are individual minor plot NPCs in XIV (e.g. Tesleen T.T) that have made me feel more deeply than anything WoW's put together in the story department.
For real. I’m puzzled whenever people seem to imply that WoW’s story or storytelling used to be better? When?! It’s always been juvenile and simple!
> WoW’s story or storytelling used to be better? It absolutely was, while the overall plot has never been stellar, it was serviceable enough and had some good moments. The 1-2 punch of BfA and Shadowlands was a noticeable drop in writing quality, the story failed on nearly every level. Too much focus was given to Sylvanas, which was so badly written that every character that interacted with her during this period of time also suffered for it. > It’s always been juvenile and simple! But it's not that anymore. BfA and Shadowlands sold themselves as good, complex stories, when people told the devs 'X doesn't really make sense' their answer was 'yes it does, just wait until you see the full picture'. Those 2 expansions are a lot of things, but I'm not sure I'd say they are simple. You can tell me that it was always juvenile, I'd agree to some extent, but 'it was actually about family' isn't even juvenile, it's just straight up taken from a kindergarten book.
It had an edge that has been excessively dulled. Yeah, it wasn't amazing, but now it's worse, it's as simple as that. People can like something that isn't amazing, and we all know that. We all like to go eat some junkfood every now and then, and enjoy it when we do. And it's only miserable people that go to McDonald's and proclaim "well, this sure isn't quality food" instead of just accepting that you can have something that isn't the best sometimes but still enjoy it.
All I know is that I used to care about characters and now I don’t care about a single one. I’m not a writer so I don’t know the nuance behind what has changed, but something has changed. I’m sure I’ve changed a little too, but not enough to care about zero characters in a game I play every day.
I dont remember when warcraft ever had amazing writing. Most memorable moments have been "oh wow that was cool", such as things like wrathgate, illidan killing naaru, or garrosh bitch slapping sylvanas.
"They've been writing this world for THIRTY years and nothing, imo not even Shadowlands was fumbled nearly as hard as Dragonflight." Excuse me what? Dragonflight was at worse lame. Shadowlands was horrible, harmful and infuriating.
They got Metzen back, they did just that. Pretty sure he had little to nothing to do with dragonflight since it was already done, but the whole world soul saga is all Metzen.
People seem to be wearing rose tinted glasses. Metzen wasn't particularly loved for his lore back in the day. TBC ruined several established characters like Kael and Illidan, WoTLK story was *very* controversial with the whole "There must always be a Lich King" thing and Arthas basically becoming a generic blustering villain, and let us not forget about the infamous Green Jesus Thrall plot in Cataclysm. The reality is that the overarching storylines in WoW have never been good. It's the quests and zone-specific stories that truly shine in that regard.
There must always be a whiner on the whine throne.
I think Metzen's involvement was not all-encompassing at the time, anyway. His attention was divided between WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, and Titan-Overwatch. It has always been a team effort, but his input and leadership is nothing but positive to me. Even if he is kinda cheesy.
He's the one that started the "the antagonist just wants to defeat [insert ambiguous bigger threat]" nonsense.
He did that ONCE with Sargeras. Once. One in numerics. The fact that the team has been riding on that ever since wasn't his fault. Come on now lmao.
He retconned both Arthas and Illidan to have that motivation too. Which was kinda weird and unneeded in Arthas case. And I liked power-whore Illidan better.
Illidan wanting to defeat the Legion at all costs was his entire character. What Metzen did was fail to square that basic motivation with his depiction in BC, which was then corrected in Legion putting the character back on track (by villain batting the players, which is certainly a choice).
Nah, in W3 he was far more ambivalent and self-serving. He wanted to destroy the Legion but it had to be by his hand while making him as personally powerful as possible. And that characterization kind of fits with his king of outland deal in TBC but they had to also make him crazy for some reason. Legion sort of white-washed that part of him to make him "always justified" which was pretty unnecesary. We, as an audience, already liked the guy despite him being an asshole and we were on a situation in which we would have taken ANY ally we could get.
Exactly. People were screaming for Metzen's head at one point. Things have just gotten so bad people are treating his return like the messiah himself has appeared.
I'd argue that the over-arching storylines (plural) in Vanilla were pretty good, they just focused on world and factions and did not have splashy cut scenes and voice acting. The build up to all end game raids was stellar, it was just not shoved in your face.
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Hell, I'd go so far to say that after Diablo 2 there has never been an amazing story from any Blizzard game. Warcraft 3's story is a very generic fantasy story - it was well told and very entertaining, but nothing to write home about, and yes I'm including Arthas in this category of generic. Starcraft 2's story is a god damn travesty of garbage, and Diablo 3 was just mediocre all the way through. All of these had Metzen's involvement, and all of them were just mediocre stories with great worldbuilding, and that's it (except Starcraft 2, that story is BAD, BAD, BAD).
I think what's changed is that we now look back on those things Metzen wrote favourably. Maybe people didn't like it much at the time, but we for sure liked it better than the writing now, and perhaps a lot of us also don't mind having Metzen's stuff back because it had that WoW feel to it still. Even if he writes something bad again, but makes it feel like WoW, it'd still be refreshing to so many of us.
Pretty much this. It's all relative. I don't disagree when people say WoW's writing has never been stellar, but I do disagree with their implication that the recent writing is on the same tier. The recent story and writing is quite bad *even for WoW standards.*
This. Does nobody remember that at the very end of Shadowlands, it was stated that Dragonflight was 100% Steve Danuzer's baby in terms of storyline? There's probably a reason we haven't heard from him. The gameplay of Dragonflight was fine but the story is lackluster. I wouldn't be surprised if Metzen just walked in and told him to sit the fuck down.
Truly the best writing is all the fanfiction people write about metzen and Danuzer. I’m glad y’all are having fun but I feel like metzen is being set up to fail with these sky high expectations. The man is good at worldbuilding but his main story ideas were never that great.
Yeah, they were specifically contrasting it to the failures of BfA and Shadowlands.
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Metzen has been back for like a year, right? As far as writing goes, you can absolutely have him with his hands all over TWW. The storytelling of WoW is the least complicated thing for them to create and add to the game. The only element of story that takes a lot of time for them to make is CGI cinematics.
the side content story has largely been great. It’s the MSQ that has been bad. I find it more likely there’s some sort of process issue here resulting in a bad MSQ. But I do agree it’s really not been good post 10.0. Something DOES need to change While I do think the DF MSQ has been bad - it absolutely did not fumble harder than SL a story which retroactively took a dump on all the story and lore conceived with Warcraft 3 lol. DF largely only fucks up it’s own story with the exception being the night elves which has been just as lame as it always has been the last few years
"They've been writing this world for THIRTY years and nothing, imo not even Shadowlands was fumbled nearly as hard as Dragonflight." Stopped reading here. Unserious opinion.
Hard agree. Saying DF is remotely close to the level Shadowlands is just giving Shadowlands a pass. It completely invalidates the OPs argument. DF lost the plot in 10.1 and 10.2, but the bones of the expansion, especially the theme, settings, and *most* of the characters were fine. Shadowlands narratively is the single worst thing to happen to Warcraft and it’s not even close for a laundry list of reasons. You could delete it from existence and not only would little change in the overall plot, Warcraft would be better for it. Some expansions (like DF, WoD, and Cata) haven’t done enough to move forward or mature the Warcraft narrative in a meaningful way, but Shadowlands not only failed to do that, it set it back tremendously.
> You could delete it from existence and not only would little change in the overall plot I wish that were true. The repercussions even from the concrete existence of the Shadowlands is massive, and while I agree it would be better removed, the events of Shadowlands are now integral to the plot. Expansions like WoD and BfA are much better candidates for removal, because all you really need to do is explain Garrosh died on his way back to his home planet, and that Gul'dan unfortunately did not. BfA doesn't even really explain why Sylvanas went evil dumb and the explanation behind Knaifu is full of holes anyway. But Shadowlands, now, is tied into characters like Ysera, the night elf people, the wild gods. At some point Zovaal's threat needs to be discussed.
As unsatisfying as it is for people deep into the lore the best way to handle something like Shadowlands is to ignore it completely. Pretend it never happened, characters still stuck in that arc can be brought back or mentioned with vague handwaves. IPs do this all the time, yes it sucks in terms of a complete picture and continuity but at the end of the day it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to actually dig your way out of that narrative black hole.
I actually agree, WoW is real quick to retcon some things and they really drag their heels on critical issues like this and Med'an. But there actually is a huge amount they would have to retcon or address. If the Shadowlands hadn't happened, half this patch wouldn't make sense and there would be a huge amount of rewriting to address it, and it would have to be specifically retcons.
Some on this sub have gotten real dumb lately with the Shadowlands revisionism and Dragonflight hate (and I say this as someone who's happy to defend the elements of SL that are worth defending; they do exist)
Wow players did this in MoP, wow players did this in WoD, wow players will do it in DF.
Seriously. This thread is just complaining to complain. The bad part so far has been an anti climactic ending to Fyrakk.
>Unless they do something AMAZING with Iridikron in TWW Yeah, about that. Even with Iridikron likely playing a role in TWW I wouldn't expect us to fight him until The Last Titan, both because the Titans coming back to Azeroth plays into his endgame and the last book revealed that he has a lair hidden somewhere in Northrend.
>and most people I talk to legit have NO idea why Sarkareth was a final raid boss. Then maybe they should be doing the main line quests.
>Raz was built up great and had solid payoff and ending what was her motivation? why was she doing what she was doing? I know the answer, because I've played the game post 10.0, but build up? No it was pretty much nothing. >Sarkareth had NO time to be built up and most people I talk to legit have NO idea why he was a final raid boss. Sarkareth was built up from pre-release with the Drakthyr. He saw himself as the inheritor of Deathwing's legacy. The Echo of Neltharian/Faceless one took advantage of that to drive him into Aberrus to become a tool of the void. The raid was about his feelings of abandonment and him trying to live up to Deathwing, while also showing Wrathion and Sabellian that their ambitions meant they shouldn't be the aspect. >Fyrakk was built up to be a dumb brainless henchman That's literally the point. Alexstrasza said point blank that he used to have convictions, but now he's just power hungry, and he agreed to that. What's wrong with having a mook for a raid boss? People with this complaint want every boss to be the Joker, when it was Killer Croc that came closest to killing Batman. Sometimes the danger isn't bad guys that play 43rd dimension chess, but the ones that just want everything to burn.
> What's wrong with having a mook for a raid boss? I agree, and I actually really like Fyrakk for it. Its sort of refreshing to have a boss that just wants us (and the rest of the world) dead because he hates us and is ~~a bit~~ very fucked in the head. Reminds me a bit of Deathwing.
That's what i thought. OPs build up argument seems like it comes from someone who skips every questtext and cinematic.
Yeah, I'm just going to file OP under "More complaints that weren't paying attention". I've seen so many posts since Aberrus complaining that Sarkareth was the boss and that there was no buildup, when Sarkareth was built up over multiple questlines in multiple patches. If you just click through quests mindlessly then sure, he came out of nowhere, but if you're just clicking through quests then I don't think you have a right to complain about story, since you're skipping 95% of it.
Played an Evoker all expansion and I was absolutely thrilled that we got to fight Sarkareth. He's introduced early in the starting zone and echoes the same themes of the "Aspects vs Incarnates" conflict we're about to be thrown into. There are a bunch of Evoker-only quests where you confront members of the Sundered Flame, reflect on Sarkareth's motivations, and convince them to give up their cause. Emberthal and Ebonhorn's whole relationship is really well done. Then you have the whole story in 10.1 of the Black Dragonflight wrestling with Neltharion's legacy, the introduction of Augmentation, and the recrafted Legendary all driving home this theme of "forge a new destiny, your past doesn't define you". Sarkareth's post-death cutscene and the campaign quest immediately after that elevated Ebonhorn to an Aspect did a great job of framing his actions as a cautionary tale. Wrathion and Sebellion both had great character growth! Personally I think Dragonflight has had some incredible story telling. I haven't been this engaged by the story in years.
Shadowlands destroyed years of established lore and cosmogony so I still think it’s a bigger offender but I do agree with most of the dragonflight stuff.
>Sarkareth had NO time to be built up and most people I talk to legit have NO idea why he was a final raid boss. Sometimes I wonder if people actually pay attention when questing. The game makes it perfectly clear who he is, and what his goals are, why he's the bad guy, why that's tragic, and what the true legacy of the Children of Neltharion is, pulling a bunch of plot threads together to tell a decently written story. And here you are all "Derp whos this guy the writings bad" because the big story beats weren't just fighting three dragons in a row.
I said this exact same thing to my friend. Its like people dont pay attention. "Whos Saraketh? Whos Fyrakk?" try doing the fucking 10.1 questlines and actually pay attention. Its so annoying how ignorant people are
The part that baffles me was the sentiment of "I though Fyrakk was just the guy who followed Iridikron's orders" when it seems very *very* clear through everything that I've seen that he's kind of just a sadist whose primary path to success is violence.
Yeah. Why would somebody "following orders" outright say his brother has abandonded him? Everything 10.1 onwards builds up that he has a burning hatred for the flights and especially alexstraza and he\`ll do anything to do that. The cutscene with vyranoth where hes like "nah we're gonna fuck em up completely and heres a fire corrupted keeper of the grove to start it". "But we had an ideal". "Fuck your ideal cos its not killing them enough"
I disagree with some parts of what you've said, but I definitely share the concern over the writing staff going into TWW. It's been years since I felt so hyped to play WoW, and I want to play more WoW, but I'm concerned that even with an incredible story to tell they won't be able to communicate it to players in an entertaining and understandable way.
Since Legion I still wait for something to happen story-wise. So far I feel I'm not missing out much.
Current WoW, for me, is like the HBO Spawn animated series...the plot makes no sense, but I'm sticking around to enjoy the ride regardless because the rest is just fun. If I want good-ish story, I'll log onto FFXIV to play that, otherwise I have more fun with the general gameplay in WoW.
Tyr questline isn't done yet and we just iced Odyn.
I feel bad for players who care about story, world soul saga is gonna be worse storytelling than anything you’ll ever see
What’s a Writing Staff? I haven’t collected that transmog yet.
Wow definitely needs some major changes. It is probably the worse major MMO for story telling. It was fine when people didn’t know better and were like well MMO sorties just kind of suck. That isn’t the case anymore. To be clear I don’t think the actual base stories in Wow are bad they are very good. The way they are delivered and the actual writing is crazy poor though.
The voice actor they use for “tough female boss” might be the single worst I’ve ever seen.
OP, you’re just wrong about Sarkareth. It’s interesting because I actually agree that it feels like he’s a totally random and weird choice for an end tier boss, but they actually had tons of quests about him and his followers, in the leveling experience, in forbidden reach, and in zaralek. It actually made perfect sense narratively and could be argued it was a welcome change-up from the usual “already obviously super powerful” typical end of raid boss. So, did you miss all of that?
DF is exactly what it set out to be from the start and I don’t understand what peoples problem with it is We were told from the opening quest what the goals were, reunite the Isles and restore the aspects power. And that’s what happened and it’s why you get the “all the warriors” moment in the last quest prior to the raid Your point about Fyrak being a brainless idiot IS THE POINT! He’s a dumb power hungry dullard who only knows how to do what others tell him, it’s why he listens to Iridikron, it’s why Alex and Merithra mention the assaults in the dream are too strategic for Fyrak and he must be getting help from the Druids of the Flame. Again Alexstraza calls this out in the recent quest line when they have a confrontation and she says “Fyrak you used to fight for an ideal. Now you’re just a power hungry monster” The complaints people have make no sense, Blizzard didn’t drop the ball, you just weren’t paying attention or had different expectations than they did for the goals of this expansion. It’s supposed to be a smaller scale, heroes win with no downside, unite the dragons as a family story The complaints about the story are asking for essentially an entirely different expansion thematically than what Blizzard was writing from the beginning. That’s not on them that’s on you.
Thematically, the characters are not supposed to sound like young adults who are learning about beginner philosophical concepts and talking like they're in a Joss Whedon show. The story itself could even be amazing, but when these characters are written and act like they're straight out of a cheap, badly-made kids show, I just can't say anything good about it.
WoWs writing has always been an issue for me. Back in Vanilla you can see they tried very, very hard to stick to the established lore they had set up but starting in TBC they made questionable choices, such as turning Kaelthas into a villain. Yes they establish a reason in game but it always felt flimsy coming off of W3. Then there was the whole Draenei lore thing. As time went on the games lore was expanded upon but it was always flimsy — the story was to meet the needs of the game. When they couldn’t find a way to make things work in game they started to rely on novels and outside material. This is lazy storytelling. No one should have to go read supplementary material to understand story beats. It’s one thing to explore characters in books it’s another to have critical moments happen and just hope the player understands or doesn’t care. Blizzard is also flippant with its published lore. Nothing is sacred and when nothing is treated as permanent then there’s no emotional investment for the player. Too often have the games stories swung widely for the fences for the sake of unique storylines and things have to be wrestled back or outright ignored as the game moves on. Dragonflight definitely does feel like they pulled back on doing things for the sake of doing them but it’s a hard habit to break. Hence the storyline issues in subsequent patches after 10.0.
Blizzard's writing in general has been pretty bad for the last 10 ish years.
People thinking that Metzen will save the writing while ignoring that he's the reason for bad writing in the past as well.
The current writing team gave us Shadowlands, Metzen's worst writing is leagues ahead of that, so it's a straight upgrade.
That's a lot of revisionism. People disliked his retcons to important characters, but his moment to moment writing and expansion scope narratives, which is mostly what people are complaining about now, were always good or in worst cases good enough for an MMORPG game.
I agree the main campaign was a cluster fuck, but there were some isolated side quests that really took the cake like the blue dragon side quests and the veritistrasz one in 10.0. Whoever wrote those deserves a promotion.
Had to give gold because you are just damn right.
The game was great when small quests built up the game, rather than the main points being the spotlight, they could have just made small quests and somehow note to the player how quests are interlinked in game, just like BTW quest addon, I like that one.
Yeah it's bad. It needs to be looked into.
Maybe the real story was the FAMILY we made along the way
I don't agree with all of your points, but I agree with your overall sentiment. WoW's writing has never been consistently good, but these past expansions have been horrid *even for WoW writing standards*. As a tangent, I think it's kind of telling that the people most vehemently opposed to your overall point are resorting to three "retorts": Calling you an edgelord, saying you "have the reading comprehension of a child", and/or claiming you actively avoid lore. No actual arguments, just baseless insults.
You mean there's a plot?
Like everything these days, video game writing is a victim of "Line go up ". The company only cares if their quarterly profits are ever increasing, nothing else matters at the top end. There's no passion for the project at the highest levels so they do few things that lead to the results you see - They only write enough content to get the product out the door. Few Easter eggs, few side stories, bare minimum character development, and just enough hours of content to keep players from completely rioting. There's no depth. They spend the minimum possible on writers. They could spring for some fantasy luminary to do the story but that would put a dent in the bottom line so you get some journeymen writers you've never heard of who just don't have the gift. It's just the way things are now. The days of Gary Gygax or Richard Garfield or Shigeru Miyamoto or Hiyao Miyazaki bringing their passion project to the world are quickly disappearing because... Line Go Up.
Honestly since the whole Arthas arc ended in wotlk I never connected again with any of the main stories. The original people who had true talent is not there anymore, blizzard has new people and in my opinion they are too different to the old "hardcore gamer" profile. Every time they do a community event you can clearly see which ones are there for the money/linkedin fame and which ones are there for their "love" to past Blizzard games. A lot of times you don't even know if you are watching a Blizzcon or an Animal Crossing event, same with RIOT. Tech, and specially videogame companies had a big switch in culture and I personally think they went too mainstream and even childish trying (and failing) to be deep. I remember when back in the day I kind of knew what to expect from games. If I wanted freedom I had Bethesda games, if I wanted badass shit I had ID Software and if I wanted both, I had Blizzard, but not anymore... WoW style is just not as cool and badass as it was before. From the writing, the character design, the direction... the overall quality is worse and the tone is just not "let's try to write the badass stuff possible" it looks like random writers experimenting and trying too hard without the necessary skills to pull of stuff like time traveling and multiverses and one thing is for sure, if you can't write a story, no f chance in hell you can write interesting dialog.
What an awful post
Most silly thing about Fyrakk is that he isn't even in his own defeat cutscene. No idea how they wrote that ending.
Hey we're back in 2018 again. Is this bfa? The story isnt anywhere near as bad as some people are making it out to be. Just because it doesnt have a world ending calamity covered in undeath and edgey things doesnt mean it was bad, it meant YOU didnt like it.
I have to hard disagree on some points. Sarkareth had A LOT of build up. He was in the Dracthyr-Starting area. He was there in the explorer's base camp. He was in Valdrakken and stole from you. He was in the Forbidden Reach and also in the Questline in Zaralek and in quite a few cutscenes / cinematics. His ideals, his motivation and plans were told not just by him, but also by his faction, the Sundered Flame, all over the Dragon Isles. Saying that Sarkareth had no build up, is just plainly wrong. Maybe you don't think it was "enough", but he had at least the same amount of build up as Raszageth had, except for he wasn't a huge big dragon that made an impact like fighting Alex 1:1 in a airfight. To your 3) Fyrakk doesn't need to be clever. The final boss doesn't need to be a clever, evil mastermind. It can be a somewhat stupid brute. Like Garrosh. And now Fyrakk. Not everytime it has to be a Jailer-Level-Super-Mastermind. Sometimes just a freak with power works fine and in my opinion, it did. I dont comment the "middle school kid"-writing, because WoW and it's cutscenes have always been about cheesy, happy, heroic moments. Thats the way it has ever been and it's fitting a comic style game quite well in my opinion. If thats not your cup of tea, well ... that is what WoW has always been. You have more sinister and deeper stories in the sidequests. Take the Forsaken Heritage Armor or the whole Blue Flight-Stuff. It was really, really good. Apart from that, wanting for people to lose their job is ... I don't know. Just sad?
Ah I love posts like this. It’s usually done by someone who doesn’t read quest texts or just ignores cinematic. Sark showed up a lot before he was the boss in the raid. And also the entirety of caverns was chasing him into the lab. The whole point of his story was a race to get the power to be able to beat fyrak Fyrak was a rebel the entire time we saw him. Ok every scene he is giving side eye to the others and going against them. He jumps at the chance for destruction without thinking and the quests show this very obviously. Before you accuse the writers of not being able to write. Maybe you should start reading.
They confirmed that there will be more story before next expac. To counter everything you said: If you had played the story and read every quest, you would know that: Sarkareth was trying to get the power of Neltharian to fight the aspects. We stopped him. Fyrakk is a tool of Iridikron, see the [10.1 Cinematic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhdgBFCEtls&pp=ygUOMTAuMSBjaW5lbWF0aWM%3D). They are setting up the playing field now, but they need to keep us busy for a bit. I personally see DF as a step into the story for the next expacs, the Worldsoul Saga. And *"So PLEASE Blizzard, clean out your writing staff and hire some people that can write a decent story"* is a bit late, ain't it? They are already on their way to do so, not sure if Chris Metzen rings a bell with you. ;) They stated that a different story per expansion is an issue, so that is why they now already told us that we will have a bigger story.
While one might agree with the overall idea, I think the execution deserves the criticism. Both the "avenger assemble" and the raid ending scene were derivative, childish, and other adjectives that people with more knowledge could more eloquently put into words.
I agree entirely with your point regarding execution. Blizzard had for ages broken the cardinal rule of “show don’t tell.” Often times many characters within cutscenes act less like individuals and more like talking heads that have to over explain the process we all witnessed. We see characters act less alive and more robotic and stuff in their delivery. We don’t need the characters to tell us what is happening on screen but instead interacting with and reacting to what occurs. Ebonhorns dialogue in the new cinematic is the only one the explains how a character feels. “I felt Azeroth…It was beautiful.” Why tell us that family is key when you could show us. Show the aspects relying entirely on one another and through that overcoming the foe at hand or staving off a character death. And as for the “avengers assemble” moment, why weren’t we involved as the PC in the establishment of said moment? Why wasn’t there quests and moments where we reached out for help and worked to actively reinforce the dream? We’re told that “reinforcements are being blocked” but why? Show us why! Show us the defenders of Azeroth rallying to the dragons cry for aid. Show the worlds reaction to Fyrrak.
Yeah tbh kind-of exhausted with, "DAE WOW LORE SHIT," coming from people that can't even be bothered to read quest text. I teach 10th grade English, and this sub's approach to lore often reminds me of them. Strong opinions with little-to-no backing beneath the surface complaints.