/games/ - Games

>>36111
Go outside, touch grass, join your local union and organize you disgusting g*mer.

Any actual concern for story ended with Frozen Throne (arguably even before with nonsensical time-travel books). MMOs by their very nature require never-ending stream of power-creeping contend, the medium cant sustain good storytelling.

It was pretty gay when they made the orcs misunderstood demon influenced hippies in the third game.

>>36114
BS. ESO manages to maintain a semi consistent world even with all the expansions, because the writers (shockingly enough) care about the lore enough to view it as worth taking seriously. What world of Warcraft’s word building needs is that kind of commitment to logical consistency.
I’m not asking for the game to be some super realistic fantasy MMO, but at the very least, some additional writing and some tweaks to the setting would make the game feel much more interesting than it currently is—similar to what most hard fantasy writers want their worlds to be like.

>>36111
Warcraft's story and worldbuilding was only really good in the RTS games and Vanilla to a lesser extent. They made some big blunders in TBC and went past the point of no return in Wrath.

>>36115
"Good orcs" was a fairly novel idea at the time.

Uhm actually☝️🤓 orcs are descended from giant rock monsters and not all of them made it through the dark portal, and not all of the remaining ones followed Thrall to durotar. They're nearly extinct but so is every other playable race, the only new lore they get is genocides.

I dunno if Blizzard has ever given an in-universe reason why not every race uses things like helicopters and robots but the real reason is because they go for vibes-based (or rule of cool) worldbuilding where each race is homogenous with its own aesthetic. It worked fine for the RTS games but is a little goofy in the MMO. I don't have a problem with that kind of worldbuilding in general and to get too into historical materialism would undermine the game itself, where a hunter with a gun is supposed to face off against a warrior or a mage. Or look at League of Legends where literal gods are on equal footing with tiny blue dudes.

Sadly I don't think they're ever gonna drop the multiple timeline/dimension thing but if anyone is invested in WoW's writing at this point they should see a doctor. It's had a Saturday morning cartoon/Marvel movie feel since Cataclysm at least where it's constantly shifting between "wacky goblin contraption EXPLODES?! 0_o" and "the fate of the universe is in your hands, champion", and VAs read each line like it's the most important thing ever said in history. Not to mention they've made no effort to make the story easier to understand for new players who are going from one expansion to the next not knowing what the hell is going on or who anyone is.

>>36327
>"Good orcs" was a fairly novel idea at the time.
You mean lifted entirely from Warhammer? Just like Starcraft?

>>36348
Where's good orcs in warhammer?

>>36348
There's good orcs in Warhammer?

Also, don't buy too much into the "Blizzard ripped off Warhammer" meme. It took some ideas for sure, but Warhammer is also pretty derivative itself and a lot of the similarities come from Games Workshop and Blizzard both copying the same kid's homework, especially Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dune, Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov

>>36351
And Lovecraft with pals!

>>36351
Fantasy is an incestuous genre, and is best categorized by degree of flanderization and distance from an original idea. If Warhammer is a poor imitator of Tolkien, then Warcraft is even more watered down.

>it's another "why isn't fiction realistic" thread
Everyone has their own standards for suspension of disbelief.

>>36370
All existing works are pastiches to varying degrees.

>>36385
>All existing works are pastiches to varying degrees.
I feel that fantasy is especially derivative.

>>36416
I guarantee grug was a better artist than the author of that webcomic

I miss when people autistically nitpicking le lore in pop culture wasn't the fucking norm and got rightfully mocked.

>>36492
I miss when writers of popular media actually gave a shit about writing believable and in depth worlds.

>>36493
How could we forget about the deep and believable world of popular media like Looney Tunes?

>>36494
You know what; it was in depth. The physics were cartoonish, and the world itself was simple, but the characters, the jokes, and the writing was complex. Those qualities have that cartoon such mass appeal and some level of value past pure entertainment. Unlike today’s media where writers keep trying to one up themselves in the scale of their worlds, but conveniently forget to add any detail to them. All the audiences end up getting are shows and details whose scale surpasses tolkiens original works, but are all as shallow as a puddle in terms of both their depth in detail and meaning to the viewers.

skibidi toilet

>>36347
>I dunno if Blizzard has ever given an in-universe reason why not every race uses things like helicopters and robots
It's because the advanced technology is made entirely by two "mad scientist" races, neither of which have any conception of "user friendliness," "safety standards," "reliability" or "practicality."

In the MMO, there's actually a good example given of why most races are still in the middle ages and haven't fully adopted gnome and goblin technology. The farmers of Westfall decided to buy a bunch of harvester robots to do their farming for them… only for the robots to go haywire and start attacking everything.

>>36347
I haven't really followed the story since Cataclysm, but my distant impression was them writing the most absurd shit so they can have a fantasy cliche. Like I saw the cutscene that is apparently for when you kill Deathwing and it's the dragon aspects saying they have to give up their powers now to maintain the balance or something.

Then I saw another cutscene where they resurrect a Naaru and the Naaru tells Illidan that he's the prophesied Chosen One and then Illidan says that he doesn't trust statements like that because he got tricked by a demon once, and so the Naaru tries to make him the Chosen One by force and so Illidan kills the Naaru and gets attacked by a paladin and tells the paladin that he's blinded by his faith and runs off. Like, fist off, why would Illidan be the Chosen One of the Holy Light, he's a Night Elf it's not even his religion lmao. And he's been corrupted into a demon at that! A demon Night Elf is the Chosen of the Light? lmao wtf.

And so I did some digging and apparently that Naaru was the Draenei equivalent of Christ Returned and their response to Illidan killing it was… Velen saying that trying to make someone do something against their will is bad. lmao wtf is this writing. How the fuck are the "heroic" characters always on the side of the writers no matter what. Helen is the prophet of the Holy Light and when a fight breaks out between Holy Light Jesus and a demonic Night Elf because Holy Light Jesus was trying to get the demonic heathen to accept the Holy Light, Velen, Prophet of the Holy Light, automatically takes the side of the fucking demon.

And the writing only gets worse from there! This is the shit modern retail WoW shit eaters have nostalgia for!

>>36506
Christ. No wonder why people are struggling to really get into wow despite the increasing player counts. It’s going to take an unholy amount of papers, quests, and levels to fix every world building plot hole in the game’s current state without resorting to retconning. At least the RuneScape devs know that their writing is fucking lazy, which is why they don’t ever expect the player to take the story or world building seriously.

>>36511
The increasing player counts are from the Classic servers.

I can't imagine anyone new getting into the modern retail version of the game. At least with Classic and the old "vanilla" world, it was an actual game from the first second you got into the game world (even if tab target combat has always been controversial.) And all you really needed to know about the game's story was the little blurb you were given at the beginning.

Now you get dropped off on a fucking tutorial island (a mistake Vanilla avoided!) and then wade through hours upon hours of braindead easy, pointless, garbage content with no clear direction for the privilege of playing an entirely different game once you hit max level. And it's an endgame you might not even expect if you're expecting something akin to an RPG, because in reality it's sitting in the capital maybe doing some repetitive phone game quests or getting teleported to an instance where you essentially play Dance Dance Revolution with one hand and some Mario Party minigame with the other, and it's expected that you already know your particular Dance Dance Revolution sequence and that you've already studied all the Mario Party minigames like it's fucking homework.

>>36514
The worst part of this shit show is that this started because of Blizzard’s mid 2010s theories on accessibility in game design. It wasn’t just wow; all their games got affected by these theories. The result was a shit load of convoluted and hard-to-understand systems introduced to wow meant to make the game easier.
Dungeon finders didn’t make finding dungeons with friends easier, but it did make people that already were hardcore raiders even more angry if they got paired with players that sucked. The new quest designs and mini games didn’t make the game offer easier content to new players, but it did make the game’s quests way more confusing, and the progression system even more complicated respectively. I don’t even want to start on their approach to the UI features.
Thankfully, most of these features have either been toned down or flat out removed after shadowlands and dragon flight dropped. However, players today should worry if the studio fully dropped their theories on accessibility, and focused back on making simple but challenging gameplay experiences. Wow was easier when it was that way; same can be said about the story.

Do you guys think that wow could be a better game if the devs removed the skill system and any currency that isn’t gold? The original few versions, i.e. the versions before the burning crusade didn’t have skills.