The writing is so bad hahaahah holy shit. Didnt want that army anyway. Hopefully this means finally no faction divide anymore in next expansion, with population, especially raid people, dipping so hard in horde favor since forever.
I don't get why they don't just hire a good writer. Pay the writer a wage of 100k a year and you'll have an excellent author. Just look at what a splash a game like the last of us made with a decent plot. They're raking in millions a year with this game but still can't find the money to hire someone who can write a plot better than a 5 year old....
On September 25 2019 03:17 RvB wrote: I don't get why they don't just hire a good writer. Pay the writer a wage of 100k a year and you'll have an excellent author. Just look at what a splash a game like the last of us made with a decent plot. They're raking in millions a year with this game but still can't find the money to hire someone who can write a plot better than a 5 year old....
I mean, thats actually what they did. They hired Christie Golden and this is what the came up with...
So Sylvanas started the faction conflict and struck a bargain with Azshara to unleash N'zoth so that everyone would die and she can raise them all as undead. Sigh, they could have resolved the faction conflict during Legion without this garbage of a storyline. Do they address the rest of the Horde at all? Or are they now all suddenly at peace with the Alliance and ok with dissolving because reasons?
Ps. Pissed about Saurfang once again being made a punching bag. They could have had Sylvanas poof him to death without having him flail around in the actual physical fight.
Hiring a professional writer wouldn't help if that writer is still beholden to Blizzard's whims. They would need to be given total and final jurisdiction on the direction of the story with minimal to no input from Blizzard.
But Blizzard was and is run by people who grew up surrounded in power metal epic fantasy stories so that's the kind of stories they write. I'm not saying that to judge either, those stories can be fun but they're definitely the popcorn action movie type of storytelling. Blizzard's issue is that their stories still run on that kind of logic, but they clearly want to write something more like ASoIaF/GoT. And I don't think this is just because of the recent popularity, the final mission in TFT was called "A Symphony of Frost and Flame" after all.
I guess I don't really get the outrage--not so much here, but pretty much any dedicated WoW forum is in a constant state of outrage about the story--because even the RTS stories were just serviceable replaying them as an adult. And it's not like the story in the MMO has ever been great. Remember the Draenei/Eredar retcon? Kael/Vashj getting screwed over? "There must always be a Lich King"? I don't get why people are constantly shocked and upset about it. It's nothing new.
I guess that a lot of my problem comes down to what the story is doing to the lore/universe in general (racial lore, class lore, heroes/leaders etcetc).
Nelf has been my favourite race for 14 years (from classic to TBC/WC3/WOTLK) and they have been a really bad joke for ages now. WoW never had the racial/class/etc identity strength of wc3 but every expansion seems to have made it worse with cumulative damage.
Blizz's writing has been unacceptably bad for many years now. Even when they bring in fresh faces or established writers to replace the old guard, it somehow always blends out to the same flat nonsense. This isn't WoW exclusive either. Diablo and Starcraft have similar trajectories and are flat boring cliche yuck. They got lightning in a bottle with Overwatch somehow, but even there it's mostly really strong characters, given that there's not much actual narrative lore / extended storylines. Cinematics wildly vary between endearingly great and frustrating depending almost entirely on how much dialogue there is, which is a shame because the visuals have always been consistently top notch.
Not something to really be outraged about. Just constantly disappointing, and unquestionably they could do much better. But why bother when it's "worked" for so long lol.
On September 25 2019 02:59 Cyro wrote: Yeah, and everything pointing to nzoth 8.3 into shadowlands 9.0 for content.
Story-wise it's so wildly fucked up that i've disconnected entirely - way better off reading fanfic while skipping everything ingame.
The Shadowlands leak doesn't make sense to what we got just though. Sylvanas says we (Azeroth) are going to join forces and die to her and Azshara and then those two will kill Nzoth. The leak also was Alliance vs Horde while killing an Old God. This cinematics just stopped Horde vs Alliance war and maybe for good at this rate. They also won't give us Slyanas as a boss this expansion i don't think so i assume a Lich Queen expansion next time with the carnage of killing NZoth spouting her to finally able to take that power she craves and it will be us all vs her Foresaken army. I assume Helya also might show herself somewhere too.
However we probably are both wrong and its gonna be completely random instead xD Reading more into it, this leak; https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2492434-WoW-quot-leak-quot-from-a-developer-on-4chan(lol) Seems very well a possibility of direction now for the game too, minus the class crap but the way they just "scrap" horde vs alliance and make it more friendly with just skirmishes. Either that or we will split everything and no alliance or horde and just a bunch of race wars instead as everyone is pslit and no one runs anything.
An expansion about going to the Shadowlands is possible without the leak titled Shadowlands being accurate. It's pretty much confirmed that we will be dealing with Death next expansions, and by extension going to the Shadowlands either as a continent, a zone, or dungeons/raids. There are a ton of hints for it--Bwonsamdi's boss, the mystery with Vol'jin's vision, Sylvanas and Death--and we got similar hints in Legion that lead into this expac.
That 4chan leak does look more likely now, it even seems to predict that Sylvanas stops being faction leader before 8.3 but maybe I'm giving too much credit. I don't really think any leak is particularly likely right now, leaning over 80% that there's been no real leak.
Blizzcon will be very interesting regardless. Expansion info, 8.3 info, probably a good bit of talk about Classic since it blew up into having more concurrent players than BFA during the launch hype.
Maybe even some stuff about sc2 co-op or a big OW2/D4 announcement and if it hasn't come already we'll get the WC3 Reforged date
Finally an auction house overhaul. Hope they bring that in to classic too, though i doubt it. All in all its just the usual stuff, nothing too hypeworthy tbh. New allied races are pretty meh.
Ya thats by far the most important thing, maybe they replace it with a token/valor type system. Maybe they somehow make it worse. There is some risk of making m+ totally irrelevant though so I don't really know. It already was this tier largely because of benthic, and it def made me do less keys. /shrug
I briefly came back this tier to clear Heroic and run some keys, and honestly the new M+ affix was complete trash. It felt worse than infested to be honest. Reaping still #1.
I was thinking of going back to high level mythic raiding, but this tier made me lose interest pretty fast. Maybe the new changes will bring me back around.
Ive done less keys this tier than any time since early legion pretty much, despite still playing a good bit. (In a bad guild that mythic raids 2 nights, we're 6/8 only now, and last tier only got 8/9. Maybe ce this tier though it seems.) For like 2 months it was legit better ev for my time to farm pearls than m+. Pretty lame. The affix is better than infested imo, but its really not that interesting and its just possible for it to randomly make certain weeks/dungeons insanely harder than others. Its very poorly balanced. Also due to benthic/actualy good raid trinkets, the only slots i can get m+ gear in are rings and cloak.
Heroic mage tower you can do in a group or solo sounds cool too. Im a bit pissed the first time we see Wrathion in a while and he is like here, have your legendary cloak back from MOP.....like ffs lol.
There is a good leak that predicted everything 8.3 delivered so far which has some very good things predicted for 9.0 which i like and seems could be very true.
Back to 8.3 i am not really intrigued outside of this new mage tower to farm my cloak, i am sad they continue to add levels and farm to the Heart meaning it will be harder for players to return as usual but that is just my opinion. Vulpera look ok i guess but Mechagnome's racials look seriously broken lol.
On September 25 2019 03:17 RvB wrote: I don't get why they don't just hire a good writer. Pay the writer a wage of 100k a year and you'll have an excellent author. Just look at what a splash a game like the last of us made with a decent plot. They're raking in millions a year with this game but still can't find the money to hire someone who can write a plot better than a 5 year old....
Even if you have a good story you still have to be able to present it. The presentation is what Naughty Dog/TLOU nailed more so than the story.
Side stab: 100k in Irvine is pretty shitty.
I know plenty of people that thoroughly enjoy WoW's story, even current content. You just only hear the vocal echo chamber on forums/leddit/etc.
On October 08 2019 05:08 Cyro wrote: Removing titanforging is big news
i still have to look through some of this stuff
I'd like to see them remove TF and have M+ gear scale up to current mythic ilvl. Probably set it around +17 since early in a season/reset it probably won't be attainable by most. Do away with the slot machine Cache and implement a consumables for either +5 ilvl or a socket.
EPT
