Bellular What's happened to Wow's Lore? A breakdown of WHY it feels Alienating.
As usual, Bellular is dealing with the large, open question, "What's going wrong with World of Warcraft currently?" We all can feel that something is not right, but it's hard to identify exactly what the problem is. Bellular summarizes it in one word: Alienating. The world of Azeroth no longer feels like home to its players.
"The writing team has brought us to a 'technical, cosmic place' that feels alien to some." Bellular opens with the observation that the game in its current iteration feels alien to some players, particularly to long-term players who have seen the lore develop first hand. And this alienation happens both on a cosmic level, by which he means the deep lore of the game, and also on a technical level where he feels like the technical storytelling tools that Blizzard still uses are left over from 10 years ago, while the narrative style has changed.
Having laid down that thesis, Bellular shifts to ownership and address the question of who owns the WoW storyline. For him, it isn't as simple as saying that the current WoW writing team can do whatever they like. Instead, they are merely custodians of lore that has existed long before they came upon the scene.
"From our setting emerges a narrative that we've engaged with for decades. The people who create the narrative, the writing team, are better described as the custodians of Azeroth. Their mandate should be based on our history together as a community, our love of the setting, and our willingness to pay a subscription every month.
"We saw the slow motion car crash of the story in BFA. I don't think we fully realized how deeply, how fundamentally the writing team failed at their role as custodian of the lore. That was until the full madness of patch 9.1 was revealed.
It's beginning to feel like the narrative no longer serves the community that is keeping the setting alive. Blizzard needs to change for the better."
With this opening paragraph, Bellular throws down three unusual claims. First, that it is the Community that keeps the game going, and that the writing team has a responsibility to the community. From this perspective, the writing team are merely caretakers of the WoW setting, not arbitrary masters of it.
Second, Bellular flatly asserts that the writing in BFA was a fundamental failure. The writing team failed in their responsibility to the community.
Third, the writing team could claim that, "No, we are indeed the masters. You will play our game." To which, Bellular would point to falling subscriptions, toxic communication from the community, and migration to other games. If game directors are confused about how those things came about, Bellular is willing to provide an answer.
"Today, we're going to be putting words to that feeling of alienation that a lot of us are feeling with the lore."
Zovaal
I think Bellular makes two main points about Zovaal, the Jailer, that I'm going to consider out of order.
For the main issue, the most destructive, Bells lays the problem at the feet of Steve Danuser, lead narrative designer for Warcraft. He thinks that Steve has overwritten the existing lore trajectory involving the Titans and Sargeras, with new lore that focuses on Zovaal. All the old lore about Sargeras, the rebel Titan who is behind the Burning Legion, happened in narrative that took place before Danuser became head of story. Accordingly, Steve appears to have no loyalty to it. On the other hand, Zovaal is a new character that Danuser created and now is inserting as the real prime mover behind everything.
"I think what's worse is that for Steve's crew, to put Zovaal at the pinnacle of death they had to overhaul the lore.
"The villain Sargeras, who we've been invested in since the beginning; this is the guy who people thought the whole lore was building up to. No, actually the Jailer was deeply connected to him as well. Sargeras was wearing domination rune armor." So actually, Sargeras was being controlled by the Jailer all along. "A re -framing so thorough that perhaps it has obliterated the original lore."
Everything that the players have experienced from the first expansion up through Legion and even beyond has all been changed. Everything we thought we knew may have to be discarded. All the details and narrative elements that we experienced first hand will have to be re -evaluated in light of this new character, the Jailer. For long-term players, this is terribly disorienting.
And this transition is made more difficult by the fact that the players know very little about this new character, having only heard about him for a relatively short time. This is the second of Bellular's Zovaal problems.
"At any point, interrogate who Zovaal is, and you come up with this void of information. And we're a year into the expansion." We're being asked to replace years worth of detailed information about Sargeras and the Titans and their struggle with the Old Gods, all of which defined the WoW universe for us up until about five minutes ago. And the only thing we have to replace it with is a name and an mystery box of who the Jailer is.
The Lore Feels Bad
"The problem is that the lore feels bad right now. Everything is so wrapped up in mystery, and what we do hear is told to us in intentionally vague ways, so intentionally vague that even if this is the most stellar lore to have ever existed, it feels half-written and bad for the player experience."
The Jailer is a generic bad guy and Blizzard is propping him up by using the clout of Arthas and Sylvannas, and diminishing them in the process.
The problem is that right at the end of the Shadowlands, we're probably going to be given all of Zovaal's intentions. It will all culminate in a modern Blizzard shock moment but it won't be satisfying. Because we didn't even know who this Zovaal guy was a year ago.
The Jailer has been shoe-horned into the lore by connecting to everything that came before to him, but the Jailer doesn't contribute anything back to the lore in return. In other words: If you remove the Jailer the lore is unchanged, if you remove the lore the Jailer becomes the hollow shell of the character he truly is.
So this is a point that Bellular returns to several times. We all know that there is this big book of lore in the Blizzard offices where everything has all been worked out. But the storytelling style that they have adopted is to reveal only microscopic fragments of this lore to the players. They are hoping that the players can collectively put this together into a discernible narrative without knowing all the pieces, and by doing so that the narrative will feel deeper than it actually is. But Bells takes it further and says that even the fragments that we are actually given are intentionally made even more vague, are deliberately obfuscated because they don't want players to figure out what is going on until the writers are ready for them to know. d
So here's the problem. Its actually impossible for writers, who know everything in the big book of lore, to know how the players, who don't know, will perceive their story. The writers can't know if the story is coming across as they intend or not. And it's very likely that what seems obvious to the writers is completely inscrutable to the average group of players. Now if there is enough time, say several expansions of lore drops and hints, then the story will eventually emerge. But if there is only something on the scale of a few patches, maybe half an expansion, and the lore drops are hidden in scripts that are 15 words long, it is doubtful that anything like a satisfying understanding is attainable.
Lore Speculation
"We've wondered if Lore Speculation is becoming too dominant. If the narrative is now geared toward this mystery box speculation. Speculation will always be an incredible part of the Warcraft lore." But that's all it is, a component of a greater narrative whole. Speculation was based on background lore. and it takes its place in the background of a larger narrative.
Now it appears that Speculative lore is all there is, and there is very little foreground narrative. Speculative lore makes the game feel huge, but it was always grounded in the narrative of the game that we knew. When speculative narrative is all there is, instead of the game feeling huge, it instead feels empty. It feels less alive.
Blizzard has taken that speculation energy and made it so mysterious that you cannot even speculate on it any more. Blizzard writers have become so addicted to speculative mystery boxes that we don't have any information about the next patch, let alone the cosmic trajectory of the next expansion.
Elune
This was a breaking point for many in the community in how it was done. This is a case of not satisfying everyone, obviously, but does this new Elune stuff stand up? The current trajectory does make me and many others uneasy. A huge problem is in how the story is actually being told:
I. Teldrassil was burned and we are explicitly told that Elune kind of abandoned her people in the moment of the burning. Many of the Night Elves believed as much at the time.
II. Then, we're told in patch 9.1 that Elune at least tried to ferry those souls to Ardenweald in the Shadowlands. Where now we know they essentially turn into cosmic fertilizer, which is a bit grim. Elune told the Winter Queen that she sent those souls to the Shadowlands. (Instead of what? allowing them to become wisps and reincarnate? instead of intervening and preventing them from dying in the first place? Its all very vague.) Elune's suggested goal was to provide Ardenweald with extra anima.
III. But why did Elune think that would be effective? Could she ensure that these souls even went to Ardenweald? Could she bypass the Arbiter and show special treatment to these souls? Well, No. Those souls went to the Maw and therefore had to pass through the regular sorting process of the Arbiter, which was now switched off. This means that Elune can't bypass the Arbiter and judgement is the role of the Arbiter. And Elune didn't have enough influence with the Arbiter to even know that it was switched off. The rules of Blizzard's lore don't even feel consistent.
If you're a Night Elf player, you're just thinking, "What was all of this misery and destruction even for? How is the lore of the race in WoW that I connect with the most - how has it been pushed forward? How is it interesting? I don't really think it is."
Then, the justifications and revelations of Elune are given to us piecemeal in cinematics with 15-word scripts. And while we love mystery, this feels half-written. It feels like huge pieces are missing. Where they could write words that will give people a framework for understanding, they always go in the direction of more mystery.
This lore could be incredible. I think this Elune-lore could completely do Elune justice. But we actually need to know it. We don't know all the information that the WoW writers know. And I think they don't know how it feels to just get the snippets that they give us. Enough with the mystery. Either give us enough to do Elune justice, or put Elune back in the box.
Meta Physics
Lore is only fun when it is surrounding a satisfying story. Story is the thing that matters the most.
Much of a good story lies in the telling of that story. And with video games it is more complex. World of Warcraft is a game, and interaction is important. And that is where Warcraft is falling behind.
In WoW, NPCs dispense walls of text at you. And they are often just OK in the writing department. Quest text is written by quest designers, whereas in FFXIV the quest text is actually written by writers. When NPCs speak, it is often talking at you. Take the Thrall/Drakka conversation in Korthia. It's nice to see those characters chat, but you are barely involved. And throughout, there's quite a bit of telling rather than showing. NPCs tend to deliver blocks of exposition and use phrases like "Maw Walker" and other depersonalizing terms. We are told we are the maw walker but we didn't actually chose that, so it isn't a core part of our fantasy.
All these things reinforce the idea that you the players are a plot device, not a character. I've met Jaina many times. And those times have been at her most vulnerable, her most emotionally charged, at some of the lowest points of her life. I would appreciate it if she just said, "You" and talked to me directly, rather than call me Maw Walker. These are the core problems: Othering language that breaks immersion, telling rather than showing, big walls of text, and NPCs talking at you.
Historically, this was not a problem because we were essentially minor adventurers making our way through lots of small stories, in and around these larger than life heroes. But over time that has changed. WoW's story is closer to you being the chosen one. And this requires a change in story telling techniques. The older ways do not suffice.
Rather than walls of text, Blizzard should frame quests as dialogue between the character and the NPC. This necessitates a change in how quests are written. They're probably going to need this stuff to be handled by writers. Players should click through NPC dialogue. And that dialogue should be framed as a conversation with the player, not a wall of text.
RP focused dialogue options should be presented, as they let a player better define their character. this is a problem for Blizzard. They would never do this in the past because they would want that dialogue choice to matter in terms of game play. They are all about "Gameplay First!" so they would want these dialogue choices to lead to complex branching storytelling which is difficult. But giving someone a dialogue choice is really important, because it lets them define who their character is.
Most dialogue options in Mass Effect do not matter in terms of narrative outcomes. Of course they matter to the player experience because that's you, talking through your character, defining your take on who Commander Shepherd is. If Blizzard wants to tell a story where you are a Character, then they need to update their storytelling tools. Telling a story that outpaces your means for telling it is a recipe for failure.
"The pacing of narrative arcs is a disaster within World of Warcraft. Battle for Azeroth rocketed through multiple expansions worth of material, doing justice to none of it. This, by the way, betrays player investment in any of those plot points. If you were a massive fan of Old God lore, you were not happy at the end of BFA. If you were a massive fan of Queen Azshara lore, you were not happy at the end of BFA. And in telling this story, they actually required two novellas, a book, and a bunch of other external material for all of that lore to properly make sense." What we're saying here is that Blizzard has plenty of narrative material to continue to release in minor patches, but they would rather occupy the players' time with meaningless Korthia daily grinds. This is what has to change.
WoW's emotes were designed to be viewed at a distance,which is why they are exaggerated. Stylistically, they are very goofy, and they were conceived during Warlords of Draenor, before in-game cut scenes existed in world of warcraft. In-game animation assets were designed at an earlier time when character animations were intended to be comic. With the current reliance on cut scenes using those same animations, WoW has a problem delivering serious storytelling moments.
Sylvannas
Sylvannas has been a low-key community favorite for a long time. Once the courageous Ranger-General turned Banshee Queen, who literally dragged the Forsaken up from their graves. She has created one of the most powerful militaries on Azeroth.
She has left such a profound mark on our setting, but one that now feels poisoned by her casual dismissal of the Horde, in the way that it was presented. And abandonment of Azeroth for the Shadowlands. But Sylvannas' true reasons for joining the Jailer, and the atrocities that ensued, that's not something we've explored in-game.
But it's a betrayal of her character to be betrayed by death again, to be used by the Jailer again, where her whole arc was recovering from the trauma of Arthas, who essentially ended up being himself a pawn of the jailer. So she's gone through two of these Serve and Rebel arcs with the Jailer. Now she contrives world wars to feed some cosmic maw in the afterlife just she she can juice up her boss, Zovaal. And that's a good-faith reading of the material: that Sylvannas had her own agency and believed that her own best interests were served with the Jailer. The worst reading is that she has been in an abusive relationship with the Jailer for a long, long time.
At the end of BFA, we had that scene in Windrunner Spire that had people excited: is she going to be the next expansion's villain, is she going to strike back, will there be a Lich Queen, What will Sylvannas do? And then all of that worked up emotion pretty much dissipated. No, in fact Sylvannas was not sympathetic at all, She was just a servant. At BlizCon, Blizzard told us that Sylvannas was an Ally of Zovaal, not a servant. But that was clearly a straight up lie, given the end of patch 9.1 when Zovaal flicked away her wild arrow.
So we are promised that all these questions will be explained in the upcoming Sylvannas novel. The main selling point of this non-game novel is that we'll get the full picture of Sylvannas, but we should get all the narrative we need of Sylvannas within the the World of Warcraft video game. That's the thing people are paying for. That has been one of the central narratives of WoW for the last two expansions or more. You shouldn't need to buy supplementary material to properly understand the main story content that is in the game. This Sylvannas novel just underscores the problems facing our narrative.
We do not know Sylvannas' motivations fully even now, despite the fact that she has betrayed Zovaal. We don't know her journey to the state of mind that saw her signing up with Zovaal. Her story has not adequately been explained in-game either, through quest text, cinematics or otherwise. To get a deeper appreciation, we need to read many external sources. Her arc has been re-framed and re-framed into oblivion and they haven't dealt with the huge philosophical questions that Sylvannas herself posed to us when she said to us things like she would set us all free. We still don't really know what that means.
It has all culminated in a deep feeling of alienation from a character once considered to be core to what Warcraft meant. There's a question of whether foregrounding her story in BFA would have made this story easier to swallow but this ship has sailed.
Shadowlands
Who are the truly memorable characters of this expansion? Beside a few solid scenes with Denathrius, there are essentially no memorable characters in Shadowlands. And that includes the cast of characters we brought with us from Azeroth. Tyrande is frozen into an action by a conflicted Goddess; the whole night warrior arc feels like it's done nothing but tease us about Elune. We've got Baine Bloodhoof just sitting around in Oribos all day doing nothing. There's Bolvar who did nothing and finally got around to invading Korthia but now stands around the Respite doing nothing.
Then we have Anduin, who even within the snail's pace story advancement of the patch cycle these days is making these breakneck character changes, from the peace-loving prince, to the war torn king, to the ultimate tool of domination. But even in this domination arc, Anduin himself has been a passive force in the story. I think one of the problems here has been passive characters.
Because the narrative machine is broken, all of these great characters with great motivations and huge narrative potential are just stationed in Oribos, staring into the middle distance, not really doing anything. What about Thassarian and Koltira Deathweaver? They're both in Oribos and haven't done anything yet. People care about those characters. They actually had cool stories in the past. Were they ever intended to have content in the shadowlands but it was cut? Why are they there, but not being used?
Bellular: I do believe that Steve Denuser and his narrative team have a full conception of everything that is going on right now, that they know where the plot is going and how it's all going to line up. I do believe that they have it all mapped out and they probably have some incredible looking cork boards around the Blizzard office. The problem is that the bits of that grand narrative tapestry that we get are not being served up in a satisfying fashion. We're currently halfway through that process in Shadowlands, and I think it does feel pretty rough.
I think the community needs to rally around constructive ideas about what it means to go home. Bring it back to Azeroth. By all means tell your cosmic stuff, but it needs to be grounded in the setting and it needs to have a very solid, well-told story driving it forward. Not a bunch of walking mystery boxes vaguely talking at us.
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