World of Warcraft: Current Year
- Thread starter hodj
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Penance
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Legion is honestly on par with any other story in WoW if not the best apart from original WC3. Gul'Dan voice over was immaculate, all the burning legion theme and Sargeras at the end. Couldn't have been more epic. Wrath is probably more emotional and feels more WC like because of abscence of pandas and all the other shit. But on a grand bad assery scale Legion wins it for me.
I never knew why MMOs don't approach the minimalism of how Souls presents its story. The perfect genre for that type of story telling.
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Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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You can do both. The problem with minimalist in abundance is it gets missed and then people complain how “dead” the world feels.
When Fallout 76 launched, it was like 90% minimalist story telling and environmental story telling. Then people complained that was boring so they added traditional story telling elements
Penance
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Honestly BDO does it pretty well. Can skip through fucking everything instantly but there's a world of lore there to explore if you want.
EDIT: Except that new shit, that was brutal. Fuck off with that.
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The "issue" is if you design a mmo entirely around questing to level up and progress, obviously you're gonna need to actually have some story elements present. Can't have the Souls "quests" where it's some random cloaked deformed weirdo mumbling some incoherent bullshit and you have to guess what the fuck you're supposed to do(which is just checking a wiki cause no way you actually figure out a quest flow organically) and then after some more incoherent shit, they just die(often offscreen). You have to have a character that tells you "eh adventurer, help me stuff's not right in here see Count McFuckface apparently became a vampire and it'd be quite nice if you could gather some garlic" and so on, and since you have a lot of quests, you have a lot of story to put into place.
Souls lore works fine the way it does because it's secondary to gameplay, and you can enjoy the atmosphere without having a clue what's actually what, cool castle city in the sunset gonna be cool even if you don't know why it's sunset, who the motherfuckers with giantbows shooting you off the goddamn fucking fuck why I fucking dodged that fuck fuck fuck are and why there's a giant lady with gigantic badonkers just laying there. You can look into it if you want but it's not necessary, while story/world building is pretty much necessary if you want to make your 600 quests slog looks like it has a point.
Like if it was old school mmo stuff where you just grind mobs non stop, you don't really need the story and so you can make it a lot more subdued, but the way wow is designed, the story has to be put forward first, since that's literally all you'll be doing the first 10hours of an expansion and will also determine the monsters you fight in that expansion, the raid and so on. The issue here is just poor writing. FFXIV manages it mostly fine with way more story and way more dialogue. Better characterization, less random bullshit, more continuation, more interesting stakes(characters dying especially makes you more interested). Even that though is still hit or miss and a lot of people can't bother with the anime-style storytelling of FFXIV story, or the fact there's so much of it.
Cybsled
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This is the main issue - if the writing is crap, the story isn’t presented well, or the story/lore is generic as fuck, your Playerbase isn’t going to get invested in the story.
A lot of the really grindy MMOs usually have a paper thin story. And there are lots of players that just want their “me kill me ding me get dopamine fix” gameplay loop and don’t care about anything else.
But it doesn’t mean a mmo would strive to have a good story. Think a tabletop game: while the players are helping create the story as they go, you still need a DM that designed something engaging to really bring it to life, otherwise you’re just murdering kobolds
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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I'm going to try and articulate why I think the story is important but ultimately not the mechanism that matters
I think more and more I find myself of the opinion that the setting is more important than the story. The story plays a critical role in actually developing and animating the setting, but it doesn't really matter in the sense that you have to play a character in the world, and one bad story is forgettable or ignorable. The setting is everything though, zones, races, quests, cutscenes, animations, dialogue, just overall feel to the world. Once you fuck the setting over, there's no respite.
This is why you can live with a dumb quest or a pop culture reference or one gay character, as long as the story beats are all decapitations, horrific massacres, macabre magic rituals, etc. Once you define the setting as just being gay dragons hugging it out, the story is irrelevant. It could be the best writing in the world, but none of it matters. Since they abandoned the lore and planning of what they would call "the story", the side effect was gutting the setting over time. This is the real sin of Cataclysm, the stories were fine, but by destroying the world and all those peripheral components of the setting as a whole, it could only go downhill from there.
That's also why the night elf genocide thing is bizarre and stupid, it has no weight, because basically nothing about the setting changed. That's also why the recent "forgiveness" stories about it also are double retarded.
I think more and more I find myself of the opinion that the setting is more important than the story. The story plays a critical role in actually developing and animating the setting, but it doesn't really matter in the sense that you have to play a character in the world, and one bad story is forgettable or ignorable. The setting is everything though, zones, races, quests, cutscenes, animations, dialogue, just overall feel to the world. Once you fuck the setting over, there's no respite.
This is why you can live with a dumb quest or a pop culture reference or one gay character, as long as the story beats are all decapitations, horrific massacres, macabre magic rituals, etc. Once you define the setting as just being gay dragons hugging it out, the story is irrelevant. It could be the best writing in the world, but none of it matters. Since they abandoned the lore and planning of what they would call "the story", the side effect was gutting the setting over time. This is the real sin of Cataclysm, the stories were fine, but by destroying the world and all those peripheral components of the setting as a whole, it could only go downhill from there.
That's also why the night elf genocide thing is bizarre and stupid, it has no weight, because basically nothing about the setting changed. That's also why the recent "forgiveness" stories about it also are double retarded.
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Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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Forgiveness can work, but it has to make sense.
There is a neat post Endwalker side quest that has a part where you’re trying to help something understand how humans define morality or justifications for actions. During one scene, it talks about 3 major characters and what they did and their justifications for it. But it also highlights they all did really bad shit that killed millions. It gets you to reflect on it from a neutral perspective. For instance, one character is a “good guy”, but our view is biased because their actions benefited us. Another character was the “bad guy” because their actions didn’t benefit us. It sort of gets at the point that even if you cannot forgive, you can at least understand. And how much we can forgive is subjective to our own experiences an how much we perceive the other party as trying to make amends.
Warcraft just handles it kind of sloppily. Compare how FF handles someone like Emet vs WoW and Sylvannis
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Chris
Potato del Grande
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FF14 has a good story despite being an MMO, multiplayer actually made it worse because you did dungeons with random people instead of the characters, they actually went back and fixed it so now you can play the game solo. It was awesome when they made party finder canon in the Endwalker finale though.
FF14 is also a good MMO despite the story, the open world is terrible but dungeons/raids and social content are great. The mandatory slow burn story getting in the way is the number one complaint about the game.
So all the comments about MMOs needing a setting not a story, more like Dark Souls/Elden Ring are spot on. Some story elements are good, carefully handled, but it doesn't need all these cutscenes.
I think my favourite story moment was in Burning Crusade where you go into a hidden underground prison to speak to Akama, only for fucking Maiev Shadowsong to be in a cell and he's just biding his time to release her on Illidan. That was also good because she had the canon kill and you didn't need to explain that 25 muderhobos killed him.
FF14 is also a good MMO despite the story, the open world is terrible but dungeons/raids and social content are great. The mandatory slow burn story getting in the way is the number one complaint about the game.
So all the comments about MMOs needing a setting not a story, more like Dark Souls/Elden Ring are spot on. Some story elements are good, carefully handled, but it doesn't need all these cutscenes.
I think my favourite story moment was in Burning Crusade where you go into a hidden underground prison to speak to Akama, only for fucking Maiev Shadowsong to be in a cell and he's just biding his time to release her on Illidan. That was also good because she had the canon kill and you didn't need to explain that 25 muderhobos killed him.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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You either bot and sell on the AH for gold, or sell a token for gold. You're dumb to use any kind of hack or bot on your primary account anyways. In legion, I was banned for botting and also got a cease and desist letter for selling combat routine shit on honorbuddy shortly after the ban. I learned after that ban that all my shit like transmog, achievements, etc. was tied to my battle.net account and not that specific wow account. So even though that account was banned for some obnoxious amount of time, I could literally just put a new code in and play again like nothing had happened. If they were really trying to cause people to stop botting, they would block new wow codes on that specific battle.net account. Hell, cant you play Classic WoW with just the free wow account, too? Its literally just a slap on the wrist.
Really, all Im saying is that these people that complain over being banned are just pathetic. My stance is, and always will be : Program your game to be fun and people wont bot your fucking garbage grinds.
Korzax Stonehammer
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Just when you think it can’t get any faker or gayer…
By the end of 2024 “players who have been found to misgender other players will be prohibited from using the wow token” or some other queer shit. Only players who purchased Jewy the Jew Octopus companion pet for $39.99 are allowed to continue using Wow tokens.
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Watching my first RWF. The pull # on the final 2 bosses are insane to me anyway. Suppose I had that fortitude 20 years ago though.
Liquid had 435 pulls on the 8/9 boss and is up to 324 on Fyrakk 9/9 final boss.
I’ve only been watching since Fyrakk but I’m definitely surprised I’m enjoying watching this.
Liquid had 435 pulls on the 8/9 boss and is up to 324 on Fyrakk 9/9 final boss.
I’ve only been watching since Fyrakk but I’m definitely surprised I’m enjoying watching this.
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Sterling
El Presidente
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That's pretty normal. Some raids in the past were like that for half the zone instead of just the final boss and 1 or 2 others.