Back in the mid 2000s, what did you think of vanilla's story when you played the game?
I only played Warcraft 3 before WoW and it was cool for me to see all the races and class spells, but also didn't really understand what was going on on a big scale. I said "yeah, its a war between alliance and horde and there are some bad guys like Ragnaros and the black dragons", but other than that the story didn't really catch me attention probably because I was only 12
What about (You)?
I played a ton of Warcraft 3 as a kid, and to be honest it took them an age and a half for the actual story of World of Warcraft to feel like it mattered. It was kind of just cool to do stuff in the setting.
If you actually read the text, vanilla wow probably has the best story of any wow expansion. Its like an anime with multiple divergent arcs, the forsaken, the scourge attacks, the corruption of hyjal, the titans, Zul Gurub, the missing Varian Wrynn, the Defias brotherhood, the centaur of Maraudon, Onyxia, the Qiraji invasion and C'thun, which was teased since the Forgotten One encounter in Warcraft 3. There was something really kino about how there wasnt one singular villain but multiple overarching plotlines, which is exactly the same way Warcraft 3 told its story.
>which is exactly the same way Warcraft 3 told its story
Yeah but Warcraft 3 had memorable characters. Ragnaros is the only guy anyone can remember from vanilla
I didn't read the quests because 99% were boring useless bloat and I didn't know there were more relevant ones.
This is true, but it was told horribly. This is what a narrative designer is supposed to be there for, but the only thing they have done in years is steal the main questline highlight from FFXIV. Blizzard truly is an adult daycare.
>steal the main questline highlight from FFXIV
That's like not being able to grill a good steak so you steal someone else's turd out of toilet instead.
No one care about the story in WoW, literally no one, not even WCII/III fans, hell not even Blizzard (which is painfully obvious in TBC).
>lorelol
Used to be a common expression on the internet in the vanilla/tbc era, blizzard actively pushed the idea it was impossible to write a good story in a mmo because of the status quo.
In retrospect I think we can all agree that path was a mistake given it gave us BFA/Shadowlands which killed any potential the setting had for storytelling.
But yeah the answer is
>lorelol
Any other response is a lie.
this. NOBODY cared about a story. the story was what we ourselves made. the friends we met and the adventures we had. blizzard tried forcing storylines with cutscenes later on
>this. NOBODY cared about a story
Imagine being this schizophrenic. A huge amount of WoWs core fanbase were lore enjoyers
>A huge amount of WoWs core fanbase were lore enjoyers
less than 1%
>Story
The lore was great, but there really wasn't a 'story', just questlines smattered across a whole world.
You know, how MMOs should be, overarching storylines in MMOs is a stupid design choice modern MMOs make because those storylines always get retconned and made obsolete by patches
Reading lore and getting into the world building of a setting is vastly different than being told a story.
Playing D&D is very very fucking different then reading Drizzt.
You know you're just outing yourself as a low wit who can't read right?
>You know you're just outing yourself as a low wit who can't read right?
I didn't even do the quests because i preferred to grind to level. I would spend 90% of the game doing instances and grinding.
Blizzard stories have always been hot garbage
>Back in the mid 2000s, what did you think of vanilla's story when you played the game?
I literally didn't even know of any story in the game. All I knew was dragons, orcs and humans with other funny creatures.
Extremely based. I just wanted to have fun because it was a cool fantasy world
I played warcraft 2 and all this sissy gay orcs and trolls really disappointed me because they didnt used to be pussies. That "demon curse" sucked too fuuuuuuuck metzen
>vanilla
>guild finally beats boss they've been trying to kill
>40 people yelling and hooting
>ventrilo filled with laugher and joy
>modern
>guild finally beats boss they've been trying to kill
>3 guys shout on discord voice chat
>chud guild leader angrily tells them to shut the fuck up because he wants to watch the cutscene
Spot on. My guilds first rag kill was cheering and yelling for a good 2-3 mins amongst 40 random people.
you have to be mentally ill to shout after a lfg kill.
I think Thrall Rexxar and Sylvannas were the only characters I recognized from Warcraft 3
Played every Warcraft game and I loved it.
However the part I remember most was the smaller storylines in the various zones such as the Duskwood questline that led to Stitches attacking Darkshire.
I was unaware at the time that there was any overall story other than alli vs horde. I was fine just being a nobody going along killing shit and doing quests on my own adventure and discovering things about the world.
That's what made it so magical. There were lots of settings and things going on in different zones and hardly any of it mattered in a grand story sense.
I hate how ever since tbc every xpac has had to have a big bad guy that everybody is trying to stop because he's going to do evil shit to the whole world. I don't hate the villains they make but I hate how everything revolves around them and how every time the stakes are just so high. Like, sure, the stakes are high for the npc's around the big bad's lair, but on the other side of the world they probably don't give a shit.
It took me like 15 years to realize the humans in Honor Hold are supposed to be the ones from Warcraft 2 and thats why they are all old and grey haired
I never played Warcraft 2 but BC made sense to me because Illidan was back and wanted revenge or something
Huh that's cool
I do not care for the WoW lore or story
Don't think anyone cared about story until BC
Me included
Defias and Stormwind are the only part that really count as a story in vanilla.
I was more intrigued by the mystique of nightmare dragons and old gods, which slowly went to shit in later expansions.
Ragnaros's story was a mess. In lore, he was summoned 200 years ago (nuking everything in the neighborhood) and Ironforge had no clue about it until the player goes to investigate ruins of thaurissan.
What nightmare dragons
The are just a bunch of random bosses with no background or anything
I expected the emerald dream portals to be activated later and the dragons to be somehow relevant.
What was the orc storyline? I remember nothing
Orcs get a couple of introductory quests about burning blade doing bad stuff and the rest was scrapped because of time constraints.
Kinda sad how many quest lines just trail off into nothingness because Blizzard couldn't pull off the scale they originally intended...
>>[LocalDefense.] The Crossroads is under attack!
You playing an orc character was the story
Shadow Council shenanigans, story line ends with RFC
infiltration and corruption of orc society by warlocks in Durotar.
I played wow for two weeks, got bored, and went back to playing counter-strike and wc3 mazing tower defense maps
>story
I made a tauren druid, met a tauren bro from UK and we went around smashing big ostriches
That was my story, pretty gud
Feeling so sad my children won’t experience something as fantastic as vanilla wow
Vanilla was a sandbox MMO
Nobody cared about anything, it was just a cool online world you could explore and have fun with your friends
>hey look a dragon boss lets go kill him
>yeah but he was a skull icon
>whatever lets go
>oh no we all died
>yeah that was fun lol
The game was about the players having fun
I didn't know shit about the lore at all, nor did I think about it tbh.
This is fairly accurate. I remember grouping up for blackrock elites near the redridge -> burning steppes and spending an entire day whittling them down with a group of lowbies and some random 50+ pally and getting no tangible returns, just pure unadulterated adventure for the sake of it.
I started with Warcraft 3 which is mostly about fighting the scourge and the burning legion and those faction you don't start encountering until the later levels in WoW. I played alliance so it was kind of interesting to learn that there existed another human kingdom that wasn't Lordaeron. I originally wanted to play undead because I thought you would play as a scourge undead, but when I heard that you played as a lame forsaken, I moved to alliance.
Back in the day, I was expecting the forsaken to betray the horde and become a third faction because they had nothing in common with the other races
Well, they've done the betrayal thing 2-3 times now but adding a new faction would be too much work.
I remember vainly hoping for something like that. I knew even then that Blizzard was not bold enough to do that
The undead are a core Horde race
thats kind of ridiculous considering theyre risen humans.
But they've been part of the Horde before even trolls
like some anons said, in vanilla nobody fucking cared about lore, there was no youtube or reddit, reading was for nerds and wow was an online game anyway, the whole muh hecking chungus secret lore in wow video compilation was after tbc
What this should be telling you is that people that did enjoy the lore back in the day and have nostalgia for it do so because they were reading the quest texts were doing it out of genuine personal interest. It's le hecking fuckin doge valid, damn it
I really liked that vanilla didn't had actual main story and all locations contained dozens of separated storylines.
Also, absolutely fell in love with some actually distant zones like swamp of sorrows, badlands, hinterlands, feralas, darkshore
Desolace and feralas were out in the damn boonies for a human. It always felt like an adventure just making it out there.
Desolace is pretty easy to reach and from there you just pass through the centaurs to Feralas
Shame they haven't finished and added scraped content for all zones with Classic relaunch, especially Horde storyline of Dustlow March
Reminder that the devs did not want raids to be the focus and all quit blizzard because of the shift. the game was meant to be for everyone and was ruined by wankers like tigole and furor i hope they both fall into a pit of fucking snakes
Source?
bullshit. Tigole was the main reason for the focus on raids at the end of the vanilla development.
Kind of funny how decision on locking into instances more and more content affected the playrbase
it didn't. the playerbase fell because everyone interested in the game played it. you can't expect 12 million people to keep playing the same game forever. especially after cataclysm the graphics startet to show their age. instanced content deliver meaningfull gameplay that can't be achieved in the overworld. the magic of exploring azeroth lasts 200h not 2000h.
To be honest the picrelated was more result of Alliance's massive dismorale
In first they actually tried to farm Zuldazar but were constantly cucked by one raid defending the stairs while some pugs were cleaning up reiforcements arriving to the port
I played back then and I honestly didnt know what the fuck the story was, and only read it and connected the pieces by searching online and looking at forum posts.
The lore was just to dispersed in hundreds of "collect boar asses" text to the point that its pretty hard to keep paying attention. Now and then I tell myself this time I will read everything and pay attention and by level 15 I have given up.
It's easy to tell when a boar ass quest wont have any bearing on anything. I read them anyway because it's fun flavor. There are so many food related quests that I can't help but IMAGINE BEING AT COMPUTERS
>It's easy to tell when a boar ass quest wont have any bearing on anything
I feel like they tried to mark important quests with that silvery background or whatever but they use it kinda rarely and seemingly random. I wouldnt have wanted to mark quests "main" and "secondary" though since that just takes you out of the world, but yeah
I didn't really understand much of the larger story, but I thought it was insanely cool to play a character in the literal world of warcraft. That was all I wanted anyway.
it was shit, that's why i left in vanilla. the actual story of wow doesn't pick up until blackrock spire which itself was underperforming content that people only went into for raid attunement, and most of the story progression then takes place in 40mans which have the least immersion.
everything before that are just side stories and "oh yeah this place existed in warcraft 3"
i thought it was dumb that there werent naga and harpy whore houses.
I was and still not really interested in the story of games. I want a atmospheric world and good gameplay.
>what did you think of vanilla's story when you played the game?
Nefarian was the mastermind behind every single bad thing that happened in the "Human" leveling zones.