How would you fix warcrafts lore? It's kinda become a mess since WoD.
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Warcraft lore
How would you fix warcrafts lore? It's kinda become a mess since WoD.
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Ends at WotLK, wrapping up the Arthas plotline and putting a nice end cap on everything from Warcraft 1-3. Cataclysm onwards is fanfiction tier.
This. Their main contribution was finally getting Orcs right (for player characters at least).
When I ran a warcraft tabletop game, I
>Created my own system for it
>Cut off the plot largely at the end of WotLK and copied some story beats from cataclysm without using deathwing
Having Sylvanas die and get brought back with a new fear of any form of death worked well for setting her up as a factional player that slowly splits the forsaken back out of the horde. Having Garrosh be the other force behind this split also worked fairly well.
One of the players played a royal apothecary and it went fairly entertainingly, in part because that player was a charismatic evil fricker who managed to convince people to follow his plans, and half way into the game another player conspired with him to let his PC get stabbed with the single black arrow the apothecary was carrying as a token of authority, changing the direction of the whole party as a result.
As this was set distinctly before pandas became common again, one player being a wandering brewmaster who had ZERO idea about faction politics and simply served as a comedic drunken mercenary was fun, and it didn't involve the shitloads of lore the pandas got in their expansion, so the player (who had not played warcraft, he was in fact literally blind and hadn't played many video games at all) was free to pull things out of his arse.
This is the best way to do it IMO.
End it at WOTLK and use anything past that as a creative playground to write your own stories.
The lich kings plotline in wotlk was moronic too. In warcraft 3 it was pretty clearly ner-zhul trying to save his own ass from the burning legion and the sensible thing to do after 3 was fight the burning legion. But in wotlk suddenly he's all about _muh cycles" and getting people to repeat arthas journey over and over.
I took Arthas' plan in Wrath to be something along the lines of "I need to be able to stop the Legion from coming after me, and the best way to do that is to create an unstoppable army by uniting the whole world under my control in undeath" when the PCs show up and start killing his lieutenants he takes notice of them and decides to test them to see if they're worthy of raising as his new generals to lead the scourging of Azeroth.
The details are still dumb, like him just letting you kill off all his previous minions and face him directly before revealing it was all according to keikaku (I suspect that was something Blizz only came up when making the ICC raid to counter the complaints about Arthas seeming too much like a cartoon villain who keeps showing up to yell "I'll get you next time!" at the end of yet another questline where you wreck his plans by making him only pretend to be moronic), but in broad strokes it works.
This plotline only makes sense in the context of MMO's and even then it's overly contrived.
Arthas being in control of the Lich King was already a massive retcon, the entire final campaign in TFT is the Lich King calling Arthas to him so he can claim his body and the ending cinematic is Arthas single mindedly ascending the steps towards the Frozen Throne, overlaid with the audio of all the people he once cared for but was made to betray and murder, breaking the armor that contain's Ner'zhul's soul free from the prison the Legion made for it, donning the armor, and then Ner'zhul's voice very clearly saying 'now, we are one' and taking the throne. Arthas' story throughout the game was one of having his humanity and morals stripped from him, having his very soul stripped from him, being made into a puppet and finally being used as a vessel by the Lich King.
they retconned it because people liked and remembered Arthas and not Ner'zhul, an important but not super memorable character from Warcraft 2 (also its genuinely really depressing and bleak just for the sake of it). the series is absolutely fricking full of retcons, it's really hard to invest yourself seriously into the story because they just change shit based on what they think resonates with people and what doesn't, its a really reactive and defensive style of writing.
>I suspect that was something Blizz only came up when making the ICC raid to counter the complaints about Arthas seeming too much like a cartoon villain who keeps showing up to yell "I'll get you next time!" at the end of yet another questline where you wreck his plans by making him only pretend to be moronic
It was the plot from the start, he tells you in the reveal trailer "only then will you realise, you were following in my footsteps all along".
The TFT and wraith overall narrative is basically swapping arthas for the player, except the intervention of tirion at the
at the what anon? AT THE WHAT!
I assume he means at the finale, where Tirion breaks out of his ice prison and shatters Frostmourne with Ashbringer to save the raid.
Arthas went on a mad quest for revenge and sacrificed all his loyal comrades, the player character recruited 25 friends and helped tons of loyal comrades so I don't see how this is at all a mirror except in the sense you're on a journey to ice crown.
But you're trying to stop the lich king from killing more people, that makes you exactly as bad as arthas anon!
It always bothered me that ActiBlizz themselves drank the kool-aids of "Arthas the Lich King", even though up to and including TFT, from an omniscient observer perspective, it was clearly Ner'zhul driving. Having this be the "big reveal" from an in-character perspective could've been kino, but they just up and ignored it, because in modern Blizzard, no-one gave a shit and they just did and do whatever based on whatever appears vaguely popular, and Arthas had been established as le bad, while no-one in the nufanbase knew who the frick Ner'zhul was.
Yeah. They were trying too hard after WotLK.
What is there after W3 and Frozen Throne that deserves to be kept, though?
Up to W3 it's cheesy and a bit trite, but it's still alright and with fun ideas. All WOW lore is garbage.
vanilla WoW did some decent world building with the mysterious Titan ruins, the elementals, the dragons, getting to see the daily villager boots on the ground life of the various races. it left a lot of things mysterious and the general stakes of most conflicts were pretty low and regionally focused. the way they shoe horned forsaken and night elves onto the horde and alliance and the general hostility between the factions was fricking stupid though. things got worse over time but vanilla wasn't bad.
there was also some decent world building in spots, MoP had its nice parts even if it was hard to take seriously because of pandas (and made it really awkward when they introduced asian humans later) and Draenor in WoD was actually pretty cool if you ignored 90% of the Iron Horde stuff, it had a real brutal, swords and sorcery, really early iron age TTRPG vibe to it
>What is there after W3 and Frozen Throne that deserves to be kept, though?
A lot of the plotlines from classic are perfectly fine. That stuff mostly just fleshed out the world and didn't kill of important characters. For the most part anyway, onyxia and nefarion. Really as an rts the whole qiraji plotline is actually a really good way to set up the old gods as a threat.
In BC the layout of outlands is fine, draenai retcons are stupid and killing off all the illidari is too.
In wrath the bullshit with LKs keikaku should be scrapped but stuff with the titans there and the vrykul is cool.
Thats all I'd keep.
Oh and gilneas being taken over by worgens is the only plotline I'd take from cata. Although all the post cata worgen lore I'd change back to pre-cata.
The truth is, Warcraft lore was literally an afterthought all the way until WoW hit and players wanted addons with plot.
Cataclysm is the worst offender, but it did start with BC and generally Warcraft lore is just meant to be easily digestible slop.
You technically could complain even at the orcs starting to get humanized at 3 instead of staying murderhobos.
When you put it like that, it's actually impressive it's somehow become more of a clusterfrick than even Warhammer Fantasy lore.
>orcs starting to get humanized at 3 instead of staying murderhobos
The problem with having a problem with this is where do you go with the orcs post 2 if you don't do this? The only orcs left are stranded in azeroth because their planet was destroyed. Where exactly do you take the orcish storyline after that besides where they took it?
>where do you go with the orcs
Why do you have to go anywhere with them? Just like real life groups of people do the exact same things over and over and over again.
>Why do you have to go anywhere with them?
Because they're all locked in internment camps and any rebellion that leads to orcs going back to their old ways will just end up with them getting genocided and becoming a part of the scourge.
The bigger problem is that Blizzard as a whole has literally 1 storyline.
>there's an even bigger badder eviler super thing that's secretly behind it all!!!
It's all amazingly repetitive, much like the games. The only people who have stuck with this over the years are literally addicted to the Skinner box
And a surprising amount of the lore and setup of Vanilla WoW was just lifted from Living Greyhawk, which a lot of the writers at the time were also working on.
This except it stops at The Burning Crusade, because it's in violation of existing canon and essentially a retcon fanfic.
TBC already has retcons like the dranei being a good aligned offshoot of the eredar that weren't corrupted by sargeras. In the og lore sargeras was corrupted by the eredar and the dranei are simply a native tribe of draenor.
And some people are STILL sore about that retcon to this day. I wasn't around for the original draenei, so it's not a big deal for me.
I might keep draenai being aliens but not the good versions of eredar. Having their interstellar ship around opens up some interesting plot possibilities.
I was salty about the retcon but it gave us delicious blue waifus so I got over it.
I have an OC who gets stuck with Turalyon and Alleria with the light forged and quickly marries one and has babies with her
>delicious blue waifus
And red, and red! Thank you very much.
How did Blizzard do it? Create a race that's so readily accepted as "want to frick" and yet it's got freaky skin colors, horns, hooves, tails and face tendrils?
Blizzard didn't do shit. Non-blizzard artists did.
The BC promotional artwork already had some pure coombait draenei girls
>coombait
not even close
The difference between art Chad blood elves and the twink ingame models will never not be funny
If you think that chad isn't breedable, you've a lot to learn.
What the frick does that even mean
That anon wants to frick elf from the art. Don't contemplate it, it's double gay.
I think this was drawn like a decade after the release of the game.
Warcraft was never good
They copied Tieflings
Pre-draenei tieflings were very different than the post-draenei tieflings.
they were not *not* horny, though.
But yeah the current technicolor trashfire is definitely WOW's fault.
Blizz didn't copy Tieflings. They copied Diaboli from Mystara.
You're supposed to let someone else post that image newfriend. Or at least wait to get a few more (You)'s before samegayging.
3rd edition ruined tieflings by making them overtly demonic and all the same. Tieflings originally could pass for human and had a minor trait or two that wasn't always obvious to the casual observer that made them otherworldly.
Then libcucks infested d&d and fricking wrecked everything with their "look at me look at me homosexual narcissism parade my weird freakishness" mentality. Then half the gaming world slurped up their wienerjuice and took a knee.
Damn it's so weird, it's almost like horns and hooves aren't that big of a dealbreaker if they're at the extremities of what, from ankles to temples, is a smoking hot supermodel in exotic colours.
And that is excluding all those people for whom the horns and hooves are ALSO a turn-on.
Literally SJWs bawds (same thing).
You literally don't know what any of the words you typed mean.
Popularity inflated severely by futa freaks. In the game their population is nothing.
Based horsewiener enjoyers
Why should she have all the fun, right?
It's HER horsewiener, she gets to decide who she uses it on
Reminder than Saudi oil money funded draenei horsewiener futas.
I'm not a futagay thoug, I just like pretty space goats. Whether they are Light-infused cuties, or Fel-using dommy mommies.
>I'm not a futagay thoug
It's okay, you're among friends here. We all know only futachads like draefus
>admits to wanting to get pegged by mommydommies
See? You're implicitly admitting your list for horsewiener already!
>futa
Disgusting. Only acceptable for futa/f wiener vore.
Least deranged draeneigay
What's that about draenei that makes them a target for unhinged deviants?
Actual tieflings have less degeneracy going for them.
It's a vocal minority as always. The internet always helped fringe groups to showcase themselves more, giving the illusion of normalcy/semi-normalcy to their views.
One can only hope so.
One's in the most popular MMO of all time and the other's a nerd thing involving reading. How do you think that affects fanbases?
Tieflings don't have as easily accessible 3d poseable models that could be used to mass-produce cheap crappy porn
Nobody cared about tieflings until BG3 and they immediately got overshadowed by bearsex.
>Nobody cared about tieflings until BG3
Please.
You're embarrassing yourself.
Gay bear sex.
WOTC has a lot to answer for.
I boycott all their products and tell everyone I meet how much WOTC is a bunch of degenerate, satan worshipping homosexuals.
>since
>not before
Yeah OP, it's really started the downhill slide at BC when all of illidans commanders went mad power and then illidan was made into a raid boss.
And then they retroactively explained that Illidan was the good guy all along, and that the factions attacked him in TBC because they didn't realize the full scope of his plans. Or something.
To be fair to the writers, illidans plan was actually rather clever. Since he rules over a destroyed world, it seems natural that he would about what he could if he could replicate what happened to draenor on any planet. Using that to destroy legion worlds is indeed smart.
I don't particularly care about Warcraft, so I'm not sure how I'd fix it. I'm also not sure what this has to do with tabletop games, given that Warcraft is a video game IP and you're asking about lore.
Here's a Warcraft hack for Genesys, to at least make sure the thread deserves to be here.
You don't. You can't have good lore in an MMO. It constantly has to one-up itself to keep people interested.
Only because of the MUDflation treadmill. Real MMORPGs haven’t been tried yet.
Could you elaborate on this point? I know a little bit about MUDs and some of what goes on under the hood of an MMORPG, but what would a true MMO look like in you mind?
by MUDflation I mean the phenomenon of
>Big Dragon drops Breastplate of +2
>next expansion
>Bigger Dragon drops Breastplate of +4
>Breastplate of +2 is now worthless
Etc. The leveling/gear treadmill.
The way around this is making horizontal progression the primary aspect of the game instead of vertical gear progression, and making player skill more meaningful than it has been.
A new player with a club fighting a veteran player in steel plate should lose nearly every time, but if he bashes the vet in the helmet enough times, he’ll beat him.
A bear is a BEAR and should ALWAYS be a threat, even to a max level player in top gear.
Adding support for different playstyles as fully rewarding gameplay: If a guy just wants to farm or smith things, or be the mayor of a town, he should have an avenue to play instead of mercenary dragon killer.
This way of approaching an MMO as a world instead of a game, removes the need to one-up itself on items and lore threats. Political maneuvering, winning or losing wars against other major PC factions, being the first to discover a new relic/race/dungeon, or being part of the literal gold rush afterward, etc, etc. thousands of options.
You want to play soulslikes, not MMO's
>Real MMORPGs haven’t been tried yet.
They existed before WoW and WoW subsequently killed them all by being a casual grindfest that attracted normies to the genre, not that a casual normie newbie like you would know. The last TRVE MMO is EVE Online and that's as much a good thing as a bad thing.
Okay, well what if there never was a WoW, what if we went to warcraft 4, what would the story of that have been?
Factions would probably be
Humans
Horde
Sylvanas Undead
Burning Legion
Burning Legion
Blood Elves
Plot would be similar to WotK I think, maybe another Burning Legion invasion for xpac, and Arthas is either defeated or joins against the Legion
Lol is there a burning legion civil war in your timeline? I'd add illidan doing his own thing in outland too.
Yeah Illidan needs to be there too
From my memory, Arthas was manipulated by the Legion, but after he became the Lich King he saw them as the enemy
Arthas was manipulated by ner-zhul not the legion. Ner-zhul is just trying to save his own ass from the legion.
Well after Arthas’Zul is the Lich King, what are their views on the Legion?
Extremely negative.
>another Burning Legion invasion for xpac, and Arthas is either defeated or joins against the Legion
They could have him die fighting the demons and give him the last minute redemption Darth Vader death. Jaina could find her locket on his corpse like in Wrath. Scourge could be a new playable army for MP, maybe even split off Dwarves/Gnomes as a MP race too
>Remove everything WoW and make it that the old RTS games are the only canon stuff (and anything that is connected to them).
>Make a WarCraft IV and make it about the Lich King, who is two souls fused into one, wanting to enact vengeance on the Burning Legion and avenge the spirits of Ner'Zhul and Arthas from which he was created as well as for all the stuff the Scourge was made to do (along with how the undead were made to be evil and expendable by the Burning Legion).
>Vengeance for Arthas and Ner'Zhul because both were ensnared by the darkness in their own way and made to do horrible things while enslaved by the Legion and essentially loosing their morals due to their transformations. Vengeance for the Scourge due to how every undead was made a slave of the Legion. Forced to kill the living (even the people that were closest to their hearts), defiling that which was pristine and pure, ruining whole civilizations...
>The Lich King marches the Scourge to Lordaeron yet again, but moves from there to where the Dark Portal used to be and rebuilds it with superior Nerubian masonry and the power of Kel'Thuzad and his Lich and Necromancer cabals.
>Everyone freaks out that the Scourge is moving out to the Outlands and follow the Lich King. Sylvanas especially since she has unfinished business...meanwhile in the Outlands Illidan is still recovering after his fight with Arthas and hearing that his rival came he also will want to set scores.
>Kil'Jaden sees all of this and he will want to use the situation to punish Illidan and personally slay the Lich King.
>However the situation gets even more complex once this conflict starts to leak into Azeroth and a 4th Great War is kickstarted...
Playable Factions:
>Alliance
>Horde
>Undead
>Night Elves
>The Blood Elf and Naga Union
>Burning Legion
All factions are also divided into sub-factions with unique structures, research and units that replace some of the universal ones (depending on sub-faction that is).
>The Lich King marches the Scourge to Lordaeron yet again, but moves from there to where the Dark Portal used to be and rebuilds it with superior Nerubian masonry and the power of Kel'Thuzad and his Lich and Necromancer cabals.
This where you lose me, why?
To go to Outland and use it as a staging ground for a raid to perma-kill Kil'Jaden who was personally responsible for everything Scourge-related by threatening Ner'Zhul after he reduced him to a spirit and forcefully transformed him into the OG Lich King (as well dropping Lich King Ner'Zhul into Northend which later resulted in ravaging the Nerubian empire, causing the plague that was spreading through Lordaeron, in part resulting in Arthas's fall into a Death Knight, decimating Quel'Thalas, slaughter of the Archmages, summoning Archimonde who would then proceed to ravage Dalaran and much, much more).
In essence this Lich King inherited the memories and experiences of both Ner'Zhul and Arthas and is determined to have his way with the Burning Legion and knock them down from their pedestal.
>To go to Outland and use it as a staging ground for a raid to perma-kill Kil'Jaden
Why? Why does arthas need to go to outland for this? Nerzhul knows how to open portals, why can't he do it on azeroth? Why does he need to march to outland and pick a fight with illidan?
He needed a bunch of artifacts to open portals.
As pointed out in another post, kael and vashj opened portal just fine without them. Ner-zhul is much more powerful as the LK then he was as an orc.
I could see him wantint to play it safe lest he accidentally turn Azeroth into another outland. Moreso why would he NEED to use the existing dark portal? Kael and Vashj opened a perfectly servicable portal to outland in Dalaran already.
You can have good lore for MMORPG. What you can't have is narrative quest. It suppose to stay in the background and give texture into the world the players are travelling. The kind of thing Dark Souls does would be a good way for that. But WoW forces a standard on the market now helas.
The Secret World was doing good lore
...then in an insane business decision I still don't understand they apparently fired all their writers, tried to microtransaction the frick out of the game rebranding it as Secret World Legends, and after years of FRICKING NOTHING happening in-universe, kickstartered a 5e conversion of the setting taking place a few years later where apparently nothing has meaningfully changed and shit just kind of stopped happening after Tokyo.
ONE good MMO storyline, and the suits went and ruined it so hard they killed their own cash cow
God, someone else who played and misses TSW.
SWL can eat my whole ass on three-bean night.
That game was fricking incredible. I played on a free trial weekend, and it was at the point where you got to the church and had to look up password hints in the bible that I realised it was something special. No "find a sparkling book, click it, and you'll see the right page", you had to either have a copy on hand, or use the in-game smartphone browser to look up the right verse.
By the time I stopped playing during the later mission packs, though, every time I used the ingame browser to look up something I needed, I got TSW walkthrough and answer pages as the first results on google and the regular wikipedia page or whatever for what I was looking up below that, which sucked.
City of Heroes would like a word with you. Before it was murdered by the Koreans for not being Korean enough (despite being their second-biggest earner, the racist higher-ups canned it because "Too many round-eyes!"), it had one of the largest and richest stories and any contradictions were easily smoothed over due to the comic-book aspect of the story. It balanced humor and seriousness quite well and had some of the most memorable story arcs of any game I've played.
>City of Heroes
The only MMO that ever took my money from WoW. It was too good for this world (but luckily private servers exist)
For me, it's WildStar.
Well I'd be usually doing progressively more and more things differently from Vanilla onwards.
EHhhh there's tons of smaller details that a Warcraft 4 would have totally glossed over.
DUH VOID connecting the Old Gods DEEPLY to void creatures and making the Legion opposed to the void annoyed me.
The first Voidwalkers we see are summoned by Eredar in Warcraft 3! (TFT at least)
Original Worgen back to being from another planet invaded by the Legion at the same time as Azeroth's War of the Ancients? I like that better than druid spinoffs.
I get that splitting it means there's ALWAYS going to be fans and writers pulling in two directions, but I like most of the WC3 style horde stuff better.
FF14 is doing great, and that's despite the massive under-the-hood retcons that occurred between 1.0, A Realm Reborn, and Heavensward. In fact, the whole reason Heavensward was such a self-contained story was so they could finally properly nail down the plot and lore that would guide the next decade of content. And it worked. Anyone saying MMOs can't have a good story is just a battered WoW coper.
Hell, I hear FFXI is still trucking along and maintaining a good story.
Stop at Lord of the Clans. WC1 -> WC2 -> BTDP -> LoTC
scrap everything after 2
Only since WoD? I'd say since Cataclysm and that's being very generous, mostly because while TBC and Wrath messed up so stuff the defeat of the Lich King at least made for a good narrative bookend and wrapped up the major plot-thread left from WC3.
The three big issues with WoW lore is them needing to come up with new baddies for murderhobos to kill for loot (up until Wrath they had the Lich King and other recognizable WC3 characters to use as bosses, but since then they've had to keep coming up with new stuff, like the evil nipple-man who was secretly behind every plot-development in WC3 but nobody had heard of before), come up with reasons why Team Red and Team Blue are back to killing each other again after having teamed up to beat the world-destroying evil for the umpteenth time, and some writer deciding what the setting really needed was an overtly convoluted cosmology with various "cosmic forces" (it used to be that you had the Light and it's opposite the Shadow, which the TBC lore on the Naaru implied were the different sides of the same coins, and then some godlike but still physical beings like the Titans and Old Gods, but now Light and Void are just two of 5 cosmic forces, Old Gods are connected to the Void for some reason despite not sharing any aesthetics with void-creatures, and Titans are now the embodiment of Order which is also the source of arcane magic which completely contradicts the old lore about arcane and fel magic both originating from the Twisting Nether and the whole reason why arcane magic is considered addictive and potentially dangerous and the Night Elves stopped using it...)
Lol all that stuff you just mentioned has already been abandoned by blizz. No longer canon.
I haven't really followed WoW lore since the Nipple Man, so what did they retcon this time?
Incidentally, I find it hilarious they published the Chronicle books to be the definitive lore-bible but by the time they published the 2nd volume they had already retconned most of the 1st volume and had to justify it by claiming it was actually an in-universe book with an unreliable narrator (which was not at all how it was originally presented).
Basically all of chronicles is no longer canon.
>Chris Metzen's magnum opus: the definitive and objective Warcraft bible
>Gets binned by the current writers almost immediately
Well he's back now so maybe They'll bring some of it back too
The fact that book didn't survive even one whole patch after it published (it got published in the middle of one, IIRC) still gets me
>come up with reasons why Team Red and Team Blue are back to killing each other again after having teamed up to beat the world-destroying evil for the umpteenth time
What's frustrating is that it's regularly reinforced that the only thing keeping Azeroth alive after all these calamities is when the Alliance and Horde work together, and half the effort involves getting the two superpowers to actually sit together for once. It's to the point where even the faction leaders themselves are sick of it.
The bad stuff happening will never be mentioned again. I update the abandoned parts of the world with the changes and stuff i like to see. People and plotlines now play out the way i and my players would like them to. I can easily start with that post the DF timeskip or even with the current timeline. If your average RP server DM can do it, so you can in a tabletop manner.
Remove the 2 faction frickery.
Let each nation have their own fricking goals and work towards them.
also remoov gnoom
TRIFLING GNOME
How many nations are there if you disband the alliance and horde?
Stormwind.
Khaz Modan (bronzebeard dwarf)
Wildhammer dwarf
Arathor
Kul'Tiras
Orgimar
Gnomergan
Darkspear trolls
Thunderbluff (Tauren)
Night elves
Blood elves
Forsaken
Theramore
You're forgetting a few. Like the goblin cartels, the dark iron clan and dark horde, the sand trolls, the gurubashi, the Amani, The drakari, all the ogre clans and the Vrykul if you take those as canon.
Most of what you have listed aren't associated with the Alliance or Horde or are even actively hostile to them both.
So, what does that have to do with anything? They're still nations.
Please read the reply chain before you randomly butt in.
I did, you still forgot a bunch of nations moron.
It wasn't me, you were just too flagrantly stupid for me to ignore you.
Sure thing moron
Had they stuck to their idea of using the Everquest faction system I think things would have been better off overall.
What does that mean exactly?
If you take each power as a plane of existance, it isnt THAT different from your average DnD/ Pathfinder cosmology. You just dont have it relate to alignments. You have your elemental planes, you have your feywild, you have your shadowfell, you have your abyss, you have your far realms and so on and so forth.
symmetric slop
Is this the new new one or the one that was reconned?
Its the original one but in color
>original one
Wrong. That's the one from Shadowlands.
The main issue, I think, is that it moves too fast. Each wow X-pac basically states a catastrophic event being contained and defeated every two years, in reality most conflicts and events of such magnitude last around 5-10 years (decades if it's a REAL big event like the Cold War or Reformation). I think fixing WoW lore would mean either slowing the rate of WoW expansions or making expansions come in duos or trios. Fix that problem, and I feel you'd end up fixing the other problems that surround this status quo.
So essentially end WoW and start again from w3? Theres no way "slowing the rate of WoW expansions or making expansions come in duos or trios" would be financially viable for an MMO.
He says, after the Blizzcon where they announced three expansions in one go and saying they're all part of a singular overarching storyline.
They even outlined the overarching plot of each expansion.
>The War Within: We're going underground to help the Earthen
>Midnight: We're going back to Quel'thalas to stop the Void from blowing up the Sunwell
>The Last Titan: We're going back to Ulduar to prep for the return of the Titans
>he thinks the entire thing is actually planned out
The same thing will happen as with the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and Starcraft 2, and with final two Avengers movies, and Battlestar Galactica, and with innumerable other "planned franchises". They are going to wing it at every step. They will introduce complications and new plots and it will be patently obvious in each part that they are making it up as they go along.
First halves will probably be better, since it's a "setup" phase, where you still believe it's all part of a great scheme. This will come at a cost of not having a real ending.
Second halves will be shit, as you realize none of the "reveals" and "conclusions" were foreshadowed, and are in fact either shoehorned or outright retcons. So, you know, business as usual.
This is not a book series, that some passionate guy meticulously constructed and thought out five books in advance. This is a franchise that is lucky to have an idea (and the team behind it) survive for six months. Like I said: don't expect long-term thinking. Not with these writers, not with this company culture.
What 3 expansions? You mean the release of cataclysm and the war within? Yeah no shit cataclysm leads into war within, we knew this for more than decade! Season of discovery isn't even an expansion, its just a new season revamping old raids and adding new gear.
See
and
Cataclysm Classic and Season of Discovery (aka Classic+) are two different forks of the game.
So basically you mean there should be proper foreshadowing. Each expansion deals with a culmination of a conflict, while also simultaneously setting up 1 or 2 future conflicts. An interesting idea, but no way it's gonna happen. Not with these writers. Not when they can actually plan anything when they cannot go 5 minutes without a retcon or an asspull.
It took until Wrath of the Lich King for the game to start in-universe acknowledging that your PC is officially a big fricking deal.
>Yes, this is the line for Alliance recruitment for the Northrend campaign. But for you, a survivor of the Outland campaign, you get to skip the line and get cracking immediately.
I feel like MMo's have to go one of two routes, either you do a single player story like FF14, Secret World, Guild Wars, etc. or they need to keep the scale minor enough that you can do the nameless mercenary in a world of adventure.
Yeah and it worked to make you and even bigger fricking deal through WoD and Legion and after all that pomp and circumstance, I was kinda happy to go back to being a random murderhobo in BFA.
Shadowlands was a fricking mistake and had zero redeeming qualities.
>It took until Wrath of the Lich King for the game to start in-universe acknowledging that your PC is officially a big fricking deal.
Which is important because that's what plays into Arthas's master stroke at the end of the expansion.
>You are, without question, the most powerful mortals walking the earth today, the world's mightiest champions. Killing you and raising you as my generals will make the Scourge unstoppable and my control of Azeroth practically guaranteed.
It seems Metzen figured that out, too and is now doing a massive event across three expansions over 6 years.
Which will hopefully wrap up WoW itself and either lead to a sequel or a Warcraft 4.
Anon is absolutely correct
First off, ditch everything post-WC3.
Moving forward, stop making every other era/expac revolve around muh old gods
Here's a list of ideas I got from /tg/ years ago about fixing Warcraft lore for the purposes of a tabletop game.
>neither the Alliance or the Horde suddenly have settlements in almost every province yet, the Third War just ended barely a year ago
>Gilneas and Kul'Tiras do not wait forever to open their borders and rejoin the Alliance, instead they emerge and start rebuild to shit too, ditch the country-wide Worgen curse
>the High Elves/Blood Elves don’t rejoin the Alliance but don’t become all-out Horde members, they loosely ally with the Horde in the same way that some goblins do
>if the Dark portal opens again Kael‘thas doesn’t because CORRUPTED and try to summon Kil‘Jaeden
>either Onyxia or Nefarian don’t die as soon, and instead keeps trying to frick up the newly reformed Alliance from the inside or with Dark Horde shenanigans
>the Scarlet Crusade forces gradually increase their control over the remnants of eastern Lordaeron, while the Alliance and Horde agree it’s better to leave them be and let them fight undead
>Balnazzar either gets revealed and defeated from within the Scarlet Crusade or decides to play the long game and lie low for later demonic shenanigans
>Tirion Fordring never magically purifies Ashbringer and becomes a Mary Sue
>the Death Knights of Acherus don’t become allied with the Alliance or Horde
>no bullshit with Bolvar becoming the Lich King
>Deathwing/Cataclysm/Old God shit doesn’t happen outright, instead everyone has to fight them from waking up at all
>Sylvanas splits off much sooner from the Horde if she goes into full-on edge territory
This is generally good except I'd keep the worgen fricking up gilneas and I wouldn't even have the forsaken join the horde, wouldn't have the night elves in the alliance either. Just leave them as their own independent factions.
The whole reason the Forsaken joined the Horde in the canon timeline was for mutual support.
>Sylvanas: You want a foothold in the Eastern Kingdoms outside of Stranglethorn Vale, and we want to avoid getting genocided by the Alliance because they're sore about Lordaeron belonging to us. You protect us, and we'll give you a new base of operations in Lordaeron.
>Thrall: ...Deal.
>The whole reason the Forsaken joined the Horde in the canon timeline was for mutual support.
lol
lmao
Come up with a good reason the orcs need support from the fricking undead. And no, the orcs don't need a foothold outside kalimdor, thats the entire fricking reason they fled the eastern kingdoms.
So, what, Thrall or Saurfang tells Sylvanas to frick off when she asks the Horde for protection from the Alliance?
Why would sylvanas even ask the horde for protection? They live an entire continent away and I'm not even sure the rest of azeroth even knows about kalimdor when the shit with kil-jaedan is going down. Even if she asked why would the horde expend resources supporting a nation a continent away who is a recent splinter from the second most evil faction to ever walk azeroth who lives in a blasted undead hellscape and offers absolutely nothing of value to the horde except pissing off the humans, that entire race you tried to genocide a war ago and now trying to get back into the good graces of via theramore and jaina?
The only thing accepting the forsaken gets the horde is a war they don't want and can ill afford. The horde doesn't want to fight the alliance post warcraft 3, thats bullshit WoW lore needed to justify the 2 factions.
>Why would sylvanas even ask the horde for protection?
Because Lordaeron is rightful Alliance clay, and Lordaeron being home to accursed undead is one of the greatest shames of humanity. It's a matter of personal pride for humans to reclaim Lordaeron. They WILL come, and without support, the Forsaken WILL get the dogshit kicked out of them.
You didn't even try to justify why the horde should help them.
Also the forsaken aren't as helpless as you claim, try to unlearn WoWs factions and think about their position post 3. All the human nations of lordaeron are either destroyed or crippled for decades or gilneas. Stormwind, kul tiras and theramore are the only ones left who could launch such a campaign, theramores out for being on another continent and very small, stormwinds on the other side of the continent and was completely destroyed in the second war and is in no shape to launch a grand reclamation and kul tiras is primarily a sea power, land force ain't their thing.
Not to mention the scourge are still in lordaeron and such a reclimation would need to contend with them too which is a hard sell considering how easily they steam rolled the greatest power in the eastern kingdoms.
I don't think the forsakens defeat is near as certain as you do.
>You didn't even try to justify why the horde should help them.
I was just outlining the Forsaken's position. It's only a matter of time until, sooner or later, an Alliance offensive to reclaim Lordaeron from the undead comes. Maybe not now, but at some point, an Alliance invasion is guaranteed. There's every reason to expect the humans to muster the full Alliance to help, so that's the dwarves, gnomes, and high elves on their side.
Still not seeing any reason for the horde to help. As well you continue to ignore the alliance post 3rd war is substantially weaker than they were in the second. You also ignore the more immediate threat to the forsaken is not the alliance but the scourge.
Sure, just ship food grown by the undead for reason even though they don't need it. through the maelstrom rather than get it through the vast virgin lands of kalimdor. Thats my point, the hordes interests are in kalimdor, not the eastern kingdoms. It's much more in the hordes interests to war with the kaldorei or centaurs than stormwind.
Keep in mind that the forsaken lack a large number of potent necromancers to grow their numbers. Their number are limited and they have the scarlets, the scourge, the alliance and Arugal up their ass.
As outlined in my other post, the alliance isn't in a position to steamroll the forsaken as you claim. Of the other factions the only on whos a serious threat to the forsaken is the scourge. None of the rest are an existential threat to the forsaken, at least for many years.
The forsakens aim still isnt to just endure. Its vengeance against the Lich King. They cant get that by dwindling away through a war of attrition on their home turf.
No, they get that through developing extremely potent bioweapons like they do in wow. If it wasn't for Varimathras betrayal then it would've worked. Also being in a faction with the living is also a detriment to that because they kinda mad about the development of such a weapon because it could've and was used on the living. Another reason for them to go it alone.
Once again you're stuck in WoWs moronic faction system, why does the horde need to divide the alliances attention? They made an alliance with the human city of theramore? The horde and the alliance are not enemies at the end of warcraft 3.
>Real reason is because it was to level out the factions in terms of the class rosters they had access to
Yeah, as I said, moronic MMO factional bullshit that only exists in WoW because they hired DaoC players and they pushed hard for factional conflict during development.
>why why why
I gave you the reason numb nuts l2read.
>moronic fluff to allow players to play undead with out making more moronic lore reason for scourge players characters.
I did read and I agreed with you, you l2read.
Lore reason? It's because the horde needed a presence in azeroth to keep the alliances focus split from kalimador. Which is a "smart" move considering (for some stupid reason) the alliance has a major pressence in kalimador already and nelves joined the allince. Sylvanus gets material and troop support to keep her tiny slice of lorderon in return for what she would be doing anyways.
Real reason is because it was to level out the factions in terms of the class rosters they had access to, give horde players a easy way to access nothern part of azeroth and to mirror the nelves (one faction gets recently immortal elves the other gets newly immortalish undead) in kalimador. It was also to allow players the ability to play an undead character with out them pulling an even more moronic lore reasons for scourge player characters.
Tldr it's all asspull fluff to allow players to play undead.
The only real alliance forces on Kalimdor are Theramore, a dwarven expedition in a bunker and the stragglers from Daelin's fleet hanging out in ruined fort.
Is theramore even really alliance anymore? They fought against daelins fleet to save the orcs. Seems kinda like they're more apart of the horde than the alliance.
Even less reason for the horde to be worried about Alliance on Kalimdor.
Theramore is Alliance in name only. They are merely the EK survivors who listened to Jaina's warnings and fled with her across the ocean to escape the Scourge.
>They fought against daelins fleet
They didn't. Jaina only released Rexxar. The rest happily joined attack on Durothar, and ever since Vanilla Theramore was becoming more and more Stormwind client state
Nta but after what she did in Shadowlands Sylvanas deserves to be put through a sausage machine over and over again.
As blighted as much of Lordaeron is, there are still many sections of land in Tirisfal and Silverpine that are viable for farming. The undead don't need to eat, but the orcs and tauren do.
I legit think making warcraft into a mod for Hoi4 would be really good. You don't have to take any of the bullshit lore from wow and can naturally extend each nations story.
There's a CK2 mod for it. It was actually pretty good and it unironically produced better stories than Warcraft itself.
I'm aware of the CK2 mod and it's good for what it is but CK2 is more sandbox and make your own stories rather than an actual narrative like warcraft tries to do. At least in terms of that I think hoi4 is a better fit, you can get some pretty good plotlines out of hoi4 mods.
If I were in charge of the entire project I think my course of action would be to systematically restart the whole thing, keep all of the plot points and events (except for really stupid stuff) but then reformulate the story so that all of the plot threads make sense, things that should've been foretold or lampshaded are, and the characters have more consistent motives and arcs.
Another thing I would do is severely cut back on the silliness. Go back to the original art style and design that was based and redpilled instead of cringe and saturated and gay. Cut away all but the core races (to start, we can add them back in later) and do a deliberate, well paced retelling of Warcrafts 1-3 plus expansion that really takes us to the moment everything flew off the rails.
Once we have a very solid foundation, THEN we can try to actually do all of the insane shit that followed. Moreover, we will plan for future events deliberately decades before we actually write the expansions.
How would to upsize the map? What locations would you add? Obviously kingdoms that existed for thousand of years would have more then 1 or maybe 2 big cities.
Thats a really nice map, got one of the other continents? One thing I think that lordearon really needs is a port city on the north coast, the only port in lordearon seems to be either in southshore or in other kingdoms, which is not a good position to be in for a continental superpower.
sadly thats the only fan map with additional places i know of
You know the source? Maybe the author did more.
lower right corner of the picture.
Thanks for pointing it out. While they don't have a fully detailed map of kalimdor they do have a political map of EK.
Aw man, looks like this guy already did all the work for us but it was on a website thats all gambling ads now
Root out all the sex offenders from Blizzard because their design philosophy has compromised every product they've put out since the original launch of WoW
WoD was a fricking masterstroke of genius writing compared to how bad TBC was.
I'd fix it by making my self insert OC marry Jaina but his daughter hates her new stepmother and it becomes a comedy of a psycho daughter and a stepmother trying to bond with her
It is (was always) very easy to fix. Just cancel everything the MMO ever did (like the forced two group divide for the sake of gameplay) and continue the story as in a Warcraft 4, business as usual. The, now almost forgotten, TRPG content and fluff had already somewhat set the tone for what was to follow (ex. Theramore becoming a blooming city and Alliance capital on Kalimdor, playing a much more important role compared to the MMO).
All this without going too much into specifics of course.
I can't quite fully accept the rpg as the basis for warcraft 4 because it has some dumb lore in it too. I'd prefer to pick and choose stuff from both classic and the rpg to get something good.
Sure, but I'm trying to avoid having much to do with the MMO when trying to formulate a better and more coherent Warcraft story because the MMO sacrificed so much for the sake of its gameplay and increasingly more as expansions went on and retcons begun to occur.
It did have SOME cool ideas though, I'll give you that.
Alright, let us hear your ideas. What kind of stories and plotlines are you interested to explore in a real of hypothetical game? Where would it take place, what would it be abound?
Personally, my dream game would be set in the plaguelands and revolve around various factions wanting to get their hands on Atiesh. The scourge, the scarlets, the argents, the blood elves loyal to kael (thus the legion), maybe even have Kadghar come over from Outland if it takes place during BC. Players then have to deal with all these parties in some way, make alliances, align with one or the other, lure them into fights or keep them in line. And ofc find out where Atiesh is and how to get it. Interesting big name npcs would be Archmage Angela Dosantos (the OG Atiesh questgiver), the scarlet oracle, maybe Helcular, Rommath, Kadghar and Kel Thuzad.
Honestly, I think the Ahn-Qiraj storyline would make for an entire good game in and of itself. One thing I'd change though, instead of players it would be a team of Qiraji agents that managed to get out of the barrier because it's weakening and they're the ones to do the scepter of the shifting sands quest.
>Bug party gets out of ahn-quiraj and start looking for the scepter
>along the way they visit all the peoples of kalimdor and EK
>they learn that the horde and the night elves are on the verge of war over ashenvale
>perfect time
>finish it up and unleash the qiraj
>now the elves and orcs must team up to fight another threat again
I think the bug party can have their own little subplots and maybe some of them go native and don't want to exterminate the other races. Just spitting ideas.
>How would you fix warcrafts lore?
Use no more than WC1 & 2 lore. 3 was the beginning of the end.
There are plenty of things i didnt like about the wow story (post Wrath in particular) but its only the whole bfa-sl expansions that i refuse to ever accept as having ever happened. So many wasted opportunities and egregious bullshit its insane.
Just scrap the whole faction war patch. Scrap everything Sylvanas did or kill her off. Turn the aszhara patch into an entire expansion. Then turn the nzoth path into another expansion. Next comes Dragonflight
The broad understanding is that, as far as roleplayers are concerned, Shadowlands never happened.
Bfa and WoD too
Nah, those were fine.
At least for the first half of each expansion.
I'll give you WoD even if the concept was stupid just because getting to see the chiefs and draenor in it's prime but BFA was not good for even the first half.
Maybe not for Horde, but Kul Tiras was great and atmospheric, even in the alpha with all the graphical glitches.
And it reinforced the idea that Sylvanas is an evil c**t that needed to be put down for the good of the world and Blizzard never even gave us that satisfaction.
>Blizzard never even gave us that satisfaction.
Not as long as danuser is on the writing team!
They pulled an Illidan and sent Sylvanas into super-exile - banished to the Maw for her crimes and made to atone. Killing her would be too easy.
It's been a mess since Warcraft 3. "Muh good guys" orcs is fricking dumb and gay.
>Muh good guys
Fricking where? Did you forget the orcs fully supported sylvanas genociding the nelfs? Even since metzen left the orcs have been nothing but savages and it's terrible.
It was the post-Cataclysm "I want Warcraft 2 orcs back" writers that turned the orcs into scumbags.
Yeah and they made all the worst storylines warcraft has ever had.
What the writers failed to understand is that coming from Warcraft 3, people signed up to be part of the post-Warcraft 3 Horde. They wanted to join Thrall's Horde - the orc/Darkspear troll/tauren bros for life who were ready to take on Kalimdor together. When it became Garrosh's Horde and the writers said "we must RETVRN to Warcraft 2" that they started losing the plot.
It didn't help that the forums were flooded day and night by 13 year old edgelords screaming for orc supremacy and how the horde should totally rule everyone.
The writers were just responding to what they thought were the calls of the crowd. It was just the most moronic, vocal part of the crowd.
People were b***hing about green jesus not the orcs not being nazi enough. The writers way over corrected.
If Blizzard really cared what the fans thought, we'd have gotten Wration x Andy a long time ago.
gays should all get the rope.
Firstly, the post-WC3 Horde is a key reason why we have such shitty lore. Secondly, returning to the Horde being brutal savages is not the issue, having a split like that in the first place is the issue. You ended up with people who wanted different things from the Horde at a foundational level.
Garrosh was the best. The whiners and the pussy writers caving ruined what could have been a great time to be Horde. My main died in the Siege of Orgrimmar defending his city and Warchief against traitor scum.
>t. 13 year old edgelord wanting "muh orc supremacy"
>"Garrosh did nothing wrong" apologist/orc supremacist
Human paladin players are nearly as insufferable.
At least the human paladins are funny to listen to.
Question: is "List of races they find sexually attractive" referencing Warcraft or real life?
I have to assume in-universe. A male human paladin would absolutely smash draenei puss if he could get away with it, and not just because the baby would be a true avatar of the Light (in his eyes).
Human Paladin + Lightforge Draenei Paladin = 200% Light being formed (in other words, Naauru)
Human Paladin + Night Elf Priest = 200% Moon-Light being formed (in other words, Elune)
Those are undeniable facts
>Garrosh did nothing wrong
he really didn’t
Garrosh technically did nothing wrong for his side of the story.
He's not even literally Hitler because he actually did care about orcs, made them stronger personally, led to battle and lost by what's essentially is GM fiat with the pre-conditioned player victory.
And he's written well. My moron friend plays the alliance paladin and keeps repeating that whenever Garrosh is brought up.
>and lost by what's essentially is GM fiat with the pre-conditioned player victory.
That's the price he paid for relying on what's essential GM fiat to somehow wield the power of an Old God without being corrupted, in a setting where FRICKING EVERYTHING can be corrupted.
Actually he was already being corrupted. Just not fully and his connection to tentacles was severed.
Essentially killing that cthulhu probably helped too.
I want to argue that's still a free fricking pass compared to just how many elementals were corrupted merely from some pools of Fel nearby, but I cannot deny I am in part salty and biased by how often C O R R U P T I O N is used to excuse conflicts in WoW
>5 o'clock shadow
What a moronic look for an orc.
Then again, this is Warcraft, the franchise that singlehandedly ruined the average/expected look of orcs in all modern fantasy. Dogshit lime-coloured bara c**ts.
>5 o'clock shadow
It’s tattoos, dummy.
It is, but he's got a point. It took me years before I've read Grom was actually tattoed on the face, and all that time I thought it was hair.
With his own black hair and model in W3, he ended up looking like a savage Homer Simpson.
>bara
Is this a tranime term or something? Explains the post quality if so.
I liked Garrosh in Cataclysm and how Christie Golden wrote him. He knows he’s not a diplomat but he’s going to fight for the Horde. He’ll crush anyone who gets in his way but he has honor. I thought he had growth from wotlk but he decided to go full moron in Pandaria.
Didn't he bomb teramore for no reason in cata. Where is the honor exactly
Yes. But horde babbies will do mental gymnastics to pretend it was a military base with no civilians leading an invasion into horde land.
Then go and cry about camp taurajo.
>Yes. But horde babbies will do mental gymnastics to pretend it was a military base with no civilians leading an invasion into horde land.
Well.
Teramore was attacking Horde ships heading to Ratchet since Vanilla (quest from a fricking High Elf near the inn to kill X guys from Northwatch Hold)
Garrosh was advancing his army slowly on purpose to give Alliance enough time to gather enough troops, it's not his fault none used this time to evacuate
So all in all yeah, legal military target, which was spared from destruction in TFT only becuase Thrall was banging Jaina (and after he stopped and married even dragon dick couldn't satisfy her)
>no reason
Propaganda. It was a perfectly valid military target.
Garrosh did nothing wrong.
Garrosh did nothing wrong. Jaina could have subsequently drowned Orgrimmar and in the same fashion done nothing wrong, but was talked down. Varian could have decapitated Horde leadership after Wrathgate and would have done nothing wrong, but was talked down. Could have dismantled the Horde after the siege of Orgrimmar and done nothing wrong, but made them promise not to do it again and let them live. The mercy of Alliance leadership is its greatest weakness.
The only ridiculous thing is how the Alliance kept getting into the position to do so in the first place and then Alliance players whine about horde favoritism.
Not mercy, but plot-induced brain addle.
Double points for plot always requiring the green Black folk to be alive when shit hits the fan. Otherwise everything is Dooomed, DOOOOOOMED I TELL YOU.
t. Medivh
>t. Medivh
Also
>t. Bronze Dragonflight
There's famously a conversation the bronze flight has with Alliance PCs to convince them to help preserve the opening of the Dark Portal.
>Alliance: Why should I help Medivh open the Dark Portal? No Dark Portal, no Horde, no atrocities on Azeroth.
>Bronze: Because whether you realize it or not, the Horde entering Azeroth is one of the most vital moments in the timeline. If the Horde never arrives, the Alliance never gets its shit together. Combined with the Horde's absence, the defenses of Azeroth will be weaker overall, and when the Burning Legion comes - and they WILL come - they will steamroll whatever middling defense the Alliance and night elves can muster and destroy the world. I know this is a personal issue for you, but the truth is that Azeroth needs the Horde; ensuring we remain in the best timeline demands it. That's why we must ensure Medivh opens the Dark Portal.
Yeah, I call bullshit on that. It's post-fact rationalisation, a known psychological fallacy where it's easy to come up with reasons why things need to be the way they are just because you're familiar with them and nothing is ever 100% bad.
You're telling me that the hyperlegendary 5d galaxy brain creatures looked at all of infinity, and in all of their wisdom didn't see a way of saving the world that didn't involve orcs pissing all over Azeroth and murdering half the continent? The power of cosmos couldn't find a single other thread of events that would lead to victory? The lazy bastards just don't want to fix what ain't broken, and if a couple hundred cities get razed then eh, good enough.
>You're telling me that the hyperlegendary 5d galaxy brain creatures looked at all of infinity, and in all of their wisdom didn't see a way of saving the world that didn't involve orcs pissing all over Azeroth and murdering half the continent? The power of cosmos couldn't find a single other thread of events that would lead to victory?
Apparently not. There is apparently no timeline where the Horde doesn't enter Azeroth that isn't strictly worse than the current timeline, never mind the "best" timeline.
>I looked at eight million billion timelines, and in every single one of them, there's no way to prevent Chris Pratt from having a temper tantrum literally three seconds before we would have won and ruining everything.
Apparently, nobody can right these stories correctly
>The power of cosmos
Dragons aren't that powerful
Without Horde Stormwind and Lordaeron probably destroyed each other fighting for domination over human domain as Arathi empire was becomming weaker and weaker.
Without Horde none would kill Mannoroth and Cenarius before he succumbed to the Nightmare
It's always so mesmerizing how eagerly terrible writers tend to put time travel into their stories while being woefully unequipped and unconcerned with dealing with the presence of time travel in their stories.
All the time travel stories are about preserving the timeline, not changing it. The vast majority of Caverns of Time quests involve going back in time to ensure the major flashpoints of Warcraft's timeline remain intact, including
>Medivh opens the Dark Portal
>Thrall escapes Durnholde Keep
>Arthas purges Stratholme
And the Battle of Mt. Hyjal, almost forgot.
Didn't the Burning Legion send the Horde? So they deliberately shot themselves in the foot, huh? Could they not foresee what a flying crocodile could foresee?
>they will steamroll whatever middling defense the Alliance and night elves can muster and destroy the world
But that completely ignores the pandarians who never joined the fight, the zandalari who never joined the fight, the nightborne who never joined the fight, and all those other empires who are canonically stronger than night elves, but were added in the expansions.
The point is that without the Horde, the Alliance never realizes its full power (no threat to rally together against means it's bogged down by human infighting, etc.), and without the Horde and Alliance together, Azeroth cannot survive.
I think this point is wrong. Thrall's horde was quite small and weak at the time of the invasion. The Alliance was in shambles due to Arthases actions. His actions, by the way? Caused indirectly by the Horde invasion. The potential pandaren/zandalari/nightborne alliance would be much stronger.
The Caverns of Time quests are after the Battle of Mt. Hyjal. Even ignoring that (where Thrall's Horde helped Jaina's Alliance survivors and the night elves win the battle), there's other Burning Legion invasions to come, most famously the one in Legion.
>Didn't the Burning Legion send the Horde?
Yes. They both created the horde and also influenced Medivh to get him to open the portal.
>So they deliberately shot themselves in the foot, huh?
Deliberately? No. They thought it was a good plan. Get a native species of a world warped into bloodthirtsy killers, and then unleash them onto an unsuspecting world via a betrayal by one of the world's guardians.
The legion did not realize that things would go wrong for them.
>Could they not foresee what a flying crocodile could foresee?
See this is the problem. You're saying "foresee." And yes, the legion would have had to foresee all of this. They'd have to be able to gaze into the future and know that all this is happening. Something that they're not really going to be able to do.
Meanwhile, the flying crocodiles with the ability to move forwards and backwards in time? They don't have to FOREsee anything. They saw it. They saw the whole fricking thing. They don't have to use visions and portents and prophecies to know how things play out. They can just fricking observe it because they have DOMINION OVER TIME.
>But that completely ignores the pandarians who never joined the fight, the zandalari who never joined the fight, the nightborne who never joined the fight, and all those other empires who are canonically stronger than night elves, but were added in the expansions.
Because they're non-factors. Did you see any Pandarians at Hyjal? How about Zandalari? Nightborne? No. The forces present defending Hyjal were The Horde, The Alliance, and the Night Elves.
Hyjal might've fallen. Big deal. That was not the first and not the last world tree destroyed. The night elves should've sacrificed it and sent envoys to the three big neutral empires. Surely they would've all joined together if they knew Sargeras could return.
Okay, let's go with your plan. You let the legion take Hyjal while you reach out to these three neutral empires.
You send your envoys, get them to all join in and ...
you get absolutely fricking crushed. Utterly, entirely decimated. Why? Because in your genius plan, you let the legion capture the second well of eternity without a fight. War is over, you fricking lost.
Remember the time when the Legion captured the third Well of Eternity? And got beaten by murderhobo's?
There is no third well of eternity.
Now I'm going to give you the benefits of the doubt and assume you're moronic. In giving you that benefit, I'm going to assume you mean the Sunwell. The Sunwell is not a Well of Eternity. It's not even close in terms of arcane potential. And in that case, it still took twenty five of Azeroth's strongest heroes to stop Kil'jaeden from breaking into reality, a big part of why they were able to do so is because they arrived just in time to stop it. A day later and Kil'jaeden is fully in Azeroth, his full power at his disposal. Probably also a bunch of other demons.
You have something exponentially more powerful in terms of the Well of Eternity. That you're just going to let them have in the hopes that you can muster three empires into defending the world and get back to the Well of Eternity (which again, you gave up without a fight) with that full force in time to stop them from ripping the world a new butthole.
>The Sunwell is not a Well of Eternity.
It's pretty close, though, being the source of power for the high elves before the Scourge blew it up to revive Kel'thuzad. When the Sunwell reignited in the finale of TBC, it also became a major font of holy power as well; they said within a generation, the fel green eyes of the blood elves would give way to the Light's gold.
The Sunwell and Illidan's well were created by exactly the same means, using a flask of water from the actual Well of Eternity. They are the same.
You know what happens if you don't ensure the Dark Portal opens? The Orcs never make it to Azeroth. This means the alliance never forms, and the human kingdoms continue to bicker and squabble over the eastern kingdoms. When the legion invasion happens, they're on the other side of the world, bickering and squabbling while the world dies.
You know what happens if Thrall doesn't escape Burnholde Keep. We never see the Horde in its present form actually be created. It remains a shattered group of tribes with no real leadership. It remains on the Eastern Kingdoms. When Hyjal happens, they're still over in the Eastern Kingdoms. Hell, it is probably far easier for Manaroth to reclaim the whole lot of them without any kind of organized and centralized leadership.
And without Arthas purging Stratholme, we miss out on two things. First, we don't see Jaina break ties with Arthas, where in she is approached by Midvh to go to Kalimdor and make sure the Alliance is even fricking present on the continent when the moment arrives. Likewise, we don't see Arthas turn into a death knight. And you might think "well that doesn't seem so bad" but Arthas being a rebellious shit of a death knight who doesn't want to serve the legion does a lot to undermine their campaign. They lose access to shit like the Skull of Gul'dan because Arthas' being a rebellious little shit leads to Illidan consuming it.
>The bad writing is fine, because the same people who wrote the bad story insist there's absolutely no way it could have happened any other way
Thermian logic in support of fellating corporate grind idiots.
>The central inciting incident of the entire setting must come to pass
Of course the writers will go out of their way to justify it if there's some suggestion of a way that forces can prevent it from happening.
The artist signature (beneath the draenei's tail) clearly says that art was done in 2006.
Oh yeah, without the Dark Portal, the Lich King doesn't happen because Orcs don't appear there in the first place
Without the Dark Portal, there's even more difficulty to accessing and depositing LK on Azeroth and no Scourge happens.
Bronze dragons can basically predict any threat to Azeroth and counter it when it happens.
Apparently you can even kick Sargeras himself with just puny mortals and call it a day anyway.
>Oh yeah, without the Dark Portal, the Lich King doesn't happen because Orcs don't appear there in the first place
>Burning Legion invades Draenor
>picks NMer'Zhul or Gul'Dan and cooks Lich King and throws into Azeroth
>You know what happens if Thrall doesn't escape Burnholde Keep. We never see the Horde in its present form actually be created. It remains a shattered group of tribes with no real leadership. It remains on the Eastern Kingdoms. When Hyjal happens, they're still over in the Eastern Kingdoms. Hell, it is probably far easier for Manaroth to reclaim the whole lot of them without any kind of organized and centralized leadership.
Also, the Darkspear trolls and taurens don't get picked up out of their troubles.
Or maybe one of the villagers Arthas would have murdered turns out to be the greatest diplomat the world has ever seen, who unites the continent. Or maybe thanks to lands not being ravaged by war, the alliance can muster the resources to spread to other places at a much faster pace. Or maybe some other conflict between humans erupts that leads to the invention of lasers.
You don't know. That's the fallacy. It's easy to remember events that happened and rationalize them. It's hard to think and imagine what could have happened.
>amazing! history books say the good guys have won every single time! we were so lucky.
I'm not saying "this is what I think happens." I'm saying that this is what the game tells you will happen if you don't make sure the timeline stays intact.
Yeah, you can imagine some incredibly stupid fanfiction where somehow everything turns out fine by making it that key events in the setting never happen. You can absolutely write that contrivance filled nonsense.
But, you know, it's fanfiction. The kind of thing that we should take with as much seriousness as some story where Thrall fricks Varian while Jaina watches.
Anon, the canon version is one giant contrivance. It's no different from any alternate timeline. It only seems "valid" because of all possible contrivances, that's what happened, which is exactly my point.
Like
says, the writers have every incentive, at a meta level, to ensure that the central inciting incident of the entire setting - "the Horde invades Azeroth, and the Alliance goes to war with them" - happens. If they could conceive of an opportunity where the central inciting incident doesn't happen and prevent it with no real loss, then there's not much point of it being the central inciting incident of the setting, is it?
In meme terms, the Horde invasion of Azeroth is Warcraft's "canon event".
What's the central incident of the Earth?
Hitler's birth, given he's still the protagonist of the setting 80 years after his death.
No, I get that this is the true reason. It's just that if you need out-of-universe knowledge to justify in-universe actions, then that's not really a good story, is it? You should either make the choice be reasonable in-universe, or make it impossible to choose otherwise. That's your job as a storyteller.
If you need meta-reasons like "there would be no Warcraft otherwise", then you've failed to tell an engaging story.
>The mercy of Alliance leadership is its greatest weakness.
That's the price of plot armor.
ALso, I wouldn't agree, since greatest weakness of Alliance are playerbase who doesn't want to play game but cries out whenever writters doesn't show them as protagonists
Horde and Alliance were both established as good guys at the end of WCIII, the players of Horde didn't want the bad guy experience, they wanted the edgy noble savage experience from the game they knew, WCIII. Time passes and WCII grogs get to write the plot instead of whoever was initially in charge. They want the story to be good vs. evil, so they recast the Horde as evil. The players were puzzled and upset. These writers are fired now. Those who came after wrapped up as best they could, and they couldn't do it very well. Who cares what comes next, the goodwill will never be recovered.
It's also worth noting that by the time the Horde was recast as evil, 45% of the horde players were blood elves. And now they're being forcibly thrust into the role of evil WCII orcs, with the plot being extremely orc-centric. Do you think they liked it?
To be fair when Blood Elves first came out up till Sunwell they were more evil than the rest of the Horde bar the undead, and people still rolled them.
Either they liked that evil side, or getting to look at a cute elf was more important than morals one way or the other
It was absolutely the latter. Playing as high elves has been a long-standing demand of the players, so when the blood elves arrived, it was a dream come true for many players while also simultaneously a nightmare for the Alliance because THEY didn't get the high elves for humans to smash. It would've been safe to assume that if the Alliance got high elves, it would've been a wrap for Horde populations.
The Horde was twice smaller than the Alliance in vanilla, and the Alliance was dominated by night elves. Blizzard knew exactly what they were doing with blood elves.
Alliance would eventually get High Elves with a side of Void in BFA.
Yes, the Alliance finally got playable high elves in Battle for Azeroth, but the monkey paw curled that day. It took a while before they finally got vanilla skintones and the like.
I had heard they were going to implement that. Is it finally in-game?
And weren't they also going to allow Draenei to be Warlocks, despite all the lore reason not to allow that, complete with Eredar coloring?
Both are in as I type.
>Do you think they liked it?
I did. TBC, Cata and MoP belves were much better than WoD or Legion
Orc 'honor' makes no sense. They do not have a consistent code of conduit, and Saurfang just babbles 'muh honor' to be the reasonable everyman in service of a shitty plot.
Orcs attempted to be honorable.
It was the attempt that mattered most and orcs who acted dishonorably were frequently mocked for being weak. They reminded me of Klingons.
The Alliance has been sending expeditions constantly to Durotar since Vanilla, with Theramore as the obvious staging base. The moment you exit the Valley of Honor from cata onwards you have humans holing up right south and then to the east of Razor Hill. And the south ones are loading up on supplies.
>Didn't he bomb teramore for no reason in cata.
>for no reason
Quite opposite
>Thrall asks Garrosh to be Warchief
>Garrosh says he is too inexprienced and hotheaded for it, Saurfang should lead
>Thrall: "It's okay by buddies will help you"
>Cairne and Zul'Jin: "we gonna kill you Garry"
>Deathwing shows up and destroys Orgrimmar
>Asks Night Elves to reestablish lumber trade
>They refuse because of WrathGate
>Decide to get some wood in Azshara since none but naga lives there
>Night Elves declares war
>Dwarves (who were killing Taurens in Barrens and Mulgore for sport since Vanilla) declares war
>Stormwind declares war
>Theramore declares war
>Hm,,,, things were different when Horde was orcish ethnostate
Varian wasn't talked down at Undercity after Wrathgate, Jaina forcibly teleported him out. (Though even if Jaina had just left on her own Varian would have likely been outpowered at the time)
>He’ll crush anyone who gets in his way but he has honor.
>but he has honor.
>Garrosh
>honor
He does before that, he wasn't happy with that bombing stonetalon and him executing the guy who did it is his best moment. Then the writers reveal that the guy who wrote that scene got the wrong message and garrosh was supposed to ecstatic with it. Garroshs best moment was literally a writing mistake.
By asking
1) End Times it. And I mean end times. Not aborted apocalypse, not even apocalypse where the world survives so much as the near elimination of everything before it is re-forged by your new God(s). This will piss people off but you know it is too bloated and fricked to truly remedy. The solutions are either retro timeline shift from WOTLK or earlier or age of Sylvannas it.
2) Have two timelines, and do not mix or let them interact. They are 100% separate worlds by whatever contrivance you want. One is lower relative fantasy, a divergence from either WC3 or BC or WOTLK at the latest. The other is high fantasy like they've been leaning into.
In effect you codify the classic vs retail divide in actual lore. You solve the angst of trying to have your cake and eat it too of the hellscream horde but also dindu nuthin horde. Horde-Alliance does not function in their current stories of apocalyptic threats and any return to it will feel ridiculous.
3) No longer have every expansion randomly bring in a hitherto unknown major land mass or region or race or god or reality that nobody knew about beforehand. Establish the lay of the land, create room for future content with hazy here be dragons, then cap it and don't asspull out major things from nowhere.
Recon all of wow, anyone who says anything different is a complete and total moron. You like some things from WOW? Can't live without dranii ass? Think some character had a cool arc? Fine, we can have them in wc4 too. Pick and choose concepts you liked and carry them over. But wow never fricking happened. Way too much simply doesn't work because because mmo constraints.
I mean forsaken joining horde? Really?
That is one uuuugly dude.
Humans can only be make.
Every other race can only be female.
The sex of a child determines if it is human or the mothers race.
Remove all femoids.
>WoD
Personally, I started comparing WoW's plot to something out of Marvel comics back during vanilla. In fact, I thought Warcraft 3 kinda ruined the beautiful simplicity of Warcraft 2.
One change I'd make is the orcs irrigating all of northern durotar with the southfury river. The area is perfect for it.
>It's kinda become a mess since WoD.
Black person, it's been a moronic since Vanilla.
Night Elves are isolationist as frick and should have never joined the alliance. Shoot them one arrow instead of two at best.
Lordareon would never joined the horde: every single fricking citizen there lost some family members to it. Cutting tie with the Alliance and even fighting it to defend against anti-undead forces yes, joining the other side no.
Same with the Blood Elves.
Tauren being druids and ex-NE pals out of nowhere was also moronic.
Frick, you could even say it started getting moronic in WCIII, when they retconned orks from a warrior race into some noble savage carebears who dindu nothing and only got tricked by like two shamans, which is fricking lame.
Blood Elves joining the Horde is especially moronic since the fricking Undead who caused them to become blood elves in the first place is right fricking there.
I don't understand this post. Yes, the Scourge is right there, in the plaguelands. They didn't join the Scourge, they joined the Horde.
In fact, Sylvanas and the Forsaken sponsored the blood elves joining the Horde.
Yeah, good point, Sylvanas was still seen as the national hero back when they joined the Horde. In fact, Sylvanas is technically his boss.
*Lor'themar's
Uh, the undead in the Horde are "deserters", sapient undead who immediately went rogue as soon as Arthas stopped controlling them.
What I take as an issue is the scummyness of Sylvanas. While she was always annoying and no fun, she had some excuse in the form of complete madhouse with Dreadlords, Garithos and was seething about Arthas.
And then she joined the band of green morons for some reason to fight against her own elves in the Alliance.
Encouraged chemical weapons.
And overall basically went insane even before tree-burning.
Oh, except, she didn't and she got better. It's shocking how they've managed to pull off another Kerrigan. WoW plot is just horrible. Wow.
Her own elves were not in the Alliance. In fact, the last thing the Alliance tried to do with her own elves was to round them up and finish off the survivors.
Garithos isn't the alliance.
Besides, it's very convenient for him to also be a complete imbecile that gets killed as soon as his job(scaring off belfs) is concluded.
I think he was the commander in chief of the Alliance at that point. He was de-facto the dictator of Lordaeron, Stormwind was under construction, and nobody takes the dwarfs seriously.
He comes out of nowhere in the Belf story, hates elves for reasons that are never established, is never explicitly given the rank you just bestowed on him (he's just Kael'thas's boss in the story, that's all we know), and then gets quickly killed.
Best bellwether possible of the incredibly lazy writing that would come to be the hallmark of Blizzard.
I think it's fair to say that the guy who treats the king of blood elves like dirt must be the boss of the Alliance.
>And then she joined the band of green morons for some reason to fight against her own elves in the Alliance.
Except she didn't. Silvermoon had already broken ties with the alliance by this point, because Garithos tried to use the elves as cannon fodder, commit regicide, and then attempted to genocide the Elves. This sorta killed all diplomatic relationships that were there.
What she was fighting against was the various human kingdoms trying to launch attacks and crusades into the north, killing all undead on sight including those who had gotten their freedom back.
Isolated, Sylvannas reached out to people who ALSO had a problem with humans encroaching on their borders and trying to do genocide - the Horde.
And guess what, when contact was reestablished with the Elves of Silvermoon, who did they side with? OH HEY IT'S THE FRICKING UNDEAD RANGER GENERAL.
>Encouraged chemical weapons.
Yeah man, seems like a good plan. You can engineer a weapon that, when deployed correctly, only hurts your enemies and does not hurt you? Sounds like a great fricking idea.
>And overall basically went insane even before tree-burning.
Nothing after WotLK counts, tbh.Warcraft went to shit after ICC, and had already been heading downhill while getting to ICC.
Everything made after the Warcraft RPG was published is made non-canon.
based RPG
The WoW one that followed it isn't bad as well
The WoW one adding lore for even world-drop blues and purples was cool.
And then Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects happen which says deviation from the "true timeline," even if it DOESN'T result in a possible loss to the Legion LITERALLY causes the world to "Run out of time" and fall apart in some unspecified way.
So they no longer even need to go through the effort of explaining the cause-and-effect that makes a specific change a bad idea.
The Sunwell's at BEST a third as powerful. 1 vial vs 3, and wasn't founded for a thousand years after so a loss of potency of the vials over time may have also contrivuted.
Just to clarify.
Without Horde invasion no paladins, no Ashbringer to deal with LK (which still would happen because orcs would still trying to open portals into another worlds and eventually destroyed Draenor)
So what you're saying is, "without Horde invasion there's still Horde invasion"
Yeah but invasion into another world, all while Azeroth sinking in it's weakness
Its Horde all the way down
>random troll have more powerful precognitive powers than the oldest living eredar
>In the end all troll lore and worldbuilding wasted on shitty Wakanda-reference
How can mesoamerican trolls be a wakanda reference?
>Warcraft lore
What is life like for a Orc peon?
>Peons are the laborers, workers and lumberjacks of Horde and the orcish clans. They are typically unfit for battle, cowardly and lazy but their work is simply indispensable for the other orcs to focus on battle. This is why the importance of the peon is recognized in the holiday Peon Day. Physically most peons are permanently bent from years of labor and trudge expressionlessly in their duty, a large sack slouched over malformed shoulders that are broader than any soldier's.
Peons are typically dumb as bricks and cowardly, so they get stuck with the menial labor. How peons are treated depends on the overseer, but there's at least one story where the Dark Horde Warchief fiercely punishes an abusive overseer. The assumption is that only a true shithead would be mean to the peons.
>abusive overseer
That abusive?
This is exactly how proletarians should be treated, imo. Otherwise they become lazy and sexually degenerate.
Slopper no slopping
There's a story where warchief Doomhammer, after seeing an overseer beat up peons for not working fast enough by his standards has him perform the same work for a day and beat up if he can't get the job done as fast as he demanded the peons. Predictably he wasn't used to doing that kind of manual labor and ended up performing worse than the peons.
Peons are the bottom-rung of orc society, but it seems beating them up for the hell of it or demanding impossible out of them is still frowned upon.
It's more like Doomhammer is muh honour: the orc.
It's not JUST Muh Honor it's a basic understanding of Muh Logistics. As far as he knew, this was a win-or-die situation.
It's mostly work, work. Always being ready for work, and doing anything that need doing. Most of the time they're best left alone, since they have no time for play, and aren't that kind of orc anyway.
Zag-zag. Ugi-bugi.
It's irredeemable shit and whatever good parts that it has should be broken out and reused somewhere else
Holy shit, WoW fricking ruined Wardens.
That's one of Maiev's HOTS skins. You may as well whine about Jaina being a Dreadlord.
>That's one of Maiev's HOTS skins
That's slightly better, the facemask is still a fricking travesty though
>You may as well whine about Jaina being a Dreadlord.
Why would I? That one actually looks pretty good
HotS did have a few stinker skin, but they also had some fantastic ones. Like Dreadlord Jaina. Or Jaina's cheongsam skin.
Or Tyrande's cupid outfit.
I really miss the HotS community. The game isn't as dead or as toxic as some say, but it's still just shambling along at best.
Too fat.
>pants
consider: no
Ignore all lore.
Use alternate Warcraft reality.
Do something like the transition between HoMM3 to HoMM4. Blow everything up but have some of the interesting races escape to a completely new planet/plane of existance/whatever and start from the beginning. Simple, crude and effective.
Swap forsaken and nelves starting factions in vanilla or make the game have three factions like PlanetSide or DAOC. 90% of the writing problems post wc3 derive from the inclusion of nelves (who used to be their own faction) as lackeys of stormwind, and forsaken (when scourge used to be their own faction) as lackeys of orgrimmar
I had an idea for a bit of an alternate spinoff of the post-TFT pre-vanilla for an RPG campaign.
Having to unite basically everything south of the Alterac/Hinterlands barrier mountains, who mostly hate each other/ Alteraci, Stromgardians, Wildhammers, remnants of Lordaeron and Dalaran, possibly even the Ogres, Forest trolls and Frost trolls.
With options to reach out diplomatically to Gilneas and to see what the hell's going on with the Forsaken and the budding Scarlet Crusade.
Obviously you have to change up who the Dreadlord is and who the non-dreadlord traitors are if you want to surprise players.
Oh and the Horde's sending a few scouts back from Kalimdor to protect Durotan's grave in Alterac Valley and possibly resettling Hammerfall.
Other possible factions: Dwarven expeditions from the Bronzebeards or Dark Irons(Or the Thorium brotherhood Darkirons) Kobolds+Giants, the Elements and twilight types,
Made a new thread to continue b***hing about warcraft lore.