By taking a page from how the FFXIV team’s narrative design, and armed with hindsight, I reexamined the Battle for Azeroth expansion to see if, by going in a different direction, could a stronger, more cohesive story be told.
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Uh oh, BfA.
yawn
If you don’t like the WoW gameplay mechanics how many of us do, just go play the game you’re sucking the toes of. Jesus Christ. Every WoW content creator is the same now.
Doomer, out of touch with the vast majority of the player base, echo-chamber fueled hogwash regurgitated from Asmon down the chain, and between chats. It’s pathetic.
The players in game don’t give a single fuck about these complaints you keep bringing up, and enjoy the game. If that isn’t something for you, by all means, go play FF14 and enjoy WeebLand. Goddamn lmfao.
What if blizzard never molested their employees, cared for their player base and didn't have a pos that was in epstein's black book as the ceo?
It'll never happen sadly, soul.
Would have loved an old gods expansion tho
I think you're on to something there. My wife has often wanted to play WoW for the story, but sadly the game doesn't tell it very well so I've directed her more to the books. If WoW took a page from FFXIV like you have outlined here, I could see this really helping bring people into the lore and story. 👍
Both SL and BfA are poor, the numbers reflect that.
(Numbers as in the amount who jumped ship after realising how bad they were)
SL has gone from 15m to 1.6m and still hemorrhaging subs; them players moving on to other games and reluctant to return, even for 9.1.
They have lacked the pride, passion and creativity for some time and doesn't look like it will ever be regained since its been two poor expansions back to back!!
Maybe they need to stop abusing staff and reinforce some creativity in them instead!!
That "minecart" questline you're talking about has a lot of good world building and character moments. Though the gameplay is "chores" in a story context, it's fantastic. Just getting to everywhere we need to be right away Is pretty boring, and doesn't take the time it needs to steep, and earn the big emotional moments.
hasnt FF been out for a long time? why is it so popular lately?
It'd certainly be interesting to go this route! I think it would certainly allow us to have more meat with other characters following after the main storyline's conclusion. Warcraft's greatest strength to me has always been its characters and them focusing more on them and our relationship with them would be great!
Just imagine all of the Rexxar interactions!
why not end the leveling Story at the battle of Dazar alor Raid, and have the Story Continue in a Suramar Style Questcampaign as Max Level? This Way the Story can take more breathers and let you sidetrack more into the zonespecific Stories, and there is a solid amount of Story left for Post maxlevel Playing
Story in both games
FF14: I am THE hero of the story and I feel I am very important to the story.
WOW : I am a random "hero" who is not even important in the story.
Stop milking ff14 for views is pathetic, you boosted because you dont like the game is okay so stay with the WoW content.
Lots and lots of copium.
I would love there to be more story and more in-depth story telling of that story. I also am a firm believer in not making the final patch of an expansion about something that could have been a whole expansion itself, like Argus or Ny'alotha. I will qualify all of this to say I have not played FF14 and probably won't just due to not really being interested in that world in my few glimpses into it during single player FF games. My only worry with following the exact style of FF14 is that it could feel very disconnected. In your example of BFA it fits fairly well because there were subplots beyond the "War" that make good patch content and are not so closely related to the main story. However, if it was done for legion where would the initial "main story" end? Nighthold kind of makes sense but that leads into ToS, so maybe the play would be to make Argus into all of the patch content and explore that further possibly. I guess my point is that it would feel odd to go back and revisit things in patches/raids if the whole story was told in the initial expansion release, unless if the patches only ever really covered side plots which feels a little odd or almost disappointing in a way. I am also not much of a fan of having raids like Battle for Dezar'alor become some sort of revisited content raid using some sort of strange Chromie time walking excuse to try and bootleg a raid into the initial expansion release. I think I would much rather have the main story end in a raid and have that raid/any small amount of after quest tie a bow on the main story. I am not sure if this is what FF14 already does and how WoW would do it given a fresh story and you only had us revisiting BoD to have some sort of raid end game content on release. Either way the devs do it I think they should put more effort and time into story and things beyond pure end game as it is obviously something people want (hopefully they keep hiring and are able to do this in addition to having the same quality dungeons and raids).
Small gripe: Saurfang died but he wasn't defeated.
Tbh, i don’t really want wow to learn from xiv in this case, in xiv I usually end up going in intending to story… and then skipping cutscenes after an hour or so because i… just… need… to… do… something! All talking and no combat drives me batty.
I was thinking about the "a realm reborn" right after shadowlands!
The remaining Gods leveling Azeroth during the final fight of this xpac and sending every adult to the shadowlands to "make the world again from scratch".
No written data about the past, all major cities uninhabitable, no adults only small children, the oldest of them barely able to speak.
Give it a couple of decades and have our new heroes begin their adventure in a completely new world!
I feel like WoW at this point is the OG in the field and as such everyone is trying to copy or iterate on what they've done. Some did it worse, others did it better. At this point i feel WoW needs a way to stand out again. Perhaps dialog options in cutscenes? Maybe your character actually talking? Seems like that's not something you see in MMOs. Granted that's not something easily done on either end of that.
I think a good way to have improved on BfA would have been to really ramp up the faction conflict as in the Alliance actually being aggressive too instead of reactive. They wanted to have morally grey situations? Lean into that. To the point where maybe the goody goody parts of both factions start to… question things. You can have a lot of the same story beats (although i feel N'zoth was way too quickly defeated) but come to find out that you had both old god followers pushing things to their goal aaaaaand (dun dun dun) Dread Lords. They have been pulling the strings on both sides egging the other on. We slay them as they talk about shadowlands and sylvanas. We go to the shadowlands the same way but nobody knows anything about them.
one thing i apriciate and hate atthe same time about FF14 is that the MSQ goes into dungeon trials and raids, while it's annoying to get up to the climax of a storybeat and then have to stand there for 20 minutes waiting for a queue, it does introduce a ton of dungeons and repeatable content with every patch!
Hey, Soul gotta say i needed to thank you . i saw your video on anxiety and recognized myself in it and so the tone of all your recent video so even compared to other streamer who are all about the end of the game and how it is a good thing. thank you for feeding me optimism ^^
I think this way the story would be much less convoluted, specially for new players who don't really know much and which BfA was hell.
What if shadowlands was told differently? What if each covenant storyline you used to get renown level 40 was instead the leveling process through the zone and you get 2 or so levels from it? That way you complete all the covenant stories without having to switch or running a different character through.
If WoW would adapt some more stuff regarding to Story and Storytelling from FFXIV and Guild Wars 2, the game would be just so amazing.
WoW team does not want plans, generic solutions or game-wise systems. They want to break everything with each and every other expansion. They think they are (still) the best in the industry and can do no wrong. As a result, each exp has 2 stories (the main one and the zone stories), completely different game-play systems and all kinds of new problems with it. Whereas the players just want improved experience each expansion with a continuation of the story. They don't want glyphs to be gone, they don't want tier sets to be gone, they want better glyphs and better tier sets. Once players love something, fckn improve it! Class hall stories were amazing! Even I started to play other classes just to see the stories. Non-instanced events are amazing too! Pre-patch for BFA was awesome cause it was not an instance. It was organic, it was inside the "world" of warcraft not an instance where you queue on a menu and play with rando's.
I agree. I can't talk for BFA but for Shadowlands I would have loved a narrative journey that let us end up helping all of the covenants to see all of their stories.
Like covenant powers and all the stuff aside we will never know how the other covenants stories panned out.
Another concern I have is they need to dial back the scale of the threat in each expansion. We're fighting the Satan version of Thanos right now, prior to that we fought eyeball tentacle hentai boy, before that it was alien demons.
I'm not saying I want to go and be a farmer boy in Westfall and raise chickens but how much higher can we keep raising the stakes? How much more powerful can out characters become?
The war campaign should've just been the initial patch and maybe 8.1 as well
My biggest gripe about the BFA story wasn’t the pacing or the story structure it is because BFA is just MoP 2.0. The catalyst behind the war is a major Alliance city getting destroyed>Warchief makes decisions that don’t sit well with the rest of the Horde>Warchief attempts to have these dissenters killed>Dissenters ally with the Alliance>Open rebellion attack on Orgrimmar. Then of course you have the Old God influence.
I don’t believe the FF story structure would have helped my experience at all, because you still have Azerite, lackluster Island expeditions and Warfronts, retcons, and Blizz’s obsession with Sylvanas.
just mentioning BFA is cringe… call it a story revamp or what have you, just dont mention BFA… ugh!
The HOW was not the issue on BfA… it was the story itself. Following Legion and MoP… (skipping WoD for a second) … NONE of the faction stuff makes sense any more from a story standpoint. And making Sylvanas Warchief made 0 sense from anyone paying any attention at all, let alone following her to do any of the other crap that was happening. Had WoD followed Legion as it should have done, then a BfA in alternate history Azeroth actually could work. A reset to a world where the remnants of the Iron Horde are what came through the portal, Northrend went poorly, and the factions were broken. Nelf and Tauren would have allied (overlapping values but different territories make natural allies), the Belves never left the Alliance, the undead are their own faction (based in Ice Crown), and the Darkspear joined the new Troll empire. The goblins are… goblins, they work with anyone who has the gold. Oh.. and GNOMERGON IS FRIGGEN CLEARED. A decade on from Operation: Gnomergon. Come on, guys.
Didn't you buy story skip for FFXIV?
Dude! The mount cart section was really about exploring the inner turmoil of certain characters! The whole trolley aspect was the "vehicle" they used to "move you" along the narrative of learning what these characters are thinking and feeling!
I must be weird. I hate FF14
I skip the story. I liked vanilla-era stories and the older Warcraft novels but not any of the in-game stuff the last 10 years aside from Sylvanas burning Teldrassil which was cool af. For me, it's about how enjoyable the zones I'm in are and how good the game-systems are aside from dungeons, raids, and PVP (which have stayed the same since forever). SL is a bit of a miss but gameplay will be improved with patches (expansions are always at their best in their last patch) and then hopefully next xpac we're on to something better. Maybe somewhere more like Azeroth and no spaceships or different dimensions or times. I'd love to go into a cave and kill a Dragon again or pew pew snakes in a desert. Not into this whole demons and darkness thing where every zone is just rocks and dark skies. Give me some sun and somewhere warm. Build me a good Elven city not using the color blue or being themed after the night. Anyway, hopefully Blizzard is learning and remembering its lessons. Hopefully these lessons are being passed down to new staff since the game has been out for longer than most people's careers. Worried its just new staff and Activision not understanding Warcraft but hopefully I'm wrong and next expansion is the most Warcraft expansion yet! Yo and they should fix Death Knights so they're actually like WC2 and not just sickly warriors coughing on people.
When I leveled to 80 during Wrath I really didn't know anything about how Vanilla and BC ended because you don't really experience that stuff if you weren't there.
In FFXIV I knew everything that happened because I had experienced all of it – except the raids, but most of them are complementary.
Having the main expansions tell a complete story and having 3 epilogue patches and 2 prologue patches was such a clever idea. Also 5 patches instead of 2 or 3 means there is never the kind of content draught (a year after Wrath, 14 months after MoP and WoD) that Blizzard keeps running in to.
First they need to do a leveling experience only from the main story quests up till the current expansion, so the new or old returning players can experience the full wow story.
REMOVE FROM THE BATTLE.NET LAUNCHER: CALL OF DUTY, OVERWATCH, HEROES OF THE STORM, HEARTHSTONE! THEY ARE NOT BLIZZARD GAMES! THEY ARE ACTIVISION! DELETE ALL THE TRANSACTIONS! REMOVE SHACKLES OF MALEDICTION TRINKET FROM PVP! #fireionhazzikostas #fireholinka #firewyattcheng ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly10r6m_-n8 ) #firebobbykotick
The story is weak of late, but that is chasing symptoms not the disease.
The problem lies at the very top.
Just remove Ion.
He more than anyone is responsible for the systems-driven RNG rat maze WOW has become.
In what other industry could anyone fail as completely as he has, and remain unfired?
At least reassign him to raid encounter design.
I'm an outlier. The reason I stopped no lifeing WOW was when he removed custom sounds. I spent much time making them, have addons on curse for it, and he ripped it all out because he didn't want data mining to create spoilers.
Well slap gw2 gearing on the same boat as well.
Older expansions would be 100% relevant.
But we can't have everything.
I haven't played WoW since Cata, and Shadowlands genuinely had my interest. I liked that they were trying to focus on a central story, but the expansion had so many complaints leveled at it, that I didn't try it myself.
On the topic of the story telling beats in FFXIV, the slower ones in particular, they are meant to be the valleys where character growth and interaction can take place as the story builds up to the next high point. If a story was just high octane all the time, you end up with something like Fast and the Furious 9, where you are actually bored even though there is lots of action. Good story telling will pace these moments out.