Just Let The Jailer Win… WotLK Vs Shadowlands Storytelling



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Bellular wants to just let the Jailer win, & be done with it! Ultimate Protest?
Was Wrath peak WoW storytelling? Michael waxes lyrical about WotLK

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36 thoughts on “Just Let The Jailer Win… WotLK Vs Shadowlands Storytelling”

  1. I haven't interest in the lore since WoD and the final cinematic where Draenei cheer to a character that was basically Hitler to them.
    And everything after that has been even worse there are exceptions like the Suramar storyline but mostly its been non memorable garbage with non context crap because i haven't read 10 books and 100 comic stories.

    This expansion was a final nail for me everything is just boring or extremely outdated not even the music or zone design interest me anymore and those were the things that could carry through crap story. And finally the combat in the game really needs an complete overhaul most classes are boring beyond belief to play and feel less fun than playing the original ET the game.

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  2. Those are all reasons why thousands of people are still stuck in wrath private servers. And we'll never quit… Wel, until Blizzard deside to shut us down. But even then we'll find the way.

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  3. Wrath was not the peak of storytelling. They didn't do Arthas justice. He just appeared a few times and then buggered off. The lore has been going downhill since BC. Only character they did justice in WOW is arguably Illidan.

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  4. WoW's story and writing is falling in the same beginner mistake that most early 2000's fighting anime did. Naruto and Bleach are probably the best examples. Believe it or not, Naruto was actually solid for the first two arcs. Good world building, lots of ways for the story to go into. Then suddenly they leaped to cosmic levels of power for no reason. Same with Bleach.

    The issue with this is that the most interesting things for a story are the grounded stories. Reasonable power levels and scale. Having the player/main character be relatively weak in comparison to the heroes and villains of legend, also keeps those things feeling epic. Any time the main character/player surpasses a level of power in the fantasy universe, everything below that level instantly become irrelevant. The power levels are like a pyramid, the lower you are on it, the wider mass of relevant characters you have to use. The easier it is to introduce new characters. The more natural it feels for an MMO character to be in the world. Currently we have been like at the VERY top of the pyramid ever since we beat titans in legion.
    If we were random adventurers like in Vanilla, a random warlock summoning demons of the legion could be an epic threat worthy of a story. Helping someone with a few undead feels like a fitting task. Collecting someone's jewelry from murlocs would be our line of work. However, we can not go back to those tasks right after beating a titan. After killing old gods. After fighting the literal god of death. After being treated like an invaluable asset by the most powerful mortals in the lore. The only stories that feel relevant now, are those that include gods, titans, and the leaders of cosmic powers in person.

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  5. 15 years of plot and still not done. This is like reading a Chinese Web Novel that keeps extending which ruined the story, created plot holes, retcons and forgotten plot and characters.

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  6. WotlK was almost perfectly made in terms of questing and storytelling. You would understand what was going on simply by leveling up, even if you had not played any of the warcraft games prior. Arthas/Lich King was involved in all the zones in some way or form, and many quests let you even directly control him (yay for vehicle quests) or fight him in some way. Heck, you even get to fight Illidan outside of Ice Crown as Arthas, I mean come on. That is so badass.

    My only regret is that they didn't expand more on Azjol-Nerub, either as a huge questing zone or perhaps even an expansion after WotlK. Where we would get to fully explore the forgotten Kingdom of the Nerubians and uncover their history and fight against the Lich King. How it all went down. We'd even get to touch on some old God stuff in the process. Not to mention we'd find out why the Lich King adopted (this is the original reason) much of the style and architecture for his own structures after the war was over.

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  7. This ironically soul less shit story in SL was the last straw for me, I don't care what happens with the Jailer. Blizz has completely lost the plot, literally. Played since BC and have no love or sense of attachment to the game or it's story anymore. Cancelled my sub and deleted the game 4 months ago.

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  8. Jaina goes and restores the Lich King helmet in order to seal them away by some magic power she receives from a 3rd party book.

    The heroes of Azeroth then have to go get an Old God to reset the world. Back to before Sylvanas became leader of the Horde and the last raid is the Heroes killing the Heroes killing Garrosh at the end of MOP.

    Game Over Screen. Thanks for playing

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  9. You can properly build up likeable characters and new lore within one xpac. Halfhill and TaranZhu were like that for me. I was emotionally connected to Dog ffs

    Also Bastion is somehow much more ‘faceless’ than Maldraxxus in general. There you have some characters

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  10. Something that I think is overlooked is that WotLK is the last expansion before they effectively ran out of the older lore to exploit. Cata onwards was very much "WoW" lore rather than warcraft lore and was written along side it. And the main problem here from my PoV is not that the writers were bad or anything, it's that the time period it all takes place in is so squashed it makes it difficult to establish new characters and their backstories before players start playing through the game itself. There's very little in terms of cohesion between expansions when it comes to establishing future characters and settings.
    In the modern era Legion had a recognisable villain and a lot of returning characters, the familiarity of Dalaran etc. which I think made it passable.
    But for BFA, I went into it not really knowing anything about anybody – There's a big sword sticking out of Azeroth in Silithus so we go half way around the world to fight a proxy war? And then N'zoth appears bringing you back.
    And Shadowlands feels broadly the same – we have a new big bad but we know nothing about them or their motives, it feels like I'm reading a mystery novel written by M Night Shyamalan and not a fantasy or even sci-fi.

    Shadowlands could have been a homerun with the sheer number of lore characters who could have had their stories continued. In the end we basically got 1 per covenant with a handful more paid lipservice and nothing more.

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  11. Thing with Wrath, the story was fine(even though LK was a little bitch most of the time.) until the later part when we started climbing ICC. Also who had the great idea of resurrecting Sylvanas there… Look how that came back to bite you in the ass.

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  12. It feels like there was some contract or copyrights issues where they were unable to use any of the original characters and in their complacency and laziness thought they'd get away with this jailor and maw bullshit. Absolute trash. Presumably aimed at 12 year old anime fans, or not, no idea. You already wrote a good back story and you have lore already. Just tell the same story but explore new avenues.

    It's like Harry Potter 2 but harry and Ron and hagrid and dumbeldore and malfoy heroine are all dead and the plot is about a postman called Dave who's trying to get promoted in work. Smh.

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  13. I'll never get over the fact we could have seen a Northrend sized Azjol-Nerub zone, Northrend in general is far more awesome than all of the Shadowlands we got, Galakrond used to live there… Some characters were nice to see again but the Jailor and current Sylvanas are just dumb and boring

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  14. AT THE TIME, I didn't care much for MOP because even though I had been playing just over 2 years, I didn't know or care much about lore. UNTIL MOP dropped, and I started playing more and more older content and came to enjoy MOP by the time WOD dropped. I look back on MOP quite fondly these days.

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  15. I want 10.0 to be a re-ordering of WoW cosmology and our attempts to deal with the ramifications of it. The Jailer would take on the role of Sargeras in a new version of the Burning Legion but called something else.

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  16. The jailer is the most boring villain the series has ever seen. Don't care about him or what he's out to do. The story feels completely disconnected from everything else in the lore. I miss Sargeras. That too was such a painfully boring end to the series ultimate evil we had heard about forever. 🙁

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  17. They could save WoW completely by pulling a "…then I woke up and it was all a dream", and we find ourselves in a world under the heel of N'zoth after realising we've all been asleep the entire time. Shadowlands never existed, it was just a ridiculous tale N'zoth spun to keep us busy.

    That way it's us vs the Black Empire, the "cleansing of Azeroth", big cool raids, blah blah… or just let the game die. That's probably for the best.

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  18. The majority of the commenters obviously hate blizzard and everything blizzard has put out since Wrath… patting each other on the backs and agreeing with each other. There are plenty of people who like the current game and the story line. You guys are like the grumpy old man yelling at the kids to "get off my lawn". I played Wrath and I enjoyed it. I played all the expansions. I enjoyed them all. The game play, the raids and my friends were all enjoyed. First you guys complained because the newcomers got it easy and didn't have to grind like you had to grind. Now you guys all complain that you don't want to grind… that it's bad game play. Especially because you want to log in on expansion day #1 and start flying. Every day of every expansion you complain about not being able to fly and having to grind it, then you get an expansion where there is little to no grinding and what do you do? you complain. It's like watching a bad version of Groundhog day. The game is bad because it's not going where you want it to go, etc. No hate, but you have to understand how frustrating it is listening to you all say the same stuff over and over and over again. Your reasons why the game sucks just never change.

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  19. TBH I like Shadowland's overall story. I'm not saying the storytelling was as good as WotLK, but my biggest hangups with SL are actually around gameplay. I mentioned to a friend that everything seemed drawn out and boring with a lot of chores, but the story and art for SL were great, and he agreed. I think the real problem is that during BFA we were all experimenting with other games, and even though I think we were all ready to go all-in on SL, blizz just didn't give us the experience we wanted, so we went to our other games where we were already building our homes (for me, it was GW2, and the mount system kind of surprised me with how engaging it was).

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