What was the exact year when wow lore went from great to shit?
>>7276424682004
When you were born
draenei joining the alliance.
>>727642468WoW lore was masterpiece, and it ended with Fall of the Lich King, Arthas. /thread
>>727642468as soon as they tried to fit everything into an mmo, so in the 2000s>undead join the hordelmao
>>727643050>WoW lore was masterpieceNewfags are so easy to spot holy shit kill yourself zoomoid
>>727643145>The light didn't abandon the undead priests
>>727643275zoomers don't play wow
>>727642468It was on a slow downturn from Vanilla onwards. WC3 and the archives is pretty much when it was the most cohesive and had the best narrative.
>>727642468The moment they started making shit up after WoTLK.
>>727643145Forsaken share a surprisingly lot in common with Orcs but Blizzard never had the gumption to explore that and just made it some cheap pity party from the Tauren that enabled it.
this was the exact moment WoW died
>>727645729wow has been dead for ages at that point
>>727645926nah, Sylvanas burning Darnassus was cool
>>7276424682006
>>727642468considering they ruined warcraft lore by killing every character in raid i assume 2004but i guess it would be somewhere around wod when they fucked it up with time travel garbage, after that it would be probably shadowlands
>>727646137Shadowlands was amazing on how they shat on night elvesand then at the end "redemption for Sylvanas but fuck white male Arthas"
I personally stopped taking WoW writing seriously ever since the Wrathgate happened and the Alliance didn't fucking exterminate the Horde, or at the very least the Forsaken in retaliation. Ever since then it felt like every faction conflict was just the horde continuing to be absolute chimps while the alliance inexplicably refuses to do anything about them.
>>727642468About the same time they put "World of" in front of the their flagship franchise's title.
>>727646019it would have been if the cutscene was actually animated
>>727642468hasn't come yetretail won, classic fags lost
>>727642468WoW lore was never great, but it was fun. A better question is when did WoW lore go from fun to pozzed.Personally I would say after Legion, but I'll also accept Cata onwards.
>>727646295Well yeah, Sylvanas never had a choice to become a soulless undead monster, Arthas did.
>>727642468Burning Crusade.
>>727642468People will say cata, people will say wotlk, people will say tbc, people will even say since launch, but honestly it ended with SoO. After that its been irredeemable shit coasting on nostalgia
>>727642468Probably Burning Crusade where they made Illidan Vashj and Kael'Thas raid bosses and evil just so players could get their loot, with the justification that they went crazy. It was essentially taking the easy way out rather than establishing them as neutral powers or a third faction on outland because WoW functions on binaries of good guys and bad guys.The only way I could see that expansion working better is if they deleted Shattrath and made Black Temple the neutral city with everyone working for Illidan and then the natural progression for the expansion would be Illidan helping deal with the Lich King after dealing with Kil'Jaeden.
>>727642468The exact moment TBC was conceptualized.>Illidan is evil now>Kael'thas is evil now>Vashj is evil now>Go kill them all.>Black Citadel gets retconned into the Black Temple for literally no reason>The draenei retcon>Warcraft has spaceships now>Blood elves team up with the orcs >Zul'jin character assassinationIt's really not talked about enough how much the Burning Crusade fucked the universe.
>>727649859Oh, also.>Naaru
>>727645729I fucking hate Sylvanas so fucking much.
>>727642468Dec. 2010 was the official death of WoW 1.0 but it was only "great" in vanilla.
>>727649859>Kael'thas is evil nowAnd then in Shadowlands they had an intern who never played the original games write his dialog and questline so he is COMPELTELY out of character and nothing like he is in WC3. That or the character in Shadowlands was originally meant to be an original character but a higher up told them to make it Kael.
>>727649435a lot of the quests that got replaced with cata were filled with bottom of the barrel memes and unfunny referencesevery single 'revamped' zone had at least half a dozen of themon paper cata had potential to be good, but blizzard writers are blizzard writers
>>727650181That's not new, WOTLK was written by somebody who never played any of the Warcraft games, so Arthas is acting completely out of character, and Ner'zhul is written out of the story entirely, despite being the biggest mastermind in the franchise.Ner'zhul's neverending humiliation arc in WoW actually only begins in WOTLK, come to think about it
>>727650248I will never forgive what has been done to Westfall and Redridge
>>7276424682008
>>727642468Wrath of the Lich King and playable Death Knights
>>727642468>greatAny examples? I played Warcraft 3 and it was a pretty weak story. Starcraft 2 pulled off what they were going for much better, its only downside being Kerrigan wank of course.
>>727642468TBC was the first major decline. Alliance Shamans and Horde Paladins never should have happened, took a lot of soul out of the game. But obviously, after WotLK was where it kicked the bucket. The story didn't have anywhere to go after Arthas.
>>727649859>Illidan is evil nowNever got this complaint.Dude signed up with Kil'jaeden and literally held a speech after he deposed Magtheridon that he's the master now.>From this moment on, Outland and all of its denizens will bow to me.>Hear me now, you trembling mortals! I am your lord and master! Illidan reigns supreme!Do you seriously expect someone who says shit like this not being evil?>Kael'thas is evil nowFair.>Vashj is evil nowNaga have been evil pretty consistently.That she somehow has been that loyal to Illidan makes little sense in retrospect.>Black Citadel gets retconned into the Black Temple for literally no reasonOkay, now what?The Black Citadel didn't exist in Warcraft Lore beyond it being featured on a WC3 map.
>>727642468exactly when they reduced mount level from 40 to 30
>>727651995So the tail end of TBC?
>>727642468Cata obviously, and then WoD when they started the entire "alternate timelines" shit because the writers wanted to bank in on the whole Marvel slop. I do remember people crying about Blizzard retconning famous characters in TBC (Illidan, etc) and then obviously the origin of the Draenei. But that was actual nerd stuff that nobody normal cared about back then, but Cata was definitely when even the people who didn't really care about the lore started asking questions
>>727642741You think the Draenei, who were genocided by the orcs in Warcraft 3 lore, should have joined with the Horde?Are you retarded?
>>727645729Bro literally a few hours early the entire horde decided to genocide the night elves and burn the world tree. Only to be forgiven 5 minutes after.How is Sadorc dying what kills WoW and not the horde suddenly going mustache evil and "oopsieeeee our leader is like umm evil again tee hee"
Post ICC, when they clearly ran out of whatever loose plot ideas they had post WC3 and started flying by the seat of their pants. Not to say it was amazing before then but that's when it went from generally pretty decent to bad and never recovered.
>>727656218If you read the background lore it was Anduin who fucked everything up first as the Forsaken/Humans were having a peace conference that would have went actually well had Anduin not decided to smuggle Calia fucking Menethil in to call for open revolt. This caused Sylvanas to consider what would happen if the Alliance attacked the Horde all-out, and come to the conclusion they would lose, so she needed to be proactive.The actual plan was to just kill either Malfurion, Tyrande or both so the Night Elves go back into isolation but then depending on what level of retcon you're on either Saurfang was a total dipshit and let Malfurion go and Sylvanas had to do something else with her sunk costs or Elune personally intervened into making him do it and also wanted Sylvanas to immolate a bunch of elven souls to fill the afterlife up.
>>727649435Cata, recycling the old world was desperation, then uldum was the most pathetic thing I've ever seen, it was hyped up by all the mystery for years and then we got a giant fucking indiana jones references that interrupted gameplay every 5 minutes with shitty in-engine cutscenes.
>>727642468it was never great, but it was fun, and at least coherent. it made sense.there was no singular point where it turnrd to shit, it was a slow burn. but I think the true event horizon was shadowlands. a lot of people disagree with me, that it was sooner, but I think shadowlands was the absolute point of no return, wherein the franchise became completely unsalvageable.
>>727651879>Do you seriously expect someone who says shit like this not being evil?The outland were fucked up by monsters, him killing magtherindon was one of the biggest good-guy moves ever, he was a major officer of the legion, draenei as they are in wow weren't a thing, it was just the broken which were sightly more than wild beasts at that point, he was basically bringing back order to a chaotic wasteland while screwing over the legion and kil jaeden.
>>727642468It was shit since the very beginning when you had a night elf in Darnassus telling you that the conflict with the horde was pointless.
>>727642468warcraft 3
>>727656116Are you hallucinating? He didn't mention them joining the horde.A bunch of races never join either faction, you moronic direction-brain
When warcraft 3 was released.It was decline from that moment.
>>7276424681. When Blizzard kept making the Horde villains by giving them shitty Warchiefs but refusing to balance it out by giving the Alliance evil leaders as well. Making the Horde look like a bunch of incompetent morons since they keep choosing genocidal lunatics to be their leaders.2. Sylvanus became the writer’s pet. Even when the fanbase completely turned against her character and wanted her gone they refused to kill her off.
>>727643050ThisAnyone who says otherwise is a fucking retard
Cataclysm is the absolute latest possible answer. Anybody that says anything after Cata was the breaking point for lore quality is a dumbass that's too willing to accept trash. It's entirely fair to say the breaking point was sometime before Cata, though, because there were a lot of stupid retcons.
>>727642468Warcraft III.Take off the sugar-coated glasses, Warcraft writing was always the coolest shit AND the dumbest trash while suffering from too many cooks syndrome.Look at how, for example, the entire story of Medivh and the associated characters got their stories so lore raped by WC III they invented the Draenei to explain Garona Halforcen and create the most convoluted retarded story for Medivh's background EVER and even after all of that, WC III and WoW writing put "The Guardian of Tirisfal" on such a major back burner it doesn't actually make sense in the lore surrounding the 7 human kingdoms.Like, its obvious in WC II the Guardian was a Gandolf the Grey tier super mage being who then has a Saruman moment, but then in the lore re-write its some shit where the Dalaran mages willingly channel their power into one mage which makes sense because ???Why would High Elves elevate humans to that power level if humans got arcane magic as a part of a military agreement? Why is it the Guardian of Tirisfal if that's a portion of Lordaeron and he spends his time at a place that's a part of Stormwind?So you're telling me Sargeras had to spawn an Avatar containing a fragment of his soul, to trick Medivh's mom to fight it so it could then incidentally possesses her unborn child so that when the EXACT moment is right at some unknown point in the future, an Orc Warlock with link with him and they'd open a portal?They gave ZERO fucking effort in making Warcraft II sync with the nu lore they shat out for WC III, preferring to retcon the fuck out of the context of 2 to work with the new ideas.They've always done this. Come up with a cool idea and cope retconn the old shit to make it work, rather than actually coming up with shit that COMPLEMENTS the previous writing.
>>727650029Real Chads pretend Cata writing never happened and Sylvanas is still hot and not poorly written.
>>7276424681995, Warcraft 2 was fucking retarded dogshit and all bad lore afterwards is the direct result of trying to work around this turd.
>>727643050Yep
>>727642468Don't post those fucking awful Shrek models and the pudding water again
>>727650820>Ner'zhul>GeniusNer'zhul as the Lich King was always nonsense and I will never think otherwise.
>>727642468TBC story writing was awful, but at least it introduced some cool new stuff. WotLK had a combo of awful story, and nothing new that was interesting. It only got worse from there.
>>727664324>Nothing new that was interestingUhhhh Yogg-Saron?As much as I love AQ, it didn't have the polish to give you the full Lovecraft experience the way Yogg did.Yogg practically stole the show from Arthas and from a narrative perspective, I mean, his blood was the reason the scourge was gaining power with potentially indestructible Necropolises and Saronite weapons.
when Burning Crusade got released
The 'lore' you cared about started and ended with wc3. You stiffened in your pants at the idea of wotlk because you knew the lore beforehand. you have no interest in actual lore or development of new.
>>727642468Everyone's got a different opinion but mine is when wotlk ended. Cata just went full retard with the references, even for warcraft, so much so that they had an entire zone dedicated to an indiana jones refrence. Then it just got progressively worse. I'd say that, for me, the game stopped feeling like warcraft at mop and when all the 'old guard' got replaced that was just the final nail in the coffin.
>>727642468the exact moment they put Night Elves in the Alliance and Undead in the Horde
Warcraft is derivative slop copied from warhammer which is derivative slop copied from LotR
>>727658519what drivel, completely contrived bullshit
>>727665201I feel like more shit is lifted from Forgotten realms if anything.I remember when I first realized Dark Iron Dwarves weren't original at all and were just Deep Dwarves but with some Isengard Pit inspiration.
>>727665201everything is derivative, midwit
>destroy the world everyone was used to and loved>add time travel hocus pocus, further destroying the cohesiveness of the game world>layering>make the game about sitting in towns, autistically collecting mounts talking on discord with boring neckbeards and getting gear that will be useless after a month.They really did a great job at removing the World from World of Warcraft, you gotta give them that.
>>727665642>destroy the world everyone was used to and lovedonly stacking endgame content every expansion and leaving everything else behind is a serious problem though. i also think the cataclysm was a mistake btw. i often think about a way to weave expansions into low level content.
Any other answer is just a filtered response.
>>727665771It was shit well before the jailer entered the scene.
>>727665771>>727666001Kind of an apples and oranges thing. The reason sneed'olands lore sucked is it tried to insert itself into the entire fucking setting while also tonally clashing with everything.Metzen, Kosak and others would at least think of something cool that had a sort of consistency with everything else even if they had to retcon a lot to get it to work. It was shit, but it still felt like something that belonged.Sneedolands is like "Here, we have fucking gay as fuck, art clashing fauns in this gay afterlife we came up, btw its ruled by elune's sister!" Anyone familiar with the /co/ meme that shows the X-men being massacred and then a bunch of trannies emerging from cocoons as the inhumans? It's basically that.Joke is WoW already kind of had that. Knaak wrote most of the Dragon lore and its arguably really gay and really off in its own little world, barely acknowledging the surrounding setting outside of key points where Alexstraza and Deathwing (The only original dragons not by Knaak) interacted with the plot.Knaak from the get-go was used to writing generic fantasy slop and didn't get things like "We aren't sure if we want Elune to be a goddess or not" and just give the elves like 5 or six ones.Case and point, I remember in the Malfurion book there was a fucking human who could teleport to the Emerald Dream at whim because a mysterious Fey creature. Why not a night elf druid Knaak?Or when in another book Krasus fights ghouls on an island and tells Ronin they aren't scourge ghouls but something from a far greater evil. He would just make shit like he was dungeon master with little care for what worked tonally with the setting.So until Trannyflight, Dragon Lore was kind of kept as limited as possible, because Blizzard knew it was clashing.
>>727665771>He is stronger than the titans!>Turns out he was a weak robot after all
I just think generally the game has lost itself. The writers should be forced to play the Warcraft trilogy every one in a while There’s not enough war in world of Warcraft. There’s always a new, bigger, evil-er bad guy, that makes the last bad guy just trying to fight off or prepare for them
>>727642468huh
>>727642468when did you start playing?
>>727642468removal of /spit expansion
>>727664504The original team intentionally made C'thun's lines blunt, violent, and spoken with a strange pronunciation. They were trying to portrary an inhuman godYogg-saron just sounds like some random character. He could play any generic dragon. He was the beginning of the Old Gods becoming just some other guys who happen to be made of tentacles like they are now.
>>727642468>What was the exact year when wow lore went from great to shit?When the IP jumped from RTS to MMO because to have 4 factions with intricate lore and story for each is a gargantuan task, so they shoved nightelves into alliance despite being their own empire/civilization and shoved undead into the horde despite undead also being their own huge kingdom with no reasons to join the horde.Besides, think of what the gameplay would have looked like if 4 factions had their separate dungeons, areas and classes. You could maybe pull off hunter, druid and priestess for nelves but not much else if you were to respect the actual lore of the RTS and the classes would have been genderlocked as well, so only men can be druids, imagine the crying on the forums about that alone. You can't have tauren druids, only elves can be that. You can't have human hunters, orc mages or gnome anything because gnomes were a minor faction that barely existed. The IP had to be heavily modified to be made into a MMORPG and with the thrown out bathwater, the baby(soul) of the Warcraft franchise was also jettisoned.Imagine having to create 20 different classes in 2004 to respect the Warcraft 3 story, it couldn't have been done, and the game would have had to be a sandbox instead of a themepark as well, because you couldn't have a coherent storyline which used all factions and classes while creating a common narrative including them all. The game would have to have been some form of Eve online tier sandbox, with zero raiding and heavily focused on open world pvp. It may have looked better or even played better but we will never know.
>>727649859even pre-vanilla the devs made the claim that illidan was going to be the strongest enemy you ever fight in WoW. blizz probably didn't initially plan for the game to go on as long as it did, but illidan was always gonna be evil
>>727645729>not "there must always be a lich king">not Jaina flip flopping 10 times between total horde death and peace in MoP>not one Legion across all timelines>not "Draenor is free"Anon...
>>727642468it was never great. the fact that it got worse doesn't mean it started out good
