WoW: Shadowlands Raid Finale Cinematic is out and...
- Thread starter Deleted member 2840
- Start date
- Spoiler Activision/Blizzard
I understand being frustrated with the overall narrative issues, but a single end of expansion cinematic was never going to solve that. So to be upset over this cinematic specifically enough to deem it a "shit show" just seems like an overaction.
Well yes, there is better ones in Shadowlands itself, I was more commenting on the difference between the in game cinematics and the actual CGI cinematics that everyone waits for each new expansion.
The expansion end was billed as the closing of the book on the lore since Warcraft 3, what do you mean? The story is a massive shit show.
To be fair, I'm not aware of them actually promoting the expansion that way. Interviews I'm sure that was said by someone.
*edit*
Thinking further on it, I'll agree with the whole Jailer intro fight cinematic played on that more than anything else. That cinematic I thought was really cool. The difference between the intro and end cinematic is honestly crazy. I don't understand how that was greenlit.
It was in the dev/narrative "deep dive" when they announced 9.2 pretty sure.
Found it:
https://gamerant.com/world-of-warcraft-92-patch-final-chapter-warcraft-3-saga/
There was really no good way to salvage this. Best they could would lean into him being bitter at his siblings. As the Arbiter, have him be depressed at having to see all the terrible stuff everyone does when they die to judge them. He wants to replace his position with a robot, but his siblings tell him he has to uphold his duty. When he refuses to judge people, they cast him into the Maw, and then replace him with a robot. That too me would have been at least a little bit interesting: he's not wrong to hate his siblings, and they have a reason to hide their involvement.
Man, I hate the WoW art style. That cut scene reminds me why.
I've always found it so ugly. It's part of the reason I ended up being drawn to XIV instead.
I've always found it so ugly. It's part of the reason I ended up being drawn to XIV instead.
I tend to agree the Warcraft/Blizzard stories have always been bad, but at least parts of it used to be cool. Legion ended with a big god bad guy stabbing the planet with a sword. There's nothing salvageable from this story in a so bad it's good kinda way.
This is just them copying Disney inventing the term "Skywalker Saga" for marketing. I doubt they put that much thought into it (or at least hope not).
Even worse, its them blatantly copying how Endwalker really was the capstone on a ten year story arc and trying to snag some of that hype
This is as silly as people thinking the Anduin cinematic was stealing from another XIV cinematic.
WoW is built to sell, not to tell a proper story. It's meant to be repetitive and never properly end so people keep subbing and never move on to something else.
Its best story was already told and should have concluded with WOTLK.
Everything since then has been force-fed bullshit. It's all built around gaming loops, not interesting narrative.
Its best story was already told and should have concluded with WOTLK.
Everything since then has been force-fed bullshit. It's all built around gaming loops, not interesting narrative.
Except in this case it's actually true. They never mentioned Shadowlands being the ending of any storyline until the BIG hype of Endwalker.
This is Blizzard we're talking about and they are VERY aware of their competitors. Multiple times they've launched expacs/patches ahead of them to have the upper-hand. Endwalker was shown and said to be a big finale for the FF14 storyline and suddenly you see Shadowlands being touted as such by Blizzard? Wow what a coincidence....
I really didn't like the lore of Shadowlands, for me, every prior expansion at least made sense contextually in the world. Having a heaven that is actually broken into several different heavens with its own hierarchy of beings and even a race of people that live there all the time? It just kinda broke the worldbuilding of everything prior to me.
I mean, objectively you're wrong. They've been playing at this for a while now, from before Shadowlands, not just tacked on at the 11th hour because Endwalker was gathering hype. I don't play XIV but I'd imagine the major difference here is Blizzard just failed at trying to play out this trope where Endwalker likely didn't.
Nah, this is revisionist history. Not only is the writing of Blizzard today demonstrably alot worse then back then, there are two things you need to consider: For one, the writing of their games was very good for the time that they came out in, very few games had better presented and more coherent and involved stories back then.
However, more importantly: Yes, the writing of Blizzard was not high-tier art and you mostly got the broad strokes of what was happening, but for the games that Blizzard was making back in the day the writing was extremly effective. The writing had engaging overarching narratives, easily memorable characters that you could get invested in and it did an excellent job at building the world. Yes, on a micro-level the writing is of course not up to the level of what one might expect from movies or books, but it did an extremly good job of selling the idea and world behind the games.
I don't follow WoW's story, I used to only play for PvP, but I saw this the other day, some of it is clearly reaching a little but some of the similarities are also pretty funny lmfao.
$10 says she faces no massive consequences for her actions, and the writers quickly try to rehabilitate her into a "good" character with a series of mawkish cutscenes about how regretful and somber she is.
They already did it with her and Arthas, despite her technically being more evil than he was. Arthas was effectively mind controlled as the Lich King. Nobody made Sylvanas genocide the Night Elves, this made up "split soul" bullshit aside. And yet Arthas gets no redemption - the last wisp of his existence just fades away as Sylvanas monologues about how it makes her feel. What an end for THAT character.
The writers have utterly destroyed Sylvanas.
Arthas got his end in WoTLK. Folks need to let that go, this is not about him. Sylvanas monologuing about the dude who killed her/turned her into a slave and slaughtered her peoples is much more appropriate than Arthas materializing to say what's up one last time. Arthas also razed Strat before he was controlled by anyone. Playing who's more evil between the two is a wasted effort. They are both bad people who did bad things. That Arthas was used in a different way than she was is not relevant to that distinction.
Blizzard cutscenes are 100% Rule of Cool before any other consideration (such as emotional resonance or simply making sense). Always.
The Anduin cutscene is especially funny because they bring back Saurfang's ghost to babble about "honor" one last time.
And your character is always irrelevant to the story. You're just the sentient gun that other characters shoot at things.
I have played many thousands of hours of WoW in my life and never once given even a single shit about the storyline. I lost count of how many questlines and dungeons have enemies that are like 'muhahahaa I am a big evil baddie and you puny mortals could never hope to defeat me!' and then when you beat them, they go 'no! how could this happen!' Like, over and over and over again this trope is repeated and somehow the writers just....never get tired of it.
Or if it's not that, the baddie has been corrupted by something or other.
Or if it's not that, the baddie has been corrupted by something or other.
I agree that Blizzard's writing was very effective for the games they made back in the day, but again, that's more to do with how limited they were in their storytelling methods due to the weaker technology and the lower expectations you had when it came to video game stories. There's also the fact that back then, that was when their franchises were still relatively new. Which brings up another core problem with Blizzard writers: their apparent frustration at attempting to craft long-term narratives. It's been clear for many years that they are incapable at competently doing long-term stories due to their incessant love of retconning and ignoring previous continuity in their games. They'd write whatever they felt like in the moment, and if they were feeling generous they might do a half-assed check for continuity afterwards. Metzen basically admitted as much when he revealed that the draenei retcon happened because he forgot what he previously wrote and never bothered to check if the new story info was consistent with the previous games. Which again, you only start to notice the longer their franchises go on and get bigger in scope.
Because of this, I'd say that Blizzard has always been at their strongest when they are creating new stories unconnected to previous lore and characters, and they are at their worst when trying to continue previous stories. They're similar to Square Enix in that regard. I'd say it's part of the reason why Mists of Pandaria was one of the best WoW expansions, since it was focused on a region and race that had almost no prior development, and why stuff like Warlords of Draenor and this Shadowlands finale are so terrible.
Last edited:
Man, imagine getting outdone by Hearthstone end of year finale cinematic.
Pretty much all of Hearthstone trailers have been outdoing WoWs stuff recently. With as much of a mess Hearthstone Mercenaries was and still is, it at least had a great trailer to go with it.
Pretty much all of Hearthstone trailers have been outdoing WoWs stuff recently. With as much of a mess Hearthstone Mercenaries was and still is, it at least had a great trailer to go with it.
Find me where they've mentioned or hinted at Shadowlands being the "end of a big storyline" before the announcement of 9.2 Eternity's End on November 11th. Endwalker was meant to be released on November 23rd. The announcement of the delay came on November 5th. What a coincidence huh, they were just always planning on doing that! The only thing that connects it to warcraft3 is basically all the bad retcons they created in Shadowlands.
The talk of it being the end of a big storyline in warcraft lore was very much tacked on for marketing vs. Endwalker.
Last edited:
There was an endgame? it seemed just like people would do the hard trials over and over and not much else. Pandemonium and the 2 dungeons were weaker than the last few expansions imo.
Have you played a FFXIV expansion at launch before? Much like with WoW, most of the endgame is released after the expansion initially comes out. 6.1 is just around the corner.
The only thing FFXIV's really missing for endgame is something equal to WoW's M+ dungeons, but I was never really a fan of M+ dungeons. I tanked them in Shadowlands, and don't miss needing to study the weekly routes.
So as someone who kinda observed WoW from a far I wanted to ask those who might play WoW and Destiny 2 here
How does this compare to the recent twists in TWQ campaign? It sounds kinda like this would he more learning about the darkness not being the big bad but an even bigger bad the Witness was trying to protect us from?
How does this compare to the recent twists in TWQ campaign? It sounds kinda like this would he more learning about the darkness not being the big bad but an even bigger bad the Witness was trying to protect us from?
Yeah, so it won't be worth subscribing again until a bunch of patches from now as usual so I can go through the few extra duties that come out.
Mythic seems kinda love it or hate it, but the multiplayer elements were what got me playing originally and climbing ranks in arena seasons was fun even if I was being carried by someone way better.
I remember people used to do a bunch of arenas/bg or world PvP nonsense. Its probably nothing like that now especially with it becoming opt in, but that kind of thing made the world seem more alive. I think the only time in XIV I even saw players interact in one of the areas was a big train of them going to hunt some NPC creatures.
I would argue SL and BFA are the 2 worst. (EDIT: I misread your comment, lol. I agree with your statement. Time to step away from the keyboard and play a different game.)
WOD had a kooky story, but it had a story that just got the middle trimmed out due to internal staffing issues. Yes, the lack of content sucked, but it was painful because the content was still decent to great at the time.
BFA kicked off the shit story of 5d chess Sylvanas and pointlessly blew through Ashara and N'Zoth as an after thought. Along with endless, useless new game play systems.
SL gave us it was the Jailer all along and destroyed WC3 in order to support it's terrible premise. It divided the story and player base into 4 factions that forced one to play 4 different alts to even get what story they were trying to tell.
I wish BFA or SL was as good as WOD.
I liked this cutscene.
This era of WoW also saw a lot of much more participatory lore going on, between the turn in of the ulduar optional boss item:
and other world events like the wrathgate-battle for the undercity chain
They don't have the directed, cinematic look of all CGI Blizzard prerendered cutscenes but they felt really really good given how tightly put together the world felt. The WoTLK end cutscene felt like that. You knew these characters. You cared about the changes represented by the events.
Haven't played since Legion but the preceding two expansions kind of killed this degree of immersion in the lore. Icecrown quest chains were absolutely monumental. This new cutscene feels much more paint by numbers.
I don't need to. The overarching storyline of Shadowlands is not the best, but it's false to present it as if all of its overarching connections to past expansions and going all the way back to Warcraft 3 aren't there. You're welcome to read up on it yourself but I'm not going to explain/map out all the ways Blizzard has been trying to connect the dots over the past expansions, and especially Shadowlands. People are upset because they took it and did less than the minimum with it. Not that its come out of thin air.
The talk of this is also relegated to an interview, not some marketing push to compete with Endwalker where it was actually front and center of their marketing and trailers.
I didn't deny the connections to warcraft3 weren't there. That being said they're all retcons related to the lore surrounding the lich king. If you're gonna trace back, I'd give it at most to Legion where Muehzala is the one that told Voljin to make Sylvanas warchief and Muehzala is an underling of the Jailer. Off the top of my head that's where the Jailer would be first mentioned. And even since then the hints at him have been very minor.
The first thing he says in the announcement of Eternity's End is call it "the final chapter of one book of the Warcraft saga". What do you think these interviews are done for if not for marketing? Especially with that timing.
That's an ending, I guess. Have they ungoobered the original Warcraft 3 with Reforged patches for its original launch state yet? Wondering what slice of Warcraft is still okay.
Won't be mythic dungeons, but I'm really keen on what the "Criterion" dungeons are going to end up looking like. All we really know is that they'll be harder than standard dungeons, scale with players playing (1-4), they're not displacing a new Deep Dungeon series, and we're getting 3 of them in the EW patch cycle (IIRC).
I tried, it's story and world may in fact be better (I'm not sure as I only got to about level 35 or so and the story wasn't great in that time) but the actual gameplay is so clunky and boring in comparison that none of that matters to me.
Having said that, this cinematic and expansion in general had been absolute dog shit. I'm giving them one more chance with whatever is coming next and if it's all the same I'm out.
