NON-TTRPG: Bolvar Fordragon and the Punchin' Bunch

 "Father...is it over?"

"At long last. No king rules forever, my son."

I quit World of Warcraft the other day. I'm not happy about it, and I'm not happy with the way the developers have been handling the game. Today's post isn't really about that, though. I quit over the mechanics of the game, but honestly I'd be lying if I said the story had nothing to do with it. I've largely enjoyed World of Warcraft's story. Honestly. It's not always great, but it's often good, or at least enjoyable. Things took a turn only recently with Battle for Azeroth and its unfocused, hole-ridden mess. A friend of mine often said(at the time) that Battle for Azeroth isn't any stupider than any other expansion, and I only sort of agree with that. The way they were expressing the story that was different, and I thought that was the problem. Shadowlands improved in terms of story but left the rough outline of the style intact: Covenant campaigns are basically the same thing as BfA's war campaign. I finished two out of four(Venthyr and Necrolords) and I can say they're generally telling better stories. So what was the problem with BfA exactly? Was Wordup right all along like he always is?

I caught up with Guild Wars 2 after unsubscribing from WoW. I'd been meaning to give it another chance and removing WoW's unhappy time sink made room for it. I decided to swap mains away from warrior, and that meant finishing the core game's campaign again on my thief. It's a single player only sort of thing that gives okay-to-decent rewards so it's not a bad idea to just slam through it regardless. 

It's not a bad story, exactly. The plot surrounds a necromantic dragon named Zhaitan using powerful magic to raise not just an undead army, but an entire sunken continent full of the corpses of a doomed society. You never get the impression that Zhaitan is power-mad, aiming to take over the world...or even intelligent, really. Dragons in the Guild Wars universe are these inherently unknowable, powerful beasts. It's a nice change of pace. 

I got to the part where a unified army of separate organizations called The Pact is trying to wage a real war against Zhaitan's army of the dead. It's maudlin in places but does an okay job of making you feel as though you're dealing with "generals" step by step and I started to notice something. Every plot point leads to a fight. I mean, this is an MMO right? It has to. It's an obvious thing, but one I never thought of before. I only noticed because GW2 goes progressively through several of these plot points, all on the way to the final one where you kill Zhaitan using airship guns. 

What are we going to do about this Eye of Zhaitan, this thing that seems to know everything about us and feed tactical information directly to Zhaitan's army? Ooh, I bet we're going to kill it. 

What are we to do about the Mouth of Zhaitan, his most powerful minion? Well, I think I'm gonna stab him with these little knives until he doesn't move anymore. 

How do we deal with the bulk of Zhaitan's army? You will never guess. 

Even the Living World stuff I've played that bridges the core story to the expansions sets up another big dragon guy to punch. So what's the difference, then? Why was this okay? Why's Garrosh's story one of the best in gaming, in my opinion, but BfA cratered, creatively? You can handle the raid boss story problem a few different ways, structurally.

Classic WoW has quite a good feel to its story. Sometimes you're directly led into why a conflict is happening, like Onyxia. Most of the time, though, you're led to just infer why you are where you are. The Ahn'qiraj war effort and the various Dark Iron Dwarf zones serve as your connection to your actions, and otherwise the world just lives on. An overarching story isn't expressly attempted, only feel and tone are presented via subplots. Not only do I feel like this is a fine way to go about your story, I actually kind of prefer it. Classic is probably the most immersed I'd ever felt in WoW. 

You could work directly with the idea and meet it head-on. WoW's done it many, many times. People thought it was dumb when Warlords of Draenor introduces its NPCs with title cards like they're wrestlers, but face it: A wrestling vibe kind of works for World of Warcraft. Being straightforward, bold and blunt is even refreshing these days. Garrosh is a bad guy. Here's how he got where he is, and here's where he's going. It makes you want to stop him. By the time he destroys the Vale of Eternal Blossoms you're incredibly invested in the story, and satisfied at the end even though he's not dead. Only defeated. 

I'm not a fan of FFXIV but you can also pull its trick and intersperse the punchin' with cinematics and other, non-violent story beats. FFXIV also even makes it a major plot point that punching the Primals wasn't your brightest idea. The two-edged sword here, obviously, is that you're now using a story method much closer to a JRPG than anything else. Does it work? Well, obviously. FFXIV's popular as hell and people rave about it. 

BfA gives up on the war mid-way through the expansion and eventually pays it off in a cinematic, not a fight. It moves on to essentially tell...extremely shortened expansion stories in its second and third raid tier. I'm honestly a little mad that it blew two excellent long-form ideas in patches. Queen Azshara and N'zoth deserved more time than they got. Full expansions, in the least. The concept of Nyalotha is a rich, compelling idea that was begging to be a whole expansion. 

Let's talk solely about the war campaign plot, which was poised to be the main plot of Battle for Azeroth. Let me get this out of the way first: Yes, I'm saying that the main problem is that BfA doesn't primarily lead into an obvious villain that we have to punch. More than that, it can't. Sylvanas was needed as a plot point in Shadowlands and neither army can be permitted to win the conflict since there's players on both sides. Therefore, it creates a confused, messy direction where a bunch of stuff just happens and the main plot is resolved in a conflict-free cinematic. Then, we're swiftly shuffled off toward mini-plots for our next two raid tiers, the sort of thing that feels almost like a panicked distraction from a story team that ran out of places to take the war effort plot.

But where could BfA have possibly gone, anyway? Neither side can lose or even be shown as obviously wrong: like I said, the players can't be left feeling like losers. The status quo must be maintained, and apparently we can't even handle cross faction grouping. The game has also used the Horde as bad guys several times in the past and ducked responsibility for it by calling the villainous Horde an offshoot or splinter group. It never goes over well with the Horde players and would feel like a tired retread, even if you flipped the script and made the Alliance the bad guys. 

So there can't possibly be someone to punch in this expansion that can be telegraphed to both sides as a threat. Not without some gymnastics in the final raid tier that we all know they're not bold enough to do, like providing a completely different raid to both sides. That is, if you want to legitimately fulfill the plot as a conflict and not just swerve at the last second to have our conflict interrupted by a greater threat that we have to band together to face. That happens to be another plot point they've overused. 

You play through BfA's story feeling like you're getting ready for a fight that never really happens. It speaks to how lame the swerve is that I had to replay the Nazjatar intro more than once to even figure out why it was happening. That's because there was no real point to it and the entire tier was presented as a distraction from the conflict story being out of ideas, before it even felt like it started.

That's what the problem really is. It's not a fruitful idea for a story. Shadowlands is doing better despite a similar(ish) writing style and conveyance method, because the afterlife is a rich source of ideas and has a clear villain we can get excited to punch. Even though I don't think the Jailer is a very compelling villain!

So basically, the thing I said when Battle for Azeroth was launched turned out to be right after all. If you need me I'll be hanging out with Cassandra, watching the city of Troy burn.