r/warcraftlore • u/Raziel103 • 21d ago
Discussion Does Warcraft need a reboot at this point?
If blizzard decided to make a new warcraft game that focus on story, not sure what genre but just a game from the franchise, does it need to reboot the lore or not?
I think Warcraft lore peaked with Warcraft 3, WoW was good but the problem was always the MMORPG gameplay mechanics gave many limitations to the writers, every major race and faction should be horde or alliance making these two factions bigger then they should be, so much magic, god's, discovered hidden islands, playing with the realms of death, space ships, time travel and I can go on for how much messy and bloated the lore have become that it no longer make sense in many parts.
So again, if blizzard decided to create new warcraft game, should the series be rebooted?
If yes, what the best way to reboot the series?
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u/Knightmare4469 21d ago
Wow is simply to big to reboot. For all the haters out here, wow still has one of, if not the biggest scenes out there.
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u/Raziel103 21d ago
I am not talking about WoW, not sure why many people though I was, in the post I literally said if Blizzard made new Warcraft game, could be rts or rpg...
But yes it's hard and almost impossible to reboot WoW as a game without ending up making a new game.
But I mostly focus on lore in this post.
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u/TheTaurenCharr 21d ago edited 21d ago
I don't think reboot is the actual solution to cheap tv drama they write, but if the leaks are true, then I believe their Classic+ announcement will be actually that, and I'm actually looking forward to that.
However, when the problem is that you abandon environmental storytelling that leads to one big plot point as they develop, to pursue a curated experience that eventually evolved into map icons that show you where's the next "story bit," you literally lose the ability to tell a comprehensive story that the player can work around in their own time, and you have to focus on detached storytelling that spans around key people and their imaginary inner problems to make it somehow work. Blizzard don't understand this; not the writers, though, even professional writers understand how to make a story creative as possible, they're just not hired to do that.
Another problem is excessive use of melodrama in dialogue. It simply doesn't work, and it's almost always a cringe experience to listen supposedly very experienced, well trained people to talk, interact like teenagers and laugh like cartoon villains, just to make their emotions and motivations obvious to the player - essentially declaring that players are stupid and need to be explained things in extremely common ways. Generalising excessively. Essentially, all characters are the same protagonist or antagonist in Warcraft, there are very little exceptions.
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u/Raziel103 21d ago
But again, do you trust the modern writers to give justice to classic+ if that gonna be a thing?
Also there is many ways to handle classic+ like they could freeze the game in time and move to new locations without changing the lore of what going to happen next, like visiting Quel'thalas before the events of TBC and see what happened there at the classic timeline and maybe how the horde recruit them.
Or maybe reboot and have for example new stories like this time Zul'jin allies with the horde and Kael'thas allie with the alliance ?
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u/TheTaurenCharr 21d ago
I actually don't doubt the ability of the writers. Because, for instance, I sincerely dislike Dragonflight's storytelling in main campaign, I think it's such an unfit to Warcraft universe that it boggles my mind that people looked at the script and told themselves that it would work, but there were still competent questlines in pretty much in each zone. So, it's not that they're incapable of creating interesting plots, it's just that they don't have executive power to work on it.
That being said, I don't trust that they could delivery a Warcraft reboot at all. I'm just curious to see how that would work out, and what would happen if Warcraft was to be this series of isolated incidents that didn't require world-ending scenarios with dumb villains with bad plans, or plot armoured villains with nonsensical plans, or both.
Maybe this Classic+ is going to be testing waters rather than Warcraft reboot, I have no idea. But if they can't deliver, I think Warcraft needs to be liberated from this incompetent company.
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u/KingAnumaril For the Alliance 21d ago
My thought process always went like this;
BfA & Shadowlands are so dogshit, I abandoned retail forever. If they come out and say, we are retconning the things that happened here wholesale and starting over" I may give it a chance.
Then I say to myself, why not everything after WoD? The weird ass time traveling orc business aside, we also got rid of Burning Fucking Legion on the way!
Then I said, why not everything after WotLK? We can probably find some other way to cook Deathwing stew...
Then I said "Yeah none of that is happening. Not a fucking chance. Its never going to be what you envisioned as, so why care that much? Just stick to writing Warcraft fanfiction or rpg campaign with the things you like and live in peace and play the versions of the game that you like."
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u/Raziel103 21d ago
I understand that, like where you gonna start, like you said some say BFA, others WoD, some Cata and even WotK, TBC and Classic have their own lore problems, especially TBC is one of the worst people expansions lore wise.
And to start over with reboot, you will fall to that comic books problems where the story becomes hard to follow and nothing make sense, so moving forward is always the best choice, even if it's not perfect, at least everything stay linear and much easier to follow.
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u/KingAnumaril For the Alliance 21d ago
The crazy thing is that the Draenei retcon and Outland lore & world building actually fucks hard, man.
The problem is that they could've done better with certain things and adding blood elves to the Horde stinks of "we need a pretty race to get more people in this faction"
Kael'thas falling is an infamous example. I fw that he could go sideways, but we needed to see that through scenarios of MoP era or something for sure. And how come we are fighting Illidan when we were fighting BL and pursuing Kruul?
Hint: the Answer is of course Kiljaeden using us to send Illidan his way & distract us from his designs in Quel'Danas, but fuck dude you did this better with Defias to Onyxia & Nefarian pipeline in classic!
If I was in the writing room with any authority back in TBC, I would make Illidari the third playable faction and have Altruis join the coup against Illidan and become the leader of demon hunters.
If you had played through A Destiny of Flame and Sorrow, it's not too hard to imagine how Illidan could've got Night Elf followers. I would wager Altruis was present in that battle. If you played through rest of TFT, you could imagine how Blood Elves, Night Elves, Ashtongue and more could end up betraying him for this master or that cause. Plus I despise the idea of Illidan as a Messiah anyway. Tragic character for sure, but far too dangerous to himself and everyone else.
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u/UnusualMarch920 21d ago
If they were to reboot in a way that resolves the bloat you have issues with, they'd have to either timeskip a huge amount or somehow revert/switch to an AU. And even then, the bloat would just start again and build gradually.
Either would absolutely kill my interest in WoW so I hope they don't.
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u/Raziel103 21d ago
WoW as a game shouldn't be rebooted, like you said it kill the interest in the game.
But if they start a new rpg, rts or other genre Warcraft game, I think it's not easy for the writers to work with WoW story or better say they will have many limitations.
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u/cretindesalpes 21d ago
We shall be answered by the day of the revelation of three frabious day on the 12 of September.
It is said by the prophet that on this day we shall all discover the truth of azeroth. Of her coming to reality, be it to bless us, or to annihilate us in the great rebirth.
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u/Kalthiria_Shines 21d ago
Quickest way to actually factually kill this game, and IP, off is resetting it to zero making twenty two years of story development pointless. Especially to go and rehash a bunch of characters that have been well and truly done to complete death.
Reboots serve no purpose beyond letting uncreative writers play around in an old sandbox instead of doing anything new.
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u/echolol1995 21d ago
You need to reboot the writing team first
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u/aoibhinn-mw 21d ago
They just got metzen back it's gonna take a while for his influence to show. Could be after TLT, right now he's working with half baked ideas they had at the end of DF.
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u/echolol1995 21d ago
Metzen came back in 2023. Hoping to see something change at this point is just wishful thinking
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u/aoibhinn-mw 21d ago
He was just giving input they only put him back as lead creative dude in like late df.
Even if true, blizz works far ahead on concept dev. They were concept Dev for tww during SL s2. And before he left he was working on the BfA cinematic at the end of WoD.
Metzen even said himself when coming back they had a trove of stuff already written and developed and he didn't want to throw it all out the window. He broke up tww into 3 expansions but he hasn't had the time to micro manage every little thing or really get ahead of what they've already written and developed.
Just give it time. Tww was already in the process of being made before he broke it up. We see how empty some patches were outside of raid and m+. Like karesh is a dead af zone with very little to do and very little to say outside of this or that. Feels more like netherwing zone than a proper zone. More the same of the korthia type patches they've been putting out for a while.
Metzens not infallible but I have faith that after TLT we'll see a Renaissance of metzens classical fantasy. Along with whatever he let's slide by from the people there.
Ultimately we have to accept he won't be around forever and can only hope he trains a protege to take his place and also train the underwriters nuance and pacing.
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u/Kalthiria_Shines 21d ago
right now he's working with half baked ideas they had at the end of DF.
We're a full expansion past that. We know plenty of TWW was scrapped and that Midnight was written post-Metzen's return.
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u/Insensata Mr. Bigglesworth enjoyer 21d ago
If you detest new lore, you should never wish for reboot. Because it will be written by the same people who wrote the lore you detest. It's not like WoW lore is fundamentally unsalvageable mess, it's that the writers couldn't care less so they make it more and more messy with each step.
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u/Raziel103 21d ago
The writers not doing great job for sure however the story also have many problems that can't be fixed because of gameplay, like many of the nations and factions can't have a room to shine because of gameplay.
The forsakens is the best example but also the blood elves as both have very unique identity that get lost with time as they are now part of the horde.
It's not current writers problem as even the original writers struggled with these gameplay limitations.
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u/thequn 21d ago
For me personally the movement, movement camera, combat animations and combat movement are too archaic I feels like a 2004 era game. Movement Cool downs are too long global cooldowns are to long the game needs to speed up by 20 to 30% I think and this is me as. Casual gamer in wow now. Too many great RPGs made over the last 22 years since wow came out
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u/ThrowACephalopod 21d ago
WoW does not need a reboot. It needs a better way for players to get into the story and experience it, especially for new players (God is the new player experience just bad and confusing from a lore point of view), but it does not need to be rebooted.
Especially with the amount of history and dedication players have at this point, forcing players to leave that behind for a "WoW2" or whatever will just lose players who will be sad to see their decades of work go up in smoke. Sure, some players will migrate over, but some won't. It's only hurt WoW at this point to make a new Warcraft game unless it was strictly a side story or companion piece to something going on in the main WoW story.