AuronFtw said:
Warcraft lore was irrevocably ruined by WC3, with hippie cowpeople, spacegoats, and the entire ruination of the high elven/blood elven lore and their departure from their centuries-old alliance due to 1 racist dipshit in a backwater outpost. And then the themselves-racist night elves magically deign to join the alliance, despite the humans and orcs razing a roughly equal amount of forested area during their arrival on Kalimdor...
Yeah, pretty much anyone who thinks WoW is ruining lore now missed the boat by about a decade. The only "neat" thing to come out of WC3 was the Arthas and Illidan rivalry, the rest of it was utter hogwash. WoW would have been better off retconning that shit, going back to a time pre-WC3, where that silly shit hadn't happened, the great orcs vs humans war was at its peak, and heroes rose up on each side... wait. That's the premise of this expac? Going back to that golden age before WC3 cocked everything up?
Holy shit, sign me up. I don't even care if I have to enter a magical plot-healing time machine.
WC3 ruined the WoW lore? Honestly, they were mid 90's RTS games before that, there wasn't much lore to ruin. Now some of the lore changes in WC 3 weren't explained very well, and others were just there to force the setting away from its previous black and white morality, but that's because there wasn't really much to work with before WC3. I remember playing the first 2, they were fun RTS games, some of the best, but the story was basically just a giant ball of fantasy cliches with a generic as hell good versus evil plot, WC3 may have been a giant excuse to throw multiple factions together, but the lore from 1 and 2 was just a skeleton excuse to make fantasy good and evil races fight each other.
As for this expansion, time travel is cliche as hell, and I can't help but think it's all going to be a giant excuse to hit the restart button on everything that happened since WoW launched, so they can follow this alternate timeline for a sequel to the RTS series with WC4. If they ever do make WC4, they now have the perfect excuse to bring illidan and Arthas back to life, as well as every other boss killed throughout WoW history, won't that be fun.
To be fair, the plot is basically hobbled by WoW's own success. The game makes way WAY too much money for Blizzard to wrap everything up with the death of Kil'jaeden or Sargeras. So after Arthas and Illidan kicked the bucket, Blizzard just seems to be stalling as much as they can, they can't really shake up the story, because there's no way in hell they are going to invest the resources to bring new enemies in when they can just keep milking the old ones. Basically they are stalling for time, always giving themselves an out so they can release at least one more expansion, as long as the game remains as profitable as it is, the story will just keep meandering around with no goal in sight.
Even with Cata, you were at least still working your way through bosses, enemies and concepts introduced in WC 3. With Pandaria and now this, I think they honestly just have no idea where they want to go from here, they can't end it, but they have to keep releasing content, so the story shuffles on like a zombie, doomed to wander the land until WoW is no longer the cash cow, and they can finally put the whole thing down. And from the looks of it, they've given themselves an out if they ever need to hit the reset button on their lore.
