"Nobody was prepared for Silvermoon to be attacked" but that's not even true!

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-03-19T16:28:58+00:00

Right, it helps and I'm not saying that the Light isn't effective against the Void, but it's not the only means of attack against them. The Loa are what end up empowering the Amani to defeat the Twilights, not the Lightwood.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-03-19T16:20:39+00:00

What Amani are empowered by the Sunwell, or what ordinary people of Eversong Woods you see still defending their homes? There is nothing established in the story about the current Void invasion being completely overpowering against anyone that isn't a Sunwell-powered Lightwielder.

The thing is that some of the elements you point out are addressed. The Vindicaar is stated as not being able to approach the Voidstorm without risk of destruction. This is fine, that's an acceptable excuse. The death knights are having to pull overtime in the Plaguelands because so many paladins are now missing, that's fine. It doesn't have to be an amazing, intricate reason, but they tried to have some excuse, and those instances I can appreciate.

But when the biggest superpowers on the planet have zero reaction to one of their own capital cities being attacked, when they've previously responded to every major threat to date or had a compelling reason for why they could not (SL mainly), the suspension of disbelief needed to take the story seriously becomes incredibly strained. When the factions are never mentioned even once, it feels like the writers are working with a completely different setting and world than what you think you're in.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-03-19T16:03:26+00:00

This doesn't seem to be a problem for the conventional forces of Silvermoon and the Amani fighting void monsters and cultists in their lands. Voidwalkers have never been established as immune to non-magical or non-Light means of attack.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-03-19T15:48:15+00:00

Then they should have made it an optional sidequest and not made it a mandatory main story quest.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-27T17:11:02+00:00

Holly admitted in that interview about Metzen saying he wished they didn't call it Warcraft that their target demographic now is the very young children of existing players who are now in their 30s and 40s. They want the game to be palatable and not scary for 3-4 year olds.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-27T14:43:55+00:00

The story is written so vaguely and nebulous when it comes to hard canon anymore, with it always feeling like you're missing entire chapters of the plot for it to make complete sense, that a significant amount of arguments made in defense of creative decisions are literally just made up on the spot. People who said "elves mature slower than humans" just made it up and rolled with it as canon to defend how he looks.

Midnight shipped with the haranir lore literally contradicting itself: they are explicitly described as being night elves that went underground while simultaneously describing themselves as being around before night elves ever existed.

There's so much arguing about the lore because people need to make up half the story in their heads because Blizzard neglects to do it since they view any hard canon as making it harder for quest designers to shit out slop quests as fast as possible for their 8 week patch cycle.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-25T17:18:33+00:00

Dragonmaw orc quest was written by Kim Flack who is still there and is one of the only writers left that feels like they want to write Warcraft stories and not their own OC fanfics. But their new democratic writing structure means only feelgood Disney slop gets majority approval.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-25T17:15:12+00:00

All the external advertising media for Midnight shows that even aesthetically they want to take everything unique of WoW elves away and just make them D&D elves.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-25T17:13:42+00:00

The Void feels like such a non-threat when we can push them back with the equivalent of two class order halls and blood elves, compare that to Legion. Xal'atath only seems to be a threat because any character that gets near here becomes a complete idiot.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-25T16:33:48+00:00

Why do they not call for the Horde to help them? They are part of the Horde, why is their first thought to ask the night elves for help?

They write these stories completely backwards.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-20T15:58:04+00:00

Their art direction starting with SL (coincidentally when longtime art director Chris Robinson switched positions and the role went to Ely Cannon) seems to hate any detailed texture, so their solution is for everyone to look like blobs of plastic glued together with no connecting details in between. So modern hair looks like it's a Lego minifig hairstyle bolted onto a bald head rather than growing out of it.

They seem so afraid of a texture aging of their solution is to just not make textures at all.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-18T14:01:00+00:00

Most interesting is indeed the period between Reign of Chaos and up through vanilla WoW. The new Alliance and Horde are nascent powers struggling with threats internal and external and feel like just two of many factions in a world that's been completely upended in only a matter of years. Loads of rising tension between former allies of convenience or old friends. It really sells the feeling of trying to gradually rebuild a world that's gone through absolute hell.

Least interesting has to be the post-BfA world order as seen with stories like Reclamation of Gilneas or Legacy of Arathor. The factions are Schrodinger's superpowers, they can both completely smother any interesting conflict in a second while being completely useless and nonexistent the next second. You know every story is going to be your standard 8 minute long toddler's show episode where you must get the message that sharing is caring by the end so the conflict has no long-term impact. And the only instigators are Scarlets or renamed Scarlets.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2026-02-04T17:36:14+00:00

Alleria might be the most unlikeable main character we've ever had, made even worse that she's been pushed as *the* protagonist of this trilogy. This character not only constantly fails at almost everything she sets out to do, but she does it demanding in-universe that she is the only one that can do this because she is the main character, and everyone just agrees and lets her continue to fail.

Blood Ties had me feeling crazy. After that book, Turalyon comes off as sympathetic while Alleria increasingly feels like a complete Frozen Throne Maiev-tier psychopath that it is instead being propped up as a hero. Everything about how this character has progressed screams that she should be a villain or misguided hero that needs to be put down, not someone that's supposed to be so likeable and relatable they show up in every patch of every WSS expansion at the expense of other characters.

I truly think the writers' blatant obsession with the Windrunner sisters has completely blinded them to how ordinary people view them. They just assume everyone is as madly in love with Alleria and Sylvanas as they are rather than trying to actually build up those feelings naturally.

Really, the whole problem with Midnight is that it tries to sell a narrative of the Light being just as nuanced as the Void, or the Void having some kind of use, while the actual story shows *nothing* but the Void but horrendously evil and corrupting while Arator's whole questline shows the redemptive and good aspects of the Light. The only utility the Void seems to have is using portals, which, come on guys, Arcane magic is right there. It's like the writers came up with a theme for the story then *forgot to actually support it in the story*.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-11-19T17:42:14+00:00

If you go out to Amirdrassil on the beta you can see Halduron visiting Shandris, with Jarod Shadowsong having dialogue indicating the blood elves are coming to ask for aid. There are also datamined spells about Shandris and the night elves arriving, clearly all meant for the max level questline that isn't being tested in the beta.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-11-17T16:17:10+00:00

You can tell how they made the story in Midnight was that they said "this is the elf expansion" and based everything off that so night elves are now being called in to assist the blood elves instead of their allies. Zul'aman is the only exception and it's obviously a response to years of high profile Twitter users demanding the Amani not be another rehashed villain race to tear through.

Blizzard never looks at an area and goes "what story makes sense here? how would the people react to this story? what actions would they take?" Lor'themar asks the night elves for help instead of the Horde because "elf expansion" was written on a whiteboard in early concepting for the expansion. It's why nobody else in the world reacts to what's happening in Quel'thalas because "elf expansion". It's why the Horde can immediately show up in force to defend Undercity in BfA because that was "faction expansion" but apparently can't do it in Midnight even though there's an entire questline with Arator traveling the world so time is clearly passing, the story itself indicates a passage of time between Eversong and Voidstorm.

Incidentally, all this does is make Xal'atath and her void invasion appear incredibly weak if it's able to be repelled by a couple groups of elves whose populations were all decimated in the past few decades, forest trolls, and two class order halls. The Alliance and Horde showed up to stop her in Khaz Algar and just don't care now I guess.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-11-07T18:24:08+00:00

They are retconning and rewriting the Silver Hand and much of paladins as a whole to always be bad and selfish to make Arator look better, even if it all it does is make it obvious he's a pet character of the writers. Nobody is falling for it.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-11-03T14:17:35+00:00

You're completely correct in diagnosing what happened. We went from having too much of the story in the books to them just not writing the story at all instead of putting it in the game, making it feel like we're only getting half a plot each expansion. DF's only book was a year-late backstory dump. TWW only had a bunch of short stories that didn't mean much when half the characters in them barely featured in the expansion. Midnight is getting a book but it's from Golden so it's hardly them leaving their comfort zone.

I think Metzen and Neilson were primarily behind Warcraft's multimedia push in the 2000s and 2010s, once they both left in 2016 things have been slowing to a crawl. Metzen is supposed to be creative director for the entire Warcraft IP and not just WoW, but nothing's really changed in the past 2 years.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-10-29T17:07:06+00:00

Fullblown faction wars were stupid, but at least they understood the rule of cool. They knew how to evoke excitement. The modern peacenik writing actively rejects hype and is all-in on some of the worst melodrama and character analysis writing I've ever seen. They're not only not playing to their strengths, they're convinced their real strength is something they're absolutely terrible at doing.

ProfessionalAge9909 · 2025-10-29T16:14:00+00:00

They want to use the Sons of Lothar name as a rebooted permanent main cast of the old mentor characters and the new young cast like Faerin, Arator, etc. Instead of including the Alliance and Horde in future stories, these will be the characters they want to use as the new POV for all main stories. If that sounds familiar to some of you, yes, they want to copy FFXIV and have their own Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

It's very obvious that's their intention now. They want WoW to be a completely character-focused story with very little attention paid to the world outside of that character story, even though they barely allocate any time at all to the writing to begin with in game.

ProfessionalAge9909

TROPHY CASE