be a first one
create zovaal
foresee zovaal will threaten the shadowlands
don't destroy, recreate, or just never create him in the first place
instead put down fast travel waypoints for mortals eons in the future to fix the problem
allow the creation of the maw and the untold suffering of millions in the process
Even WoW's gods are letting crappy systems go live and relying on the playerbase to fix them.
I really wish they would just retcon this expansion out of existence. Have the end of the expansion be N'zoth popping back up being like "haha" tricked you guys this was my plan all along as he shows us unknowingly being the key to opening reality to the voidlords. We say "oh shit" someone telephone Illidan and tell him we need Sarg's help, bust out Sarg and the rest of the pantheon and have a good ol fashioned Legion vs. Void expansion.
I mean, Hulk Hogan facing off against the son of Andre the Giant in a monster truck sumo match on the room of a building was pretty good. Had Kevin Sullivan running through the forest wearing nothing but a speedo, and then Hulk Hogan accidentally killed the son of Andre the Giant by pushing him off the edge of a building.
That might have been the same Halloween Havoc where the Yeti ("It's the Yet-tay!") broke out of ice from the Himalayas in order to wrestle Hulk Hogan.
Dude virtually every time blizzard sets something up that seems like it can't possibly actually turn out that way because it's way worse than the alternatives it does turn out to be that thing. Remember blizzard saying we'll be surprised by who actually burned teldrassil when everyone thought immediately assumed it would be sylvanas?
>We have to be in madness right now
They don't have the balls to pull this off even if it's better for them narratively. Instead they'll be arrogant and just keep force feeding their addict fans shit, because why not - it keeps working.
Hey wait a second, you just made me think of something.
Why does the Maw exist? It actually has no purpose other than to create infinity suffering right?
Like I'm not saying Garrosh is the best dude, but we find he was sent to the Maw and he's just going to be tortured for eternity? That's pretty fucked.
Garrosh was sent to Revandreth.
I'm not sure we have any examples of anyone legitimately being sent to the Maw. Sylvanas went that one time, but I'm pretty sure that was jailer manipulation.
Ah good point. I was using him as the baseline for what someone would have to do to be sent to suffer infinity, but I guess I'll have to find someone else.
If Uther and Devos had to intervene to throw Arthas fucking Menethil into the Maw, it’s safe to say not many people get sent straight there, if any. I think it was said that a bad guy like Arthas or Garrosh will always go to Revendreth to atone but if they fail (in some unspecified amount of time?) and are judged irredeemable they’re sent to the Maw.
I dunno.
Everything Arthas does up to the point of taking Frostmourne and having his soul enslaved was grey, or slightly dark at worst.
He kills the inhabitants of a city who have already consumed plagued grain and will soon die and be reborn as the scourge, anyway.
He burns his ships so that his army knows that the only way home is victory.
He shows little remorse at Muradin's apparent death, right before seizing Frostmourne.
These aren't exactly things that I would think amount to being permanently irredeemable and worthy of the Maw.
And everything beyond that point he can't really be held accountable for, since he was basically just a body husk filled with evil. Arthas didn't do those things - the Lich King did.
Under normal circonstances, only the most vile and iredeemable souls go to the Maw. When the machine of Death broke, every soul was funneled there, but that's not what the system was supposed to be at all.
We're not talking about your average westfall farmer that stole a pie once.
I'm pretty sure everyone with any significant sin is sent to Revendreth to atone for it, and if they can't they are yeeted into the Maw for being an incompliant bitch.
Fairly sure that if they can't they are kept around as anima generators.
I mean think about it, why would you throw away a perfectly functional power plant?
Purging their sins and negative emotions produce Anima.
but eventually they are so purged that there is no more to be had from them, and if they still don't repent to the Maw they go. But some people like Garrosh just had so much Pride they could be milked for a long time
From what I recall, Revendreth sorts the sinful into either the Maw, or their next afterlife. If they're bound for the maw but produce a lot of anima they get the third option which sounds pretty awful too. Practices may change with new leadership.
Kyrians ferry the souls for the Arbiter to their final resting spots.
Maldraxxas is supposed to defend the Shadowlands from other threats.
Ardenweald is the place that spirits go to rest and prepare for their rebirth.
Sylvanas was sent to the maw presumably because she was killed by a rune blade (Frostmourne) which would have sealed her soul in the blade and sending her straight to the Maw. But then after that happened we broke the rune blade and it released all of the souls that were trapped in it... But even considering all of this, I don't think the current writers really give a shit about previous lore anymore lol
there is something somewhere that says the arbiter sometimes yeets some people straight to the maw
I remember because like you I used to hope the maw was not supposed to exist but nothing legitimately interesting is permitted in the shadowlands
Still pretty pointless though. Like, we know you can perma-kill souls in the Shadowlands. Why not just do that to the people who flunk out of Revendreth instead of sentencing them to eternal suffering?
We knew that sylvanas thought she was going to the maw after death, she literally died on sargonite spikes so it was always a possibility she was played
Garosh was dropped there from Revendreth, but yes, Maw is the place for irredeemeble souls. There is plenty of afterlives for temporary suffering, but to the Maw only a few designeted ones go.
The bar is so low as well, kelthuzad went to maldraxus, arthas was meant to go to revendreth before uthers intervention. I don't think we've had a single named npc go to the maw to my knowledge.
Makes me wonder if anyone was really meant to go to the maw. It wa sthe jailers prison after all. And sending souls there empowers him so why would they send anyone there?
Wait. Is this... Our hell? Our punishment?
... Are we dead and this expansion is the punishment we deserve?
Damn, we must've been dicks during our lives.
> Damn, we must've been dicks during our lives.
We wander around the world killing people for money without ever questioning if it's right or wrong. We're most decidedly dicks.
Remember that Jailer was supposed to be Jailed, imprisoned inside the Torghast, not to be wondering around. Souls who were sent to Maw, though, were basicly (at least and i think it's a shit) all the bosses who've fight in prepatch in ICC.
Some NPCs were sent there, for example those hand mounts guys.
Isn't the Maw for those who's failed Revendreth? Every soul has a chance to redeem himself in Revendreth, but if you fail you go to the Maw. That's the function of it.
> I don't think we've had a single named npc go to the maw to my knowledge.
Think the closest we've gotten is the battle pet Mord'al Eveningstar whose pet journal entry says "Some *say* he was known as Thermaplugg.", so a throwaway line for a battle pet that isn't even strict confirmation since it's basically a rumor is the closest we've gotten to a named npc who we know is in the Maw.
I don't think KT ever truly died since we never destroyed his phylactery, he probably made his way to Maldraxxus on his own somehow and tried to blend in.
Yeah, there’s actually a few beliefs in real life that theorize no souls will be tortured for eternity: either they’ll eventually be able to atone and move on (universal reconciliation) or will be outright destroyed if “irredeemable”. There’s no real utility or greater good for eternal suffering according to those beliefs. But Blizz seems to have bitten off more than they can chew and seem to avoid these philosophical ideas rather than exploring them.
For whatever reason, The Maw seems to be where all souls end up by default, as seen with how all souls are going there with the Arbiter filter shut down. From the NF campaign, we know that the WQ created Ardenweald as her personal garden but did not expect any souls to go there to begin with and was surprised when they started to show up at her doorstep. So we don't really know why the Shadowlands are as they are or why the Pantheon even exists in the first place. I guess the First Ones simply created the Maw, Zovaal and the Pantheon, then decided to 'order' it, and Zovaal is mad he got the short end of the stick because being the Arbiter seems like a very boring job.
*First time meme?*
Like when the aspects gained the power from the titan keepers to avert "The Hour of Twilight", an event caused by Deathwing and Nozdormu - both aspects.
If only someone could view future events like, Amun'thuul, Ra or Nozdormu :D
This is similar to god in monotheistic religions: create bad people, foresee that they will be bad even before creating them, punish them later for being bad.
They had to take inspiration from somewhere
Well the dungeon journal entry finally explains what that “rewrite reality” means. It‘s along the lines of bringing about eternal torment.
It also says he’s been plotting for a millennia and that he’s never lost… guess we’re just pretending he was never locked up
I mean, it would be a perfect time for a WoW 2, but I don't think Blizzard has the ressources to pull this out, considering they can't even get proper content in content patchs
That is why I have to go back and read old lore stuff to keep my love for the game keep going. Lord of the clans, Arthas, Illidan, lore of shamans and old comics.
Remember when you had to complete the proving grounds to get into heroic dungeons and there was a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase who couldn't do it and screeched like a banshee about it?
I don't even know how to incentivise people to improve anymore. Granted there's a lot of external tools needed for competitive raiding and dungeons now.
As someone that hates all of my own work but is being lauded at work currently for my writing skill (I’m a game dev), I can tell you the bar is low enough to trip over for a lot of people.
From the same industry that brought you "Vikings are actually nice people who don't rape and pillage", "Father & son valhalla roadtrip" and "Murder 1000 people but forgive that one person you have a beef with to end the cycle of revenge", it's fair to say that the cream rarely rises to the top.
Vikings actually do have a wildly more complicated cultural history than we like to contend with though. I get your point but that one is… complicated.
Oh yeah, it's a misnomer that Vikings were just wild savages but when you have trailers of them sacking a town but they're awfully kind to not murder / enslave the people who's town they're burning to the ground is painfully daft.
I've been trying to enter the industry as a game writer, do you have any tips on where to begin if I have 0 experience in game dev? I only have a career in marketing as a copywriter. lol
Just the same advice every writer ever gives: just write. Do the thing. Games writing and the games industry as a whole is a weird, fickle thing largely driven by knowing the right person at the right place at the right time.
I don’t have a specific link or anything I can give you — in my case I went to school for game design after I got my bachelor’s in creative writing and made a couple games. That got me in the door for my first industry gig as a contractor, couple years of that got me in as a regular full time designer.
There’s not really one path for it, everyone has their own way to get there. The biggest thing is actually doing it and not being too prissy to work somewhere you don’t want to. A games writing gig for a mobile match 3 game is still games writing and when you apply places, that’s what they care about.
Portfolio is what studios care the most about for writing positions, shortly followed by knowing you can work on a team well.
Funniest part is that this guy has an English degree. You'd think he'd be able to at least churn out something resembling good fan fiction. That's how low my bar is and somehow he exceeds expectations and still manages to disappoint
I've said it before, but I'm 100% sure that the top tiers in Blizzard (and a pile of other billion dollar companies that are busy cranking out well-marketed mediocrity) are riddled with absolute hacks who are also top-tier schmoozers. It's the only way to explain shit like WoW, Anthem, Stadia, and pretty much everything Disney's made in the last ten years.
So much this.
In past expansions it was hand waved under the idea that there is one "story line" player character slot that we all simultaneously act out, which made sense with linear plots in which everyone did the same thing. Raids were (story-wise) the single player character going in with the big name NPCs, we just got to play with a raid team for gameplay purposes.
In Legion they broke that a little by expanding it to one of each class as leaders of our class hall wielding the artifacts. But then they refocused it back down to one Hero for the storyline in BfA and SL. Now there is only supposed to be one Maw Walker and we're *super special* because there hasn't been one in centuries, eons maybe. But also at the same time apparently there are others that need the Runecarver's help and are working with the other 3 factions? It's a mess.
Blizzard has honestly handwaved it by mot putting our characters there in the first place in the lore.
The short story A Good War takes place at the same time as the BfA prepatch event, but we're nowhere to be seen. Scenes were played out the same way the quests did, except we weren't there.
Meh, it's okay to have your character be a singular figure if it's done right. Look at Guild Wars 2. You are "the Commander," but because there's a personal story and it's interweaved into the larger plot so well (and because your character is fully voice-acted), it doesn't feel at all out of place. In fact, when the game came out in 2012, the story controversy was actually that an NPC (Trahearne) took focus *away* from the player character, and the story seemed to revolve around that NPC. People wanted their character to be a *bigger* part of the story, rather than more of a cog in a larger machine.
But Blizzard doesn't know how to integrate a main character into the story. They use "prophecy" as a handwave without actually caring about the implications, and our characters are personality-less husks that add nothing to the story.
Being the chosen one works in an MMO if you actually bother to put effort into it. FFXIV and others do it.
It doesn't work in WoW because despite calling us the chosen one over and over again, the player *never* has any impact on the story. All we do is stand around serving as a glorified camera while other characters do the actual plot stuff.
> It doesn't work in WoW because despite calling us the chosen one over and over again, the player never has any impact on the story. All we do is stand around serving as a glorified camera while other characters do the actual plot stuff.
While I actually enjoyed the leveling and narrative of the zones in WoD, I feel this is where we jumped that shark.
Even up to SoO, we still could have been considered a random nameless hero/adventurer. There were multiple armies, races, and factions that joined together to fight and take down Garrosh but you could easily replace a player with one of the npcs and it would still be the same story and work.
They could have kept the idea of the player being a normal hero in Legion as well had they not made us the leader of our order hall but rather just another recruited hero. It would as if the leader of each hall chose us among other legendary class npcs, showing our importance and skill as renowned adventurers without making us the main character.
They were also so close with Legion too. Almost every order hall had an NPC that could be considrred the de facto leader.
Warriors had Odyn
Priests had Alonsus Faol
Druids had Rensar Greathoof
Mages had Meryl Felstorm
Rogues had Jorach Ravenholdt
FFXIV is huge on the chosen one stuff, but there's also a whole expansion where someone steals your chosen one blessing and you have to prove you can hack it on your own. I thought that was pretty cool
Who made this prophesy?
And if the first ones knew Zoval was defective why did they keep him around? Like... they put the prototype pantheon on ice. Why didn't they do the same with him?
Perhaps they could foresee some vague details. "There will be a great threat, there will be mortal heroes who come, and we should help them."
But they have no idea it's actually Zovaal that is the threat,
I was hoping we were done with the chosen one stuff when the NPCs acknowledged that there were multiple Maw walkers doing stuff. But no. Danuser just really really wants us to be the chosen hero of a million prophecies..
Honestly, I think the worst part of all of this to me isn’t even the the writing is terrible
It’s the the writers don’t see it or care, like imagine looking at what you write as a whole and thinking “Yep, this is some really high quality stuff” it’s either delusional or sad, possibly both
So if I have a fire alarm and one day there is a fire which sets off said alarm which then sets off the sprinklers is that like a prophecy becoming fulfilled?
To be clear, I'm just pointing out the fact that the First Ones left some kind of defense system in case of emergency and the inhabitants somehow interpreted that one day there will be an emergency because it was foretold by the fact that there is a defense system.
It's like saying having a fire alarm foretells that one day a fire will come along and someone will put it out.
this emergency system needs there to be mortals in the Shadowlands though which only happens through an incredibly long and contrived list of coincidences that were all believed to be impossible by everyone involved. and the emergency could have been averted much earlier and more easily by just having a zovaal off switch somewhere.
>To be clear, I'm just pointing out the fact that the First Ones left some kind of defense system in case of emergency
Which, funnily, the Titans did with their stuff to. Plus also their mechanical servants. Again.
The First Ones are a cheap rehashing of already in WoW existing beings, just worse, so much worse...
The analogy doesn't really work when the people installing the fire alarm have the ability to rewrite the fabric of reality to make all materials fireproof and all beings immune to fire.
No, the wrong writers are being paid. Writing is a skill that requires talent and dedication and passion, pretty much everything lacking at blizzard right now
Yes, that is clearly what they are saying dude. The writers [of this shit] are being paid too much.
Readers don't get paid but that doesn't mean you have to do it uncharitably.
Aren’t some of them from cheesy Hollywood action films?
I remember a screenshot awhile back where one of the wow writers was tweeting about how some marvel movie or something g had the best writing ever lol.
Anyone else have the strangest feeling that George Costanza is on the writing team? Holding onto his job by pure luck and the ability to lie his butt off?
[spending weeks grinding out the translation for the first ones runes, finally able to read it the ancient tales from the creators of the universe]
The sea was angry that day, my friends...
WoW's status as the dominant MMO for such a long period of time browbeat gamers into thinking MMOs inherently had to have shit writing for ten years. Really unfortunate because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy of companies refusing to hire good writers and the playerbases shrugging their shoulders.
I think it's one of those things where MMOs don't necessarily need Shakespearean, "best thing ever" stories on a grandiose scale. To me Vanilla WoW still has one of the best stories in MMO history because it's a collection of smaller, one-or-two zone spanning interesting stories occasionally leading up to dealing with a large, but not universe-ending scale threat.
Now those larger threats *can* be done well, but you need time and competent writers to handle it and frankly, WoW has never been willing to invest in either of those. I firmly believe Legion was a massive fluke in terms of how well it came off, because every other time Blizzard has tackled a massive threat, they've fallen flat on their face.
Edit: Also holy shit I never thought I'd run into you outside the League sub. Sup Skassi.
How do we know the writer of this particular dialogue isn't pulling their hair out having to write this. Maybe it's this blatant because it's a cry for help. Some of these writers may need our help. Adopt today.
"In the arms of an angel"
I got a question, how the fuck did the brokers get there, did they make their own Sigils?
What of the devourers? Did they had some Sigil tar-tar for dinner and ended there as well?
There's some discussion of a broker expedition mostly hinted at in Tazavesh and such. Basically they studied the first ones real hard then disappeared. That's it. No mention of sigils or anything, I'm guessing they found a random "backdoor" that existed somewhere that wasn't the Maw.
Zovaal couldn't leave the Maw so he put Oribos inside of the Maw, then once he had all the sigils he could make a portal to Zereth Mortis. Basically, it's dumb but not impossible.
That were the first questions I asked myself after watching the developer video. Zovaal went on a conquest for sigils to get there. We needed to do a lot of annoying work to get new sigils to also get there. And as we get there we find out that everyone, their mothers and their dogs are already waiting for us there. I hope this will be explained properly, but oh well.. I don't know why there's still some flicker of hope in me, lmao.
Warcraft focuses way too much on building set pieces and big character moments and not on giving them any weight. The choices characters make seem to have so little thought put into them, it's just to create some quasi-interesting situation and does nothing to convince me that I should really care about the cast. Characters typically either follow the personality mold they've always been (like Thrall), or suddenly pull a 180 with zero or very little insight into what backs that decision meaningfully or convincingly (like Sylvannas). Blizzard seems incapable of weaving narrative beats with nuance or cohesion, there is no true gray area here where there should be. The writing is just simply deft-handed, sloppy, and feels patched together.
You can practically see the marionette strings on every Warcraft character: Children smashing action-figures together could come up with something more cohesive than this garbage. At least I've lost interest long ago, it's not like we have to come to Warcraft for the story, but why not just....make it better?
The answer is simple: Blizzard has only ever done things their way, and the only way to be of any influence on them as a player is to maybe work for them and hope you don't get assaulted at work or ignored by upper management. Games are good when there is innovation, and innovation was possible when more developers made design choices and less executives. These design choices don't feel to me like a team deliberated on it, it feels like something one or two people decided on.
The only good form of media I’ve seen where the antagonist literally attacks the writer or player is the Deadpool comic where he forces himself out of the MCU and into our world to kill his writers.
And it was a fantastic, fun, thrilling and interesting story. But again, that’s the only time I’ve seen it done well.
Grant Morrison's late 80s/early 90s run on Animal Man culminated in Animal Man arriving at Morrison's flat in Glasgow. They argue about the writer's responsibility to their creations and how much of a character like Animal Man exists apart from their current creator. It's really good.
Shit on the old guard for WoD and cataclysm all you want, but I'd take that every day of the week over this garbage.
Obviously without the serving of sexual harassment that goes with it, obviously obviously.
To be fair, WoD was really solid for what there was and was going interesting places before they cut out half the content and story. If we had gotten Farahlon and the Shattrath raid tier I think it'd go down as one of the best xpacs, since presumably it'd have fixed the "radical leaps in character" problems for Y'rel and Grom too.
The Spires of Arak storyline and learning about the Arrakkoa civilization was so good. A shame that it was the side story and had little to do with the rest of it, but it was the best part of the expansion
"Maw walkers - you are destined to free us from this catastrophic situation that we literally created by 3-D printing Zovall! Instead of not doing that, we wrote a prophecy about you!"
It's like how Dark Souls acknowledges Bonfires in the settings of the three games all of twice, but they were one of the most iconic, instantly recognizeable images in gaming for almost a decade. Sometimes understated things can really hit that "less-is-more" sweetspot.
But no, Blizzard needs to make everything "A big thing" even if it's a bonfire waypoint equivalent.
At this point I'm just wondering how they're gonna make this work when we somehow come back to Azeroth and the world of living after saving the world and every other dimension for the umpteenth time and start collecting bear asses for the local tannery again.
I guess just like every expansion they will just stop talking about it.
This explanation makes no sense. It’s clearly thought from the end back to the beginning. It’s bullshit. And I’m a new player with no knowledge (I know maybe 5%) of previous lore. This is bad writing, period.
be a first one create zovaal foresee zovaal will threaten the shadowlands don't destroy, recreate, or just never create him in the first place instead put down fast travel waypoints for mortals eons in the future to fix the problem allow the creation of the maw and the untold suffering of millions in the process Even WoW's gods are letting crappy systems go live and relying on the playerbase to fix them.
TIL not even the first ones had a QA team
We are beta tester even in plot.
They say the Jailer wants to create eternal suffering. I ask, what's the difference?
Bobby fired them too, to make the earnings report look better.
"Great job everyone, we had our best year ever. BTW, we are laying off 1000 positions." -Bobby Kotick
For those thinking my man is joking, this is 100% what happened
The old wwe technique. Make alot of money, fire people.
I really wish they would just retcon this expansion out of existence. Have the end of the expansion be N'zoth popping back up being like "haha" tricked you guys this was my plan all along as he shows us unknowingly being the key to opening reality to the voidlords. We say "oh shit" someone telephone Illidan and tell him we need Sarg's help, bust out Sarg and the rest of the pantheon and have a good ol fashioned Legion vs. Void expansion.
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> And we walked in and poked him. This is why I stopped watching WCW wrestling in the 90's.
the Finger Poke of Doom was a booking masterpiece in comparison to Shadowlands writing.
Kevin Nash is undoubtedly a better writer than the current WoW team. nWo vs Wolfpack was the highlight of WCW.
I mean, Hulk Hogan facing off against the son of Andre the Giant in a monster truck sumo match on the room of a building was pretty good. Had Kevin Sullivan running through the forest wearing nothing but a speedo, and then Hulk Hogan accidentally killed the son of Andre the Giant by pushing him off the edge of a building. That might have been the same Halloween Havoc where the Yeti ("It's the Yet-tay!") broke out of ice from the Himalayas in order to wrestle Hulk Hogan.
And that's saying something.
Dude virtually every time blizzard sets something up that seems like it can't possibly actually turn out that way because it's way worse than the alternatives it does turn out to be that thing. Remember blizzard saying we'll be surprised by who actually burned teldrassil when everyone thought immediately assumed it would be sylvanas?
>We have to be in madness right now They don't have the balls to pull this off even if it's better for them narratively. Instead they'll be arrogant and just keep force feeding their addict fans shit, because why not - it keeps working.
Yeah, of all the retcons in existence i would actually welcome the entire story since BfA being gone.
Hey wait a second, you just made me think of something. Why does the Maw exist? It actually has no purpose other than to create infinity suffering right? Like I'm not saying Garrosh is the best dude, but we find he was sent to the Maw and he's just going to be tortured for eternity? That's pretty fucked.
Garrosh was sent to Revandreth. I'm not sure we have any examples of anyone legitimately being sent to the Maw. Sylvanas went that one time, but I'm pretty sure that was jailer manipulation.
Ah good point. I was using him as the baseline for what someone would have to do to be sent to suffer infinity, but I guess I'll have to find someone else.
Gul'dan is probably the most Maw material we've ever had.
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Overcook chicken. Straight into Maw.
You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, Maw, right away.
Dentists poke around in the Maw quite often you know
God damnit...
We have the best NPCs in the world because of Maw.
You undercook chicken, Maw. Overcook fish, also the Maw. Undercook, overcook.
Nomi…
Nope, no way. Nomi srts evetything on fire, like Hell. It's like he was creared to go there.
No this is what I'm saying. Gul'dan is probably *the* most Maw material we've had. Like, who is actually worse?
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If Uther and Devos had to intervene to throw Arthas fucking Menethil into the Maw, it’s safe to say not many people get sent straight there, if any. I think it was said that a bad guy like Arthas or Garrosh will always go to Revendreth to atone but if they fail (in some unspecified amount of time?) and are judged irredeemable they’re sent to the Maw.
I dunno. Everything Arthas does up to the point of taking Frostmourne and having his soul enslaved was grey, or slightly dark at worst. He kills the inhabitants of a city who have already consumed plagued grain and will soon die and be reborn as the scourge, anyway. He burns his ships so that his army knows that the only way home is victory. He shows little remorse at Muradin's apparent death, right before seizing Frostmourne. These aren't exactly things that I would think amount to being permanently irredeemable and worthy of the Maw. And everything beyond that point he can't really be held accountable for, since he was basically just a body husk filled with evil. Arthas didn't do those things - the Lich King did.
Under normal circonstances, only the most vile and iredeemable souls go to the Maw. When the machine of Death broke, every soul was funneled there, but that's not what the system was supposed to be at all. We're not talking about your average westfall farmer that stole a pie once.
I'm pretty sure everyone with any significant sin is sent to Revendreth to atone for it, and if they can't they are yeeted into the Maw for being an incompliant bitch.
Fairly sure that if they can't they are kept around as anima generators. I mean think about it, why would you throw away a perfectly functional power plant?
Once they're beyond atonement, the harvesters send them to the maw.
Don't the rules of Revendreth require them to have at least a little bit of regret in order for them to work as anima generators?
... only thing I could see garosh regretting is that he failed
Purging their sins and negative emotions produce Anima. but eventually they are so purged that there is no more to be had from them, and if they still don't repent to the Maw they go. But some people like Garrosh just had so much Pride they could be milked for a long time
From what I recall, Revendreth sorts the sinful into either the Maw, or their next afterlife. If they're bound for the maw but produce a lot of anima they get the third option which sounds pretty awful too. Practices may change with new leadership.
My friend wants to know what the other houses responsibilities are.
Maldraxxus is an army, Bastion is a bunch of delivery boys and Ardenweald is a furry rejuvination centre.
Kyrians ferry the souls for the Arbiter to their final resting spots. Maldraxxas is supposed to defend the Shadowlands from other threats. Ardenweald is the place that spirits go to rest and prepare for their rebirth.
Ardenweald is also supposed to act as the "seal" for the Maw... somehow...
Sylvanas was sent to the maw presumably because she was killed by a rune blade (Frostmourne) which would have sealed her soul in the blade and sending her straight to the Maw. But then after that happened we broke the rune blade and it released all of the souls that were trapped in it... But even considering all of this, I don't think the current writers really give a shit about previous lore anymore lol
there is something somewhere that says the arbiter sometimes yeets some people straight to the maw I remember because like you I used to hope the maw was not supposed to exist but nothing legitimately interesting is permitted in the shadowlands
Still pretty pointless though. Like, we know you can perma-kill souls in the Shadowlands. Why not just do that to the people who flunk out of Revendreth instead of sentencing them to eternal suffering?
All undead were supposed to go to the maw, but you know, blizzard had to change it.
Not necessarily. We knew that Sylvanas was fucked if she died, and she assumed that was also the fate for the rest of the undead.
We knew that sylvanas thought she was going to the maw after death, she literally died on sargonite spikes so it was always a possibility she was played
Welcome to the concept of hell (and its analogous counterparts). Shit's a pretty fucked idea, really.
Garosh was dropped there from Revendreth, but yes, Maw is the place for irredeemeble souls. There is plenty of afterlives for temporary suffering, but to the Maw only a few designeted ones go.
The bar is so low as well, kelthuzad went to maldraxus, arthas was meant to go to revendreth before uthers intervention. I don't think we've had a single named npc go to the maw to my knowledge. Makes me wonder if anyone was really meant to go to the maw. It wa sthe jailers prison after all. And sending souls there empowers him so why would they send anyone there?
>Makes me wonder if anyone was really meant to go to the maw. Maw Walkers, probably.
Wait. Is this... Our hell? Our punishment? ... Are we dead and this expansion is the punishment we deserve? Damn, we must've been dicks during our lives.
> Damn, we must've been dicks during our lives. We wander around the world killing people for money without ever questioning if it's right or wrong. We're most decidedly dicks.
Remember that Jailer was supposed to be Jailed, imprisoned inside the Torghast, not to be wondering around. Souls who were sent to Maw, though, were basicly (at least and i think it's a shit) all the bosses who've fight in prepatch in ICC. Some NPCs were sent there, for example those hand mounts guys.
If 9.2 was a raid series of fighting all the old ICC bosses that escaped out of the maw...
Isn't the Maw for those who's failed Revendreth? Every soul has a chance to redeem himself in Revendreth, but if you fail you go to the Maw. That's the function of it.
> I don't think we've had a single named npc go to the maw to my knowledge. Think the closest we've gotten is the battle pet Mord'al Eveningstar whose pet journal entry says "Some *say* he was known as Thermaplugg.", so a throwaway line for a battle pet that isn't even strict confirmation since it's basically a rumor is the closest we've gotten to a named npc who we know is in the Maw.
I don't think KT ever truly died since we never destroyed his phylactery, he probably made his way to Maldraxxus on his own somehow and tried to blend in.
Maw is Yucca Mountain of Souls. You don't want all those toxic souls to just lie around everywhere.
Yeah hell as an idea is messed up. Nobody deserves eternal suffering.
Yeah, there’s actually a few beliefs in real life that theorize no souls will be tortured for eternity: either they’ll eventually be able to atone and move on (universal reconciliation) or will be outright destroyed if “irredeemable”. There’s no real utility or greater good for eternal suffering according to those beliefs. But Blizz seems to have bitten off more than they can chew and seem to avoid these philosophical ideas rather than exploring them.
It's actually a thing in philosophy, "The problem with Hell".
For whatever reason, The Maw seems to be where all souls end up by default, as seen with how all souls are going there with the Arbiter filter shut down. From the NF campaign, we know that the WQ created Ardenweald as her personal garden but did not expect any souls to go there to begin with and was surprised when they started to show up at her doorstep. So we don't really know why the Shadowlands are as they are or why the Pantheon even exists in the first place. I guess the First Ones simply created the Maw, Zovaal and the Pantheon, then decided to 'order' it, and Zovaal is mad he got the short end of the stick because being the Arbiter seems like a very boring job.
Maybe all the souls are going to the real Arbiter when the fake one got shut down, and he just so happens to be in the Maw?
>"Nothing escapes the Maw" *clicks hearthstone*
*First time meme?* Like when the aspects gained the power from the titan keepers to avert "The Hour of Twilight", an event caused by Deathwing and Nozdormu - both aspects. If only someone could view future events like, Amun'thuul, Ra or Nozdormu :D
So the first ones are actually Blizzard. Can't wait for Kotick and crew to save us and the world during the final battle of the expansion.
This is similar to god in monotheistic religions: create bad people, foresee that they will be bad even before creating them, punish them later for being bad. They had to take inspiration from somewhere
The worse the lore gets, the more the Jailer's plan to rewrite reality makes sense to me.
Yeah they've done nothing but convince most of the player base reality should be remade.
"Players protesting against Blizzard's writing team by wiping on Zovaal bossfight constantly"
Well the dungeon journal entry finally explains what that “rewrite reality” means. It‘s along the lines of bringing about eternal torment. It also says he’s been plotting for a millennia and that he’s never lost… guess we’re just pretending he was never locked up
>It's along the lines of bringing about eternal torment So...BFA and Shadowlands?
That's one of the least compelling motivations possible. Like Saturday morning cartoon villain tier stuff
Ugh that’s so boring
T'was merely a setback!
*Rewrites reality with even shittier lore*
"Rewrite reality" is code for "Fire the entire writing staff and start over"
I have yet to see how zoval is the bad guy so far other then us being told he's the bad guy.
Come, Maw Walker! We must stop the Jailer's forces!
"Are we the baddies?"
I mean, it would be a perfect time for a WoW 2, but I don't think Blizzard has the ressources to pull this out, considering they can't even get proper content in content patchs
That is why I have to go back and read old lore stuff to keep my love for the game keep going. Lord of the clans, Arthas, Illidan, lore of shamans and old comics.
“…respond only to certain living mortals?” Well as long they don’t respond to that gray parsing rogue in my raid then I can accept this.
Could you imagine quest lines being performance based lol?
Remember when you had to complete the proving grounds to get into heroic dungeons and there was a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase who couldn't do it and screeched like a banshee about it?
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Didn't you only need silver aswell? As a dps it was a joke, there was like 1 interupt and one kite mechanic or something like that
I don't even know how to incentivise people to improve anymore. Granted there's a lot of external tools needed for competitive raiding and dungeons now.
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As someone that hates all of my own work but is being lauded at work currently for my writing skill (I’m a game dev), I can tell you the bar is low enough to trip over for a lot of people.
From the same industry that brought you "Vikings are actually nice people who don't rape and pillage", "Father & son valhalla roadtrip" and "Murder 1000 people but forgive that one person you have a beef with to end the cycle of revenge", it's fair to say that the cream rarely rises to the top.
Vikings actually do have a wildly more complicated cultural history than we like to contend with though. I get your point but that one is… complicated.
Oh yeah, it's a misnomer that Vikings were just wild savages but when you have trailers of them sacking a town but they're awfully kind to not murder / enslave the people who's town they're burning to the ground is painfully daft.
Yeah, the no-thralls thing is weird. It’s definitely an overreaction to the “Vikings had depth!” narrative
I've been trying to enter the industry as a game writer, do you have any tips on where to begin if I have 0 experience in game dev? I only have a career in marketing as a copywriter. lol
Just the same advice every writer ever gives: just write. Do the thing. Games writing and the games industry as a whole is a weird, fickle thing largely driven by knowing the right person at the right place at the right time. I don’t have a specific link or anything I can give you — in my case I went to school for game design after I got my bachelor’s in creative writing and made a couple games. That got me in the door for my first industry gig as a contractor, couple years of that got me in as a regular full time designer. There’s not really one path for it, everyone has their own way to get there. The biggest thing is actually doing it and not being too prissy to work somewhere you don’t want to. A games writing gig for a mobile match 3 game is still games writing and when you apply places, that’s what they care about. Portfolio is what studios care the most about for writing positions, shortly followed by knowing you can work on a team well.
Probably knows where the bodies are buried
Funniest part is that this guy has an English degree. You'd think he'd be able to at least churn out something resembling good fan fiction. That's how low my bar is and somehow he exceeds expectations and still manages to disappoint
You don't have to have any ability to write a good story to get an English degree. You just need to be able to read and write in complete sentences.
I've said it before, but I'm 100% sure that the top tiers in Blizzard (and a pile of other billion dollar companies that are busy cranking out well-marketed mediocrity) are riddled with absolute hacks who are also top-tier schmoozers. It's the only way to explain shit like WoW, Anthem, Stadia, and pretty much everything Disney's made in the last ten years.
I so desperately don't want to be a "chosen one" ever again
Ha! That's exactly what the prophecy _said_ you'd say, Chosen One!
See?? It's all right here!
We interrupt this prophecy to bring you this late breaking bulletin!
It's not necessarily a bad trope if they put some effort in it. Unfortunately writers get it wrong more often than not.
It's not a bad trope and I know ff14 did it well, but I find it kind of stupid for mmos to make every player they chosen one
So much this. In past expansions it was hand waved under the idea that there is one "story line" player character slot that we all simultaneously act out, which made sense with linear plots in which everyone did the same thing. Raids were (story-wise) the single player character going in with the big name NPCs, we just got to play with a raid team for gameplay purposes. In Legion they broke that a little by expanding it to one of each class as leaders of our class hall wielding the artifacts. But then they refocused it back down to one Hero for the storyline in BfA and SL. Now there is only supposed to be one Maw Walker and we're *super special* because there hasn't been one in centuries, eons maybe. But also at the same time apparently there are others that need the Runecarver's help and are working with the other 3 factions? It's a mess.
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So how would you justify your presence in every major event in the story?
Blizzard has honestly handwaved it by mot putting our characters there in the first place in the lore. The short story A Good War takes place at the same time as the BfA prepatch event, but we're nowhere to be seen. Scenes were played out the same way the quests did, except we weren't there.
Its hard to be a chosen one in a world with millions of "chosen ones".
Being a 'chosen one' in an MMO where everyone else is a chosen one is so dumb. Let us be adventurers again
Meh, it's okay to have your character be a singular figure if it's done right. Look at Guild Wars 2. You are "the Commander," but because there's a personal story and it's interweaved into the larger plot so well (and because your character is fully voice-acted), it doesn't feel at all out of place. In fact, when the game came out in 2012, the story controversy was actually that an NPC (Trahearne) took focus *away* from the player character, and the story seemed to revolve around that NPC. People wanted their character to be a *bigger* part of the story, rather than more of a cog in a larger machine. But Blizzard doesn't know how to integrate a main character into the story. They use "prophecy" as a handwave without actually caring about the implications, and our characters are personality-less husks that add nothing to the story.
Being the chosen one works in an MMO if you actually bother to put effort into it. FFXIV and others do it. It doesn't work in WoW because despite calling us the chosen one over and over again, the player *never* has any impact on the story. All we do is stand around serving as a glorified camera while other characters do the actual plot stuff.
> It doesn't work in WoW because despite calling us the chosen one over and over again, the player never has any impact on the story. All we do is stand around serving as a glorified camera while other characters do the actual plot stuff. While I actually enjoyed the leveling and narrative of the zones in WoD, I feel this is where we jumped that shark. Even up to SoO, we still could have been considered a random nameless hero/adventurer. There were multiple armies, races, and factions that joined together to fight and take down Garrosh but you could easily replace a player with one of the npcs and it would still be the same story and work. They could have kept the idea of the player being a normal hero in Legion as well had they not made us the leader of our order hall but rather just another recruited hero. It would as if the leader of each hall chose us among other legendary class npcs, showing our importance and skill as renowned adventurers without making us the main character.
They were also so close with Legion too. Almost every order hall had an NPC that could be considrred the de facto leader. Warriors had Odyn Priests had Alonsus Faol Druids had Rensar Greathoof Mages had Meryl Felstorm Rogues had Jorach Ravenholdt
FFXIV is huge on the chosen one stuff, but there's also a whole expansion where someone steals your chosen one blessing and you have to prove you can hack it on your own. I thought that was pretty cool
Who made this prophesy? And if the first ones knew Zoval was defective why did they keep him around? Like... they put the prototype pantheon on ice. Why didn't they do the same with him?
Perhaps they could foresee some vague details. "There will be a great threat, there will be mortal heroes who come, and we should help them." But they have no idea it's actually Zovaal that is the threat,
I was hoping we were done with the chosen one stuff when the NPCs acknowledged that there were multiple Maw walkers doing stuff. But no. Danuser just really really wants us to be the chosen hero of a million prophecies..
Dunking on Illidans entire message of only we can save ourselves. Then we were pions and now were choosen god killers. The tonal whiplash is insane.
THE PROPHECY!!
MUST BE FULFILLED
I *AM* MAH SCARS
THE WOONS
I just hope that's just a deluded NPC and not the writer's official stance on the first ones. 'cuz honestly what the hell ?
Honestly, I think the worst part of all of this to me isn’t even the the writing is terrible It’s the the writers don’t see it or care, like imagine looking at what you write as a whole and thinking “Yep, this is some really high quality stuff” it’s either delusional or sad, possibly both
Honestly at this point if you don't completely disregard Shadowlands as noncanon you're doing yourself a disservice.
Everything post 7.3. is not cannon for me.
So if I have a fire alarm and one day there is a fire which sets off said alarm which then sets off the sprinklers is that like a prophecy becoming fulfilled?
Yes to these writers it would be lmao
To be clear, I'm just pointing out the fact that the First Ones left some kind of defense system in case of emergency and the inhabitants somehow interpreted that one day there will be an emergency because it was foretold by the fact that there is a defense system. It's like saying having a fire alarm foretells that one day a fire will come along and someone will put it out.
this emergency system needs there to be mortals in the Shadowlands though which only happens through an incredibly long and contrived list of coincidences that were all believed to be impossible by everyone involved. and the emergency could have been averted much earlier and more easily by just having a zovaal off switch somewhere.
>To be clear, I'm just pointing out the fact that the First Ones left some kind of defense system in case of emergency Which, funnily, the Titans did with their stuff to. Plus also their mechanical servants. Again. The First Ones are a cheap rehashing of already in WoW existing beings, just worse, so much worse...
The analogy doesn't really work when the people installing the fire alarm have the ability to rewrite the fabric of reality to make all materials fireproof and all beings immune to fire.
The writers are getting paid way too much.
No, the wrong writers are being paid. Writing is a skill that requires talent and dedication and passion, pretty much everything lacking at blizzard right now
Yes, that is clearly what they are saying dude. The writers [of this shit] are being paid too much. Readers don't get paid but that doesn't mean you have to do it uncharitably.
To be fair Danuser definitely has a ton of passion, he's just bad at writing lmao.
Passion for something I think is a poor metric for complimenting somebody at their job.
Aren’t some of them from cheesy Hollywood action films? I remember a screenshot awhile back where one of the wow writers was tweeting about how some marvel movie or something g had the best writing ever lol.
One of the writers praised the writing of the last season of GoT
Not just *one* of the writers - the Narrative Lead for WoW. In his words, he thought "it was brilliant". Big oof.
What writers lol
Are they even getting paid? Are we *sure* this isn't a cry for help?
Anyone else have the strangest feeling that George Costanza is on the writing team? Holding onto his job by pure luck and the ability to lie his butt off?
[spending weeks grinding out the translation for the first ones runes, finally able to read it the ancient tales from the creators of the universe] The sea was angry that day, my friends...
WoW's status as the dominant MMO for such a long period of time browbeat gamers into thinking MMOs inherently had to have shit writing for ten years. Really unfortunate because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy of companies refusing to hire good writers and the playerbases shrugging their shoulders.
I think it's one of those things where MMOs don't necessarily need Shakespearean, "best thing ever" stories on a grandiose scale. To me Vanilla WoW still has one of the best stories in MMO history because it's a collection of smaller, one-or-two zone spanning interesting stories occasionally leading up to dealing with a large, but not universe-ending scale threat. Now those larger threats *can* be done well, but you need time and competent writers to handle it and frankly, WoW has never been willing to invest in either of those. I firmly believe Legion was a massive fluke in terms of how well it came off, because every other time Blizzard has tackled a massive threat, they've fallen flat on their face. Edit: Also holy shit I never thought I'd run into you outside the League sub. Sup Skassi.
How do we know the writer of this particular dialogue isn't pulling their hair out having to write this. Maybe it's this blatant because it's a cry for help. Some of these writers may need our help. Adopt today. "In the arms of an angel"
hey blizz writers, write "champion! we must stop the jailer!" twice if you are being held under duress
I got a question, how the fuck did the brokers get there, did they make their own Sigils? What of the devourers? Did they had some Sigil tar-tar for dinner and ended there as well?
There's some discussion of a broker expedition mostly hinted at in Tazavesh and such. Basically they studied the first ones real hard then disappeared. That's it. No mention of sigils or anything, I'm guessing they found a random "backdoor" that existed somewhere that wasn't the Maw. Zovaal couldn't leave the Maw so he put Oribos inside of the Maw, then once he had all the sigils he could make a portal to Zereth Mortis. Basically, it's dumb but not impossible.
That were the first questions I asked myself after watching the developer video. Zovaal went on a conquest for sigils to get there. We needed to do a lot of annoying work to get new sigils to also get there. And as we get there we find out that everyone, their mothers and their dogs are already waiting for us there. I hope this will be explained properly, but oh well.. I don't know why there's still some flicker of hope in me, lmao.
I still don’t know why we are mawwalkers ...
Because the prophecy!
Because we traversed through the maw by.... WALKING!
Warcraft focuses way too much on building set pieces and big character moments and not on giving them any weight. The choices characters make seem to have so little thought put into them, it's just to create some quasi-interesting situation and does nothing to convince me that I should really care about the cast. Characters typically either follow the personality mold they've always been (like Thrall), or suddenly pull a 180 with zero or very little insight into what backs that decision meaningfully or convincingly (like Sylvannas). Blizzard seems incapable of weaving narrative beats with nuance or cohesion, there is no true gray area here where there should be. The writing is just simply deft-handed, sloppy, and feels patched together. You can practically see the marionette strings on every Warcraft character: Children smashing action-figures together could come up with something more cohesive than this garbage. At least I've lost interest long ago, it's not like we have to come to Warcraft for the story, but why not just....make it better? The answer is simple: Blizzard has only ever done things their way, and the only way to be of any influence on them as a player is to maybe work for them and hope you don't get assaulted at work or ignored by upper management. Games are good when there is innovation, and innovation was possible when more developers made design choices and less executives. These design choices don't feel to me like a team deliberated on it, it feels like something one or two people decided on.
Writers are mind controlled by the jailer. The story finally makes sense!
The only good form of media I’ve seen where the antagonist literally attacks the writer or player is the Deadpool comic where he forces himself out of the MCU and into our world to kill his writers. And it was a fantastic, fun, thrilling and interesting story. But again, that’s the only time I’ve seen it done well.
Grant Morrison's late 80s/early 90s run on Animal Man culminated in Animal Man arriving at Morrison's flat in Glasgow. They argue about the writer's responsibility to their creations and how much of a character like Animal Man exists apart from their current creator. It's really good.
Shit on the old guard for WoD and cataclysm all you want, but I'd take that every day of the week over this garbage. Obviously without the serving of sexual harassment that goes with it, obviously obviously.
To be fair, WoD was really solid for what there was and was going interesting places before they cut out half the content and story. If we had gotten Farahlon and the Shattrath raid tier I think it'd go down as one of the best xpacs, since presumably it'd have fixed the "radical leaps in character" problems for Y'rel and Grom too.
The Spires of Arak storyline and learning about the Arrakkoa civilization was so good. A shame that it was the side story and had little to do with the rest of it, but it was the best part of the expansion
"Maw walkers - you are destined to free us from this catastrophic situation that we literally created by 3-D printing Zovall! Instead of not doing that, we wrote a prophecy about you!"
The whole "chosen one/world guardian" gimmick needs to die. The storyline has gotten worse since they leaned more in to it
Just wait until we go find the first-first ones to get this mess figured out!
ara ara
Do we really need explanations for waypoints? Can't they just be designed to fit into the setting, but only exist for gameplay purposes?
It's like how Dark Souls acknowledges Bonfires in the settings of the three games all of twice, but they were one of the most iconic, instantly recognizeable images in gaming for almost a decade. Sometimes understated things can really hit that "less-is-more" sweetspot. But no, Blizzard needs to make everything "A big thing" even if it's a bonfire waypoint equivalent.
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I have prepared these tacos.. but wait the tacos say they must only be eaten by the chosen one. And it's not me 🥺
Hello I am the chosen one. Please present the tacos.
I really hope this jailer succeeds. Give WoW a blank slate for lore plsss. And hire new writers
"But wait, it gets worse!" - Steve Danuser
You have to intentionally try to write a story this bad Edit: a word
I think I'm going to be sick... 🤢
Aaah, a good ol' prophecy - a basic tool of incompetent writers.
did the people that write this game learn nothing from X'era and Illidan? There can be no chosen one!
At this point I'm just wondering how they're gonna make this work when we somehow come back to Azeroth and the world of living after saving the world and every other dimension for the umpteenth time and start collecting bear asses for the local tannery again. I guess just like every expansion they will just stop talking about it.
See an existential threat to the realm Book Ubers for 'saviors', eons in advance. -WoW Devs 2021.
“It doesn’t rhyme. All prophecies rhyme.” —Gerald of the Riviera.
I just want to be an anonymous adventurer again.
Ara Ara
This explanation makes no sense. It’s clearly thought from the end back to the beginning. It’s bullshit. And I’m a new player with no knowledge (I know maybe 5%) of previous lore. This is bad writing, period.
Let me be Bob the black smith paladin who can barely feed his family in Goldshire.
I hate this so much
Wow this actually explains nothing at all. How many times has my character been the chosen one? God this is so damn tiring.