Why Are Players so Mad at WoW's Story?

A bit over a week ago, patch 12.1.5 brought us a short update to the current storyline and a new instanced raid boss, the old god servant Kith'ix. Killing him is part of the story, and for once, Blizzard made the story mode version of the fight accessible from day one! Thumbs up for that.

Still, I didn't play on release day, but I immediately saw people complaining about the new story, before I'd even gotten to it myself. Now, this has actually been the case with almost every Midnight patch and I never found the complaints very convincing, but this was on another level in terms of sheer volume. I eventually ended up running across an accidental spoiler for the major plot point that triggered all of this, which just left me feeling confused, because it didn't sound so bad in principle. What exactly was wrong with it? I urged my husband to play through the story with me as soon as possible, so I could find out for myself.

The below will contain spoilers for the 12.1.5 story, so don't read on if you want to avoid those. There is more content to this post that is spoiler-free, so you can scroll down to the "Why does everyone seem to be so mad about WoW's story right now?" header and read on from there if you want.

To summarise the 12.1.5 story in a nutshell: With the defeat of Ula'tek, Kith'ix is free and the Aqir are swarming in Eversong and Zul'Aman. Lor'themar leads an army to deal with the problem and clashes with the Amani. Liadrin manages to keep everyone focused on the Aqir threat and an agreement is reached to send a small mixed strike force to the Coiled Isle. During the confrontation with Kith'ix, the darkness is overwhelming but Liadrin calls upon the light like she did in the Midnight expansion cinematic and manages to save the day, though it comes at the expense of her own life. Everyone is sad and Lor'themar and Zul'jarra agree to part peacefully to honour Liadrin's memory (though they still aren't friends or anything).

So far, so good. Maybe you don't like the idea of Liadrin dying in general, and I wouldn't fault you for that. WoW has a long history of killing off important characters in unsatisfying ways, and I do suspect this one will be added to the list by many, but it shouldn't be a problem on paper, right? Going out with a heroic sacrifice for the greater good is not a bad way to die, right?

The problem lies in the execution. Self-sacrifice used to be part of the paladin class's toolkit a long time ago, with Blessing of Sacrifice draining your health and Divine Intervention literally killing the player to save another one, but it's not something that's generally been reflected in the storytelling. When Tirion Fordring called upon the light on top of Icecrown Citadel to lay the smack down on Arthas, he seemed empowered by it, not drained. And when Liadrin empowers us during the Kith'ix fight, she grows bigger and bigger golden wings, which honestly just looks badass. You go, girl! I'm not saying being drained to death by the light doesn't make sense, just that based on more than twenty years of in-game lore, it's not exactly the natural thing to expect when you see someone pumping holy power like there's no tomorrow.

It took me watching this T&E video to learn that she apparently has some shouts during the fight that indicate that things may not be going so well for her, such as "Let my life sustain them!" but I'd argue that these are easy to miss in the mayhem of the melee and also don't sound like she's on the verge of dying. More importantly, the characters in-universe don't seem to get the idea either! You'd think that if Liadrain was giving off vibes of being on the verge of death, someone would immediately turn around after Kith'ix's defeat and ask whether she's OK.

Instead, the post-raid cinematic shows us everyone whooping and cheering obliviously while Liadrain quietly expires in the background. Honestly, I thought that was unintentionally comical, which is really unfortunate. Only afterwards do Lor'themar and Zul'jarra turn around and act all shocked. Heck, Lor'themar starts saying "Liadrin, you were a(mazing)" like he expects to be high-fiving her any moment. So yeah, I 100% get why people are memeing about that.

In addition, there's also the meta context of all of this happening in a minor patch, during a raid (where players will be wiping and getting back up again all the time, and there should be plenty of healers around to aid the injured). My understanding is that Kith'ix is quite the bad mofo in theory, but in game he's made to play second fiddle to Ula'tek and everything about him is wrapped within less than an hour of questing, so that only adds to the feeling of underwhelm.

All that said, it's one moment in a story that's otherwise solidly constructed (Liadrin gets quite the send-off in Silvermoon), so I don't feel like this is a sign of WoW's story being terrible or whatever other hyperbolic headlines are being thrown around right now. (Bellular made a video calling for Blizzard's writers to be fired in the title... I mean, come the fuck on.) Which brings us to the bigger question:

Why does everyone seem to be so mad about WoW's story right now?

Like I mentioned earlier, even before this patch I'd been seeing complaints about whatever the latest story update was for a while now. You'd think that Midnight had the worst story ever, which it really hasn't.

To take a step back for a moment, people have been complaining about WoW's story and lore for as long as I've been playing it. People will claim that the story was good back in Wrath of the Lich King for example, but you can go back through the archives of this very blog and find yours truly complaining in 2009 about how ridiculous Arthas was as a villain if you weren't predisposed to love him due to nostalgia for the RTS games. I just didn't think that made everything about the expansion terrible.

I do think there are other things that have changed over the years though:

1. The story's weaknesses lie in different areas

One thing I found interesting while reading some of the reddit threads in which people were complaining about the latest story and wistfully talking about the "good old days" of... usually Legion or earlier, was that they would say things like "I miss when cinematics were just cool". I can't quote a source for it, but Blizzard famously went on record back in the day saying that their storytelling was largely driven by the "rule of cool": someone would picture a character doing something epic, and then they'd write the story around making that thing happen.

The result were some admittedly pretty memorable cinematics, but often tied to story beats that made zero sense. To use Legion in specific as an example, Illidan yelling "I am my scars!" in The Rejection of the Gift is badass and definitely memorable, but the whole narrative around him suddenly being a chosen one was considered quite cringe even back then, and the way the Army of the Light are only mad at Illidan for killing a semi-divine being for all of ten seconds before moving on and seemingly forgetting about it is ridiculous. However, I can understand that for some people having these cool moments was more important than characters behaving in a believable way, and that fond memories of a neat cinematic are enough to paper over a lot of plot nonsense.

Since circa Dragonflight, there has been a shift towards more character-focused plots, with cinematics often used to show us NPCs talking about what they think and feel. I personally feel that this has made them more interesting and relatable... but I won't deny that it has resulted in fewer "exciting" cinematics.

I also wonder whether Blizzard has moved away from showing us specific characters kicking butt because they want the focus to be more on us as players doing heroic things. I do know I hated Tirion killstealing Arthas back in Wrath, and that wasn't even a cut scene yet, just a bit of in-game RP. But that's just me speculating. 

2. Blizzard has actively been drawing attention to the story

Blizzard's story may have had its issues in the past too, but they always promoted themselves as "gameplay first" and there was a widespread sense that people generally didn't play WoW for the story above all else. With the Worldsoul Saga promoting itself as... well, an epic saga, it makes sense that players are paying more attention to the story the devs are trying to tell and putting it under heavier scrutiny. So I'll say that this at least is something they kind of brought upon themselves by promising to be so much better about story.

3. Social media rewards outrage and clickbait

Like I said, people complaining about lore and story is almost as old as the game itself, but twenty years ago, that kind of stuff used to be confined to forums or niche blogs like this one. With social media, random complaints can gain much further reach, and algorithms and paid incentives actively reward anyone expressing outrage, which I think makes these complaints look much more widespread than they actually are.

With reddit in specific, I think WoW Forever has also caused a lot of cross-pollination between different WoW subreddits recently, and I think some Classic players are enjoying the opportunity to dunk on retail by upvoting complaints. I honestly don't think that we'd be seeing quite so many highly rated threads complaining about 12.1.5 otherwise, as /r/wow usually leans more positive towards the game as a whole. Again, I'm not saying there aren't valid issues for people to talk about, but for them to gain this much traction and to be blown up to be this massive sign of how retail WoW is over is definitely... abnormal.

As for me, I don't think that the current story is any worse than most of what came before. I don't think the Worldsoul Saga is entirely delivering on its promise of being much better at storytelling so far, but we're only about halfway through, so we'll see how things go in the second half. The one thing I do think the writers have gotten better at is general plot consistency and logic - I'm not claiming it's perfect, mind you, but you can usually tell where things are coming from instead of the random nonsense they used to inject in the past on occasion (hey, here's Jaina on a flying boat). However, I also agree that this has made for fewer "cool" and surprising moments for people to get excited about, so if that's something that's an issue for you, I do think that's fair. Let's just not pretend that WoW's storytelling having problems in general is a new thing.