Game > Lore

I read a lot. As far as WoW goes, some of what I’m read­ing are excel­lent WoW blogs, but I also fol­low stan­dards like WoW Insider and mmo-champion (whose cov­er­age of Wrath has been amaz­ing). I enjoy it all, but not all of the enjoy­ment I get is inten­tional. Peo­ple who com­plain about lore in WoW make me smile.

I guess that hav­ing a steam­punk motor­cy­cle means that Bliz­zard has com­pletely ruined… some­thing. I mean, I don’t know what that is, but as you can see in this Mas­sively arti­cle, it seems to be pretty bad. Read those comments!

For this group of peo­ple, I think that see­ing a motor­cy­cle in the game seems to have com­pletely destroyed their sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, or serves as the last straw in the ongo­ing destruc­tion of such. My ques­tion is, how have these peo­ple not been tripped up over any num­ber of other points before this one?

• Char­ac­ters carry around an entire armory’s worth of equip­ment in one bag. One light feather takes up exactly as much room as twenty feath­ers, while twenty-one feath­ers take up twice as much room as one feather. One feather also takes up as much room as a horse. Also: horses in back­packs. I mean, why does any­one have a sta­ble? I would think that there’d just see be one small silk pack in the back of the rancher’s house. You buy a horse, he reaches into the bag o’ horses.
• Weather fol­lows polit­i­cal bound­aries. It is rain­ing in Dust­wal­low Marsh, but not in the Bar­rens. Step left, rain. Step right, sunny. Rain. Sunny. Rain. Sunny. I’ll stick with the rain because hon­estly, I only visit the Bar­rens when I really need to.
• Too many pop cul­ture ref­er­ences to list, most of it good for a groan or chuckle. For exam­ple: every last dance. (And I am dis­ap­pointed that there hasn’t been a Rick Ast­ley dance. Cross­ing my fingers.)
• Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is weak. Nobody has a last name. Or, you know, fam­ily. Well, NPCs some­times do, but you don’t. Also, nobody’s named the same because there’s an invis­i­ble global nam­ing com­mit­tee. Oh, and your friends cease to exist fre­quently, but it’s cool because they’ll likely be back tomor­row, resum­ing the exact moment that they departed from. It’s also really easy to deduce someone’s guild affil­i­a­tion, even if they’re not wear­ing a tabard… because it’s spelled out in text float­ing above their head, along with their name. At least you never have to worry about for­get­ting your one-night-stand’s name in the morn­ing. “I had a great time last night… Silen­ceikeelyou. Call me!”
• You can whis­per in anyone’s ear from across continents/dimensions. Wait, I hear whis­pers all the time in real life, too. Never mind.
• A new fan­tasy race was recently intro­duced when their space­ship crashed into the planet, and that space­ship grew a new island or some­thing. Come on, peo­ple. On the fan­tasy whack-out scale space­ship > motor­cy­cle.
• The world is sta­tic. A game expe­ri­ence where noth­ing you do in game leaves a mark on the envi­ron­ment. You’ve been able to attune and go kill Onyxia for four years. There was a time in the life of this game where you could see Onyxia’s head hang­ing on the gates of Stormwind every all day, every week­end. Because Onyxia died all the time, the heroes brought her mon­strous head back to Stormwind all the time (in a back­pack), and the city con­grat­u­lated all the time by hang­ing her head out­side the front gates… yes, all the time. And yet (ancient spoiler warn­ing), there she was in Stormwind Keep! Glar­ing at you! Then being exposed as a dragon and whoosh­ing off to her dragon lair, wait­ing to be slain and hung on the gates! But no wait, five min­utes later in Stormwind keep: Glar­ing again! Also, not just Ony. Every enemy in the game. For this rea­son alone, I can’t imag­ine role­play­ing in MMOs as any­thing but very, very dif­fi­cult. “These trou­bled times remind me of when I killed the ban­dit lord Van Cleef, lo those many months ago–” “But Lor­dazure­fox, I just killed him last night, what are–” “OOC SHUT UP YOU’RE RUINING MY STORY!”

None of this con­cerns me in the slightest–that list is not a dig on the game. Hon­estly, I smile. Because it’s a game. A game for the play­ing. It’s pos­si­ble to have good sto­ries in games, but MMOs in par­tic­u­lar are dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to pull this off.

WoW hap­pens to be a very fun game that’s sto­ried as well as is rea­son­ably pos­si­ble. It’s cin­e­matic at times, but never a story. It’s a game, and Bliz­zard will always choose a bet­ter game over story integrity, because peo­ple aren’t pay­ing them a monthly fee for the story.