The story of World of Warcraft is always a heated point of contention. Whether you’re a hardcore lore fanatic or a casual player, there are always discussions about the story, its meaning and importance. It often gets heated and all sides have good arguments. But in many cases, this is overshadowed by people who neither play the current content nor really see the connections.

And at the Nether: It gets on my nerves.

There is a pretty big part of former players, who only experience the story of World of Warcraft “from cinematic to cinematic”. They follow news sites like MeinMMO, wowhead or similar sites, even though they don’t even play WoW anymore, but still have some kind of interest in the story.

This then leads to the various cinematics being experienced “in one piece” so to speak. The cinematic around Sylvanas awakening in Oribos is closely followed by the video that takes place after the fight against Anduin. The video of “Tyrande as Avatar of Elune” follows directly after the fight “Tyrande vs. Sylvanas” – even if there are many quests in between in World of Warcraft.

And of course, cinematics are always the polished finale to a quest series or battle. But the story in World of Warcraft is much more than that. There are usually long quest lines with some dialogues of the characters or a final boss fight itself has some small dialog passages that contribute to the atmosphere, mood and story.

So I can say from my own experience that the Anduin cinematic has a completely different effect when you simply watch it as a detached YouTube video or as the conclusion of a (rather long and hard) boss fight. The criticism that Arthas was simply “burned out” and only appears as a blue glowing cloud – that just falls apart when you’ve spent hours before with this very Arthas, who makes some pretty cool appearances in the Anduin fight as exactly the Lich King you knew him to be – with rune blade in hand and a huge army of undead.

I want to explicitly state that I don’t like all of Blizzard’s decisions either. I too dislike that some characters – such as Ve’nari – have been a bit shortchanged in Shadowlands. I, too, think that building up the dungeon master as a big baddie didn’t work out well because you had far too little interaction with him in patch 9.0 and 9.1. As a player, you simply learned too little about the Dungeon Master, which made it difficult to find him interesting. I think he would have worked much better as a standalone villain without having to put the story of the last 20 years around him into new context.

And yes, I too am bothered by this implied, “The jailer knows an even greater and worse evil for which we are all unprepared.” Yes, of course he knows it. Because all bad guys in WoW kind of always know that, and it’s been the narrative since Warcraft II. But that doesn’t directly make everything bad or “destroy the game” for me. Far too often I get the impression that Warcraft is held up to the story standards of a great book epic – when at heart it’s a PC game whose story is primarily meant to underpin the gameplay, not the other way around.

“Gameplay first” has always been the standard at Blizzard – the story is also subordinated to this.

Nevertheless, I’m tired. Justified criticism is all well and good, especially in a subject with such passionate fans as Warcraft. However, whenever the “usual suspects” come crawling out of their holes to first outright badmouth a new cinematic or cutscene without considering the context, it bothers me. It always feels like you want to talk to people about a book, but the other person thinks he’s absolutely capable of judging the book because he read 3 pages in the middle that made little sense to him and he doesn’t know the rest.

So for me, I have now also made the decision to simply discuss less about something like this, if I have the impression that someone only watches “from cinematic to cinematic”. It saves a lot of nerves and most importantly: it keeps the fun of such cinematics and the associated quests for me.

Or how do you guys see it?