The YouTuber and streamer Bellular critiques the WoW story. He considers the writers incompetent – and sees them as a danger to the Warcraft franchise.
The latest cinematic from World of Warcraft takes place after the battle against the Jailer. At least this chapter concerning this antagonist ends here, although there are still a few more story chapters and cinematics featuring other characters to come.
For many content creators, this is the right time to take stock of the Shadowlands and Blizzard’s storytelling of recent years. Bellular also assesses the situation – especially with the final cinematic of the Jailer.
Who is Bellular? Bellular has been following World of Warcraft (and other MMORPGs) for many years. He regularly presents analyses regarding the game’s story, but often also provides insights into the popularity of features and draws conclusions about player counts. In one of his latest videos, he examines the storytelling of Battle for Azeroth and the Shadowlands.
“Zovaal is a parasitic villain”
Bellular begins the video right away with the statement that Zovaal – the Jailer – is a parasitic villain. This means he only functions because he utilizes already existing story elements, and the lore of the past 20 years has been reframed in a new context so that it all makes sense that Zovaal is the evil mastermind behind most incidents in the Warcraft cosmos.
A lot of the lore here is actually really cool and could have worked really well, but it was told so terribly in the game that the reality of the storytelling has killed any chance that this lore might work.
In his view, Blizzard is not that bad at inventing stories – but the way it is told in the game is simply poor. Players find it hard to access, and to Bellular, it seems that the developers have such a huge construct in mind that they cannot articulate in appropriate story content in the game.
37 Lines of the Jailer – He has no character
One of Bellular’s biggest criticisms is the lack of “build-up” for the Jailer. He is insufficiently integrated into the story, and essentially there is simply too little interaction with him to either understand or truly fear him.
Especially bitter: Bellular has counted all voice lines of the Jailer and finds just 37 lines between Patch 9.0 and Patch 9.1. This means the Jailer has far less spoken text than, for example, other, much less important side characters that players meet in the Shadowlands.
Therefore, Bellular does not believe that Shadowlands should really consist of only 3 content units, even if Blizzard has been saying for a while that this was always the plan. Bellular sees it differently:
Between Patch 9.0 and Patch 9.1, Zovaal had roughly 37 lines of dialogue, most of which were very short. It is never the truth that this was what they planned from the start. Because if this is really ‘incredible drama in 3 acts’ as they planned, then they should not have jobs anymore. Because no one would deliver such poor work.
So I’m being mild here and saying: They lie when they claim that Shadowlands went exactly as planned. They just may not be allowed to tell the truth, because that’s how Blizzard operates.
Within the WoW community, many players believe that this “3-act story” from Blizzard is a flat-out lie. Many justify this with the fact that some storylines completely run into the sand and built-up characters suddenly play no role anymore – like Ve’nari. Many expected new storylines here, after Ve’nari played a relatively large role in Patch 9.0 and 9.1, but ultimately that did not come to pass.
The developers are slowly but surely killing Warcraft
Normally, Bellular strives for fairly neutral analyses, but in this video, a lot of his own opinion flows in – and a lot of emotion as well. One of his most striking sentences is:
This must have literally been written by donkeys with an IQ of 2, because [the story] doesn’t hold up against even the simplest tests. […]
I have never seen such lousy storytelling in all the years I have observed various media.
At the end, however, Bellular becomes serious again and explains how this style of storytelling harms the Warcraft universe and its fanbase in the long run. Because if the story continues to be told like this, Bellular believes it will damage and destroy the emotional connection of players to Warcraft in the long term:
All I know is that the end result is: They are killing Warcraft. They are not killing World of Warcraft – they are killing Warcraft. If I were Mike Ybarra, if I were any senior person at Activision, I would see this as an existential threat to the value that can be provided to shareholders.
Because this is cutting the emotional connections that people have with Warcraft. And these emotional connections can be monetized. These emotional connections brought them a subscription fee every month and additional microtransactions in the shop. The financial damage being done here is very real. […] This cannot go on like this.
Do you share Bellular’s opinion? Are you also so disappointed with the WoW story of recent years? Or do you see it completely differently and find the story’s progression good?
