So, about narrative: WoW, Arcane and Baldur's Gate 3

Usually, I stay away from these kind of posts cuz you tend to get a lot of corpo white knights defending their favorite brand AND, worse of all, it's like words on the wind, it don't reach the ears its suppose to reach, the so famously called "we are hearing" from Blizzard, but due to the last expansions (which I have a lot of concerns about the suits influences vs what the dev team needs/wants to do) being more transparent and high ups really trying the best to hear their audience, I think I should address what makes me love World of Warcraft more than most games and what keeps me bringing back even when I dislike the state of the company that crafts (haha) it.

To the point, what I think World of Warcraft past 2 expansions, especially narrative-wise, can learn from Baldur's Gate 3 and Arcane. It's two simple things that shouldn't even be said, but apparently the quiet part needs to be said out loud a lot more in the last decade or so: Don't think yourself so smart that you insist on a bad narrative/giga brain theorycrafting which is disruptive for the story you're trying to tell (Shadowlands and a bit of Battle for Azeroth) but also don't offend your audience's intelligence with dumb, not-even-kids-needs-this-much-chewed-over explanations and expositions about the story and characters (Dragonflight).

Arcane is a TV show (well, a streaming service show, whatever), Baldur's Gate is a cRPG from a company that has a lot more reins on what they want to develop and freedom on releasing window, BUT they have gold lessons for anyone who's willing to put 2 and 2 together, lessons in how to build your main story while developing characters feelings, understanding of the world, their place in everything, etc... IN THREE ACTS, look at that, Blizzard, you cut a large patch a couple of years ago and now your expansions have 3 major acts (.0 .1 and .2). About Baldur's Gate, I'll be a lot more concise and direct: Look at the scale of that game and look how crispy it plays out, how Larian connects with their community and have a big weight on QA, which you know, no matter how you blindly love warcraft, is very lacking in the last few patches. "Larian did 3 years of Early Access, man, that's not a fair comparison to a multi dollar company like Blizzard"; We help Blizzard ALPHA test their expansions, we give feedback from early beta that doesn't make to the game til the last moment of the expansion, like Awaken the Machine or many other features I can't think off on the top of my head while writing this essay. We're beyond the joke of beta testing the game on the release of each patch, we are alpha testing it with game breaking bugs that not even early versions of BG3 EA had.

All that said, I want to end on a positive note, though: I'm very sure that there are A LOT of talents at blizzard that know these things and can't do jack shit to change cuz they are just an unheard voice over the "kashings" Gallywixes above them are listening to. This is not a message of hate, I'm not here to hate on the devs and on their passion for what they are build, that the exact opposite of my message here: I know you want to do better, you know you can do better and I sympathize with your frustration, but we also deserve more, deserve better, as consumers of the product you love developing and we love playing. Don't give in to despair of "it is what it is", unite, make your voices louder and louder to bother these suits and for us to hear it too and join you. The WoW community, devs and players, deserve a game on the highest standards cuz we have no lack of talents nor passion that differs us from Larian and Arcane.

We can do better if only you make the voice of passion lead this 20 years old project again. Not the kind of passion that can be exploited to make more money, but one that can be "exploited" to give satisfaction to both players and developers.

(jeez, sorry for the long rant. TLDR; We trust you to do better, so have the courage to do better.)