Do any of you have Gripes or Nitpicks about Wynncraft's Story?

Hey again, it's~ ya~ boy~

Now despite my extensive history with Wynncraft, I actually know very little about the lore. I like a lot of the story elements, like the history of the corruption war. I get to see that with my own eyes and I get immersed in this world. I love it when stories SHOW YOU rather then TELLING you something, and this part of the game in particular displays this wonderfully.

But in some cases, some of the writing just feels... off? And I don't mean like Lari being dumb or whatever. I mean like things that are way too similar yet disconnected without any explaination. These are nothing more than nitpicks, and shouldn't be seen as anything else. I am not a writer, I just feel that two things in particular are confusing.

1. The Void
Specifically, the Location of the Void, and the Void shown off in TNA, are specifically said to be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PLACES. This baffled me when I found out about this. The color of the VOID holes in VOID valley, and a secret discovery talking about the VOID all seem to connect to the same place right below Ahmsord.

I think the void is a neat concept. Worlds that are all connected by one large gap, like an ocean of nothingness, filled with everything time forgot.

So it confused me when I found out that the TNA void is supposed to be completely different. Sure, they have differences. TNA is an archipelago of anomalies, while the void below ahmsord is a literal empty void. But the TNA void should still be IN THE VOID, as in the location, no? That's the whole point of the Anomaly itself, to rip open holes in reality to let things from the Realm of Darkness in. That's why it's situated in the Silent Expanse. You could explain this by just saying "Oh, well the TNA void is just another realm". Okay, but then why hasn't there been any exposition up to this point about it? Like, at least a few stray lines of dialogue from a Silverbull Raid guy telling you "oh this is a different dimension, we just call it the void for simplicity" would be all you need, or at most, a Questline detailing the location.

On top of this, I feel it's a missed oppertunity to not have these things be connected because of a growing complaint by players, being that there is no fast travel from Ahmsord to Lutho. If these two were connected, it'd be a fun way to connect these two. Like maybe have a silly sidequest about someone wanting to explore the Void in Ahmsord, and we go on this silly journey that quickly gets dark when we accidentally reach the part of the Void that contains TNA, and we then end up in Lutho. That'd just be a neat quest that people could enjoy!

2. Garaheth
This one didn't confuse me, but I feel like it could confuse some players, so I'm putting it here.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Garaheth lies in a domain different from the Nether, dispite being a massive demon very similar to that of Annihilation. Besides being very similar to the previous remark about the two different voids; What are the chances that TWO DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS, both covered in FIRE, and have GIANT FREAKING DEMONS, DON'T CONNECT IN ANY WAY

"Oh, well maybe some demons just dimension hopped from the nether to this new one that the Doguns worship, or vice verse!"


WELL THEN MAYBE TELL US ABOUT THAT FIRST! RAWGHHH!!!!!!

I am of course being theatrical for the sake of comedy, but these two things genuinly confuse me.

Is there anything that confuses you about the story? I'm genuinly curious to know. I'd even like to hear a thing or two about the lore if I got things wrong.

Love you!

 

The reason there's some issues is because of the age of the server. The old stuff isn't canon anymore and is slowly being replaced, but a player isn't aware of what's deprecated necessarily. Wynncraft's lore was initially just a cobbled together quilt of what each questmaker felt was the coolest fantasy concept. There was really a serious effort to create a proper world.

 

The issue here is the fact the Ahmsord region is called 'the void', as it does not actually take place in the Void-- as nothing could take place in the Void. The Void is something you can infinitely approach, but never actually come into contact with, as it just ... isn't. It is not anything. It's the conceptual "nothing" that would exist where reality isn't.
These two regions are related, but they're not the same location. The Ahms Void is part of the Physical Plane, and it's debris that have been splintered off from the modern day Sky Islands. These are chunks of physical existence approaching the void, creating lonely islands that have been separated from the rest of our reality. On the other hand, The Archipelago is on "the other side", being in The Realm of Darkness. The TNA raid is far closer to the Void than the Ahms Region. These chunks of The Realm of Darkness' reality are too far away from the "mainland" to reach, and are comprised of the pieces of our reality that were melon-balled out and taken by The Nameless, leaving Void Holes.

Absolute nothingness cannot exist in our reality, so when the Void interacts with the Physical Plane, it's forced to morph into /something/. That's how you get stuff like Void Essence and Intangible Intangibility.
On the flipside, when absolute nothingness interacts with the reality of The Realm of Darkness, it turns into creatures (such as Little Ones).

Void Holes are named such because they're gaps where reality isn't anymore. It's where pieces of our reality were cut out by The Nameless, leaving behind a gap where The Void is. These teleport you because existence is so abhorrently confused by having this vacuum in it that it attempts to fold itself like origami to fill the vacancy, connecting them like wormholes.

The 'other realm' is The Realm of Darkness. It's motherfucking Dern!!

Just because the Ahmsord Void is technically "closer" to one another than the majority of our reality is to The Archipelago, there's still an infinite distance between them, and theyre part of separate realities entirely.

"The Nether" doesn't exist. Period. It's not a part of Wynncraft's lore.
Garaheth's prison is not a realm, it's at most a little pocket dimension made to imprison him specifically. It's not where Demons originate from, and it's not Garaheth's home either.

I can't tell you how Demons form I don't think, because I'm pretty sure that lore is not public yet. What I can tell you though is they are NOT Devils.
Devils form from the ongoing conflict of the Realm of Light and the Realm of Dark, being born from the otherworldly hate and acts of conflict. They form in The Realm of War, the reality on the other side of the Portal in the Roots of Corruption. Unlike Demons which are known to speak, have identities, and take on various forms depending on what they are a Demon of, Devils are always humanoid, are made of flesh and bone, and experience nothing but the rawest, purest hate for all things. Their single and only ambition is destruction.

Almost all the things I've talked about in this response are in game in some form. The only one that I'm pretty sure isn't is why Void Holes are called Void Holes, which is instead documented on the official wiki.

 

To be fair, I don't understand why Lari had to be an outright pacifist, but she does get pissed in a certain quest (idk if I can use inline spoilers) but she does settle down later on. Seeing as this could've saved Dullahan, and possibly the decay, well - what the heck happens next? Sure, we defeated the parasite that plagued Orphion (and we do give him pats as well :3) but then again, I'm not sure if raids can affect the story in one way.

I could say something about Fruma, but that's for the future

 

There are a lot of little issues like that which sort of add up in my eyes to get a bit annoying. Item lores are, well, random and most of them describe things that sound really cool but don't actually matter. An ancient hero or some giant battle or a great ruler or- none of it comes up again, none of it matters. The handful of lores that do actually fit into a consistent narrative usually aren't even something that's in the game, and if they are they usually add very little. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it makes reading them feel pointless. Why am I reading what effectively amounts to a three sentence creative writing exercise? The entirety of Bob's story and the timeline concerning that and villagers is just... look, someone needs to explain a lot of stuff there to make it make sense. literally everything having to do with the magic macguf- meteors, the magic meteors is just kind of a mess. There are still too many links to the old "joke" lore before they decided to be serious, where they've either tried to work around it or to incorporate it in ways that just feels off.

I don't want to sound negative here; Wynncraft is a great game, with great mechanics, quests, and even a good story. I think it was better before the Corruption became represented by an edgy kids-show villain and started being second-fiddle to the Darkness which is mechanically the same and- look, here I am complaining again. Not because it's bad, but because it's so close to really good that it hurts when stuff like that comes between it and its potential. It has bloat. It has ideas that weren't fully fleshed out or seamlessly tied into everything else before jumping to a new one It feels like a salad with too many ingredients. A book where the author just couldn't pare down their ideas. A webcomic where the creator wanted to include every fun new interest they developed. A running story that added too many new characters and gimmicks and adventures over the years that it lost a bit of the plot. You still enjoy the story. You still appreciate plot points, clever twists, well-written characters, interesting stories, drama, intrigue, relationships and politics and lore. But it isn't a story that changes how you look at things. It won't win your mental gold medal for storytelling. Not because it's bad, but just because lots of small, individual good things don't add together into one great whole.

 

Canonically the raids happen and are completed.

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Bak'al has been around forever, I don't get why you're acting like he's some modern shoe-horned in character.
And Darkness and Corruption are not mechanically the same at all. They don't work the same in universe and the creatures you combat are nowhere near the same.



Also "bloat" is inevitable. Maybe you forget this is an MMORPG. We have to explore a bunch of aspects of the world because we have to provide a bunch of content for the playerbase. We can't just have one story, open and shut, and call it done. Look at any other MMORPG's story - or even just similar games like D&D that need to explore every bit of their worlds by the nature of how the game works - and you'll see the same thing.

 

Bak'al still feels new to me, but I guess he has been around for a while now. I do stand by what I said though; I personally found the Corruption far more interesting and compelling as more of a force of nature, rather than the army of some edgy dude. As soon as it is controlled and ordered around by someone of human intelligence and stability, it stops feeling chaotic and unique and just kind of generic evil™.

As for them not behaving the same, that really doesn't come across in-game. We're repeatedly told they're different and then we see the Corruption spreading from another dimension to new areas and making them evil... and then we see the Darkness spreading from another dimension to new areas and making them evil. Both spread through a corrupting or tainting influence. Both oppose the Light because evil gotta evil I guess. The Darkness has the Dern Beast while the Corruption has Bak'al... who works with the Dern Beast to spread evil™. Like, I get that there's supposed to be lore reasons why the Corruption is working with the Darkness, but all it really does is remind me how they're basically the same thing but one is the spicy hot flavor and the other is blackberry. The only difference is that the Darkness actually twists and corrupts things while the Corruption just makes a bunch of nether mobs spawn in and gives you more reasons to need to tell people that the Nether isn't canon. There are literally blazes and magma cubes just hangin' out. And yes, the creatures are mechanically and visually different, but if you just recolored all of them and maybe added a bunch of eyes to the neth- Corruption mobs, no one would bat an eye if you just merged the two evils together.

And yeah, bloat is bound to happen. It's a fact of the genre, but it doesn't mean I like it, particularly when it's done without fully integrating the new system/lore/story/mechanic/character with everything else. I don't object to lots of content, even if it doesn't go into the full depth of what a singleplayer RPG might do. My issue is just that the team adds something, adds important lore on it, and then mostly drops it to move onto something else. Meteors, Demons, the Four Magical Macguffin stones (which I guess are meteors again), Fallen Factory, Bob, the Twains (I guess they keep getting new lore in reworks of old quests, which I appreciate), Wybels, Wocs, Gavel politics, Wynn politics, Wynnexcavation, Dead Island, the Old Empire, assorted item lore events and people. All are either one-offs that are never touched on again or something that teases/promises so much more lore than is ever given to you. And yeah, obviously not everything can or should be explained in full or given more screentime, but when there's so many things that seem really, really important, it just makes it hard to care about the other things that are. There are multiple alien races with space travel capabilities that are here, possibly observing magical meteors of incredible power. It's really hard to care about some war between two factions I know basically nothing about when that's a thing.

Again I think they're all pretty minor nitpicks, individually, but they add up in my opinion by just making the world feel less fleshed out than it actually is. It teases and promises so much, which I know it absolutely is capable of delivering. You guys do a fantastic job on the stuff you do include (some of the dialogue in older quests excepted perhaps). It just really feels like a lot of stuff doesn't get the screentime it needs or deserves.


EDIT: I'd like to thank autocorrect for all of the wonderful help it did to make my post even more nonsensical and unintelligible than it already was.

 

wynn doesn't really.. have an interconnected story yet. it is a big problem, it means a lot of big worldbuilding details are left for the player to find in sidequests and discoveries, instead of there being a basic plot you can follow that introduces you to stuff in a better way. we also suffer from the fact that, up until recently, there hasn't been much of a grand plan to join everything together, most of the game is just what some quest designer in 2014 thought would be cool. we acknowledge that this is a problem, and we're trying to avoid and fix our past mistakes.

Bak'al is super old. he's genuinely been a planned character since Gavel, he shows up in one of the gavel teasers.

i think youre misunderstanding bak'al's level of control over the corruption? its kind of our fault for not making it clearer. he is not in control of all the corrupteds. hell, he isn't really in control of any of them ever. the corrupteds are mindless and only want to kill and destroy life. when he attacks with an army, its less like him leading them into battle with a big strategy planned out and all, and more like those times when you messed around in Creative Mode and spawned a bunch of zombies in a village to attack the villagers. (was i the only one who did that?) the zombies dont have some kind of big goal or whatever, they just want to senselessly kill the villagers. you cant order them around, hell, if you let them (by exiting creative mode) they'll attack you too!

on the other hand, Orphion, the beast of Light, has the capability to control (at least to some extent?) creatures of Light on the physical plane (see Messengers from Beyond). it can be assumed that the dark beast possesses this capability too. bak'al could never do something like this. for this reason, it is also false to say that the corruption is working with the darkness. bak'al may be, but corruption as a force is not. it cannot be controlled.

i do sort of agree with the sentiment that corruption and darkness are too visually similar but to an extent it's intentional. being the end result of light and dark mixing together, it takes elements from the designs of both forces. the Cinderblossoms in the Roots of Corruption resemble things you may find in an area influenced by Light, while stuff like Burning Irises are a lot more similar to things you'd find in areas influenced by Dark.

these are super old mobs and in 2.1 we've made efforts to move them away from that. a blaze mob once called Nether God is now called Hellblaze God. Blazes are now Blazing Constructs. Magma Cubes are now Corrupted Globules. Devils have also been introduced as a new type of Corruption enemy. i'd argue the issue you're talking about here is virtually gone already.

 

What Sam said about Bak'al. He isn't representing corruption, he's just a corrupted guy.

 

I'm on my phone which is in a perpetual state of having a stroke so I'm not even gonna try quoting parts of that individually.

It definitely has gotten a lot better over time. I also don't think it's necessary to have a full story through quests and discoveries and traditional, direct storytelling. I've definitely said this before but I'm a huge fan of how Dark Souls does it; using item descriptions, environmental storytelling, and comments from NPCs flesh out the world and do a lot of the heavy lifting of storytelling, but in a way that is deliberately designed to leave things to up to interpretation. I don't think that would work as well for a story-driven MMORPG (although it might honestly); I just mean to clarify that I don't think not having a full story available to the player is necessarily an issue. It's just how disconnected the parts of it we have are and how little a lot of what we have matters, which, as you said, comes from over a decade (I feel old) of development by a large number of people who didn't always have a guiding vision or expectation that this would eventually shift from a funny concept to become a more serious, story-driven game with complex lore in 2025. It's genuinely impressive how well that shift in tone has actually gone.

My big issues with the Corruption/Darkness is just that both kind of feel like different flavors of generic world-corrupting evil from how they're presented. I also have an issue with how the big bad Corruption we spent the first 40 or so levels being shown as the big bad of the story suddenly just stop mattering in the story halfway through. There are exactly 5 quests (unless I missed one which I very well might have because I am an idiot) after level 45 that deal with the corruption in any major way other than to express how it's just a consequence of the bigger issue of the Realm War.

Yeah, I definitely have a big issue with how Bak'al is portrayed. You're first exposed to him in secret discoveries commanding corrupted armies to kill people. You then see him serving the Dark Beast, initially by fighting with Lari and then directly by the secret discovery. You then see him command you directly in AHC. All of this builds him being a direct, controlling force of the Corruption. -To sort of break character for a second, a lot of my misconceptions about lore aren't actually misconceptions (and I only call it the Nether to bug Deusphage), they're just me making a comment on how vague or easily misintepretable something is- That was genuine however; I thought he was a controlling force of the Corruption. So thank you for correcting that, but that really does need to be fixed. On a less important funnier note, I still think of him as a new part of the story even if he has been around since Gavel (seriously?!).

Again, I want to be clear that I don't hate the story or how it's conveyed or anything like that. On the contrary I think it's pretty darn good, even ignoring the fact that it was somehow done in Minecraft. It just bothers me to see it not live up to its full potential and to have these little issues that prevent it from really hitting as hard as it could.

And thanks again to autocorrect for all of its "help" in writing this.

 

Fair enough

 

I kinda just assumed the stuff on the other side of the portal was supposed to be "The Nether", and I completely forgot about the Realm of War. And I also guess I didn't quite understand that the void is supposed to be INFINITE, but getting to learn about it firsthand from a professional is facinatingly cool!!! *Guitar riff*