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Disclaimer : being a non-native english speaker, there might be some errors/imperfect turn of phrases in this post. Apologies in advance !
Being a MTG player for quite some time now, I've been fascinated by the plane of Innistrad ever since its release : a tormented plane, house to werewolves in the woods, vampires in their castles, necromancers in towns which were once filled with life, and all sorts of geists, all tormenting the living.
In the card game & the lore (if you're interested by it, I recommend checking out this post), the plane is in a state where said living are protected from the many theats of the plane by a legion of angels led by the godlike Avacyn, which eventually (and simply put) goes nuts and turns on them. Simply said, there is a lot of chaos everywhere, in a plane at war with itself.
But Gavony feels... dead. Sure, there are werewolves and skaabs everywhere, some encounters with villagers running away from dangers, but overall not the feeling of impending doom I expected from my readings, rather a feeling of flaccid gloom. Speaking to one of the NPCs in the town, you learn that Avacyn is no more, thus explaining why the plane is in this state of post-war. This choice of placing the action after the events of the card game + novels means that the player, instead of fighting a war to protect the inhabitants of the plane, is left to wander around and do stuff for the local protector, the witch Nani Oula, which is one the only 3 interesting npcs from the plane (the others being Gisa and Geralf, whom I'm glad to have seen in the game). I think that the plane would have gained a lot if we could participate in the events of the cards game!
Speaking of Nani Oula, let's get to the questline which is, quite franckly, boring. First of all, you get asked to capture the souls of an entire village in an amulet, by someone you don't know, who happens to be a witch. That's not something anyone would accept, yet your character doesn't even try to negociate or tell the witch to get lost or something. A big part of the storyline suffers from this, as you (the player) reluctantly do tasks given by the witch, without really knowing why you (the character) would even want to work for/with her in the first place (the whole idea of getting more powers and learning from the witch didn't work for me, since it doesn't ever happen --> I expected the witch to give me a new spell/an artifact/a piece of equipment/... , but I dont' remember it happening).
Even with this, Nani Oula is one of the only NPCs you'll get meaningful interactions with, where the plane has so much more to offer. What happened to Sorin Markov ? Arlinn Kord ? The Lunarch Inquisition ? The angels ?
Why can't we see remnants of the Eldrazi scourge, that didn't die after Emrakul got locked up in the moon ? Stuff that all factions would try to kill or, even better, run away from (and not giving a damn about the player, that would need to face off the monstruosities by him/herself) ?
Because I don't want to rant for pages and pages of thext, I'll end this with a few examples of things that could improve my experience regarding Gavony's storyline :
I really hope that this plane gets some more love! It's dark and sad and everything wants everyone dead, but it could be great where it is kinda dull right now.
Thanks for reading! 😊
Comments
I really feel that the story inside the game was poorly managed, I totally agree with your points and I hope they actually read this and change the way the internal story is presented in-game. What bugged me the most is the fact we are giving like no reasons on why we want or need to go to the different planes, what's our motivation? the intro "story" we got presented in the tutorial never got touched again during the campaing (atleast not at the point im currently at) and that doesnt help.
Overall I thinkg they need to remake the whole story and try to connect everything to give us reasons to travel to other planes, atleast something basic like "we lost memory, we got partial amnesia and we need to get back to our original plane while collecting artifacts that we allow us to return back home", idk.
People expects great storytelling when playing an MTG game, this is just lazy ... and its not that they need to make a story from scratch, they literally got like 27 years of material.
Reading your comment made me think about why we play the game, and I completely agree with you that, ata least for now, I'm not following a story or a narrative of any sort : the missions are there to give you places where you can enjoy the gameplay (which, leveling, performances and servors put aside, I enjoy so far), where the studio could use the 27 years of material, as you say ! :D
The story is bad because you can obviuously see what's going to happe before it happens. It's so obvious what's going to happen that giving the the conclusion wouldn't even be a spoiler...
Thanks for taking the time to post feedback - I definitely appreciate it!
Bear in mind, this is just the launch arc. Innistrad is an incredible plane, and there are many tales I have set aside for potential future content. I know our team would love to tell more stories here, so this feedback is very helpful!
Winter "Winwin" Mullenix
Senior Writer | Cryptic Studios
I wanted to reply to the original post.
I agree with some of the things you mention about Nani Oula. I found myself wondering why I was doing these seemingly evil things without any real questions. It actually comes up a couple times in the game where we go down this kind of road where we might actually be a “bad guy”, I think it might be a common thread?
That being said I think some of the other things you mentioned may need some more analysis. In the game right now we don't know where we are in the timeline, knowing that we should consider some of the things you mentioned as clues rather them missing from the game. The Devs have only said 2 things for sure 1 we are post mending and 2 we are pre Hour of devastation. I made a whole video about where I think we are, take a look if your interested that (Zoly421 on youtube). The summery of that is that I think we are currently in the first set of Innistrad.
At this point: Sorin Markov has created Avacyn and left her behind to protect the plane. I think she is currently stuck in the helvault with Griselbrand which would make the angels more aimless and only start to go insane a year later. We can't see any of the Eldrazi left behind because they are years arriving on Innistrad.
Gavony is the only atmosphere/story in the game that I liked. /Shrug
Playing a necromancer, my objection to the nani oula story was that they thought she had to coerce me into it. I was totally on-board from the word go. It's the other realms which made me think "Really? Why am i just volunteering to help here?" More dialogue options and perhaps some sort of character alignment based on choices might make the storyline more engaging, although its an ARPG, so deep, multifaceted story-telling isn't exactly a priority.
The only overarching story relevance tends to be the last chapter in each zone, where the red-haired planeswalker shows up and does something, which happens in most, but not all, of the chapters. (At least I don't recall her appearing in Benalia). We just sort of pop in and meddle. I assume that planeswalker will be relevant in future content, although the lack of a boss fight against her is a gaping hole in the current content.
I actually really like Gavony. Obviously I saw what was going to happen a mile away, but I REALLY like my Nani... Remember, this is not a big over arching story where you must protect the world from evil- its introducing a few characters here and there and letting you affect the people who live there.
I am really happy to see the vampire in town and can hardly wait to do stuff with her again- hoping for a vampire player character class...- knock knock- is this thing on? Black, White/Black or Red even.
Also I love the writing and music. I feel the writers have done a very good job here with characters themselves... I laughed my butt off when I hear my favorite character say, "They died of...natural causes...Pity."