WoW cannot do what Warhammer does because it wrote itself into a corner where the power scale and the player narrative completely contradict each other. In Warhammer, the universe is massive, but the stories stay grounded because they are about ordinary people most of the time. The setting is full of gods, chaos entities, and galaxy-ending threats, but the core focus is still soldiers in trenches, civilians trying to survive, or leaders making impossible choices. The scale is huge, but the perspective stays small and human.
WoW did the opposite. They inflated the threats to cosmic levels but kept writing the players as reality’s constant saviours. You cannot say the universe is vast and dangerous while the same heroes defeat world-devouring entities every expansion. It kills tension and scale. The player never feels irrelevant, so the threats never feel overwhelming.
And even then, WoW’s universe is far too small compared to Warhammer. Warhammer started with millions of worlds and ancient civilisations so vast that one planet means nothing. The universe was built to be incomprehensibly large from day one. WoW came from grounded sword and sorcery, one planet, small factions, and personal conflicts. They tried to retrofit cosmic scale onto that, but everything still revolves around Azeroth and the same small cast of characters.
You cannot stretch that structure forever without it breaking. Warhammer earned its scale and still grounds its stories in ordinary people. WoW inflated its threats but never expanded its world properly. That is why the setting feels bloated, small, and disconnected at the same time, and why it cannot balance cosmic storytelling with grounded narratives the way Warhammer does.
I think I’ve read once that the cosmic system of wow should be imagined as a 3d construction, which means it’s way bigger than we thought. That is an opportunity for a massive change of scale. The cosmic chart many people saw during shadowlands was a 2d projection of the 3d construction, if I’m not mistaken. There is actually a big opportunity to massively escalate wow’s story and make us feel like nobody’s by using the cosmic planes properly, and massively increasing their scope. The dark beyond that was constructed by the first ones could be like a tiny garden. For example the burning legion could have been a small army compared to the chaos realm of the game. The twisting nether could have just been a plane that was created randomly as a scar in the world construction of the dark beyond, that is small in size compared to the actual chaos realm. There are countless opportunities to aggressively change the scale of the story, if they have courage, but that’s also irreversible.
So my opinion in short: We either need an aggressive change of dimensions, or we need a big reset by using narrative tools such as time skips, world-ending events, etc-.
Again I disagree. It was pretty obvious for me what they were going for. And what nailed is the scene where he trusted her to inject him in the eye with the thing. It was played very casually showcasing that this isnt a one off either but something routine. Also all the lines where X character was literally saying “you are biased towards Jinx and letting slide her mistakes” even though he was ruthless towards anyone else even for the slightest hick up. That suggested either romance or daughter figure, romance got excluded pretty easily due to their past and when they met among other things, so it left father-daughter relationship. I feel like unless they reffered to each other as Dad and Daughter in every scene or a flash back sequence of Silco pushing her on a swing and helping her blow out birthday candles, it couldnt have been more explicit.
That sounds good in theory, but it will not work because WoW’s structure and writing cannot support that kind of scale escalation. You can redraw the cosmic chart in three dimensions or claim the universe is bigger than we thought, but it does nothing to fix the core problems. The foundation is still built around one planet, a small cast of characters, and players who win every time.
The real issue is not the visual map or lore concepts, it is the narrative structure. You cannot suddenly tell players they are insignificant nobodies when for years they have been positioned as world saviours, defeating gods and cosmic beings every patch. No matter how large the cosmic planes get, the writing loop will still revolve around player victories and everything happening through Azeroth.
Massively increasing the scope without resetting the narrative logic just makes the universe feel bloated and fake. You cannot claim the Dark Beyond or the First Ones’ constructions are vast beyond comprehension when the same group of characters will inevitably fight their way through it and win. It becomes spectacle without real consequence.
You cannot have Azeroth be the most important thing in existence and at the same time pretend the universe is infinite, indifferent, and the conflict never ends. The story cannot hold both ideas at once without collapsing under its own contradictions.
If your friends did not get it, then by definition, it was not obvious. Nothing about that was obvious because the story relies entirely on the audience filling in the emotional gaps themselves. You are listing subtext, fragments, and vague gestures, but if that was enough, people would not walk away confused.
Good storytelling does not depend on people decoding indirect lines or casually played medical scenes. It shows the emotional foundation directly. You do not need characters calling each other Dad and Daughter in every scene, but you do need more than scattered hints and assumptions for a relationship that is supposed to drive the entire character arc.
What you described is implication, not clarity. Emotional connections should not feel like puzzles for the audience to solve. They should resonate through shared history, development, and on-screen moments that naturally show the bond evolving. The fact that people walked away saying they do not get it means it was not built properly.
No, it could be the most important thing in the scope of the dark beyond. Remember that the dark beyond is just a construction of the first ones. I was advocating for the dark beyond to be like a “garden” in the real universe, if that makes sense.
If Azeroth is just one small piece of some tiny corner of reality, why does it even matter to these supposed cosmic forces that exist on a completely different scale? You cannot have it both ways. Either Azeroth is the centre of everything and the cosmic entities are focused on it for a reason, or the universe is so incomprehensibly large that what happens on one planet is irrelevant.
The more they inflate the universe, the less believable it is that all these cosmic forces are obsessed with the same world, the same characters, and the same conflicts. It turns the entire setting into nonsense. You cannot claim infinite scale and still have every major event revolve around one planet without breaking the story’s internal logic.
Our reality is the dark beyond. That is also what these timelines we know from the Bronze Dragonflight are connected to. What I’m advocating is that Azeroth is only important in the dark beyond, but comapred to the greater scale of the universe it’s a garden with energy, that some smaller entities want to devour, while for more powerful ones it’s beneath them. A lion is not catching mice usually. The thing is: Doing something like this is a massive risk. What could/would be better is to just reset the world of Azeroth with time skip or something like this, so we can go back to the roots of the game like in classic in a believable way.
I think the problem is that doing something like this risks that the game is not gonna feel like warcraft anymore in the slightest, especially with the current writing team at Blizzard. That’s why a big reset is probably the smartest choice, yet they can still use chronicles to “nerf” our power in the way I described here without doing this wh40k type of escalation
This is already more complicated than Warhammer and that is exactly the problem. Warhammer has massive scale with millions of worlds, ancient gods, and incomprehensible cosmic threats, but the structure is simple. Humanity fights to survive, chaos corrupts everything, and every faction is locked in constant war. You do not need layered timelines, different levels of reality, or overcomplicated explanations for why certain planets matter. The scale is huge, but the stakes are clear.
What you are describing with Azeroth, the Dark Beyond, the timelines, and greater layers of reality is already more convoluted than anything Warhammer does. It is complexity stacked on top of complexity with no payoff. You are turning the story into abstract nonsense that even hardcore players cannot follow, let alone care about.
The best large-scale settings stay grounded by keeping the motivations simple. Survival, power, corruption, loyalty, betrayal. That is why Warhammer works. The more you add extra cosmic layers and conditional logic to justify Azeroth’s importance or irrelevance at different scales, the more disconnected and bloated the setting becomes.
And why would these so-called lesser beings even care about Azeroth if she is just another lesser being in the greater cosmic structure? You are building circular logic to explain her importance while also claiming she is irrelevant at the same time. That is not good worldbuilding, that is overcomplication to cover weak narrative foundations.
They have made the very much wrong move when they started butchering major lore characters by putting them into raids as bosses and never since stopped. At some point, like the end of BfA, they were bound to just run out of things to do in this paradigm, and when they did, they started pulling new threats out of nowhere, that looked the same as before but were worse due to the bad or even absent writing behind them. SL and Dragonflight have proved it well, that they don’t have suitable foundation left, can’t write something genuinely good from scratch, and perhaps the worst, they lack the guts to point at the grittier, heavier themes in the factions’ daily life. Be it humans recovering after the pyrrhic victory in the Fourth War, orcs contemplating how much of their bloodlust is the demonic legacy, elves still seeking vengeance for Teldrassil or any other race, the fear to show a conflict where more than one side is in the right shows. And it can’t last forever without being ridiculous, just like what we see in the Arathi questline.
The story is atrocious, and the main focus characters are walking tickboxes, and there is blatant biased politics stemming from USA being paraded around.
I miss the focus of World of Warcraft, and dislike the focus of World of Wokecraft.
Honestly, I am just tired of Americans taking European, Asian, and African culture, putting it in a blender, grinding it into corporate paste, and calling it diversity like it means anything.
Well, the payoff is that it’s a triage to “nerf” the azerothians in the world building and make them feel irrelevant again, so the story can be more grounded and more tense. What I described being hard to understand and abstract is exactly the point, because I think the cosmic powers need to be something abstract again like warcraft until MoP. I think we should also simply lose more in general in raids to build tension, and we should be pushed more into a corner in the story. What was done to wow’s world building in shadowlands was extremely problematic and unhealthy. Else, as said, resets, making a “wow2”, etc. is a good way of dealing with this problem too. Else they can have a 100-1000 years timeskip, where our current characters are legendary heroes of a distant past, and then also reshuffle a bit how our universe works generally by adding a bit of chaos and complexities, so it doesn’t become boring or predictable.
But what does that actually do for the player experience? You can say it nerfs the Azerothians in the lore, but unless that translates to gameplay or meaningful story structure, it is just abstract worldbuilding with no real impact. Players do not feel irrelevant just because the lore says they are. They feel irrelevant when the world treats their actions as meaningless, and most people are not playing for that.
Adding chaos, complexities, or a time skip sounds impressive, but it does nothing for the core problem unless the storytelling structure changes. You can reshape the universe all you want, but if the players still win every raid, defeat every god, and the gameplay loop never reflects tension or loss, it is all cosmetic.
And if you are talking about a time skip of hundreds of millions of years to match that cosmic scale, then it is no longer World of Warcraft. You are wiping the board entirely. New world, new races, new rules. The characters, history, and identity of the setting are erased at that point. That is not escalation or evolution, that is ending the current franchise and replacing it with something else under the same name. It might work as a clean slate, but it will not fix the structural problems of the existing game. It replaces them with something entirely different.
My point is that I want to make the cosmology of the game again something that is abstract and hard to understand. What you criticize is my intention. I think these cosmic entities need to feel mysterious and “larger than life” to be interesting.
But it never was. The cosmology in Warcraft was never abstract or hard to understand. The cosmology had a very real impact on the day to day lives of people and set things in motion.
It absolutely was before Blizzard released this stupid cosmic chart, or made Elune speak through Tyrande. My suggestion tries to revert that damage they’ve done in Shadowlands, where they made these abstract cosmic entities concrete.
This is like saying Christianity is hard to understand because God spoke through Moses. It is not. That is normal in mythology. Every belief system has its own cosmology, but what they do not do is overcomplicate things to the point where it becomes stupid.
A proper cosmology is supposed to enhance the world, not bury it under layers of contradictions. In Warcraft, the cosmology originally had a direct impact on the world. It shaped the magic, the enemies, the races, and the atmosphere. It was simple, clear, and rooted in the world people actually played in.
The moment the cosmology turns into abstract nonsense with endless layers of reality stacked on top of itself, it stops serving the world and starts undermining it. Complexity for the sake of complexity does not create mystery, it creates a mess.
It does create mystery, because it turns something abstract again, that was made concrete in Shadowlands, by putting a larger frame around it. The only way to triage this is by making it more complex. You cannot really make it simpler, if the intention is to fix this.