Why do I have to think about a forced season pass…
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I’m beyond astonished that a game 15 years in the making could be totally undone in a matter of months.
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Shadowlands + Blizzard concealing scummy elements in their workplace environment = RIP
Bit of a perfect storm scenario, one might say.
What gets me is that people are loudly clamouring for the next expansion to come around already, and I’m left here wondering what makes them think the label on the box will change the problems of today. Danuser will still be there, Kotick will likely prevail, and player retention is likely to remain the Alpha and Omega of systems design.
At least we still have AD. 
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But for how long would be my question…
For as long as we believe, brother.
For as long as we believe 
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I would imagine Zovaal as a Lucifer character,a benevolent character questioning why the system looks like it is and seeing ‘some’ great injustice in it and thus trying to rebel and rework the system that is in some way equality for all, but had far more draconian ideals to achieve that and thus was put into the Maw for his crimes and overtime, those ideals and belief that the system could improve eroded with time into something far more sinister.
That is a far better background than the bland ‘oh I just want to create an eternity for torment for chuckles sake’’
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There’s just so much potential, and the fact that even some dumb shmuck like me can see it makes it all so much more saddening.
Shadowlands, for all its whackiness, could have been okay from the hero’s perspective.
Absolutely.
Zovaal had a lot of potential, although his existence was never going to be a natural fit into the canon as it was. The way he was added not only altered lore retroactively, but altered the motives and mindsets of other characters in so doing. Kel’thuzad being one of the greater crimes in this regard.
What bothers me is that you can just see the outline of what could have been. The fading shadows of a potentially compelling character.
Just imagine if Zovaal saw the suffering of the Maw and decided it was too cruel a fate for anyone, naming himself the Jailor upon his banishment in sympathy with the souls lost to perpetual torment. What if he was a reluctant antagonist, wielding twisted magic because it was the only tool available to him.
Heck, what if his condemnation of the Maw was the thing that earned him a permanent stay in the first place? Not reality or the designs of the First Ones - but the Maw specifically. His peers being entirely too rigid to consider his perspective and - when revealed to us - flipping the script and showing us how the Eternal Ones aren’t quite the paragons they would have us believe.
Granted they’ve changed as of late, and that in itself might be worthwhile for Zovaal to explore, leaving him with the choice of either forgive past misdeeds and reunite with a repentant family - or go through with his plans, knowingly turning himself into the villain for what he perceives as a greater cause.
We might still have been to Zereth Mortis, but the road there would have been far more compelling - and even sympathetic to a degree. It might even blur the lines, leaving it unclear whether we’re really better off stopping Zovaal or not, given the innately sadistic nature of the realm he’d want to either destroy or reshape.
Or heck, go the totally opposite direction.
Have Zovaal be the embodiment of the evils tortured out of new arrivals to the Maw. As their souls were stripped from memory and cruelty, those traits would be absorbed into the aptly named Jailor - the one keeping those things under lock and key.
At that point you could at least point to his current deeds and go, “yeah it’s a bit out there, but what would you expect from the sum of the worst souls in creation.”
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They could have just used Hades as the template, but instead went with a mobile game BBEG.
Sounds like a Sha of Evil type situation.
I dig it.
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Nah, the few ounces of clarity to the agenda was to remake reality into something highly subjectively better, vauge enough that Sylvanas, up to her pointy ears in Zovaal’s plots could paint her own rosy picture of what to expect.
As Primus explains it, Zovaal was the first Arbiter but tried to game the system after finding flaws in the design, thus shaved, tatted and banished to diablo 3 while his sibling god-beings made a robot to replace him.
Presumably after ripping the sigil out of his chest in a cinematic cut for budgetary concerns.
Inscrutable precursors is an old old trope and an easy out. You can coast on that for decades if you’re a hack writer and/or can stretch the story out with one minor lore advancement every few years.
He was stuck on the afterlife’s biggest desk job for aeons. The tedium stifling his creativity is just about the only humanising bit of writing he has going for him.
GoT themesong plays
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I don’t even think that was a problem the first time around. Titans were obscure and enigmatic for a long, long time. But we’ve done that trope now. We coasted on hints and Titanforged keepers retelling things second-hand. And then we finally met the Titans themselves, in a climactic battle for the survival of the very cosmos.
And it was awesome!
And… now we’re retreading those same story beats, facing “Sargeras” absent the “Titans” of this story. Plus 3D printed totally-not-Titanforged being passed off as divine-like beings.
It’s hard to get excited for the tablescraps of a greater expansion, even with its remarkable Danuser paint job. 
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That’s a decent way to do it.
That’s the thing, though. Titan keepers and the like were obvious constructs even with their mortal flaws and it worked as an expression of something greater; the mysterious worldsouls, physical but spiritual beings, gods of the material universe as we know it.
Building bigger, even the gods are just souls in a machine and the same device that gives us life arbitrarily defines our eternity, from the lowliest to the mightiest. To someone of a certain disposition, this is all grand and humbling but to me, it’s a metaphysical slurry that makes most of what we do meaningless in the big picture.
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I suppose it just shows that some things are better left mysterious and up for speculation, rather than jumping through hoops to make it work in a convoluted way.
Being someone who likes writing as a hobby and who one day perhaps hopes to make his own fantasy novel, I wonder how I would handle gods and deities in my universe. Would I keep them as just being figments of imagination, or as actual beings. And if they are actual beings, do they directly appear before/interfere with mortals, or do they just remain in their own realm?
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Exactly this. Isn’t the Maw already an eternity of torment for whoever ends up there? Which is, currently, everybody who dies?
Not gonna lie, I personally never found the Titans all that interesting. To me it was probably the weakest part of the lore.
Because even while I like gnomes, I always found the whole thing about “life being robots”/Titan lore about constructs to be really dull.
This is just it but worse, because apparently the whole of existence itself is just robots.
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It’s the Titans without any of the things which made the Titans interesting - the idea of extremely powerful, aloof creators who see things according to their own narrow vision, is one with a lot of potential, at least as a concept. There’s a reason that “Titan Keeper who feels the world has deviated too much” was a staple boss fight right up to Legion.
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Here’s a lore question though.
If everything is robots, why is there even an afterlife in the first place? It’s specifically designed to be a life after death, which wouldn’t be needed if its just robots.
Even if we just take Azeroth too. Most of the original life on Azeroth was artificial constructs, the whole thing about being fleshy mortals was alot due to old god corruption.
How come Azeroth then has an afterlife like this?
Don’t worry i’m sure we’ll find out when we visit zereth lumen next expansion
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Oh please no. I’m sorry, I won’t ask more questions!