I agree with pretty much your whole post. I would absolutely trust the current Dragonflight team to do a world revamp, and I mean it. They would likely remove the cringeworthy Cataclysm stuff (like Rambo of Redrigde and CSI: Westfall that you mentioned) and fill the world with small-scale heartfelt stories that actually fit the tone of the zone they’re in.
The main storyline is indeed where most of the bad is concentrated in, and it feels like a direction imposed from above. I wouldn’t necessarily blame Danuser alone for it, it’s just likely to me that Executive Meddling hit the main storyline the hardest, and dumbed it down the most, while the side quests escaped too much executive attention and writers who actually care about the world were given more free rein. Some compared the Dragonflight side quests to roleplayers putting their own RP campaigns into the game, in a good way.
And even then, even at its worst, the main storyline of Dragonflight isn’t a Shadowlands level crime against writing. It’s just… eh. “Champion, go babysit two manchildren unfit to lead while we discover that Titans bad, Void good!” is still a far cry from “I’m shocked, shocked that the man who rules from an evil-looking spiked citadel, wields domination magic, and wants to obliterate all creation is a bad guy! Also the one who burned Teldrassil wasn’t me, it was my evil twin the evil half of my soul! I’m going to be good now and deny you all the satisfaction of killing me and avenging your loved ones!”
Arthas watching in wisp form as Sylvanas is given a redemption arc after Gilneas, Hillsbrad, the Plaguelands, Teldrassil, Wrathgate (up in the air, her involvement changes monthly):
I still take psychic damage any time I remember that Uther, Jaina, Anduin and everyone but Sylvanas who actually knew Arthas just stood around AFK whilst she monologued at the tortured soul of a young adult finally getting to know peace after being turned into the LK and then Frostmourne 2.0.
I genuinely don’t think they’re trying to do a story where we end up siding with the Void against the Titans.
Rather, I think they’ve got people on the dev team that subscibe to the idea that morally gray = good writing, which results in the constant stream of side lore about questionable Titan motives and benefits of the Void. After all, purely good guys and purely bad guys are bad storyby default, right?
What I think is far more plausible (if the leak is true) is that Iridikron will come to Avaloren, meet up with the evil guys there and we’ll have go there and fight them before they finish their evil plan.
I’m hoping that after the feedback from DF, they’ll try to involve the factions more into it, perhaps giving us unique bases similar to Broken Isles or Pandaria. Giving gryphons and wyverns dragonriding could also serve towards this, by having one mount customization for Horde and one for Alliance.
And, best case scenario would be continuation of some stories on Azeroth. BfA gave us changed zones and so did Slands with Tirisfal. Even if we don’t have old world as the main focus, it can still be involved
I truly wish we could get off the morally grey train caused by GoT for all the wrong reasons.
Morally Grey works because the character’s in GoT have their set of ethics and morals that they try to stick too regardless of the utter bleakness of the world of Westeros that constantly tries to chew them up and spit them out for sticking to their ethical and moral values.
It was never about how everything is and must be inherently grey in its moral and ethical definition. Media literacy and its destruction has had disastrous consequences for humanity.
There’s already an establishment of the Titans being absolute spoons, Algalon is a good example. How many planets have they pre-emptively razed? There’s definitely a narrative you could tell about the Titans cracking nuts with sledgehammers or even being ambivalent/uncaring to the people they helped ‘raise’.
But trying to do this through showing “the void is good actually” despite it being shown to never really result in anything good unless you have a fetish for the David Cronenberg Body Horror genre and think insanity is a cute quirk.
I’m just so busy at the moment. Having to do actual adult things.
Wasn’t that what they also said in one of the dev interviews (I think, the one with French interview that everyone clowned on for… reasons), that basically each dev would have an idea and the response (from higher ups at least?) was that ‘sure, go for it, add it in!’
So while some quests might feel a little awkward or out of place likely because they just added things in, I think it also allowed for devs to create more personal and heartfelt quests, which was very welcome in my opinion. Especially after Shadowlands, where every quest felt like mandatory existential dread written in.
From the brief excerpts of Tyr being like ‘you need to mass breed so dragons can protect Azeroth’ is also weird from the angle that Titans would’ve just nuked Azeroth (and have tried to). So why bother mass breeding dragons?
I’m willing believe this leak to be a genuine look into next expansion.
Man I nearly forgot all of this… Goes to show how much we’re being gaslit into thinking Order, Life and everything else to have always been the normal terminology. It’s so dull, dry, flavorless compared to the OGs.
