Some thoughts on cosmic threats and player power

Community General Discussion
1

I believe that a big cosmic threat can only be interesting when there are times where we, the players, feel like we are in immediate danger. With the Jailer, I can’t really say I’ve felt like that. He seems kind of daft, and whatever his plan is it doesn’t sound all that scary, just a vague “unmake the power of the cosmos” or something along those lines.

What does that mean for us players, anyway? What is the “cosmos”, at all? We now know that whoever gets killed in the Warcraft multiverse goes to the Shadowlands. I reckon that by the time the expansion is over, we’ll have fixed all the issues there. And by doing that, we make any ominous fate towards the people of Azeroth feel a bit more insignificant, knowing that they will move on to the fields of Elysium. Any subsequent threats, deadly or otherwise, will most probably not feel as heavy from this point on.

Besides, our immense intergalactic power as these all-consuming, all-defeating, all-looting superhero characters has rendered every enemy useless from about 2010 and after. Our enemy will have to be truly worthy! Unlike, the Jailer. There has to be an expansion where we are too late or something and we fail. An expansion where we are forced to look the consequences of our mistakes in the eye and truly realize the magnitude of our mess-up. That will strengthen the plot by a lot.

One of the reasons why the Thanos arc worked so well in the Marvel movies was that, besides Thanos being well-written to the point of being almost human, the heroes lost in the first chapter of the battle. That had serious repercussions on both them and the world, and it helped establish Thanos as a serious intergalactic threat. If they managed to stop him in Infinity War, it would not mean anything. Thanos would be considered to be a complete joke. The WoW villains however, are introduced in the beginning of the expansion, proceed to slid into the background for the most part of the story, reappear towards the end, and are killed off. Sort of like the early MCU villains. Some of them have DECADES of old lore material behind them to set up their arcs, but once introduced, they just get whacked.

And I believe that this is PRECISELY why the cosmic threats in WoW don’t make us feel like we’re in immediate danger, and as such, do not serve their purpose as they could and should.

2

Blame the Blizz trash writers + their silly business model that requires them to invent the wheel every 2 years story-wise

Players kill literal gods in this game

They should’ve just left it at the “big dragon” phase tbh

1 Like
3

There’ll always be some even more powerful threat out there.
We just have to train in some increased gravity capsule with weighted clothes and we’ll unlock our super-player-level-that-has went-beyond-normal-player-level form and we’ll be ready for that next threat!

4

I think it is fair to say that the story in WoW needs consequences to feel impactful.

But I think it’s wrong to say that there aren’t any consequences of the story.

Ask the Night Elves.

That being said, proportions matter, and when you’re dealing with cosmic powers you expect cosmic-scale consequences…

Like Sargeras’ sword in Silithus.

Deathwing’s destruction of Azeroth.

But I suppose you can say that it’s difficult to see what the player’s stake is in the cosmic conflict. Are we supposed to be be cheering for The Light? Are The Titans bad guys? What is Azeroth’s World Soul even and why do I need to save it?

I think the biggest problem is the speed of the storytelling. To me it seems as if Blizzard are slowly unveiling a grand story that they’ve been setting up for more than a decade. But it will take another decade before it reaches any form of fruition. And that’s not super satisfying if you’re playing Shadowlands and you’re confused about this Jailer guy and who the hell The First Ones are, or what you’re even trying to achieve by killing everything in your path. You need some answers now!
That’s the main culprit I think. I have little to no doubt that Blizzard are planning to have a lot of WTF-moments in the story going forward - because WoW thrives on having them as a sort of cliffhanger. It just takes very long to get there and you kind of want a fast-forward option. WoW as a storytelling medium is very slow for the gigantic story that Blizzard are trying to tell.

RTS games are typically better at advancing these cosmic-scale storylines, because they just cover more ground through less and more simple content. If you had to convert the storyline of Warcraft III or StarCraft II into WoW, then it would amount to countless expansions spanning almost an entire decade!

WoW storytelling is just slow. The lore and story answers we’re getting now in Shadowlands were questions people posed and thought about way back in Wrath of the Lich King!

Patience is a virtue with Blizzard. :yum:

5

They still have the option to retcon the entirety of shadowlands and everything after BFA, as us failing to defeat N’zoth and succumbing to his madness.

I mean we’ve clearly failed to kill Illidan back in BC, seeing how he came back in Legion, similar to how the player has failed to kill Illidan back in WC3, seeing how he came back in BC.

That’s the beauty of having awful writing. You can always retcon everything and people won’t even be surprised, because the writing has always been bad.

And let’s be real, playercharacters becoming mad, believing their faction leader has become evil (Sylvanas) or corrupted by evil (Anduin and his “mourneblade”), dreaming up an entire afterlife in their madness wouldn’t even be the worst retcon they’ve made thus far.

It would also explain why we’ve defeated one of the most powerful beings with the help of my MOTHER and a dwarf made out of blue rocks who’s addicted to the literal blood of the planet. I’ll be damned if those aren’t some drug references.

We’re just mad. It’s all a bad dream and the second we defeat the Jailer, we notice it’s actually Aman’thul and we’ve just helped N’zoth achieve his vision.

Now that I think about it, that would probably be better than anything that’ll actually happen and it would make the entirety of BFA a lot less despressing as well.

1 Like
6

Puny gods!
:bow_and_arrow: :fox_face:

1 Like
7

Jailer is kinda… well boring. I feel more scared from the Venthyr guy. The way he strangled the prince

1 Like
8

The Jailor doesn’t seem to be written that well.

Eye of the jailer level 5, Jailer slowly kills you while out of sight from wherever he is.

Jailer in Torghast (cutscene), continues casually talking to Sylvanas while not noticing you there hidden around the corner.

2 Likes
9

You’re pointing out a bigger problem with the story telling, in Legion we had the Legion, that felt massive on scale (mostly thanks to the prepatch and the story taking us everywhere to get artifacts and showing us yeah these legion guys are everywhere)

Now with Shadowlands, it’s the Jailor and the Eternal ones (pantheon of death) who really guys they’re just as powerful as titans please believe us while we proceed to show you nothing in the story that solidifies that
Also the jailor totally has a bigger army then Sargeras please believe us while we proceed to show you nothing in the story that solidifies that.

Shadowlands lore is all tell no show.

To be fair I do believe the Jailor when freed is probably titan tier, but based on what we’ve seen from the Eternal ones I wouldn’t place them higher then titan keepers, if they’re equal to the titans then titans are a lot weaker then I think they are because I don’t see posessed anduin getting a stab off on an actual titan without just being turned into dust midleap

To stay on topic a bit more and not hang on this; in general I don’t believe every enemy has to be bigger then the previous one, I’m sure they can think of scenario’s where someone weaker then let’s say Argus is threatening existence on Azeroth in one way or another and this whole all tell no show will be the future of the game if they don’t sober up on big bads a bit again

1 Like
10

Now THIS would be a real 4D chess move twist

I get what you’re saying but I just don’t buy it. To me at least this story doesn’t seem like it was conceived decades in advance but rather scribbled on footnotes during bathroom breaks two weeks prior to the previous expansion’s last patch.
It feels more like they’re just throwing everything they come up with in the pot and making it up as they go, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there has to be an extra layer of care put into the story to make it more compelling, whether it’s an MMO or not, whether it’s character-driven or not.
Just my five cents.

11

I feel that ever since they published the WoW Chronicles series there’s an obvious shift in the focus of the story that’s told. And it goes back a bit further obviously, to whenever they internally sat down and mapped out the cosmology of Warcraft and the ideas behind it.

Chris Metzen left in 2016 and Chronicles came out in 2016 and Legion came out in 2016.

Lure me if Blizzard didn’t have one hell of a creative story session prior to Metzen leaving where they sat down and figured out what they wanted for the story going forward, so the new people responsible for it would be comfortable writing it in Metzen’s absence.

And then they manifested that story direction and plan in the WoW Chronicles series, which WoW expansions and novels and what not have subsequently revolved around.

That cosmology map on the first page is not some intern’s random scribbles. That’s the masterplan Blizzard has for the story and the guide for every developer to anchor their work around.

And it’s not like Warcraft hasn’t had those shifts before.
Blizzard have had documentaries where they’ve explained a time where Metzen himself just poured his brain out and mapped out all of Azeroth and its kingdoms and such as Warcraft: Orcs & Humans needed to grow into a new and bigger game.
And they did the same thing again when they tasked Richard A. Knaak with building the lore and world of Warcraft even futher, which he did in the War of the Ancients trilogy, which established a lot of the backstory that Warcraft III and WoW revolved around.

1 Like
12

I’d like an expansion where we are depicted as the bad guys from the villains perspective.

Imagine a future scenario in which we invade the Void Realm and it turns out the reason the void is “evil” is solely because of self preservation. The void can see every future possible, and all possible future leads to the comming of the loot-crazed Murderhobos whom will genocide their entire plane of existance and wear their remains as they go on and wipe the other realms from existence as well. In the name of “Loot”.

So in a desperate attempt to save themself, the Void Lords created and sent out the old gods and other minor void entities in an attempt to destroy the murderhobos before they rise to power in a “kill or be killed” sort of manner.

14

I wish you were right and maybe you are, but until I see them actually finishing their masterplan and the whole entire story coming down to this epic cosmos of a finish, where every depressing part of the story that seemed badly written turns out to be just a tiny cogwheel in the entire clock of WoW story, I’ll expect them to just be bad writers.

But man, I do wish you’re right.

15

Oh I’m not excusing bad writing or insinuating that everyone should love the story Blizzard are telling.

If you don’t like it, then you don’t like it.

And given the sheer mass of story that Blizzard are producing for Warcraft, there’s obviously ample opportunity to point out the parts that you think are less great than other parts.

All I’m saying is that Blizzard do seem to have a story direction and that they’re not writing these major story arcs at random.

And I think you can trace most of the new story direction back to Warlords of Draenor and Legion. In Warlords of Draenor the Horde versus Alliance conflict that has revolved so much around Garrosh Hellscream is sort of ended and it seems to me as if Blizzard sows the seeds for the new story focus going forward – the cosmic conflict. And that’s basically what Legion revolves around – introducing The Burning Legion, The Titans, Argus, The Twisting Nether, The Emerald Nightmare, Old Gods, Keepers, The Light and Void, Death, and so on. And they’re still running with that stuff in Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands. It’s not The Highmountain Tauren and The Zandalari that the story revolves around today. It’s those same cosmic story seeds that Blizzard continues to push forward: The Titans, Odyn, Old Gods, The Emerald Nightmare, The Void, The Light, Death, and so on. And then they sow more in the process for later: Xal’atath, Azshara, and so on.

And that all seems obviously deliberate.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that people appear pretty stupid when they say that Blizzard are just making the story up at random and they don’t have a clue about where they’re going with it.
That’s obviously criticism rooted in the fact that people just don’t like the story, but in my opinion it makes people with that criticism appear stupid – as if they’re incapable of deducting simple story themes and progression.

16

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.