I should probably first of all make a note of how everything I say is my opinion and I am in no way saying that this is all objective fact. It is just how I look at things.
The World of Warcraft writers seem to be deathly afraid of scaling things back. Not, incapable, we know they can do smaller, more personalized stories, but rather they seem to be unwilling.
They’ve proven that they can do small scale conflicts well. If you ask around, many people will claim stories such as Darrowshire, Fiona’s Caravan, or even more recently Exile’s Reach as their favourite plotlines in the game. On the flipside very few people will claim recent expansion plotlines as their favourite. So why is this?
For me it is a problem of being able to relate.
Think about the overarching plot of the Shadowlands expansion. What are we truly doing? We’re saving the mechanism of death itself, the very afterlife of not just our world but all existence. That is epic, yeah. But, I can’t get emotionally invested in it. It is too big. It is a ’concept’, more than anything else.
On the opposite end of the scale my favourite story in WoW is Fiona’s Caravan. It’s an excellent vehicle for getting you around the world and meeting characters. You pick up noteworthy ones and get to build relations with and grow their characters naturally through dialogue and actions. It has a good beginning, middle, and end. The overarching plot of helping your new paladin pals to fulfill their dream of joining the Argents and then dealing with the reality of this. And it’s climax, saving one of your new friends from an evil necromancer alongside your new ragtag little family is much more epic to me than saving a thousand worlds and killing a million old gods. It is a story I can relate to. Saving my friend actually means something to me on a personal level.
Saving Stormwind from the Defias. Delving into mountain canyons to fight a quillboar threat. Even fighting a dragon in her lair. These mundane base game adventures are all more meaningful to me than anything we’ve done since Mists of Pandaria.
So, what do I mean when I say the escalation of the story isn’t sustainable? I mean that eventually we will experience, and many already have experienced, ’story collapse’.
In ’On Fairy Stories’, J. R. R. Tolkien says:
Inside [the story], what [the author] relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.
This is ’story collapse’, it is when you’re thrown out of the story and stuck being un-immersed looking in. Rather than taking a part of the story. We’ve long since reached a point where the writers need to constantly invent new things for the Warcraft universe for us to take part in and interact with. Even 9.1 already introduces new concepts grander in scope to the Pantheon of Death. Where does it end? When can we stop discovering a new force behind the force? When can we stop escalating?
The real problem with this isn’t even plot holes, it is that it is a thematic and emotional failure. How can we get invested in a universe in which we never know something? How can we have any sort of emotional connection to ’concepts’ that will always be eclipsed by the next ’concept’? When does it just start being arbitrary, if it has not already? Your world building cannot be based on a child saying ”Yeah but the monster was controlled by an even more powerful evil-er monster!” At least it should not.
Now I am not saying that we should scale back all stories and not have any world saving adventures. But I think that with the way they are currently going with no end in sight, we will eventually forget about our world. Because it will no longer hold any sort of significance for us. We will have ’outgrown’ Azeroth. And on that day, for me, the story will collapse.
