They for sure are not gonna retcon Zovval, the present story team is pretty proud of this story they concocted for Shadowlands.
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Are they?
Or are they perhaps stuck with the story Afrasiabi came up with and itâs consequences
They have an opportunity to hard retcon reality into something less incoherent and deeply unpleasant
If they refuse to take it, theyâre just dumb honestly
Iâm going to bed. Itâs to late to try and wrap my head around this bs 
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Every time Danuser has been in an interview or the like in Story Mode he has been totally excited. They legit like the story.
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Yes they were, all except a hundred that we did free, but so so many more died, 100 souls isnât even a tenth of those that died.
You could say that about everything that happened to the night elves after teldrassil
âIf they dont let us free the night elf souls atleast they are dumbâ
âIf they say that the night elves are nearly extinct they are dumbâ
They are just hateful
Of course they like the story, now that they got rid of the night elves once and for all in the most vicious ways possible and got to glorify their abusers, Iâd be happy too if I hated Night Elves
About the cosmic things.
He avoids the topics of sylvanas and night elves and forsaken like the plague.
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I had always thought Shadowlands was a slight âjabâ at the original writers of WoW.
âToo long I endured the makers â flawed design . I will forge a new realityâ
Seemed like they wanted to wrap up as much of the original story lines as much as possible so that they could rewrite their own version of WoW. One they deemed âbetter.â
(This is why it felt rushed with the Old Gods and Dreadlords, etc)
Honestly, I think itâs arrogance more so than any other factor.
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So. Whatâs happening? The former developer liked Baalsamaelâs suggestion about Afrasiabi and Teldrassil - now there are retcones of developer inserts, so now Teldrassil will be retconned (or things that led to it) - Shadowlands is a way to retcon everything and build everything correctly. Right?
That is true, it will be interesting to see what they do. I am not totally sure they are even sure right now.
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Yeah⌠if I remember correctly, the new âAfterlifeâ being forged seemed to be more of a Light LandsâŚ
âThese are all testbeds for what weâll eventually see elsewhere.â
Light lands and Garden of Life incâŚ
They arenât going to retcon BfA and if you think they are then youâre just going to get repeatedly disappointed.
If thatâs the case I actually applaud them for making an attempt to confront some of Vanilla WoWâs structural design flaws. Like factions. Or the Forsaken.
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I wonder how much the popular reception of the story right now would be altered if they had just let us kill Sylvanas. The fact that sheâs still around seems to be the most consistent point of friction for your average joe.
Honestly she should have been killed in BfA/early Shadowlands but not before she corrupted Anduin so that he could serve as the chief anchor of the story and our primary connection to Azeroth.
Yes it would be an Arthas sequel but at least weâd get some pathos. Maybe weâd even feel an emotion other than resentment towards each other, the devs, and ourselves.
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It is the internet. It is contractually required to be 76.4% composed of resentment.
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With Classic rolling out the original experience and story, it would not bother me to see something drastic to create distance between the old and new. Afrasiabi was effectively calling the shots since Cataclysm and onward, so trying to surgically remove his influence from every element of the game is just not possible. Old characters are repeatedly mishandled (if not outright ruined) with metaplots increasingly unmoored from core Warcraft themes and now the cosmology is entirely detached from what came before. So give us something approximating a fresh starting point and tell a story worth engaging with.
I mean, weâve already got âit was THE JAILER ALL ALONG!â being thrust into our face to undermine and tarnish the most beloved chapters of the gameâs history. Why would something on the scale of reorigination or reinvention to a fresh beginning be so out of bounds? Maybe then your writers could actually be allowed to understand what the hell the characters theyâre writing are supposed to be doing! Wouldnât that be novel?
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Aradneâs Falling Strike is more likely a placeholder or incorrectly linked spell, given thatâs from the Sanctum of Domination raid.
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To be honest I donât really get a lot of the bald-faced contempt towards the story as of 9.2. It doesnât break new ground and doubles down on the controversial cosmology approach, but watching the developer preview and looking at the datamining I mostly was thinking. âHuh. Okay.â or âHm. Thatâs neat. I wonder how that happensâ
Nothing that made me feel contempt or anger. The closest thing was seeing Sylvanas around which made me roll my eyes out of my head.
I actually donât mind this either. There was always something aesthetically and thematically unusual about the Scourge that set it apart from simply being a Burning Legion proxy and I suspected as early as WotLK that there were other forces at play, which I correctly thought would be associated with the Dreadlords in some way because they were so unusual as far as demons were concerned (chiefly in the form of their abilities) and my suspicions only heightened when we learned that the Legionâs actions were a reaction to the Void.
So the hooks for there being something more at play than simple Legion proxy were always present. Were they intentionally present? Almost certainly not, especially since we know that the Scourge was basically supposed to be the Warcraft version of the Zerg and Dreadlords were pretty plainly just Vampire Demons, but those hooks were present nonetheless and I like that they actually made use of them. The clarification and expansion of Warcraft 3 lore doesnât bother me at all and I actually approve of it.
If anything, the Jailer and whatnotâs connection to the Scourge helps to actually anchor it in Warcraft. If that Scourge/Warcraft 3 connection wasnât there then Shadowlands would quite literally be a completely different franchise for all intents and purposes.
The problem lies in the execution I think. Specifically in that they seem to want to keep a mystery going as to the bad guys motivations and intentions but Iâm not sure why.
Zovaal would have been a good time to play it safe I think. Just make him a Cosmic Lich King and he wants to attack Azeroth so he can make everyone undead because heâs a warped and evil bad guy. They can even keep the âScourge as a vanguardâ approach and most subsequent story beats, including Sylvanas working with him (because sheâs scared to die) and tearing open the veil with the Helm of Domination, Death Knight Anduin, Zovaal is getting souls that are killed on Azeroth, etc.
They could even still use the Shadowlands as the expansionâs primary setting, just make the entire thing Zovaalâs dark realm (instead of the true afterlife for the entire setting) and we go there to fight him aâla Northrend.
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It 100% was the execution of the story.
Death, the cosmic force and Pantheon werenât set up like some over looming villain.
The âgrim reaperâ style character that wants to spread plague and famine, to use the scourge to wipe out all of existence because thatâs what death does.
Zovaal, and to a lesser extent, the Pantheon of Death, donât captivate any aspect of the âDeath Cosmic Force.â
Their existence just destroys existing afterlife lore and have added almost nothing of true value to the story.
They are trying so hard to make Zovaal a âgrayâ character, by simply leaving out character detail in hopes of players speculating their own conclusions.
When in reality⌠he should just be-- you know, âDeath.â
Denathrius and the Dreadlords got reduced down to a scooby-doo level villain and Sylvanas has become a moody teenager.
This needed to be 3 expansions, not 3 lazy patches.
This should have been ZovaalâŚ
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Tbh Iâd hate for âdeathâ to be a villain, especially considering so many races in WoW donât see it as a villainous force, but a natural one.
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I donât think Death should be the villain, but more so like the Void. Its more neutral. But I wouldâve liked to seen Zovaal be the villianâŚ
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Once again I maintain that each Pantheon of each cosmic force should have been 6 people, where at most two are The Bad Guys, and the remaining four are themed around various mythologies that tie back and reconcile the fantasy of the playable races or are based upon the same body of myth as the playable races.
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