Remember when the Old Gods tried to create their own Shadow Wild Gods, that was fun, not sure why Blizzard decided to drop that plot and never revisit it. My guess is probably due to player pushback.
Lycanthoth was cool, not sure why they didn’t pursue this thread.
“Only death is eternal. You will be undone. Fate subjugates faith, mortal. Your prayers are meaningless here.” Clearly he had some interesting things to say. Only Death is eternal is a Yogg-Saron phrase. Another missed opportunity to have Yogg-Saron connected to the Shadowlands. It’s like Sean Copland has never played WoW in his life.
It could also be a view to make religion more akin to Hellenistic or Norse styles, where the Gods are flawed to sometimes greater degree then even mortals.
I’d have an easier time believing that if blizz didn’t make Elune dumb and have her not know that the Shadowlands was broken. Or them wanting to villain bat and than kill off Bwom, only to back away from it due to player feedback/outrage.
They don’t respect most religions except whatever the current team believes in, if anything. And I think that’s largely where the disagreements stem from
I certainly do not remember any interview in which Danuser said loyalists were right. That would highly surprise me, as Danuser is usually very thorough at avoiding making conclusive statements about right and wrongs.
I don’t even know if you’d need to attribute anything to respecting or having any specific stance against religions. It’s entirely plausible that this is just a natural consequence of needing to expand out a world in ways that were not previously thought of.
The Light was one a nebulous inner-force type thing. Then we have Naaru. We’ve even had hints of tension regarding that in the past; the time when Velen casually mentioned Elune sounded like a Naaru and Tyrande was like “Watch yo mouth”. The Old Gods used to be this ultimate incomprehensible bad, and now it turns out they’re basically underling scouts of the Void Lords. Titans used to be an unspeakably powerful entity, but then they’re basically just robots who got oneshot offscreen.
When you have to expand outwards, you need a way to link what you’re expanding into to what currently exists, and “creator/progeny” type relationships, or “Gods are not true gods, just really powerful beings”, or “previously godly being turns out to actually be a pawn” are some of the most basic ones there.
A lot of the dissatisfaction with the Shadowlands mythos can even be left to this part; they tried to weave in disparate fragments into something expanded into a Realm of Death that “seemed cohesive”, introducing a bunch of retcons and contradictions along the way, or changes that people who obviously liked what they bought into didn’t particularly appreciate.
We could kill them at some point in the future, but that probably won’t be because of what developers are thinking now. Deities existing just to be lootbags is false. We’ve known of Elune for 17 years, that’s a long time to not kill someone. We have defeated one Eternal, who is still alive, and the next to be defeated is explicitly a villain. Legion would’ve been a great time to kill Sargeras and that didn’t happen.
We’ve known the titans and wild gods and such and so forth for just as long. And besides the Old Gods (whom I think we can all agree were made to be looted), we hadn’t really killed any deities.
But we’ve slowly been getting there.
First, it’s banishing elemental lords and the scions of the dragonflights. Then it’s killing perma-dead(-ish, for now) elemental lords and the leaders of the dragonflights. Then a wild god here or there, a titan keeper or two, slowly but surely escalating the power creep of our enemies. But the titans themselves? We had long been told, we’d never stand a chance. Not a single iota of hope to fight one of those guys. Even banishing one of the big eredar was supposedly a massive undertaking.
And suddenly Legion happened, along with a change in how our characters are depicted.
Prior to Legion, we weren’t really “the chosen one”. We were special, sure, but special in a still mortal sense. We became a military leader with an army and command post of our own, but that’s not even a stretch. Our biggest accomplishments were all at the head of an army anyway. All the game told us, and how the game treated us, was that we are a really good fighter, tactician, and among the best of the best.
But in Legion, we became the Best Ever (Insert Class Name). We’re going off to collect the most potent weapons of myth and legend, and in many cases, those weapons chose us as well. We’re collecting legendary knick-knacks. Those big eredar that are a monumental feat to kill? They’re our stepping stones to invade the Burning Legion’s own homeworld, so we can go kick the butts of two titans.
BfA, the planet itself choses us to be her personal savior. We are, by any definition, the actual chosen one. We kick the quaglflump (old god equivalent of a butt) of the most devious, cunning, and forward-thinking old god while recovering from a massive war.
Then we walk into the Shadowlands, a feat itself, and activate first one tech just because. Eternal Ones are at least Titan-tier? We knock one around after getting our barings. We’re about to knock down another one, and this guy even collected his own Infinity Gauntlet. Eternal Ones were literally created to give us two to defeat.
And when all of this got started, a trilogy of books were released; Chronicles. In addition to being a now-very-subjective comprehansive-ish take on the lore, it also gave us the first hints at new threats in that god-tier ranking; Void Lords. Thought Old Gods were bad? Wait until you see their daddies. And if Void Lords exist and now Old Gods are on the same tier as Naaru, wouldn’t that mean their might be “Light Lords”? And if Void, Order (via the titans), Fel (via Sargeras) and presumably Light have their own God-tier beings, what about Death and Life? Maybe them too?
Prior to Chronicles, we never had reason to ask those questions. But as the in-game narrative builds us up into god-tier-slaying Chosen Ones, books are coming out to say there might be more god-tier threats to kill.
And the current developers were working at Blizzard at the time all this escalation started. And then they created a tier of (potential) threats even bigger than the previous god-tier threats.
We haven’t killed Elune yet, and I doubt we ever will. But we’ve defeated someone on a similar power scale to Elune’s sister. Expecting the devs (who have also expressed that they plan to have us explore that cosmic map of theirs) to not have a plan for us to eventually visit the “Lifelands” and beat up someone from Elune’s pantheon is ignoring where the game has been going.
I’m not suggesting we’re killing the First Ones next week. But I’m definitely saying expect within the next expansion or two for there to be story hints that a single First One went rogue somewhere in the distant pre-history of the cosmos and became the First Ones Satanic stand-in.
I’m not saying that we won’t be killing any more deities or gods, I’m saying that the developers aren’t having us do that due to being anti-theists. As I mentioned before, this is a result of powercreep and it happens in these type of franchises when they go on for a long time. The best example is probably DragonBall, which started as an adventure series much like WoW, and now it involves going against gods who threaten to destroy multiple universes. When franchises last for so long, they can either expand upwards or outwards, and WoW has done the former, much like how the MCU has; that started with Ironman fighting basic terrorists, now we’re getting deities who are trying to save multiple planets. This is not being done out of maliciousness, this is being done because the people making the story are thinking in terms of bigger instead of wider.