Burning Crusade's plot was a travesty

Lore Story Forum
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I know I’m about 14 years late on this, but it has been something that has bothered me since back in the day.

I remember when they announced BC and that Illidan was slated to be the BBEG I was literally shocked. I’d played through all of WC3 and TFT a few times, and I remember thinking after the Illidan vs Arthas fight the first time I saw it “nawww Illidan’s going to be fine, he’s too much of a badass to let this punk end him.” Then BC came out and it was like the writers completely forgot about anything that happened in WC3 or TFT. Yes, all the names and places were there, but nothing made any sense. I will say that my memory is a little hazy on some of the points of the plot, but here are some main issues I have and would love if someone could correct me or explain them to me.

  1. Why did the Dark Portal even reopen? Was it the Legion trying to draw in the defenders of Azeroth to end Illidan, or was this just another botched invasion that ended up having the consequence of Illidan biting it? There was the initial demon invasion event pre-launch, and then from what we see right when we enter Outlands there is a massive demon army trying to press into Azeroth, I guess cause that’s just what the Legion do? So we push in, we get a stronghold and then… we set to work just smashing through Illidan’s forces and demons alike. Who the hell was in charge of intel?

  2. My understanding of Illidan at this point in the story is that he was still (as always) obsessed with defeating the Legion, but the way he is presented in BC it seems like all he cares about is being the “Overlord of Outlands”. Huh? Illidan only came to this rock because everyone on Azeroth either wants him dead or in prison. I thought the whole point of being here was to prepare his blood elf/naga/fel orc army to fight the Legion?

  3. Why is a Naaru, with all of it’s light blessed knowledge and wisdom, imploring Khadgar and other heroes to murder Illidan? Wouldn’t it have know that Illidan was the chosen one, or was this all just “part of the plan”.

  4. Akama is a piece of crap. He should have know full well that Illidan was the enemy of the Legion, you know, the one that commited a genocide against Akama’s people and turned them into withered husks? Oh but hey, the guy who is conscripting your people and every able bodied warrior on this dead space rock to fight the largest threat in the known universe MUST be the bad guy! I know, I’ll spread a bunch of half truths to these folks who clearly don’t seem to like him in the first place. What’s the worst that could happen?

  5. This is the thing that really chaps me - it SEEMS like the writers just wanted a well know BBEG to follow up on classic which was all over the place, but they didn’t actually take the time to think about Illidan’s character, or if he was important to the overall Warcraft story. Once he is defeated, there is that comically bad line about “Yeah, you got me, Maeiv, but you’re nothing without the hunt!” and she’s just like “omg ur right I’m a shell of an elf boohoo” and vanishes into the mist. Wow. This seals for me that A. They meant at the time for Illidan to be dead and gone B. They were also done with Maeiv because her story was 100% connected in their minds to Illidan and had no further depth.

It really seems like it wasn’t until years later, probably when they started thinking about the Legion coming back again, that they realized exactly how stupid it had been to kill off Illidan. The entire AU Dreanor/Gul’Dan nonsense plot was just to get Illidan back from the dead, and then Legion slides in the whole “they took the body” thing. I do think it was somewhat clever how they managed to dig themselves out of that narrative hole, but why the hell were we in it to begin with?

Could Illidan back in Outlands not have sent, like, one dude with a white flag when the Alliance and Horde showed up to be like “Hey, woah, don’t shoot! I’m here to talk. You guys from Azeroth? Horde and Alliance? Cool, cool. Me? Oh, I’m here with Illidan fighting the Legion - you’ve heard about them, right? Massive demons, fel fire, suck out your soul, tried to destroy Azeroth a couple times? Yeah, those guys! So anyways, we are here to stop them from setting all of creation on fire. What are y’all here for?”

Roll credits.

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Pretty much a small-scale Legion invasion. It ended up starting out as one, but transitioned into “let’s kill Illidan and his friends too”, only to go right back to dealing with the Legion once Illidan and his friends were all dead.

Retroactively, yes, but the story in Burning Crusade was apparently that he had “gone insane” after losing to Arthas in Icecrown and had been trying to dominate Outland ever since. You could make the argument that he was using it as a staging ground for a battle against the Burning Legion, but he was doing some pretty messed up things to get to that point.

IIRC, the Illidan novel states that A’dal wouldn’t lend his forces to Maiev to go fight Illidan, which directly contrasts with his role in BC, where he is in the fact the one who tells players to go kill Illidan; so that’s either a retcon or bad inconsistency.

Also because Illidan being the “chosen one” was a retroactive detail added in Legion that also doesn’t seem to be shared by all naaru, which makes sense considering Illidan did a bunch of messed up things in Outland, including enslaving countless broken tribes, draining all of Outland’s water, mutating mag’har into fel orcs, etc.

The way I see it, Illidan only started doing the aforementioned terrible things to Akama’s people after they had claimed Outland from the Legion; so by the time Illidan started showing his true colors, Akama didn’t really have the means of doing anything about it, since Illidan had his people enslaved. Combine that with the fact that you find Akama having his Shade ripped out to serve Illidan in the Black Temple, and it’s clear that he was doing his best to internally oppose Illidan from his position, and paid the price for it.

Pretty much this. Everyone agrees that story-wise, Burning Crusade was a lot of big names going down for no reason and a lot of wasted potential. However, I do think it had a few really good individual storylines, such as the one involving M’uru and the blood elves’ redemption.

At the end of the day, I don’t like Burning Crusade Illidan any more than Legion Illidan, because the latter is an absolute disaster when you take the former into consideration. The game goes from treating him like an insane villain to a misunderstood paragon, to the point where everyone who has even a slightly negative opinion of Illidan is portrayed as being in the wrong, even though there were a LOT of reasons not to like him.

I stand by my opinion that the best incarnation of Illidan was WC3 Illidan. Still did some shady things, but always had good intentions, and was pretty humble about it all things considered.

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Thank you, I needed to know I wasn’t alone here. Everything you said makes sense and lines up with what I can recall. I feel they pushed hard to justify what had been going on in Outlands with the whole “any sacrifice to defeat the Legion” mentality Illidan had in Legion.

I also agree there were good parts. Kara was my favorite raid of all time and the blood elf redemption was great too, but damn if you’re into the lore it feels like a scar.

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They didn’t really have an overall story planned. World of Warcraft at the time was just things happening, it wasn’t until Cataclysm that they stated painting this continuing story.

If you look at TBC and all it’s raids… it’s not really following some overarching story. Each raid is just a conclusion of that zone. Magtheridon for Hellfire, Gruul for Blade’s Edge, Serpentshrine Cavern for Zangarmarsh, Tempest Keep for the Netherstorm, even Black Temple for all of Outland and Shadowmoon Valley.
The Sunwell was just, “Now fight Kil’Jaeden.”

A lot of the characters had their motivations changed. Illidan was broken and crazy. He wasn’t fighting the Legion, he was just brooding over his defeat by Arthas. Vashj was doing her own thing and Kael jumped ship. Akama said he was done following Illidan too.

Nah. There was one BlizzCon that Chris Metzen asked the crowd if they wanted Illidan back and everyone pretty much had a seizure with excitement, so Blizzard realized the bulk of their fans just wanted… well fan service. They could have brought Illidan back a million ways, they didn’t need Gul’dan for that.

Yeah, like many things, TBC was at a time when future planning wasn’t really a forethought, they were just running with the success of the game. Kinda like Star Wars. It wasn’t until later that they realized they needed to actually sit down and map things if they wanted to continue making money. No doubt they would have done things differently if they could go back, but they are just making do with what they have.

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Which is kind of stupid. Most of the people going to blizzcon are fanboy that would cheer and applaud anything blizzard would say at blizzcon. Their opinion shouldn’t count as the overall Wow player opinion. I still remember how people at blizzcon all applaud the BFa cinematic and the ‘‘faction war!!! Return to the root!!!’’ even if one of the playerbase consensus after legion was that both faction should just allied themself to fight bigger enemy and get rid of those faction fight.

Diablo cellphone announcement may be the only time were the crowd didn’t look happy.

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You have a point.

The people in the crowds were all for it, but the people on the internet called bullsh** on all of it.

And it turns out… that the people on the internet were right to call it that. Soon after even the people that were at the blizzcon in person saw it that way. It was not something that we took pride in doing, but we smelled that bull a mile away.

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Overall you’re not wrong. BC’s main (Illidari) story has always been it’s weakness. Legion’s retcons don’t really fix this IMO, but at least they recognized they wasted Illidan and did something better with him the second time around. I’m still not sure if it’s an improvement over Vanilla’s not having a main story at all or not. BC is still an improvement over Vanilla in terms of gameplay elements, with class revamps, the raiding revamp, heroic dungeons, dailies and flying (with special quest hubs you can only access with flight anyway).

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Kael’thas deserved better. Much better.

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TBCs story was bad, but I’ll give them a break as it was their second expansion and they clearly didn’t get into their groove with a mmo storyline until WotLK.

But as others said the main take from TBC at the time was Illdain was insane. The Legion was what got us to Outland and what was waiting for us when we left without a real narrative hook to drive us. Everything had to be added post TBC to explain stuff.

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Wait, TBC had a story?

To my recollection, it went:

  • Holy crap, Hellfire! Look how big everything is! Aaaah! Fel Reaver!
  • Terrokar is so surreal. Did you join Aldor or Scryer? Do you think we will have Aldor v. Scryer cross faction Pvp?
  • Nagrand pretty. Holy crap thrall story progression. Simba, one day, everything the light touches…
  • I’M FLYING IN PURPLE OUTER SPAAAACE!
  • apparently illidan crew bad now. Also a bunch of named orcs and we are gonna kill zul’jin in this lore blender of an xpac.

In other words, even as a lore nerd I was waaay to distracted by this brand new first xpac amazement to realize how badly we were almost arbitrarily chainsawing the story. The story was largely a semi functional pretext for the shiney raids, and, apart from some concern over zul’jin and Kael, my lizard brain couldn’t be bothered.

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Soooo many dead RTS characters in Burning Crusade. I’ve seen some speculate that Blizzard didn’t anticipate that the game would keep going for several years after that first expansion, so they grabbed a bunch of recognizable names from the RTS lore to use for dungeon and raid bosses just to make sure they at least made an appearance in WoW. I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but I can certainly see why one might think it. There’s even an entire raid set in Warcraft III!

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Wait, I was thinking about it, and here’s what BC is.

BC is a wild, wild party in a new apartment complex. Everything was cool and normal, but somebody threw an absolute rave. There were far too many glow-things, people wore “questionable” outfits, and even more questionable substances.

The next morning, the destroyed common areas, those guys you punched for no reason, your inexplicable neon outfit, lips encrusted with your own drool, and disturbing amount of glitter? Well, anyone who wasn’t there looks at you and thinks, “Geez, what a mess! Why would anyone do this?”

But when you make eye contact with the other people who were there? They just nod, knowingly.

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I’ll just have to try and keep the “he went insane” thing in mind. Hey, maybe he did, dude went through a lot of crazy stuff, was jacked up on fel energy, locked in a cage for 10,000 years, Legion comes back and still no one will trust him and he had consumed the skull of Gul’Dan which I cant imagine would be good for the sanity. You could argue that his soul just needed a “timeout” in order to get back on track in order to keep things consistent, but it’s still the workings of current writers taking advantage of blanks that were thankfully left unfilled in the past.

I think the party metaphor is apt. I find so many folks who played back then who will still tell you it was their favorite expansion to date. Classic had been pretty successful, from the numbers I can find they ended with nearly 6 million subs prior to BC, and the numbers just went up year after year through BC and WotLK until we were at the record smashing 12 million. It really seems like the hype and just how fun and still new the game was at the time, especially for the couple million people who’s first venture into Warcraft was BC, is what made BC so outstanding in everyone’s minds, lore be damned.

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As far as the major story beats, it was a bit sad to kill Vashj and Kael. It could have gone a different way. But some of the side stuff made a lasting impression.

Murmur is awesome. The Netherwing quests were a great example of using Flight in Gameplay. Playing through the story of that flight was pretty great. And the Twisting Nether / Farahlon stuff is intriguing, as well as the parallels and connections to AU Draenor.

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The guy who tells us to kill Illidan in BC was Akama himself naturally… A’dal never gave us any orders to even meet Akama either as it was done on the orders of the leaders of the Scryers and Aldor who we already know have a grudge against Illidan!

Illidan’s death was because of Scryer and Aldor grudges! A’dal only showed us Xi’ri’s attack on the Black Temple that according to Khadgar’s Servant was already going on since Illidan’s attack on Shattrath(despite him not being put ingame until the first Major Patch of the Expansion)!

Xi’ri clearly did not agree with A’dal’s refusal to attack Illidan as he immediately laid siege to the Black Temple while A’dal withheld his forces!

Maiev apparently was unaware of Xi’ri attacking the Black Temple and A’dal never bothered to direct her to him like he had directed her to the Scryers!

A’dal clearly knew that Maiev would immediately ally with Xi’ri first chance she got but would never side with the Scryers so he told her of the Faction she would never side with!

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I feel that TBC would had been better, if the plot circled around Kil’Jaedan and Illidan preparing an underground movement of training more Demon Hunters to kill him on the homefront.

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There hasn’t been an xpac in the entire history of WoW that hasn’t been a hilariously badly written mess designed to create raid and dungeon encounters.

They’re making it up as they go. The whole chosen thing by the Naaru was a retcon because they thought it sounded cool at the time.

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In Vanilla the story was you, what you did in the world. It was a “here is a big world, have fun” design philosophy. Today it is more about taking a fancy rollercoaster ride through someone else’s narrative.

Burning Crusade was a mix of both. There was still a lot of content simply plonked down in the world, but as others had said the focus shifted more toward racing to end-game with a few scraps of narrative hidden behind those end-game encounters. Which is why so many players had to learn what happened in Outland primarily through the various game wiki’s out there as the majority of leveling quests amounted to “Greetings, Hero. You are just in time. There are a lot of demons around so…uh…get on top of that please”. Compare that to modern leveling where you follow a series of plots and subplots interwoven across multiple zones, culminating in dungeons and raids.

Now we have a very well-oiled machine of Prequel Novel -> Trailer Cinematic -> In-Game Cinematic -> Leveling Narrative -> In-Game Cinematic -> Dungeon -> In-Game Cinematic -> Raid (LFR for most players).

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Eh, Wrath, MoP and Legion had good stories, Cata had a decent one except for the gaping hole where the Water raid should have been. WoD was sorta hamstrung from the begining with its iffy premise and was further squished by technical problems that resulted in loads of stuff getting cut until they just gave up. BFA was just a parade of stupid they kept trying and failing to dress as cool; a re-hash of the most disliked aspects of MoP’s Faction Conflict storyline.

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