Can the Old Gods ever be done well?

Lore Story Forum
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When you think about it, it’s more than a little odd the Old Gods have never once been regarded as an extinction level threat by the story.

C’Thun was certainly strange and foreboding but he was overshadowed by Kel’Thuzad in Vanillia.

Likewise Yogg’Saron was a side quest in Wrath. He’s second fiddle to a guy with an evil hat living in a fortress made out of his frozen blood.

And now we’ve N’Zoth who while technically the final boss of BFA still feels like a B Plot being used to hastily tie up the main one.

Thing is though - maybe it’s wise to play it this way. I think fantasy RPGs by their very nature conflict with Cosmic Horror. Spoiler for a 83 year old book;

At the end of The Mountains of Madness the crew of the Alert (a boat) ram full speed into the head of Cthulu - to no effect whatsoever.

That’s what makes the Lovecraftian pantheon so dreadful - it’s not just that their visage is beyond or comprehension. Their power is beyond it as well. We’re gnats to them. Insects who’s only means of survival is hopefully being so insignificant that the Elder Things just don’t bother squashing us.

And I think you can’t capture that feeling in a game like WoW. To put a health bar on Cthulu defeats the point. There is no traditional victory to be had. It’s about a feeling of utter powerlessness in the face of a cosmos too terrifying to understand. Whereas WoW’s about power fantasy. Every expansion essentially ends with using the power of teamwork to cancel the apocalypse. So maybe the Old Gods can never be done well in a setting like that and should be kept as weird interludes if used at all.

But what do you think?

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Things like them can be done well to an extent, but you need significantly more talented writers and designers that are actually interested in creating an atmosphere and not just encounters. Mass Effect 1 and 2 immediately come to mind, even things like the opening to 3.

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I actually liked how C’thun was handled the most out of the Old Gods in WoW, with him clearly having his own little kingdom and servants devoted to him while he was just the whisper at the back of your mind right up until he was the giant eyeball one shorting you when you came around the corner.

Ahn’qiraj was a sprawling maze and a truly alien environment compared to the compromises Titan structures that Yogg, G’huun, and even the Sha showed up in, and there was a serious sense of foreboding as a result.

Now, was it overshadowed by Naxxramas? Sure, but that’s mainly because the plot thread for the Scourge was more recent and more personal than the millennia old cosmic scale that the plot of the Old Gods was operating on. But the Old Gods are sort of meant to be vague and nebulous, the whispers in the dark, the chill up your spine, and whenever they’re fully exposed and screaming in your face they lose the mystery and grandeur that makes them compelling in the first place.

Where they screwed up with C’thun was by letting you be able to fight him at all. The Old Gods totally can be done well in the setting WoW has, but not as a front and center threat, nor as a side plot. They need to genuinely be the dark mystery behind it all, the surprise when you ‘dig too deep’ and the mind numbing terror when you look too far into the past. Having them as tier bosses just ruins any mystique they might have and makes them just another dragon to be slain.

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I think they can be done well, but it really depends on what your goal is.

If you want some overarching pantheon of evil that is done right, they need to win at first, and big time.

Fighting them one by one is meh, because we know in the end the heroes have to win. If you want to establish the big bad as a truly tremendous force, we cannot have this final victory over them where we’ve tackled them piecemeal, and that’s exactly what we’ve done with each of our old gods.

For example, if we faced C’thun and it was made abundantly clear that we only just barely survived by the skin of our teeth, then we have the fear of “oh my god, what if we have to fight another; or, worse, what if we have to fight multiple of them at once!?”

We never got that, though. It was just: Old God? Cool, let’s beat their face up.

MoP did a not half bad job dealing with Y’shrajj or w/e his name was; even dead, he was incredibly powerful and had a lasting impact.

The other big thing is the start and stop, or isolated nature of the old gods in WoW. There really isn’t any connective tissue linking them; they’re each on their own and we only ever face them as such. They seem weak as a result.

I created a A Proposed Revision 🖊 in which the Old Gods played a more powerful role and we never initially defeated them, and as a result they eventually raise up the whole Black Empire. In that, I tried to knit their stories together across the sequence of expansions.

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i think this was the best opportunity to have an old god victory and the black empire rise. maybe kill a few characters and destroys everything or almost everything about the factions.

A defeat so chrusing for both factions that having a faction war ever again would be so stupid that it would actually make us forget about the past teldrassil would be small in comparassion so we can, slowly but surely regain the power to strike back and retake our world.

That is how you resolve faction war. by having a third party that is actually scary and someone that eventually we can have our revenge.

And no, after so much build up ,n’zoth randomly becomes the end boss expansion and is killed by a dumb kamehameha with the power of friendship, that would make fairy tail proud.

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The problem is that they don’t feel that threatening, you know? Even this expansion that has had so many Void related elements, feels so empty, even the Legion felt unbeatable at a certain point.

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The Old Gods and their Lovecraftian, Cosmic Horror themes, would always be a challenge to pull off for any writing team with any medium. Honestly? Even Lovecraft didn’t do them justice, and they were his own creation. The best Cosmic Horror ever written were either inspired from Lovecraft or not related to Lovecraft at all.

To do the Old Gods and/or Void Lords justice, Blizzard has to be willing to make us, the players, the PCs and Azeroth as a whole feel insignificant. That would be the whole point. Which is needless to say, difficult to do in a video game where we are supposed to be the heroes. How would we, as players, react to losing? Or feeling powerless? Or faced with a big bad that we know will inevitably win? How will we feel as players with the knowledge of all our past victories ultimately meant nothing?

While I might be okay with losing to a big bad for narrative reasons, I am not sure others share that, nor do I think even I would enjoy it to that extreme. However, to pull off the Lovecraftian, Cosmicism themes from which the Old Gods are inspired from, this is kind of what needs to happen. The whole point of Cosmicism is the insignificancy of humanity when faced with the vastness of the cosmos. Beings like Cthulu, Azathoth, and Yogg-Sothoth, are not only terrifying by themselves, but they represent the unknown. Nay, not just the unknown, but things that we as a species will never know or ever hope to understand. They are the mysteries humanity will never solve before, like so many species before us, go extinct.

So how can we accomplish this in Warcraft in a way that is satisfying? I am not sure we can. Cosmicism is not meant to be satisfying, it is meant to challenge our very existence. It is meant to force a confrontation with truths that we rather ignore.

it is difficult to win against something like that, which is why I think it is silly to have the Old Gods as something we fight at all. Blizzard tries to have it both ways where the Old Gods bolster about the futility of mortal struggles, and how unstoppable the Void is as a force… But we continuously prove them wrong, which makes them come off as a bit punkish.

This is why I think the Old Gods merely being manifestations of the Void Lords was actually a smart move on Blizzard’s part, it makes them enemies we can fight and defeat, but it is a bit of a waste regardless.

I think there is some potential for some Cosmic Horror themes with the Void Lords and Dimensius the All-Devouring, perhaps with an expansion that takes us to the shattered world of K’aresh. However, I think, unless Blizzard wants to take a leap of faith and have an expansion in which the heroes of Azeroth not only fail, but are completely and utterly powerless to even contend with the evil they face, these inspirations of Lovecraft will never be true to the genre they are born from.

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This was one of the main criticisms towards Cata, where the twilight hammer cult was suddenly turned into this massive military force.

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Part of the issue, at least for me, is just how readily available solutions to them are (titan tech; dragon soul; whatever other McGuffin is at hand; etc). Nothing can be that scary if you always have the magical item necessary to kill it at hand. That’s why N’Zoth is so lackluster to me - he appears and immediately we figure out how to connect a bunch of titan tech to blow him up. Also, Wrathion just happens to show up and have his anti corruption stuff all figured out from the get-go. All this before Azshara apparently had her own plan with the dagger as well.

It also doesn’t help that N’Zoth’s buildup in BfA kinda sucks. Not quite sure what they were going for with Stormsong and Nazjatar, but they really didn’t sell me on him being all scary and threatening. He’s just… there. That’s it. G’Huun and the blood trolls were more intimidating.

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The Old Gods are by far one of the biggest disappointments of this franchise.

They have never come across as a credible threat. We always dispatch them in the same expansion they start trouble in so we never see any lasting impact from our battles with them. We’ve never been in a losing position against them. Not even temporarily. Shoot, not even in our history.

They are a disgrace to the cosmic horror genre. Little more than large loot pinatas with a Lovecraftian aesthetic. The Burning Legion were actually a better example of cosmic horror because for much of their history we were physically unable to go on the offensive. The Legion was infinite. There was no defeating them, only surviving. At least until Legion.

Could they have been done well? To be honest, probably not. Not with the way WoW is set up where we need to defeat every big bad that comes our way in the form of a raid.

But if they were treated more like the Burning Legion? Maybe. Ideally the Old Gods wouldn’t be something we just… Fight. They would be continent sized tumors lurking deep beneath the planet’s crust. Snaking their miles long tendrils across huge stretches of the world. Corrupting the elements and local wild life. Maybe having their massive bodies used as a sort of transportation method for the aqir. A massive mass of eyes and mouths erupt from the earth and spew forth hordes of insectoid monstrosities would leave a potent memory in one’s mind.

Fighting the Old Gods would involve fighting the aqir and the Twilight’s Hammer. It would involve creating quarantine zones where armies are stationed around the borders to try and keep the corruption in check. Never able to be purified. Only prevented from expanding further.

But we’d never actually be able to kill the Old Gods. We fight them and put them to sleep for a while, but there’d be a chance for them to awaken later and begin the spread of their vile flesh all over again. The raid tiers would be about fighting their champions and preventing them from waking the Old Gods back up.

Throw in some major casualties to the Old Gods. Instead of Garrosh it was an Old God that swallowed Theramore whole, leaving a gaping maw of endless teeth where the city once stood. A piece of an Old God that had been stirred by Onyxia and her brood. Tie that into Deathwing. His rampage across Azeroth could have revealed miles worth of Old God flesh under the Barrens instead of generic lava. Cataclysm would be about destroying Deathwing because if he finishes unearthing the Old Gods and their ancient prisons because should he succeed that would be game over.

So yah. I think it could have worked if Blizzard took a more Lovecraftian approach to the Old Gods. If they really did it well we could be getting a Black Empire expansion now as N’Zoth awakens fully and a massive, black citadel of spines and flesh rises from the deep sea wearing Nazjatar as a crown.

It would be a true apocalyptic event. A whole expansion dedicated to trying to survive the full awakening of the weakest Old God.

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the old god s are void gods right?

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No, they were created by the Void Lords to corrupt titan world souls in order to create a Void Titan. As they themselves have trouble manifesting into the phyiscal plane.

Hence why Sargeras destroyed a world soul that was about to be corrupted by some old gods (the remains of which are speculated to be where the Void Elves call home, due to some dialogue there), and why he originally wanted Azeroth destroyed when he learned that Old Gods were on the planet. As he believed keeping them imprisoned is a short term solution and not a permanent one.

The other titans knew that however, hence Uldir being created.

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I think a big thing they could do to make them at least feel a little more threatening without having to devote time into something like letting them win and destroy a zone or some such is to make them more than just purple and tentacles.

If they gave whoever designed the Ur’zhul free reign (rein? rain… I hate english) to design some eldritch horrors I think they’d at least feel more threatening even if they weren’t.

If I can look at it and tell how it functions, it’s not eldritch enough.

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It probably doesn’t help that the most we’ve seen Old Gods do is… uhhh… what have they done again?

I mean, the Heartsbane Coven, which we got just this expansion, was far scarier than the Twilight Hammer ever was. Drustvar was almost destroyed entirely, and by its own women! Not purple squid-faced people sprouting from the ground.

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This is why I wanted Ny’alotha to be an expansion and not a single patch. But no, blizzard has to listen to their rod between their legs that loves an undead corpse instead.

N’zoth getting free from his prison would be the perfect ending to BFA imo if it was written better. I like it when we actually lose in storylines. Reason why the intro to Legion worked so well. As well as the human campaign in WC3. Just have to look at Infinity War in the MCU as well. Having your characters lose can be a great way to explore them a lot more than just having them win 24/7. It also puts the stakes much higher because of it. Just look at WC3 and the scourge / Legion. They took out Lordaeron and Quel’thalas like they were nothing. So it makes the battle for mount Hyjal even more intense as you are staring down this army of undead and demons.

Shame WoW filled with second-rate writers atm.

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I think this raises an important point that scale alone is not necessary to generate drama and audience engagement.

Assuming that nothing short of world-ending apocalypse threats(or universe ending ones) will ever as much as tickle the audience’s interest is a terrible thing and will lead to an almost immediate spectacle creep that’ll quickly go beyond the level of absurd.

How many times hasn’t Azeroth been threatened with destruction in the last 30 years alone?

Drustvar was good because of the characters, atmosphere and story. This a reason why we can enjoy a good drama even if it is not about world-ending consequences.

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Yeah, you pretty much nailed it.

I’m amazed they actually let N’Zoth free, because by all that we’ve ever been given about them, the Old Gods should wipe the floor with us without a second thought. It should be effortless. I don’t think any other threat we’ve faced - not the Lich King, not Deathwing, not even the Burning Legion - is on the same level.

And yes, while Sargeras is more than capable of killing Old Gods by blowing up planets, the reason he destroys the planets in the first place is fear. The Old Gods are morsels of the power of Void Lords. If the Old Gods ever successfully corrupt a world soul, it’s as good as over as far as he’s concerned.

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Unfortunately some people don’t like those types of stories that mainly focuses on short scale conflicts. Because they see it more as “filler” compared to the grand “END OF THE WORLD” plot.

For example the two MCU spiderman films and the two Antman films.

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They’re very clearly burning through old lore as fast as they can. Argus was a single patch, Nazjatar was a single patch, Nya’lotha is now a single patch…

Presentation is probably more important than scale, and I feel like the Old Gods might be lacking both nowadays?

I mean, they did a great job of painting the Horde as the biggest threat to the Alliance’s continued existence at the start of the expansion, a foe we’d have to wipe out or die trying… But then it comes to N’Zoth and it’s just “go plug these Titan machines in and we’ll zap him to death”

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They’re a poor man’s attempt at Lovecraft horror. I don’t think they were ever meant to be written the way fans expected them to.

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