I’ve been revisiting Classic during this long wow hiatus, and some lost potential lore threads have me shaking my fist in anger about what could have been. One of the things that could have been, being a coherent narrative when it comes to Sylvanas and the Forsaken. We interact a lot with Varimathras, who has us collecting artifacts and things of interest for Sylvanas, who is preoccupied with trying to find the means to stop Arthas, that’s what Sylvanas was doing, but there was more, Varimathras was working with the Burning Legion against the Old Gods.
I really wish they didn’t repurpose these ideas into newer lore, because the original idea of where the lore was going was far more interesting.
There’s a Horde quest in Alterac called “Prison Break” where we break into an Alliance Syndicate Outpost and kill 4 forsaken and recover bloodstone artifacts that they stole from the Undercity Vault, Sylvanas’s personal artifact stash. The thing about these Forsaken deserters is they are portrayed as “good Forsaken” as opposed to Sylvanas’s evil Forsaken. one of the humans drops a readable lore book titled Belamoore’s Research Journal. The Bloodstones that they smuggled out of undercity contained a hungering presence, not unlike how Old Gods are described in other parts of the text. One of these Bloodstones actually goes missing, presumably stolen by a rogue Dalaran mage and is lost to this day.
There seems to have been two threads here, the first, that forsaken were still largely under the control of Yogg-Saron, and that’s why they were evil, which was later revealed in WoLK. But secondly, these “bloodstones” were meant to potentially be the original idea of Azerite, and hinted at a connection between Azeroth being an Old God herself. In BtS we find out that Azerite at one point had a red hue like actual blood, Gallywix had one for a long time on top of his cane, harvested from Kezan before the Volcano erupted.
iirc the Humans the forsaken were going to give to the Bloodstones to were the Syndicate, which were in league with the Argus Wake. A burning legion cult.
EDIT: Got confused, it was to the forces near Dalaran.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Prison_Break_In
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lordamere_Internment_Camp is where they are located. Which was run by forces belonging to Dalaran.
However one of the pendants never made it to their destination after Belamoore sent it out.
wow, a lot of enemies were using bloodshards back in Vanilla.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think that retcons or introducing new lore aspects to replace old lore aspects is necessarily a bad thing.
The core issue with the current lore (both from BfA and Shadowlands) and Zovaal overall isn’t really just that it’s superseded older lore.
It’s that I don’t think it’s been constructed (or portrayed, whichever it is) in a way that makes it interesting nor compelling.
Which is what can really feel bad about lost lines of lore, like the lore mentioned in this thread. That it’s been somewhat discarded for something that seems pretty subpar overall.
There’s a lot of relatively nuanced older lore that just feels kind of shallow or fragmented now, and that’s a bit of a shame.
It does feel like Blizzard was just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. There are other things from Vanilla that never came back or just ended with no follow up. And it is something that continues to this day.
It’s kind of interesting that the ‘bloodstone artifacts’ article notes the quest giver only knew about four artifacts being stolen, which brings an interesting question of why he would omit a fifth or where/how the deserters got a fifth one.
With something like WoW where the structure of telling a story is a bit different to, say, a novel (not only is the story presented in a different format, but we know that it’s also often beholden to the mechanical side of the game as well) - I don’t totally disagree with that sort of approach.
I guess the issue with it is that it can be hard to keep track of all the different strings of spaghetti you’ve tossed at the wall. This seems more a failing of the lore keeping at Blizz to me though and we’ve seen through the recent Exploring Azeroth: Kalimdor book that there’s very clearly some internal issues in the WoW team when it comes to Warcraft history and lore keeping.
Overall though, I don’t know that the approach is the entire issue. We’ve now learnt of other contributing factors (particularly when it came to the storyline of BfA), however SL has a number of its own problems that I don’t think can be entirely pinned down to those other factors.
I’m not sure what’s behind it. Perhaps they really did just struggle with the mess that they were left with, though to struggle as much as they have in SL doesn’t fill me with truck loads of confidence. Still, I hope that they can turn the story around with the next expansion.
Now that the current team have pretty well washed their hands of the story from BfA/SL the next expansion is going to be the real telling point of how things may look moving forward. I hope they realise the gravity of that and I hope that they put together something good. I don’t want to see the story struggle and flounder as I feel it has been of late.
I feel like that is why the world felt larger than life back in Vanilla. You had all of these minor stories that in hindsight didn’t go anywhere but it felt relatively important. Lately blizzard has been streamlining the story and focusing solely on one or two major threats while somehow tying minor ones to the greater ones for some reason. Probably why Drustvar was received so well. As it was the only zone that didn’t have a heavy focus on the Old Gods either directly or indirectly. All 3 of the hordes leveling zones had Uldir as the final destination. While Stormsong Valley and Tiragarde sound was setting up for Nazjatar. The former being directly and the latter being indirectly. The only meta story Drustvar is connected to is reuniting all of the houses of Kul Tiras and bring them into the Alliance.
However there is a downside though. Ardenweald due to his production history feels aimless and certain plot lines, such as Bwonsamdi and Mueh’zala got sidelined as a result.
I think you certainly have a point there - though it’s been a good while since I levelled in S/L and I’ve long since disconnected from the expansion as a whole. So I won’t comment too much on how smaller plotlines are handled during that process.
That said, I do think that having smaller lines that exist separate from the overarching narrative does help to make the world feel both larger and more alive. I also don’t think that every string of spaghetti tossed at the wall needs to be followed to absolute completion just because it was flung at said wall.
Take Abbey Lewis in Drustvar - she may not have had a big role to play in the larger story but her existence makes it feel that there are people and entities in the world that are doing their own thing - “living their own lives”, as it were.
I think that is important. If all, or the vast bulk, of those we interact with are all centred around the overarching story then it can feel like the world isn’t alive at all but instead just a staging ground for whatever big story beat is being pursued at the time.
Part of me hoped that we would’ve got a Drust themed raid in Shadowlands and she was going to be a boss in it. It could be like a return to Karazhan situation where we are shrunk down onto a tea set.
Usually mid expansion or early mid expansion raids are the conclusion of a secondary storyline. And considering that the Drust had invaded Ardenweald beforehand, who is to say they wouldn’t do it again? It is why I wished we used what we learnt from Cata with Ragnaros and Legion with Argus. Where it is sometimes better to end the threat at the source instead of just sitting back and wait for the threat to return. But alas for reasons, in which COVID probably was a factor, we didn’t get a raid like that. Instead it went Main story, main story and finally main story.
That would have been very cool, Return to Karazhan was a wacky and wild adventure. They could have pushed the horror theme present with Abbey as well, through things like having her laughter ringing out through the air at times as you travelled through or stuffed animal/wicker mobs that move in an odd and unsettling fashion as is stereotypical of “exorcism” themed movies.
Hopefully now they’re better set up to work around the likes of Covid, it was an adjustment for us all.
I’m curious as to how we got Legion, because it was just soo jam packed full of content. From the class halls/campaigns/sets/mounts to the Mage Tower and it’s appearances. Of course Legion wasn’t flawless, the artifact weapons themselves were pretty rough for a while. However it had a lot of new stuff in it and I wonder if we’ll ever see an expansion as packed full of content again, or was the sacrificing of WoD required for it.
The language of death confounds me, but I have been able to identify commonly uttered sounds and phrases. The word "Yogg-Saron" is said with great contempt and is usually followed by loud outbursts. They refer to the ore as "saronite."
I doubt Arthas would use Saronite as his main building material for his bases, weapons etc if it allowed Yogg-saron to control the scourge. The Ashen Verdict even reverse engineers the scourges methods of manipulating pure saronite so the users don’t get influenced by Yogg-saron, even after his “death”. As it was used to craft Shadowmourne.