If this expansion is another "Existential Threat" story

Community General Discussion
1

You’re making a mistake. What WoW needs more than ever right now is a “Beach Episode” style expansion.

What is a beach episode?

A trope mainly found in anime, where the main conflicts of the story are put on hold, and the audience, and the characters get a chance to breathe. This is usually an episode where nothing particularly important happens. It’s just the characters hanging out, there is some character development, some nice down to earth interactions between characters that may not normally interact with each other. A beach episode is not necessarily one that takes place on a beach, but a beach is usually the norm.

What this means for WoW is, we need an expansion where we have a return to status Quo. We need that D&D adventurer style mood back. We need an expansion where we protect the peace on Azeroth we have worked hard to build over the course of this game. We killed the old Gods, we stopped Arthas, we defeated deathwing, the birning legion, the jailer, ect ect ect. Azeroth needs a time of peace and rebuilding. It needs a return to comfy adventures on azeroth. Where we’re not dealing with one major threat, but several smaller ones again.

In peace time, we still have conflicts, we still have bandits, highwaymen, cultists, necromancers, but none of these are necessarily threatening the entire universe. Just the peace.

In the wake of Shadowlands, we lost our lich king. Alliance lost our king, The horde is leaderless, and the undead lost sylvanas.

All of these and more can make for incredible stories, and none of them could have anything remotely as dire as The Burning Legion returning.

We need a beach episode where we just chill and rebuild Azeroth.

34 Likes
2

Totally agree. No big bad. Smaller stories that are contained to each zone. The raids are just mysterious places to explore for no rhyme or reason other than for our characters to go on an adventure.

10 Likes
3

I just want to fight Dragons.
And Quilboar. Boars. Bandits. Snakes. Spiders. etc.

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4

As long as we never see a faction war expansion again I am good

:nauseated_face: :face_vomiting:

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5

You can still have a big bad but it doesn’t need to be world or reality breaking in any way. The villains motives can be simply obtaining power or invading territory and that would be good enough

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6

Those things are “episodes” for a reason. There’s nothing of enough substance to last an entire expansion, and it would very quickly get boring.

7

Yea man, having everything be about The Jailer and his 7hed plan to dominate the universe was so much fun, we should do it 8 times in a row.

5 Likes
8

If nothing important happens, how will we have dungeons and raids?

9

Particularly is relative. You can still have threats that aren’t Jailer level, my man.

1 Like
10

I understand that. But it sounded as if you wanted no threats. And end of raid bosses are usually big threats.

Apologies if I misunderstood.

11

They tried that with MoP but then I guess they panicked and thought people would be confused at no new ‘big bad’? Whatever the case, Lei Shen died too soon.

1 Like
12

I love when you just put words in my mouth. :slight_smile: Please, what else can you claim I said without having ever actually said it?

13

I said many years ago this franchise was going the wrong direction when they kept trying to one up one big bad guy after another. You don’t really need to do that for a fantasy RPG game to be great.

They could have taken blackrock depths style dungeons and stories a long, long way without players getting tired of that.

Venturing down into dungeons and finding phat magical loot never gets old. Just because a boss is hard to defeat it doesn’t need to be “end of the world” every single time for it to feel epic.

The whole after life thing, I knew from the moment it was announced it was going to be a disaster. But not for the usual reasons people think.

I used to dabble years ago in horror writing and horror film making. And something that I learned was that in any genre, but most ESPECIALLY the horror genre, the scariest thing you can write about is the unseen terror. Take for example the first paranormal activity movie. A lot of people found that was more frightening than many other movies. Why? It followed the key ingredient for success which in my belief is: DO NOT SHOW THE BAD GUY. People’s imaginations will always default to the most terrifying thing possible when it’s invisible. But the moment you try to give it some physical form (I.E all the dumb horror movies with a physical monster) it immediately loses it’s scary component and becomes just another cheesy monster movie.

It’s like that with trying to visualize after life stuff or any religious theology or ideology. Heaven can be paradise in the minds of many and hell can be the terrifying pit of eternal torment. Until you visualize it in the form of Bastion and the Maw.

4 Likes
14

How do you go back though?

after killing gods and the like whats the next challenge?
oh… now we are struggling to fight a bandit leader… yay?

15

The best part about this is who cares? Literally who cares, man. Just do it. It doesn’t matter. At. All. Just do the beach episode.

1 Like
16

20/10. Please. Blizzard does NOT write big threats well. At least, not this new team. Legion and Sargareas were great but N’zoth was robbed and The Shadowlands had so little story wrapped up with another foreboding allusion that only made me roll my eyes.

Just let us explore the world, enjoy a chill adventure. I’m TIRED of being “Hero” “Champion.” “Maw Walker” it makes no sense it isn’t earned and it’s frustrating. Just lemme be some random goblin down the street. THAT’S what WoW was founded on. Save the Main Character thing for games that do it well.

5 Likes
17

I’d say that Mists of Pandaria and the beginnings of BFA were a good example of WoW style beach episodes. Pandaria told a good thematic story without resorting to world/universe ending threats. BFA’s Zandalar and Kul’tiras storylines were pretty fun. They should have kept that tone for the rest of the expansion rather than resorting to N’zoth and Azshara as borderline fodder.

3 Likes
18

And ruining BOTH in the process. They were villains that deserved expansions dedicated to them, or at least that gave them real respect. The current writing team just seemed eager to write them off and give us… ???

3 Likes
19

Guaranteed there will be lol.

20

Nope. I’m out.

Shave. Buy a suit. Touch grass.

1 Like