They did this with Garrosh in Mist and The Jailer for Shadowlands, where they just came out and said “Yea, that’s the final boss.”
Do you feel that kind of hinders the story?
1 Like
When the boss is the leader of your entire faction, I don’t think that making it a surprise would have been a good plan.
20 Likes
I wouldn’t say it hinders the story, or limits it in a bad way, per se. If anything, it ties their hands, and prevents midstream changes. Because I, for one, don’t buy their “planned years in advance” shtick.
30 Likes
Garrosh being revealed in advance messed with story discussion.
Sylvanas was mostly the same plot but you had more discussion about whether to follow her because people didn’t know what was going on. We missed getting that with Garrosh.
1 Like
I don’t think it’s fair to compare MoP and SL with their final boss reveal. We knew it was the Jailer before the xpac even hits, and Garrosh way into the expansion.
That being said, no, I don’t think it hinders the story. I think that both ways can be done successfully.
I think the issue comes with BFA, where it was stated to be a faction xpac, but turned out to be an Old Gods one. Needs to be either be obvious from the get go, or not. No inbetween.
3 Likes
Kind of depends on the situation. We knew the Lich King and Deathwing would be the final bosses of their expansions and it didn’t really matter, meanwhile Garrosh being the final boss of MoP probably would have been better saved until the later. I feel as though the Jailer is too much of a “who?” to pull out of their butts at the last second so calling him out as the final boss right away is fine.
1 Like
Yes. It actively ruins any mystique or shock in the story.
Its crazy to me that people think its a smart narrative choice to spoil the end villain of a story before the players even open the book.
Imagine if Blizzard wasn’t constantly spoiling story stuff or putting blatant story spoilers on the PTR and you actually just played the game and experienced the story moments naturally.
Like imagine getting to Revendreth, the final zone of the story, and experiencing that its largely about [X] being redeemed in real time as you play.
But nope.
4 Likes
Definitely don’t buy it. See Vol’jin’s current arc in Shadowlands. Total fan service and writing fan theories into canon.
3 Likes
They said at the blizzcon MoP was announced at, that Garrosh would be the final boss.
They’ve been doing this for years now. At least over a decade. For example, before TBC there was a crazy fan theory that Gilneas was taken over by Worgen and would be the new playable race for alliance alongside Blood Elves on the horde. Two expansions later, that outlandish fan theory came true.
Knowing who your villain in going to be is fine because it should give the story a definite ending, which means the story should be leading towards that ending.
Then Blizzard tries to be secretive and coy, all they do is fudge around in the dark until we’re randomly plopped infront a villain and told kill him he has purples.
WoW isn’t a mystery story. it’s a straight forward Heroes vs Villain. And the writers aren’t good enough to actually surprise us anyway.
11 Likes
Technically Halion is the final boss of Wrath…
In any case, it’s kind of up in the air, though announcing it does benefit Blizzard writing more than us, because it gives the veneer that stuff is all planned out, rather than done in response to stuff, which absolutely happens.
That said, there have been more expansions where we haven’t known who the final boss was than ones where we’ve known.
Vanilla- Didn’t know.
TBC- Assumed Illidan, turned out to be Kil’jaeden, didn’t know.
Wrath- Arthas, knew from the start (joke technicality above aside).
Cata- Deathwing, known.
MoP- Garrosh, known.
WoD- Archimonde, unknown.
Legion- Argus, unknown.
BfA- N’zoth, unknown.
1 Like
It worked for Legion. It didn’t work for BFA or WoD. Probably because we’re fighting an entirely different faction than the one we started in those two. WoD should’ve ended with us still fighting the Iron Horde, and BFA should’ve ended on another faction war raid instead of just rehashing MoP’s entire horde story arc.
Oh, it also worked for TBC, mainly because Illidari and Burning Legion were equal threats to begin with. And Sunwell Plateau had a more coherent story than Illidan going mad off-screen and needing to be killed.
4 Likes
Don’t think so.
I for once liked WoLK the most partly because you knew how big and bad the Lichking was and the whole idea was to be finally ready to take on icecrown.
The zone itself was a novum with Monsters there that were not supposed to be killable and so on.
What baffels me more is that some people during the times after WotLK were in such a denial state that they crafted pretty much the most entangled and weired chain of possibilities just to make it somehow possible that the character is not evil or will be the final boss or so.
It peaked in BFA with Sylvanas literally telling and showing you how evil she is, genociding a player race and people still were not accepting it.
Crafting rediculous claims liek teh NE children were actually corruped by old gods and Sylvanas was just a hero here … wtf.
So conclusion:
I think the player base itself is the reason that Blizzard has to come up with the evil guys infront of you. Telling them exactly how it is.
6 Likes
People were confused about Sylvanas because Blizzard devs literally said she wasn’t evil a few weeks before she burned Teldrassil.
6 Likes
Should have been some kind of … don’t know … a hint? That that statement was probably not going to age well?
There are not many ways to paint genocide and burning children alive AFTER you rallied up civillians AND children in Astranaar and kill them for no reason, to not be as evil as one could become.
This is what I mean. Sure that statment from Blizz was … pretty stupid, but people somehow could also think for themselves and these actions didn’t leave much room for anything else at all.
Don’t get it twisted, after Teldrassil I didn’t think Sylvanas was a good guy. I was just mad at Blizzard for jerking us around before hand. And I haven’t really seen anyone argue that Sylvanas was a good guy in BFA either.
13 Likes
I definitely prefer knowing who the villain will be, if not in whole at least in part. Like Legion building up to Argus instead of Sargeras was fine with me because it was still the last fight in an expansion very much centered on the Legion. There was no twist, no distraction, just a slightly different fight than we might have expected.
The one thing I think they missed out on (and it seems Blizz agrees considering recent info) was showing us the Jailer in a cinematic from the start. I think TBC, Wrath, and Cata all had the right idea in showing us the enemy, pointing us at them, and also giving us a real sense of them. Obviously Wrath did this the best, but it’s hard to beat Arthas as a villain in the Warcraft universe.
Sylvanas may be an enemy, but she isn’t -the- boss. I want to see the Jailer and feel like he is someone I should want to fight, preferably as something I want to do even before the horrible things he’s done to the Shadowlands become apparent in the questing experience. I just think it can make it more satisfying as we get to the end.
2 Likes
Yeah, it seems unnecessary. I’d rather be surprised.
PC Gamer’s latest issue has a CGI rendering of the Jailer. I think we’re getting another CGI cinematic before Shadowlands goes live.
2 Likes
Blizzard stated that very early on they want Sylvanas have a dialog with one of the main characters of the expansion revealing everything and every whys.
I think this is done with that cinematic.
I can think of 2 possibilities:
- Just Sylvanas interrogating Anduin in the Maw after he has been abducted and the Jailer is somehow there.
- The cinematic will feature the capturing and then the monologue.
(Would ike the 2nd version as it would somehow mean we vould see a CGI of the nightwarrior dismanteling her captors… but I doubt it)
We are thus up for 2-3 cinematics for the prepatch:
- The capturing
- The CGI of the jailer, though as I have explained could be combined with the first.
- The death of Nathanos.
I am very curious about them.