I don’t think it matters. It could be done right and done horribly either way.
If we think of Arthas, Deathwing, and Garrosh… I don’t think it hindered the story knowing we would face them. If anything, it gave us a lens to see every detail on the way, and a goal to work towards.
I guess in BC we didn’t technically know Kiljaeden would be the final boss, but that makes sense enough. He is a big wig in the Legion. So there was immense related build up from the first day, even if we didn’t know exactly who it would be.
BfA and WoD had so many other issues… the fact that we didn’t know the last boss before hand is probably not why those 2 expacs are often complained about.
I think there are so many issues that can make or break an expac, and this is not among those issues. Knowing the final boss doesn’t innately help or hurt the story. It depends on the execution.
No, it’s a video game not a novel waiting two years or more to find out what’s going on only leads to disappointment and lies from blizzard while they try and maintain the “surprise”
Or Ardenweald. One quarter of the Shadowlands leveling experience. One of four max-level campaigns. A retcon of a considerable portion of Emerald Dream and Wild God lore. And it only exists because some guys were like “Those are some cool looking trees.” while looking at Bastiom concept art.
Looking back, I’ve enjoyed it more when I knew who the final boss was going to be. It helps give a feeling of working towards a specific goal, whereas when it’s up in the air I almost feel like everything I do is just treading water waiting for the reveal.
WotLK was a great experience for me, slowly journeying across Northrend, building myself up for the eventual final confrontation at Icecrown Citadel. It made the expansion seem more epic and fun. Legion felt similar, with each patch having us hitting back at the Legion more and more. This time around, I felt none of that. It was like I was blindly lurching from story to story with each patch.
I liked that the LK would literally show up during questing too, it gave him more presence. Nowadays it feels like a big bad just shows up and we’re sent to go kill it.
Depends on the expansion. Wrath and Cata were villain-focused. It was good to know that the climactic throwdown would be with them. WoD was villain focused too but uh, so much for that.
I’m willing to give the Jailer a chance as the star of the first villain-focused expansion in a while. In which case A) it’s good to know we’ll have a more conventional fight with him and B) it’s good to know Sylv won’t gank him and take his place, which I assumed at firat.
He’s a scenery-chewing evil dude with apparently simplistic motivations, sure, but he’s also the Warden of WC Superhell and seems more conniving than the LK or Deathwing. I’m down for that
I dunno, I want to half-take Necroxis’s side on this.
I think if a story is really good, then having it spoiled will absolutely diminish it for me. It’ll still be a good story, and I can still enjoy it, but some of its impact will definitely be lost.
As an old personal example, the original Dragon Warrior 3 on the NES had an entire walkthrough of the game in its manual, including a plot twist that had (at the time, I think) never been done in a videogame before. Child me absolutely spoiled that for myself because I read the manual. I recently watched a streamer who played through the game completely blind, sans manual, and he was absolutely blown away when he hit that part. And he wasn’t even a Dragon Quest/Warrior fan. So that reaction is demonstrably something I missed out on as a kid.
On the other hand, I very much disliked MoP’s faction war aspect and I LOATHED BFA, and I truly don’t feel like I missed out on anything worthwhile by knowing that Garrosh was the raid boss at the end. In fact, I think it helped me compartmentalize the bits I liked about MoP a little bit more because I went into it trying to disassociate what I disliked about it. I might have been able to do the same with BFA. (This is not high praise)
So to me, I think when I have the feeling of “I want to know what the final boss is ahead of time”, what I’m really wanting is a form of investment triage, trying to find out if it’s worth trying to get into the story of something that I -want- to enjoy, but despite feelings of being burned hard and not wanting to commit.
I just fundamentally disagree. IMO it is stories which rely on “wait and see” and essentially “jump scare” logic which are trash. A true classic is timeless even though you know the ending, because it is written so well that it doesn’t matter you know the ending because the journey is so good.
I mean why is that a bad thing? I feel like you have the right to know if the thing you are investing your time in might be worth it.
Oh no, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to feel confident about what you invest your time in. I was just trying to dig into my underlying reason for it, and thought maybe others would feel the same way.
In my Dragon Warrior 3 example, I still hella enjoyed the twist for what it was. I was just missing the impact of the real-time reveal. I’d go into detail if you were interested but I don’t know how to do spoiler tags, even if it’s just for a hella old NES game.
Honestly I think we can all agree, knowing or not knowing the villain ultimately doesn’t matter super much.
What truly matters is the build up, to said final confrontation, knowing our actions are actively toward a certain goal be it building up resistance against a force, Going around inspiring hope in the denizens of the country, becoming notorious for our unmerciful ways towards those who actively seek to harm, etc.
Some push and pull needs to happen where progress is made, setbacks occur, big baddie casually compliments our new haircut before slapping us upside the head and showing how strong they truly can be, thus we are left looking for alternatives as we slowly experience the dread others have felt for so long.
If blizzard really wants to make a big baddie work they need to be like Arthas/ Guldan who would occasionally pop up, snark a bit, or even congratulate us on a job well done for killing a strong minion.
They were somewhat going in the right direction regarding Nzoth but used him too much imo, but unlike the other two I mentioned it did give us the choice of “joining” him (False, Fake, Meaningless) choice.
SL Should have the jailor pop up from time to time and give us an easy way to complete a quest by like accepting his power or something, at the risk of rep loss or insert something here.
TLDR: knowing the big baddie early doesn’t matter, just gotta build them up throughout the xpac (Arthas/Guldan) without exposing them too much (Nzoth), make the players feel invested to confront said baddie.