It’s just oozing with atmosphere, creativity, and is the first time WoW’s marketing team has genuinely got me to laugh;
And I’m just going - oh no we’re going to have to stop this fun and deal with more Void BS aren’t we? Yeah let’s leave jazzy petropunk funworld to go fight some purple stuff threatening non specific cosmic doom.
Will it be bandaged purple stuff as this patch implies? Gooey purple stuff with a big orange eye? Insectoid purple stuff? Or perhaps the always popular dudes in purple armor? Or the best - just vague purple stuff incarnate!
All at once, dare we dream?
Seriously is anyone excited about that? The Undermine patch to me has shown what a winning formula it is to update and expand on the more mundane parts of Azeroth. The Goblins have been around for awhile and I don’t recall much demand for a big expansion on their presence and lore but WoW went for it and it’s the best content I’ve seen in damn near a decade.
I’m not interested in another new race or faction or more cosmic doom drama. I desperately want the existing core factions to get this much love, attention and content.
That’s my concern as well. Undermine is so grounded in the culture of WoW that I’m not too excited for some new high concept ethereal world that doesn’t have staying power or long-term connections with the worldbuilding.
I want to see more places like undermine and less places like whatever the darklands is gonna be.
For me it’s the lack of diversity. I haven’t been convinced yet that the void is interesting or anything more deep than just lifting the aesthetics of hp lovecraft. They just never go deep enough with it.
When two characters we know are fighting (like gazlowe and gallywix) there’s just so much more character drama to work with.
Arthas was kind of the best of all worlds because all of the characters knew him and had beef with him but we also got the cool undead aesthetics being a problem everywhere. it put a face to it.
The void is just so… nebulous.
I can’t ever have strong emotions against xalatath because it never feels personal. With arthas everything was personal.
In fairness, this is especially a problem with defeating the Burning Legion as we did. The Legion had a long pedigree of personal antagonism with myriad characters across both player factions and throughout the established neutral cast. It was ultimately the franchise antagonist responsible for many of the world’s factions - including the Alliance and Horde - existing at all, while even the Void and Old God buildup since Chronicle was comparatively remote and detached. Offing the Legion so abruptly and with so few of those longstanding conflicts being truly addressed has seen the franchise-wide Big Bad mantle taken up by a bunch of short-lived replacement villains ever since who either feel starkly impersonal or get saddled with a bunch of front-loaded retcons to hastily grant them weight by giving them shared off-screen credit for things the Legion did.
Narratively speaking, every cosmic villain since Legion is trying to fill the demons’ shoes, and in spite of efforts to posthumously reframe the Burning Legion as less significant than these newer threats all along, said newer enemies still fall well short of WarCraft’s original enemy of all life.
Fun Fact: King Arfur and his Court are at Ringing Deeps and in order to do the “King Arthur goes to Avalon” Plot we need for Siren Isle to be the shores that Odyn kept sending his lackeys to which means that Beledar must be Avaloren.
Avalon is the Realm of Titania the Fairy Queen and her husband Oberon.
Beledar is also the source of the Radiant Song that is tied to K’aresh so if K’aresh is not a Titan then there must be a Fairy Queen named Titania there whom the Ethereal will drain of Shadow(no doubt the Day Face of Winter inhabits Titania’s Body when the Shadow isn’t present) using the Dark Heart causing the Winter Queen of Ardenweald to be pulled out of her Ardenweald Body due to the literal void.
The Winter Queen unrestrained by the First Ones’ programming reveals her true face.
Prototype of Renewal yells: Pruned.
Prototype of Renewal yells: All things end.
Prototype of Renewal yells: Only the strong survive.
The Proto-Winter Queen’s mention of “Only the strong survive.” being shared with Xal’atath turns out to be on purpose as the Winter Queen is Xal’atath!
Having the Shadow sucked out of Xal’atath doesn’t stop her malevolence but instead exposes it as not being connected to the Shadow but instead to Death.
The High Elven Corpse will switch between Spellfrost Death and Nature Death no doubt.
Her Midnight Face of course being a copy of the Winter Night Face bonded to the Black Blood and Galakrond’s Necrotic Death is no better so once the Black Blood is in contact with the Summer Queen the Fairy Queen of Midnight(a newborn Void Lord) will use her to access the Naaru Mu’ru in order to summon the Void to Azeroth in order to make it compatible enough to devour it.
I love the story and characterizations… felt nice, I don’t know these characters well enough to say they are all in character or not, but it worked for the story beats.
Heck for a moment I even felt bad for Gallywix, that look of loss and abandonment when Xal tossed him aside was a brilliant piece of characterization. I don’t feel bad about how it ended, hopefully, for him, but it gave some interesting character to him and made him feel more real even if still a problem.
That said… as much as I love the zone it’s got too much going on for my brain and I can barely handle being there before I’m feeling mentally exhausted and looking for a nice quiet place to just relax and chill… which is usually a delve these days.
I’m still salty about the Alliance getting most of the spotlight in Legion when the Orcs had their entire corruption, loss of home world and exodus to Azeroth going because of the Legion. But fine.
I’m super keen for that as well, we know very little of the Ethereals and they look pretty cool. Space mummies.
I was saying this the other day! Maybe have an expansion which explores an old race each patch. Update a zone, give us a raid, two dungeons, some delves. Expand the old stuff then do something crazy. Undermined was great! The Xala’tath stuff lost my interest a long time ago, but as a goblin fan, I am goblin-satisfied.
The Draenei being the ones to ultimately lead the charge against the Burning Legion made sense though. They were the one race the legion harmed the most.
I am Gallywix, and I’m here to ask you a question.
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
‘No!’ says the man in Stormwind, ‘It belongs to the poor.’
‘No!’ says the man in the Teldrassil, ‘It belongs to Elune.’
‘No!’ says the man in Orgrimmar, ‘It belongs to everyone.’
I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different.
I chose the impossible. I chose… Undermine.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor.
Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality.
Where the great would not be constrained by the small!
And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
Yeah, Undermine is the kind of thing WoW should be doing all the time.
It was such a breath of fresh air to actually build on a race we are already familiar with in a location we already knew existed with relatively low stakes. Instead of just constantly bombarding us with new places and people we’ve never heard of and aren’t really even given enough time to get attached to.
There’s so many people and locations that we haven’t checked in on in forever that I care about way more than anything in the Shadowlands, Dragon Isles or Khaz Algar. It’s why I actually appreciated the Exploring Azeroth series flaws and all, it was nice to check in and see what’s been going on in our absence.
Say what you want about the world revamp in Cataclysm but at least it made the world feel a little more alive by having things change in our absence and gave the writers a chance build upon what was already there.
