I actually didn’t enjoy all the sadness from the orcs. Been saying that since day one of seeing it. More fun with Blood and Thunder, not depression orcs.
The somewhat positive thing is Thrall got to come back. Which some people are divided on that but I think quite a bit were happy for it to happen.
In Legion that happened mid-combat, had a whole phase afterward, and was followed up with a proper sendoff cinematic that concluded two major characters’ story arcs (three if you count Velen) and led directly into the next expansion.
N’zoth gets popped with a meme beam and it just sort of ends.
Dunno but it definitely felt like we were heading for a battle for Thunder Bluff until we took a crazy right turn.
Illidan’s arc was concluded in TBC to me. I understand why they brought him back, but I was never interested in his arc in Legion tbh. What I pointed out is more significant to me.
We get son’d by both bosses and titans/titan stuff have to save the day.
Can we stop burning all the budget on oscar bait cinematics (Saurfang) and shove it to the gameplay side.
And old God who was completely free since Titan where on Azeroth revived only one patch of attention. N’Zoths threat to world was way bigger then we saw and experienced, but the way blizzard presented it to us is just lame
He should be main focus of this expansion and this stupid faction war should be side story . But I’m not the script writer so for me it’s only enjoy the game and “content”
He definitely needed to make an appearance earlier. Have some successes before we fought him. That was one of many mis-steps with the story this expansion.
The ending looks, well… underwhelming.
Even WoD had a full end cinematic… WoD!
Which is another contradiction on Blizzards part.
Because those demons you kill are in a fel saturated area, so they shouldn’t regenerate.
So Demons perma-die in the Twisting Nether or other fel soaked areas (like in the Demon Hunter intro)…Unless they suddenly don’t. Or killing them outside that can be for realizies (anyone seen Xavius recently?) if Blizzard doesn’t need them anymore.
At this point, Blizzards stories are like a road constructed by the lowest bidder. Low quality and full of holes.
Two words have summed up this xpac well as a joke. “morally gray”
This is an extremely bizarre prioritization. Saurfang gets the lion’s share of the cinematics team’s resources without even being in the game for the vast majority of his story, and then finishes said story in a patch with very little actual player content (no raid, no warfront, only a few new quests).
Meanwhile, the majority of the game’s raids (Uldir, Crucible, Palace, Ny’alotha) build up the actual threat to the game, the Old Gods, yet receive absolutely none of the marketing time for this game. And then that shoddy conclusion comes out and literally blasts the Old God to hell in the space of a minute.
Theory: The war campaign was always meant to be the main focus of the entire campaign. Hell, maybe Sylvanas really was supposed to be the final boss. But then people hated the story, they hated stuff like island expeditions and warfronts, and they hated Sylvanas.
So they brought N’zoth in to pad out the expansion, but they didn’t have enough dev time to advertise him or create an actually satisfying ending to his story.
got admit it was a bad ending even for myself.
Sad to see another end expansion patch turn out so poorly. I feel like Legion was the only expansion since Wrath that delivered a good final content patch.
That cinematic was such a colossal letdown. No exposition, no Wrathion… ugh, they even squandered an opportunity to tease the Worldsoul of Azeroth.
So glad I didn’t come back for 8.3 to see a rushed Dragonsould/LotR mashup cinematic.
Giving the most powerful home-grown baddie in the history of Azeroth gets a single patch was so fitting for the garbage that is BfA.
I’m honestly not even sure what really happened.
I saw both videos and was like “is that it”? The wrathion one was kind of cool (bit of a trope).
Wrathion at least got his moment between the Carapace and final fights.
Hell, if N’zoth keeled over from that instead of having another boss fight, it would honestly have been a better conclusion.
Horde v Alliance was still supposed to be the overarching theme of the expansion. But the problem with that is that you can’t really make a whole bunch of content with that.
Horde fighting Alliance goons and Alliance fighting Horde goons gets kinda stale after a while. So other threats have to be invented, like G’huun and the other miscellaneous stuff we’ve dealt with in dungeons.
Which created the out of game impression that the story was about Horde v Alliance, or more specifically the cultural battle of the Old Horde (represented by Saurfang) which sought honor in conflict, as opposed to Sylvanas’ “new Horde” which only seeks domination.
But the in-game impression was outside Dazar’alor (which again, with a few exceptions was mostly just Horde goons v Alliance goons), Magni’s side of the story was significantly more important, which was as you said, incredibly old god focused.
Personally I think there should have been another raid between Uldir and Dazar’alor (possibly dealing with the Drust?). That way we could have ended on Nazjatar and had a perfect segue into future expansions, with Azshara defeated, N’zoth released and the rebellion against Sylvanas at it’s climax.
That way we could have had the option to deal with N’zoth later, as we weren’t powerful enough to deal with the Black Empire and gone to Shadowlands to deal with Sylvanas and figure out a way to counter N’zoth, or we could have had a Black Empire expansion and dealt with the Shadowlands after that.
I agree, we need more mo-cap Metzen and Taster’s Choice moments with Saurfang feeling guilty about genocides.
now THAT sounds awesome. exactly what i wanted! 
wouldnt it have been so great to use the black empire as an excuse to update old azeroth again? they said they want players to be able to enjoy content at any level, well, we don’t want to “enjoy” the same zones we’ve been doing since cata…
think of the dailies they could add! the world bosses! 