For the last few expansions we’ve got bits and pieces of information about the old gods plans. We’ve heard lots of whispers and prophecies, most of this occurred in Legion. Il’gynoth spoke about many things and then there was the cult in Silithius at the end of Legion that gave us even more insight.
Now we do know that the old gods do lie, as does the void. That said those whispers and prophecies were very chilling and interesting and kept the players guessing for quite some time. They added this dark aspect to the game that we all wanted to see, but now the old gods on Azeroth are gone. So do the old gods always lie or were we robbed of an experience because blizz got lazy? Could all of the things said by the void disciples have been expanded on or where they just lying from the start.
I personally feel like we were robbed. The old gods, the void, the prophecies, and Nya’lotha were so severely watered down. We could have had this dark, mind mending, ominous expansion but I feel like blizz used the lies of the old gods line as a cop-out because they didn’t want to do the work, but that’s just my opinion. Thoughts?
It was a more canonical version of what Blizzard has been doing for over a decade, laying out breadcrumbs, opening up potential story paths, etc, then deciding later on which ones of those they will to pursue. The difference this time they had some creature saying them all at once, leaving them even ambiguous into the meaning behind them, giving them even more freedom in how to approach it. Or they just scrap it all and decide to go in a completely different direction.
I was so sure, pre-BfA, that a lot of the rampant aggressiveness and willingness of the factions to do terrible things (such as the Burning), would be revealed as N’zoth’s corrupting influence.
Whether Sargeras’ sword had damaged N’zoth’s prison and let his influence grow stronger and affect more people, or Azshara and the naga were secretly causing terrible events and leaving evidence that pointed to the other faction… I wasn’t sure how, but I thought that the worst of the war would be traceable to this omnicidal entity that, once revealed, the players/factions could happily agree to punch in the face.
And sure, Old Gods and their insane minions would logically lie a lot, but since WoW is a fictional setting made for entertainment, I had a lot of fun speculating what those neat cryptic lines may mean.
Death may not be enough to stop the old gods, in Ulduar, Yogg-sarons minions keep spawning and his wispers are still rampant, we may yet see what the old God prophecies meant.
They were generic spooky lines that people were reading way too into.
No we couldn’t, and I say this because there’s precedent. That kind of story is something Blizzard has never successfully been able to do before any time the Old Gods have been involved, and wouldn’t be able to do this time either. You can’t have an ominous mindbending story in a game where 25 superheroes beat any threat by punching it a lot, especially not when the monsters are just big screaming flesh blobs.
Blizzard (and a lot of pop culture, it’s not just Blizzard to be fair) fundamentally is not able to understand what makes Lovecraft’s monsters so terrifying. It’s them being alien and unknown and unkillable that does it, not just “aaa scary octopus makes me turn crazy I better stab it until it dies.”
I think many prophecies-whispers have been fulfilled and people failed to notice. The second lie has been offered.
There are some prophecies-whispers that probably foreshadows events that will happened in Shadowlands.
While true, I was impressed with how spooky Blizzard managed to make Crucible of Storms, with the dynamic transition after the first boss and how the second seemed not really to care that the adventurers were beating it up.
It’s moments like that which make me hope for a good Old Gods story… even despite all the other Old God spookiness letdowns. Like N’zoth.
Rhan-Tegoth wasn’t unkillable and was shot dead by Orabona and made a part of the Wax Museum alongside it’s High Priest(whom only found the Great Old One thanks to Orabona’s knowledge of Eldritch Horrors).
Rhan-Tegoth is introduced in The Horror in the Museum which was Ghostwritten by HP Lovecraft himself for Hazel Heald.
Lovecraft himself made a Great Old One killable by a bullet shot by someone who was well trained in the lore of the Great Old Ones!
The creature’s High Priest a mere novice was the one who assumed the creature was unkillable while the experienced keeper of forbidden lore(who taught the High Priest pieces of Lore) knew exactly how easy it was to kill the thing!
In otherwords Lovecraft himself is all “aaa scary octopus makes me turn crazy I better stab it until it dies.” as you put it!
The only Great Old One that is unkillable is the High Priest of their own religion: Cthulhu and even he gets send into a temporary dead state when a fishing boat flies through his head.
It’s the Outer Gods who are nigh unkillable and that’s only because we never seen anyone try!
No one in Lovecraft’s own stories tried to kill Azathoth(though killing him would end the universe since it’s his dream) or any Outer God aside from Nyarlathotep and that one has no true body as he is the will and Soul of the Outer Gods keeping Azathoth asleep and thus won’t die until they are all dead.
Azathoth is practically a N’Zoth with Earth being his Ny’alotha and if he dies his Dream dies with him just as Ny’alotha did when N’Zoth died(Ny’alotha was both Re-Originating and crumbling on it’s own when N’Zoth died).
The more likely explanation is the team that wrote Legion laid a bunch of hooks for what they wanted their next expansion to include, the team that wrote BfA wanted to do their own thing, and decided to just ignore most of the whispers and tie some of the others up in a super anticlimactic on-the-nose encounter that read more like the cleaning up of loose ends than it did a significant story point.
Well for starters not all the old gods are gone we still have xalatath getting around and they didn’t really lie. They all saw all possible realities simultaneously so what what happens in our reality may differ greatly to the events in another reality but they will tell us this is as fact as to them it truth
I don’t care. I really, genuinely, earnestly do not, will not, and did not ever care.
Everything in this dumb game for over a decade has been old gods this, old gods that, just forever and ever in an endless, nonstop parade. Every third boss is vomiting purple pixels at me, and ooo ahhhh there’s an infinite supply of cultists to beat up and oh goody more ham-fisted Lovecraft references in quest titles.
Stop. Please Blizzard. Stop. Enough with the cosmic eldritch horror; the fact we can beat it up makes it suck, and it’s been going on for far, far, far too long. Old gods were boring when it was just Cthun, and adding in a half-dozen more and their squiddy -and-or-beetle minions… has not made them ANY more interesting.
C’thun was the only time they got close to pulling it off. Y’shaarj wasn’t terrible during his tiny snippets in the Garrosh fight but still wasn’t any good. Yogg and N’zoth were terrible.
Maybe this is the problem. They had these beings and knocked them off one by one instead of keeping them in the background and then bringing them all together in a Nya’lotha/Emerald Nightmare/Thoros combo.
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