I might be alone in this but recent villains feel so flat and boring to me. I’m tired of the big bad threatening to wipe out all of existence. All while being so unrelatable and distant.
Xal’atath feels like another generic villain. Her back story was somewhat interesting but we still know almost nothing about her, which gives us very little to connect to her with.
In my humble warlock opinion, the most important thing in making a villain good is being able to relate to them. Being able to understand them, or their perspective.
One of the best examples of this in wow is Arthas. Yes he did awful unspeakable things, BUT we can relate to him because we can see ourselves doing the same thing if we were put in his position. Not only this, but we could also relate to his victims. We all saw the destroyed villages, the slaughtered humans and the horrors of Arthas’ atrocities. We could see ourselves as the victims in those villages, or the families of those victims.
We could relate and sympathize with every side and perspective of Arthas’ story, and that’s what made it so good. This is also the same reason Illidan and Kael’thas Sunstrider are relatable. We can see ourselves in their shoes, even if they are “evil”.
A big problem with recent villains is we can’t do this. How are we supposed to relate to a giant cosmological villain that wants to wipe out all of reality for “reasons” we humans cannot comprehend?
I feel like I’m starting to ramble so I’ll end it here.
TL;DR Recent villains feel too unrelatable. It’s hard to connect and sympathize/understand them. They just feel generically evil and it’s not that interesting
Dunno… I feel like the current villain is pretty curvy. I mean, maybe she doesn’t have the largest set but I think it’s pretty proportionate to her body. I definitely wouldn’t say she’s flat.
It’s a side effect of WoW’s community having a meltdown at the idea of timegating.
If you want a villain to be meaningful we have to actually spend time with them, but WoW players hate being “forced” to do story content more than anything in life.
So the plot gets wrapped up in a week and every character is forgettable.
I think in a game like this, a villains goals should be laid out clearly as soon as you know they’re a villain.
Ragnaros: burn the world
Onyxia: take over stormwind through trickery
Kel’thuzad: serve the lich king, bring the scourge to all life
Kaelthas: serve the burning legion to save his people
Illidan: destroy the burning legion by any means necessary (seemingly dangerous to us)
Lich King: total scourge conquest
Lei’shen: conquer pandaria
Mantid: answer the swarm call, devour all
Garrosh: only orcs are fit to rule, all lesser races and lands will be conquered
The various generals and bigshots of the Burning Legion: conquer every world
These are just criminally short versions of what the villains want. They were made clear in their goals and methods throughout the xpac or in earlier games. I gues xalatath wants… azeroth? Or maybe void stuff? To kill light? I don’t know. Only that she refuses to walk like a normal person and gets really smug about popping up in every conflict. Oh and that we have no agency in any interactions with her, only aleria and pals get to do that
Thirdly, due to recent years - anyone talking about “Disney ‘anything’” is mostly just using it as a buzzword or dog whistle. Both of which means this means nothing.
No! She’s boring, uninteresting, her delivery is piss-poor and hollow. Just like a Disney Villain. Previous villains were much more relatable and interesting. She is not.
They have done a lot to make her actions meaningful and interesting. But the problem is that the metric in which people judge a villain by isn’t their actions, but by the number of cutscenes they are shown fighting in.
Then you can take the next step and include other metrics but, it is always a case of “how much fighting in a cutscene” do we get to see that is used as a determining factor. Story, hints, secrets, character building by using other people as tools for that - none of that matters.
What time? We’ve had like three interactions. She’s barely appeared in game.
Just because she’s existing for a while doesn’t mean we’ve actually had the time to develop her. That requires extensive storytelling and questlines that WoW players can’t handle.
Yeah, unfortunately the loud majority of people in the community have the reading comprehension, and media literacy, of a turnip.
It wasn’t that long ago that people were arguing that what WoW’s story needed was to " return to big sweaty, muscly, men beating the pulp out of each other," something WoW’s story never was, and really only could be considered the case in Warcraft I.
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