Peculiar Fish in the Khaz Algar questline has an awful lot of connection to N’zoth, is all I’m saying. N’zoth used to like to appear as a dead fish to make bargains. And Particular Fish was able to whisper directly into your character’s mind.
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I’ve always been under the impression we absolutely have not. We foil them, drive them back to dormancy, but we’ve not beaten any of them. Y’Shaarj was the only one exclusively known to have died and its heart still maintained influence over an entire continent. It also required so much effort to actually kill Y’Shaarj the Titans decided it was better to just shackle the rest and bury them deep in isolated areas of the world (the Silithus desert, the wastes of the Storm Peaks, and deep below the ocean).
Though actually that made me realize. The Titans locked N’Zoth away under the Well of Eternity. Because Azeroth was a super continent prior to the Sundering, and N’Zoth’s prison is distinctly within the district of Azshara’s palace which has never moved from where it was within Zin’Azshari. So that begs the question if N’Zoth didn’t create the Well to begin with? It’d make sense then why the Dark Trolls turned into Night Elves since a big part of the Old Gods influence is mutation.
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N’Zoth undid all the awe and intensity that the previous Old Gods had.
C’Thun felt like a legitimately lost relic of an ancient empire–inhuman, impossible to understand. Yogg-Saron felt more like a standard villain, but we saw how an Old God’s influence could oppose even the Scourge and it was impressive. Y’Shaarj was cool just because it explained why they couldn’t really be just done away with.
Then N’Zoth shows up and every interesting development in Warcraft gets retroactively credited to him (before the Jailer showed up and got everything retroactively credited to him) and then comes out of nowhere to backbench for an expansion that barely had anything to do with him.
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idk as a massive lovecraft stan, the old gods in wow have always had the subtlety of a load of bricks to the skull.
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I would be fine if Blizzard would stop trying to do their own brand of cosmic horror, it just never lands.
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It’s so horizontal and so low to the ground – almost sinking into the sand – that you’d hardly call it a ‘chair’ yet for her, it’s a throne.
She lounges as waves lurch and languish across the shore, as if desperate to reach her…
A pocket of air crackles in a sudden fit of disturbance. She sighs. It ripples and folds in on itself. She grunts, leaning up. It resolves into a window of sorts, the bustling streets of Silvermoon seen from an ornate balcony.
Two women step through, one in fine rainment embroidered with a Kirin Tor motif and the other, armor polished to a near-annoying sheen. Especially in this light.
“Sef,” the armor-clad agent begins. “A portal to the Shadowlands is supporting movement of troops for both the Alliance and Horde.”
“The what?”
“The–”
“The supposed ~ afterlife ~,” the mage cuts in.
Sef offers a cascade of confused, skeptical, then dubious expressions in reply.
“We should go there,” the paladin offers.
“You should go there. I’m staying right here. I’m still recovering… try and fetch something for the Archives, perhaps?”
The paladin nods. The mage smirks. The rogue, again, sighs.
“So what is this place, really?” Sef questions.
“I don’t know yet,” the mage replies. “But it’s not at all what they’re claiming it is.”
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It’s the same everything time. Tentacles That Make You Crazy.
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It’s just so …
It’s very this. Yogg-Saron still had a coolness factor that worked but beyond that point, it’s like. We have the build-up, the ooooh spoopy nightmares and cults and there’s tentacles and faceless monsters (that somehow still sort of have faces) and these forces always just end with the stated purpose of “aaaaarrrrr make you crazy make you evil then kill you we want to kill you and kill everything we’re eeeeevil”
And I wouldn’t call myself a Lovecraft fan or particularly well versed in cosmic horror but my understanding is that they’re supposed to be incomprehensible. We shouldn’t know what they are or WHY they are and we ought to be so small and insignificant to them that we’ll never know anyway.
If the colossal tentacled freako has to tell us they’re evil, tell us how foolish and weak and worthless we are and about-to-be-supermurdered-haw-haw, it’s not a cosmic horror, it’s a power rangers villain.
Also idfk old gold cults lose some menace when we’ve already been smashing monsters in the face with improbably huge weapons to begin with. “the tentacles gonna getchoo gonna ruin your credit score” okay and?? i shoot fireballs out of my eyeballs at 700 shots a minute do your worst, tentacleboy
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i mean yeah i think this is the intent.
this is true of most “cosmic horror” video games, gonna be honest. cosmic horror is very hard to pull off, and I don’t think Blizzard has ever been good at it. granted, they’re making a fantasy game, not a horror game, so the old gods fit as fantasy set dressing to me.
i’m pretty passionate about horror and i can safely say that the old gods have always used cosmic horror aesthetic, but they’re only scary if you’re like six years old. they don’t capture the essence of horror and never have.
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You know what was way creepier than the actual reveal of Yogg-Saron in Northrend?
In Icecrown, I wanna say not too far from what becomes the Ebon Blade hub, down in the water of a quarry, there’s this. Orifice. It’s very clearly organic and it moves. And at the time nobody knew what it was supposed to be, what it did if anything, what it was connected to. People speculated about it for a while and a lot of folks agreed it was just eerie, that it was /there/ without explanation.
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They’re just copying the mysterious purple limb that leaked the green goo into The Undercity sewers.
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One of the key issues with Shadowlands gross lack of lore detail is that while the events of Shadowlands were unfolding—so that’s essentially from the time the sky above Icecrown cracked to the time it was ‘repaired’—things on Azeroth—particularly on continents with a Scourge presence—would have been regularly hectic.
No Lich King means a majority of overwhelming numbers of mindless undead ravaging whatever they could and a minority of Mawsworn agents and other Scourge-controlling types—such as members of the San’layn—who were controlling what Scourge undead they could to attack whatever ends suited them.
In other words, whilst we were in Shadowlands, Azeorth was regularly in peril.
How exactly Azeroth coped while Shadowlands’ story unfolded is largely hand-waved and put down to minor mentions here and there; and that’s INSANELY poor handling, not to mention a nightmare for RPers who wish to build as lore-coherent a background as they can for their guilds and characters.
Because the impact was large, it’s kinda hard to ignore, unfortunately.
For me, I have some characters—such as death knights—who knew what was going on and they went to the Shadowlands to fight the Mawsworn, and I have other characters who stayed on Azeroth and defended what they could, knowing little other than the Scourge are attacking again for, to their knowledge, unknown reasons.
Unfortunately, for most characters—there are always exceptions, but most, I’d say—Shadowlands story had an impact on their lives; to what degree is the question. Was it just fighting Scourge or was it more in the Shadowlands.
Ignoring Shadowlands lore outright is a tough task, too. How do you tell the story of Lordaeron being recovered by the Forsaken without mentioning a key point like the Maldraxxi’s assistance, for example? What about the seed that spawned Amirdrassil? How do you tell that story without taking about Ardenweald, for another example? Hard to do.
Strange, organic structures leaking viscous material?
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I mean, it really wasn’t.
I was fishing. Oh sure, one time I almost ran out of bait but I just spent a few days diggy diggy holes to get some worms, and it was all good.
You guys and your OMG WE WALKED THROUGH DEATH IN THIS PLACE CALLED THE SHADOWLANDS AND THEY CALLED ME MALL WALKER OR MAW WALKER OR WHATEVER AND TO GET THERE YOU JUMPED INTO A PORTAL IN ORIBOS THAT RESEMBLES A LITERAL TOILET AND THERE WERE BLUE ANGEL VAMPIRES MASSIVE UNDEAD ARMIES AND AND A REALLY ANNOYING ROBOT.
Honestly, it sounds like the lot of you went on an acid trip.
Sleep it off and come back to Dornogal.
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I think it’s more the “realms of death” that’s easy to ignore. The Scourge Uprising might be harder, but that’s still grounded in Azeroth stuff and thus a bit easier to write into a character.
As for the Maldraxxus/Amirdrassil stuff, characters are not always privy to every single detail the lore characters are. “I know the vague details but don’t know every detail about its existence” is an extremely fair position for a character to take. Tyrande and Calia having friends in the Great Beyond is just about all you need to know as a random resident of Azeroth. Knowing Malfurion took Ysera’s place is probably not something you would know if your character wasn’t there.
It’s like how not every character went to Argus during Legion, and thus all of us probably don’t know that Illidan blew up a Naaru prime. Information overload is a thing; it’s reasonable to know, yes, but Azeroth is a big world with a lot of things going on. It’s more realistic to have a character not know every detail of everything. ESPECIALLY if Azeroth’s fighting the Scourge-- there’s not enough time to keep up with Sylvanas’s Big Adventure when you’re literally fighting for your life.
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No, it actually isn’t.
Not every character is–or is required to be–involved in everything that happens. This didn’t touch any of mine in the slightest in any way that would make sense, therefore… it’s a simple thing to shrug and step past.
rofl I actually had someone all but screaming in my face in December that I am required by law to acknowledge and play out Shadowlands in some manner. Pure comedy.
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That doesn’t make any sense. Did he believe literally everyone without exception went to the Shadowlands? The population of the entire world? I guess in some sense you “have to” acknowledge it in that it happened but it doesn’t have to be important or be known in detail.
There are many a handful of expansions that would have been hard to ignore entirely… Cataclysm comes to mind because the entirety of Azeroth was remade as Deathwing erupted from its crust. Even underground areas were affected. This also worked surface elementals into a frenzy and they attacked multiple population centers in a recurring pre-patch event.
As for another, maybe… the very end of Legion, mostly because Sargeras literally stabbed the planet and that’s also hard to ignore. Damn thing is visible from a good chunk of Kalimdor and also (TWW launch spoilers-ish): the stabbening is when Beledar roughly started to act up and swap from light to dark.
But nearly all the others were so local, off-shore, or literally in another timeline or planet that there are many ways denizens of Azeroth — even our PC Champions — could find an unaffected place to chill for an expansion or two.
Shadowlands is definitely one of them.
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Yeah, whatever happened to what used to be very common – “my character has experienced none of this ICly” ??
Consent in RP – despite us not really ‘owning’ our in-game assets as per the TOS – still applies between devs and RPers IMO.
Write whatever insane story you want… I don’t need to integrate it into a character’s story (that I’ve been playing for decades now).
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To be fair this was also someone who got wildly angry about a random warrior’s name and wanted me to get mad about it with him. And got madder when I refused. So.
I actually loved the lead-up events for this reason. The random quakes also brought a lot of tangible tension and atmosphere.
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