As a preface, one of the reasons that drew me into the Warcraft franchise was the story of Warcraft 3. In that “Reign of Chaos” dynamic, Metzen seemed to me to be weaving together 3 intertwined villain teams with their stories all folding into one another to make an entertaining narrative. From one level…all 3 villain teams considered themselves enemies of each other.
Sargeras had essentially a public goal of being enemy of Void…but in practice his activities became mostly against Titan creations.
Death (and here I don’t mean the danuser conception of death…I mean the kind of mysterious death that Metzen embodied within and behind the Scourge) was actually tricking Sargeras while in practice their activities were mostly against the Light.
Void had a public goal of being against Titans and wanting to make a Titan into a Void Titan but in practice most of their activities were against Life. They constantly were corrupting and torturing and feeding on Life. Including Dimensius feeding on Life.
All 3 of those villain teams being claimed to be enemies…kept working so closely and betraying the others.
So, could it be possible for Chris Metzen to craft a new dynamic for this world soul saga where Order and Light and Life instead publicly claim to be “friends” but in practice they are not really faithfully working together and they are envious and interfering with each other even while most of their activities might actually be against those villain teams?
Light could have deceived Aman’thul into thinking that light created titans when they didn’t, and that there is a true timeline when there isn’t one. Thus Light team could claim in public to be friend of Order but they are exploiting them as a defense against void. Order team could have publicly claimed to be a friend of Life and that they’d spread life…but really the Titans want sentient life and civilizations and not just animals or plants so they limit and control life to make sure there will be sentient mortals. Life team could publicly claim to be a friend of Order and Light, but really they are envious of the powers that titans have and they’ve been manipulating and hiding and framing the Titans to have sentient mortals get resentful and angry against them to leave open an opportunity for Team Life to claim domination of the Azeroth World Soul and they may have even corrupted Eonar to do their agenda and deceive Aman’thul the whole time.
This would truly be a conspiracy that began “at the dawn of civilization” rather than at the beginning of the great dark beyond. Instead of the Reign of Chaos dynamic of 3 enemies cooperating, this would be a Temperance of Order dynamic of 3 friends obstructing and impeding and resisting one another. The Titans are not villains…but the ending of The Last Titan could certainly offer them criticism of the methods. The Light is not a villain…but they may need to be struggled against for a raid or two and made to admit their fallibility. The force of Life is not a villain…but they may need to be shown that they require supervision and guidance and temperance by Order to remain sustainable and fair and flourishing. They need a Gardener, essentially. As such…I think an appropriate ending for the World Soul Saga is for Azeroth the World Soul to genuinely and fully awake and emerge as a Titan. In fact, a Titan of Wisdom. And no, that awakening should never destroy the planet or players on it. And then I think the Azeroth Titan should join the Titan Pantheon and she is no longer vulnerable to corruption into any other kind of cosmic team. So future expansions can deal with other things besides that danger. And maybe that fully realized Pantheon says it needs to leave and has plans for restoring planets ruined by the Burning Crusade…so they can be elsewhere unless stories need them to come back.
To reiterate, the Titans of the pantheon could have been contacted by beings in the Light who misled them into thinking the Light created Titans when really they did not…and beings of the Light have been influencing and coercing various Titans and titanforged and sentient mortals to do what the Light wants. Those beings of the Light would have convinced Aman’thul that there is some sort of True timeline when really there isn’t. And this explains why Aman’thul doesn’t see or predict everything…especially his own betrayal by Sargeras. Next, another nuance that beings from Life as a cosmic force had been envious of what Titans can do…so they deceived and betrayed Eonar to get themselves involved at the very beginning of the appearance of sentient civilizations on Azeroth. They tricked and weaved their way into the ordering plans. They made Elune’ahir to dominate and possess the Azeroth Titan world soul. They also made conspiracies against the Titan pantheon using innuendo and misrepresentation…preparing some beings like dragons and bug people and haranir and later mortals to oppose the Titan pantheon. While Aman’thul was focused on the Void and Disorder and Death being threats…he missed the problems created by Life and Light.
Metzen when he first created StarCraft stated the Void was Space only for Legacy of the Void to retcon that.
Perhaps that was what the Void was in WarCraft before the Chronicle was made.
Alas they Retconned it… either that or the Void Lords are the Ethereals who mastered portals into the Great Dark Beyond and the Realm of Shadow is K’aresh(which was destroyed when the Void Gods sucked in the Shadow of K’aresh and flooded it with Arcane just as they did with the Realm of the Light) not the Void which is still the Great Dark Beyond.
It would be just like the Gods of the Great Dark Beyond to fool the forces of Light, Shadow, Death, Life, Order and Disorder into letting them into their Realms in order to conquer them.
The Gods of course were given Automa as Avatars for the Shadowlands but the other Cosmic Realms needed subtlety to bring the Old Gods of the Void of the Great Dark Beyond to them.
That would be a way to undo the Retcon of Void to Shadow when originally it was Outer Space(it wouldn’t undo the Retcon in StarCraft though).
Sorry, but you are wrong… the underground missions with Arthas and Anub’arak very clearly introduced it; and then Metzen put flesh on the bones of the writing for his preparation to drag all that over into vanilla wow afterward.
Cosmology as we know it today did not exist until Chronicles was published (WoD/Legion?). The author is also Dave Kosak, as I was informed. Metzen’s original vision can most likely be found in the RPG books. Light and shadow had no own domains there.
In Warcraft III, normal factions and characters interacted with each other. That’s actually superior to the current cosmological meta-nonsense about Order, Light, and Nature, etc.
Technically they appeared in WC3’s Expansion Pack not WC3 itself.
The Expansion Pack introduced the Faceless(though didn’t use the term Void in reference to them), the Forgotten One(which also didn’t have the term Void associated with it either) as well as the Voidwalkers(which was definitely the first appearance of the Void though not in association with Shadow).
Yeah I don’t think there was a direct link between the Old Gods and the Void until Wrath, maybe even Cata.
Chronicles gave us their origin but I’m sure the connection existed prior to that. The Tribunal of Ages using the term, Necrophotic to describe the Old Gods, which according to warcraft wiki is Greek for basically, dead light seems to be the first sign of the connection. Given that in the previous expansion, we killed a naaru, a creature of light and they became a void entity.
A shadow entity. Unless I’m misremembering, the use of the word “Void” (in this type of context) was also a Chronicle era thing, replacing the previously used term “Shadow.”
We had things like voidwalkers and void lords and all that, and IIRC they were firmly established as not necessarily being demons as early as TBC, but Void as a school of magic or force of its own is a post-Chronicle thing.
Old Gods were introduced in WC3. Voidwalkers were simply demons in WC3 but TBC put them as their own category of being while also hinting that Old Gods exist across multiple worlds(but not yet linking them to the void entities). Old Gods and their creations being linked to the void didn’t happen until WoW chronicle.
So, Old Gods as a villain faction existed in WC3 and Void were added in TBC and then they were combined in Chronicle. What you’re saying in essence is true but in true warcraft fashion the path to where we are now is winding and indirect.
Sigh… I’m not talking about cosmology today for the preface…
Wait, wait, wait… given that context clue; you and I are not talking about the same thing at all…we’re talking at cross purposes. You’re putting too much baggage on the word “Void” and I’m intending there to be more baggage (or more emphasis) on the word “dynamic”. When I typed
I’m actually meaning dynamic to mean more than just what ended in that disc. I mean dynamic more like how I interpret “world soul saga” …as in an entire agenda which Metzen interweaved into all his stories from warcraft 3 up through the end of Wrath in wow. Just as Metzen seemed to suggest he would be treating the term “world soul saga” as an agenda to interweave through all the stories of war within, midnight, and last titan. The term Void was used in that Warcraft 3 through end of Wrath period where the dynamic seemed to end; but as I said…the term Void wasn’t supposed to be used by me with any extra baggage that it has accumulated since that time. I mean the simple Void that was said by Metzen to represent and replace writing that had only called it shadow before bc.
See above… there is a misunderstanding of what I mean by dynamic and by void. The void that I mention in the dynamic I’m talking about was definitely confirmed in burning crusade both by their activity in netherstorm but also Metzen giving a recontextualization of what he wanted the Sargeras/nathrezim relationship to be for the rest of the Reign of Chaos dynamic.
Apologies, but see above… there is misunderstanding about what I meant by “dynamic” and what I meant by void…which is not supposed to have any of the baggage that was added to the word void after Wrath. The dynamic I am talking about is specifically having the bad guys of the story actually being 3 separate groups that are in principle enemies of each other…but end up working closely with one another because they all think they can pull the wool over the eyes of the others in the group of 3…and as a result what each group does through the dynamic (warcraft 3 through all the way to the end of wrath) is activities against the groups I mention in my starting post of the topic rather than to their enemies of the other 3 bad guys.
All of which was just supposed to be the preface… leading to what I actually wanted to talk about; which is the application of that dynamic as an agenda and interweaving through multiple expansions from dragonflight all the way to the end of the last titan; but this time with 3 good guys being in principle “friends” and even claiming in a public sense as if they are “friends” but the interweaving of the stories will have each of them doing as I said in my initial post of…