For a while I’ve been going over WoW’s lore, it’s history and extrapolating where we can and will go into the future.
But, drifting off topic, I’ve been loving ARK: Survival Evolved for a very long time. It’s got action, it’s got some farmville-esque stuff, generally hits all of my buttons.
But in the last (Final?) expansion, Extinction, we finally meet the being responsible for the players’ creation and subsequent reincarnations, as well as the one who lead those who came before us and left all those notes and dossiers that gave us delicious lore and hints on how to progress in the game ourselves.
And if you managed to beat the King Titan in Extinction, the A.R.K.s that have been orbiting the dead Earth start to fall, to revitalize Earth, reintroduce the hardiest of species to repopulate it and to, and this is the most crucial part, eliminate all Tek from the planet, with themselves being the final target.
Now, for those of you who have never played ARK or read up about it, Tek was a miracle substance found late in this version of Earth’s history, a metal with limitless applications. Harder than any known alloy yet infinitely malleable under the right circumstances, conductive to almost insane degrees and it could even be used as a power-source, with the benefit that if used in such a fashion, atomic particles would be released, absorbed into the environment and then more Tek over time as the atomic particles would absorb energy from the surroundings and transmute that energy into more physical matter, more Tek.
To counter the rampant spread of Tek, in a corrupted, nearly-sentient form, a System was established that created the A.R.K.s under the guidance of Humans so evolved they have become their own sub-species, Humanity Deus (Can’t use the actual term because it’s a ‘prohibited’ word), able to think and see backwards and forwards in time.
Sadly, the System began to corrupt as the errors began to pile up as one test became fifty, became fifty thousand, became fifty billion, a cascade effect that the Deus, being slowly eroded by the passage of the millenia and their identities being ground to dust by the System’s overflowing errors and corruption as the Tek that powered and created the A.R.K.s began to affect them in turn, and the last of the active Deus, their youngest and least powerful member, had to cheat the System to find a way to break the ever-expanding cascade of errors and corruptions.
The players. All of them. Each one a treasure carefully cultivated from throughout Human history, made with non-renewable resources necessary to each A.R.K.s survival, unable to die and rebuilt with a new body forged from those same irreplaceable resources every time, people who would have the skill, the drive and the courage to face the System’s increasingly erratic and unfair ‘tests’, conquer the aberrant monsters created to facilitate said ‘tests’ and eventually reach Earth to fight the Titans and finally render the Corrupt Tek vulnerable to the cleansing effects of the Obelisks on the A.R.K.s.
And once those A.R.K.s came home and began their final, self-destructive task … there would be no more reincarnations. The resources once used to revive the players in a new body time and time again could no longer be diverted. All Tek had to be eradicated if Earth was to bloom with life again.
And yet … that’s also the end of it all. Tek is what allows Humanity to so easily tame the megafauna of the A.R.K.s. Tek is what allows Humanity to develop technology on the A.R.K.s so easily without needing ridiculous amounts of sub-tiers of tech to produce the amazing feats of technology used on the journey to this point. Tek is what allowed the various tribes on each A.R.K. to communicate with one another despite being plucked from different nations, different times. Tek is the only thing that can allow Humanity to rebuild as a technological society above the level of a hand-to-mouth subsistence society.
And it must all be destroyed, will be destroyed. Even the Obelisks themselves will eventually devour each other and then themselves to purge the environment of all traces of Tek, although this will take hundreds, if not thousands, of years and also wipe out many new species who evolved on Earth in the millennia of Human absence from the world who either feed off of Tek or whom have incorporated the miracle substance, Corrupted or Natural, into their bodies.
In short, we’ve won … but we’ve lost. We’ll never reach the peaks we once conquered, we’ll never reach the stars, never ascend to near-immortality like the Deus did, always be scratching at the earth to feed and clothe ourselves in a world where most of the natural resources are either expended or are entirely necessary upon the Tek-powered A.R.K.s to produce … which will dry up faster and faster as all the of the Tek in the environment is eradicated.
We’ve beaten the monster we created by stabbing ourselves in the heart.
And that got me thinking about WoW.
Inevitably, the journey has to end. The Legion is shattered and leaderless, the Titans returned by now spending eternity shackling Sargeras to his throne, the Old Gods are defeated but still linger in the darkest corners of the Abyss, waiting for yet another chance to drive all things into madness and an endless cycle of self-consumption, the Naaru are beginning to show some of their mightiest have plans that are less than benevolent and the Void Lords are done acting through proxies to deal with us.
And even if we surpass all of that, the Alliance and the Horde don’t raze Azeroth to ashes in their endless conflicts and somehow we make it through … Azeroth will hatch.
The slumbering World Soul will eventually mature into a Titan proper and leave the world behind to pursue it’s destiny, it’s agenda or it’s fate, whatever it may be.
And yet all life on Azeroth exists because of the overwhelming power of the Titan, drawing massive amounts of Spirit Energy to the planet which brought forth the Elementals, and then organic life, and with the meddling of the Titans and the Old Gods, sentient life itself.
So what happens when Azeroth ‘wakes up’ and leaves her egg? When that power-source that draws a continuous stream of life-giving energy to the planet and is responsible for everything from the humble bacteria to the mightiest of dragons existing … leaves?
Even if we win, the people and nations of Azeroth are destined to lose, to see all they have fought for, bled for and built atop failure and victory alike brought down low to nothingness in the end.
What do you guys think of the inevitable ‘downer’ ending of WoW, that despite everything, the very thing every Hero and Champion of the Alliance and Horde have fought, bled and died to protect will inevitably be the very thing that could kill them all.
For me, it’s both a subtle nod to a metaphor for death and it’s inevitability and a curious plot-point, that the larger the grasp on the nature of the world, the less control the ‘Heroes’ have, and the greater the stakes for an end that seems to only end in failure and loss for them no matter what course they choose to take.