The "Metzen Tone" (Storytelling/Worldbuilding)

Lore Story Forum
101

I never got why we needed Kyrians as they were described, anyways. Just describe souls as having a buoyancy of sorts where if they lack something to anchor them to the mortal realm they naturally drift into the Shadowlands. Requiring falliable ex-mortal psycopomps to hand collect every soul in the multiverse is fullstop a silly conciet to make pointless drama for drama’s sake. If you really want something like the Kyrians we already had the Spirit Healers—describe them as compassionate souls who in death have dedicated themselves to wandering limbo, rescuing souls who have become stuck/trapped due to trama or dark magics instead of going onto whatever reward they deserved. The WoW edition of a Bodhisattva, basically.

As for the rest of the the shadowlands, well… I have opinions on all of it, but to address them all would effectively be me rewriting the entire expansion’s lore and I doubt anyone wants to listen to me lay out something like that.

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102

In that cinematic, the Archon only pulled rank when Devos criticized the Path. Though I wonder why didn’t Devos just carry Uther to Kyrestia and show her Uther’s soul wound?

103

The main thing that put me off is they presented an afterlife for us all that, to be frank, sucked. Delusional as she was, Silvana was right about that.

104

Well, aside from how what we were shown was only a trillionth of a trillionth of a miniscule fraction of the actual afterlife, and what Sylvanas saw was presented to her by beings with every reason to lie, twist and exaggerate things if it would convince her to aid them. Basically the worst things about the afterlife we did see was what the Jailer and his minions were inflicting upon everyone against the proper working order of things.

All these years later and people still seem to have trouble grasping that an infinitesimally tiny percentage of souls actually end up in any of the five realms we visited in Shadowlands, and those are all very specifically sorted based upon their fundamental nature and character. What we saw of the realm of Death was hardly any of the realm of Death. We were basically only shown the front door and the utility closets of the Shadowlands.

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105

What we see in Revendreth is more mental/emotional torment caused by being confronted with past misdeeds. Once the souls let go and come to see their own failings, they experience relief. I wouldn’t call that torture.

106

The rest of the afterlife was presented as places for other being from other worlds/planes. Which could indeed be infinite.

OTOH, the afterlife we saw was presented as the afterlife for Azeroth. It wasn’t as if only tiny number of NE souls from Teldrassil ended in the Maw. The entire premise was that most, if not all, went there. When the arbiter was damaged, almost all the people from Azeroth ended up in the Maw. Not a tiny percentage. That was one of the premises of the expansion.

107

No, what we saw were the realms explicitly created to process souls into the rest of the Shadowlands, to rejuvenate slain Wild Gods and to keep cosmic invaders out. The vast majority of the Shadowlands are various degrees of “paradises” where mortal souls from all various worlds spend the rest of eternity, along with some intermediary “sub-Revendreth” places where souls can address minor burdens and the like before moving on to their final rests.

In the grand scheme of things, when the “machinery” isn’t broken by way of the Arbiter being disabled, hardly any souls end up in Bastion, Revendreth, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald or the Maw. Souls sent to those five places are very narrowly and specifically chosen from among the vast multitudes of the dead (and in the case of the Maw, mostly only after they’ve exhausted every avenue of redemption in Revendreth.)

There was nothing specific to Azeroth’s dead about the places we visited; Maldraxxus is the Maldraxxus for the entire universe, Ardenweald is the Ardenweald for the entire universe, etc. One of the Dromans in Adrenweald - Aliothe - is even a Wild God from a planet that was destroyed by the Burning Legion, and a former Night Warrior found there died using the power of Elune to save their world from an unnamed Old God. Similarly Revendreth has various denizens - some being venthyr - whose crimes in life included global atrocities like overrunning their homeworld with undeath.

Gamescale doesn’t allow it to be shown, but the size of the armies in those places were far larger than Azeroth alone could support. Yet even so, it was still but a tiny fraction of the total dead souls in the universe.

All souls going to the Maw was an unnatural result of the Arbiter’s dysfunction thanks to the Jailer’s allies. All souls go through Oribos and the Arbiter, but hardly anyone is selected to go to the other realms we visited. That was the premise; every new dead soul in creation being funneled to the Maw was symptomatic of the problem at hand, not indicative of how things normally worked.

Shadowlands wasn’t the sum total of the natural afterlife for Azeroth. While all souls pass momentarily through Oribos for assessment, the rest of the realms we visited are where only a tiny percentage of souls from across the entire universe - or Azeroth - are meant to go. You don’t just go to either Bastion, Maldraxxus, Revendreth or Ardenweald if you’re from Azeroth; souls are very specifically sorted out and selected for those places from among the entirety of dead souls produced by the universe.

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108

I will always find it odd the Shadowlands is a one way street for souls, given how important the overall cycle of life and death is supposed to be. Life gives, and Death takes. If its a cycle shouldn’t its foundational purpose be to allow souls to rest and use up their good/bad karma until they are ready to pass on and be reborn?

Sigh.

I will just chalk it up to Shadowlads Was a Weird Time, I guess.

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109

None of them were, IMO, paradises. You either had to serve new masters for the rest of existence or you were a battery for them. Or both.

You were either forced labor and/or drained for the use of others.

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110

Because you’re ignoring my entire post. Very few souls actually went to those four places to serve the Eternal Ones. We never got to see what the majority of the afterlives are like in-game because those places exist solely as eternal places of rest, so they aren’t integral to the working “machinery” of getting souls where they need to go or preventing other cosmic agencies from invading the Shadowlands.

It’s covered in the Grimoire and developer interviews; the vast majority of the Shadowlands is comprised of afterlives that are created for the express purpose of letting the souls they contain live out their idealized lives in peace.

People just ignore that because they have personal issues with things they saw in the four leveling zones and decide that must be the entirety of the afterlife in WarCraft in order to justify their moral outrage at being triggered by what they saw. Hence the “so why do tauren and orcs all become blue humans in the afterlife” idiocy. They don’t. In fact very few members of any race in the entire cosmos become Kyrians, Maldraxxi, etc. because very few souls actually end up in those places.

The Arbiter doesn’t send just anyone to any of the four leveling zones, let alone just anyone from Azeroth. Only “special” souls from among the countless mortal souls throughout the entire universe whose particular life experiences and temperaments would make them uniquely inclined to embrace or benefit from such an existence are sent to Bastion, Revendreth, Maldraxxus or Ardenweald. Everyone else is sent to live their idealized existences in one of the infinite number of afterlives being continuously created by Zereth Mortis.

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111

Unfortunately, while the Shadowland covenants and their zones were supposed to be, and canonically are, just the maintenance rooms of the infinite set of afterlives (where all the zones that people thought were going to be in the expansion still theoretically exist offscreen)… they were not at all presented that way, and so no one will think of them that way.

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112

So most of them were paradises, except the ones that Blizzard chose to represent the Shadowlands? This is what they chose when they wanted to show what the place was like.

113

Only in Ardenweald, for some reason.

114

Me, staring at the mess that is the Shadowlands lore.

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115

I’m not saying it was a good decision to omit a playable representation of the rest, but yes. What we saw was not indicative of most of the Shadowlands. Maintaining the integrity and existence of infinite other afterlives is the canon function of the Shadowlands’ “big five” realms (six if one counts the Maw), and they aren’t where most souls go.

The point of Zereth Mortis’ Forge of Afterlives was that whenever the Arbiter assessed a soul, deemed it not suited to the “utility” realms we know and needed a new afterlife to properly address that soul’s specific nature, the Forge would produce it.

It was poorly manifested in-game (though there were in fact a few references to other afterlives outside the playable ones, such as the “Craftenium” and the “Inn of Forever”), but between those mentions, further examples in the written material and several explicit statements of such by the developers, there are an infinite number of afterlives in the Shadowlands and the ones we accessed in-game comprise only a small part of the whole. Their importance lies in their functions, not in the percentage of souls who end up in them, which is actually quite small compared to the total number of souls that pass through Oribos for judgment.

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116

We were literally told this was the case. The reason the other realms were not part of the expansion was because the devs had a story to tell and for the most part the other realms would be effectively fluff.

118

Just because there were other realms, doesn’t really mean they were any better. Sure the devs say how great they were. But Given how Blizzard represented the ones we were shown as good afterlives, I find it dubious that they were really any better.

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119

If I took a poll where Warcraft fans had to choose an expansion to not exist, Shadowlands would get over 90% of the vote. Guaranteed.

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120

There were lots of great comments here. Lots of great insights.

What bothers me the most is that our playable reaces don’t really matter. They keep adding new ones, barely expand those which already are,except humans and elves, and everything feels so dilluted.

Everyone might look different but they sound and feel the same. There is no agency for each subfaction. And when I play a certain race like for example Tauren I want for them to gain something from whatever campaign they’re involved with.
At least one small quest chain that would update player what they’re on about, what as faction they aim to achieve that would benefit them and slowly introduce new characters. Just so player that mains said race knows that they’re not AFK’ing around and they have extra objectives in mind.

Blizzard is jumping from one extreme to another, BFA was a total escalation over nothing, and DF is sweeping everything under the rug and pretends nothing happened and everything is friendly.
I’d rather for Horde and Alliance have separate experience, they don’t have to be “right to the throat” enemies per say, but they shouldn’t be super friendly either to each other. There could be begrudging cooperation/ tolerance (in it’s actual meaning). Kinda like Argent Tournament was done and in Pandaria Jade Forest Questing. And I wish we could return to this kind of approach.

And lastly - the other issue I spot in DF is that it’s focusing too much on neutral content without properly developing Horde and Alliance. Neutral content isn’t bad in itself, but they put so much focus on the dragon stuff, and to be blunt I really don’t care about them, I’d rather know what my “homies” could gain from participaiting in it.
What do I get from helping these dragons? What my faction gets from it - and I mean like Worgen and trolls.

I mean you could fabricate some vague reasoning, but I’d rather have conrete answers provided in-game.

We are also talking about players who are stuck in very constant waiting because they never get an update on how their faction is doing. And Worgen are one of them.

The only glimpses are provided by Heritage questlines, but they’re super short and underwhelming and don’t really add much.

If they will continue this direction the game will become more and more soulless to me. Cosmic forces aren’t my thing, I want good ol’ fashioned conflicts, and geopolitical stuff.

I’m not saying that we should get another faction war, but minor conflics, animosities, should return. Not only in H/A but within the faction. I just cannot believe that everyone gets along just fine when there are bigger and bigger cultural gaps within H/A.

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121

I still think a Warcraft 4 should have been made after Wrath. WoW is not a good medium to tell the kind of story people are looking for since it all has to factor in the player character and keeping the factions balanced, etc.

In the RTS games if they needed a villain to win, or one faction to crush another for the story, they just had you play as the canon winning faction. Arthas’ story is one of WoW’s most famous stories, but it never could have been told in WoW. Garrosh was the closest WoW came to a compelling new villain, but they had to throw in a rebellion for Horde player characters so there was a story explanation for why they were raiding Org, his story seemed all over the place since stuff happened in quests you could miss or even outside media, and due to how time works in WoW, they had to hasten his fall so it seemed like his character took a sudden turn in MoP. Where as in WC3, between the campaigns it was like “btw there was a time skip and Arthas became a DK during it”.

My points apply to other characters, not just villains, but since Arthas’ story is most well known, and Garrosh was the closest WoW came to it, I figured it would be a suitable comparison.

So going full circle, how does this relate? Well TBC and Wrath were coasting off WC3. Cata and MoP had a little bit to work with, but not a lot, and after that it was uncharted waters. If you notice, a lot of people have a lot of “The lore wasn’t as good after Wrath, and WoD was when it got bad” sentiment. I think a WC4 could have set up really solid lore for the next 3 expansions.