the same way WOD wasn’t complete without Shattrath, Shadowlands complete without Bastion’s right ending. ima hypothesize why it didn’t happen.
Torghast shifted development vision sharply, from a rogue-like to a weekly-required 6-floor 2-wing slog. the 9.0-9.1.0 version of needing it made the game suck. what sucks even more is when you realize too much of development was sinked there. the same way Garrisons sinked too much development in WOD.
We obviously lost a raid tier. the wait between CNathria and SanctumOD was over SEVEN months long, the longest 1st-2nd wait ever. then the SepulcherFO wait was EIGHT months…
the most popular story cinematic with 3 million views today was the Uther and Devos one, where Arthas got thrown in the Maw. we know it could’ve led to an abstract story of how the Kyrian path destroys memories whether they like it or not. the Archon made questionable executive moves. the Forsworn protected what they wanted, but they sided with the evil Jailer. guys, imagine all that HIGH writing potential there.
what raid did we miss? there could’ve been a Dazaralor-type raid in a major patch. the Ascended and Forsworn fighting, told from two perspectives. imagine you fight and kill Devos in the middle, and in the end you fight the Archon. instead we got a half-dump dungeon of Spires of Ascension, wasting Devos’ character. on top of that, we got no Drust-story dungeons.
we missed it because of all the Torghast anima powers and legendaries design. most of us only used one or two, but think about it - all of those MUSTVE taken a long time to make!
how to avoid a repeat: Blizzard’s writers need to plan out better how they’ll begin and end their stories. it seems they start out knowing what results they want, but don’t consider the process enough. for example, instead of Shattrath story developing Yrel’s charisma, we saw her awkwardly buddy with Grom in the end. we see washed story results as consequence for bad process-plans. in future stories, Blizzard writers need to plan a beginning, middle, and end.
luckily though its not looking like they’ll need to worry about how to do that in Dragonflight. theres no ambitious feature soaking dev time. and its looking like first raid is a standalone story, not a serial one to a big bad. maybe thats a good thing, since story sequences are CLEARLY Blizz’s weakness. we just saw the Jailer lol