They already said it’s not going to happen.
That doesn’t mean anything. They also said Blood Elves wouldn’t be getting blue eyes. Then a few weeks after that statement BOTH Blood Elves AND Void Elves got blue eyes.
Just because they say something “Won’t” happen doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t. Especially if it involves the story or setting of the next expansion. I dont think they’re going to spoil that 2 years in advance.
Yeah i’d like to see more animations and racial themes. Like i want to finally see Night Elf Paladins but have their light be silver etc.
It seems so ridiculous to me we had a Night Elf pally introduced back in Legion yet we don’t have them yet as a playable option.
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I’m digging out my thread to post the following experience.
I was recently asked by my friends to join “Legends of the Five Rings” Tabletop Roleplay.
To make is short, the setting is asian themed, you are part of the Empire that was created to resist the Dark powers, and the empire is consisting of various clans: Lion, Dragon, Phoenix, Unicorn, Crane, Scorpion and Crab. Each Clan has it’s a role in the empire, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is like-minded.
https://l5r.fandom.com/wiki/Clans_of_Rokugan Each clan has established view and outlook, elaborated culture, highlights and lowlights.
As you see Certain clans cannot stand one another, every clan has opinion about members of the other clan. Some were greeted with appreciation and some are looked down upon with contempt.
This is a fantasy! This is a great roleplay setting. Not everyone is like-minded zombie despite being in the very same faction.
It made me wheep again, seeing how WoW is turning with each expansion more dull.
And made me realize why I have such a hard time playing Alliance and the only races I have an interest in are worgen and Dark Irons because they have 2 shades of dark to them, unlike the rest. And even then it was done in an underwhelming way.
And Horde is going in the same direction.
IMO WoW Really needs to return to the roots and re-discover the world itself, the races that we play, the zones we go to. And many more.
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BfA is already that. Sylvanas was built as the big bad, she ran away after she had gotten what she wanted (IE won), then set everything up for us to handle the consequences (Shadowlands).
Peace is a result of technological and cultural advancement, either reducing scarcity, or creating a power gap (ie pax romana).
What we have at the end of the 4th war is a terribly weakened Alliance and a destabilized Lordaeron/Arathi/Ashenvale regions. What we have is an ISIL/ISIS situation, and it should be easy for a Light Based terror organization to recruit as they will be necessary to fight off the scourge since we all chased Sylvanas to the afterlife.
Na, I don’t think so. This would never be the main thing in WoW. As much as I like the idea of it.
I understand your point, but I disagree (and would like to see what Gomgrim is describing).
If Sylvanas is the “big bad” in BfA (and I mean that in the sense of the main villain), then she has very little plot coverage (unlike, say the Lich King who kept re-appearing in quests, dungeons, other raids, etc), and we really never confront her. Yes she has her cinematics and the storyline involving her, but she basically kills a lot of people (at the very start), eventually the Horde rebels against her, and she runs away.
BfA was a jumbled mess in my opinion, but the closest thing to a “big bad” was N’zoth and if N’zoth would’ve won it would have been interesting. He couldn’t “totally win,” as in corrupting Azeroth completely, but let’s say “blasting him with the necklace” energized him and brought Ny’alotha completely into existence (on an island, because… islands) leading to the next expansion “Corruption of the Old Gods.”
Prepatch has the bugs run rampant and conquer Silithus, Uldum, Tanaris, parts of Pandaria, and wherever else I’m forgetting. Corrupted cultists try to raise C’thun and Yogg-Saron. The Titans send Algalon’s brother … Malgalon (I suck at naming things) to annihilate the planet using the Titan stuff (and we hit him hard so he decides his brother was right). We spend the entire time fighting on our backfoot since N’zoth won. Zones are lost to his expanding army. Then we let in the Army of the Light. They help us reconquer some territories (but FORESHADOWING they seem less interested in returning the land).
After we have managed to finally destroy N’zoth, the Grand Master Chandelier decides it was our fault and we almost brought about the end of the universe (sorry?). It’s because we relied on so many things other than the Light and allowed them to infect us. We are clearly powerful, but we must serve the Light if we are to truly defeat the Void! Turalyon and Velen are upset by this development because, you know, Turalyon is kinda involved with a Void Elf… and they’re heroes so we all go fight the Light siders and it turns out the Grand Master Chandelier was going a bit rogue, and there’s intrigue as we help his second in command take control. Then we find out the Grand Master was actually CORRUPTED! And he turns purple. So we break him. And also by virtue of having injured both forces, we’ve restored some semblance of balance. And… stuff.
Yeah that all ignores Sylvanas and instead of having her jump to Shadowlands we find out she’s been hiding at Marris Steed and have a raid in Plaguelands or something. This was all just trying to build off the idea of us actually “losing” at the end of an expansion.
We basically walked into Ny’alotha and murked an Old God who had been behind a bunch of things we’ve run into - and he went down with a whimper.
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While I don’t disagree with your overview, allow me to point out how little difference there is between Sylvanas’s villain arc in BfA and Garrosh’s in MoP. Or Deathwing’s in Cata, for that matter. True, we don’t have a raid fight with her, but we certainly do confront her at the Orgrimmar gates, when she leaves to have a Shadowlands.
She’s not only in cinematics tho. She’s the primary motivation of the plot. Horde see her all over the war campaign, Alliance are given constant reasons to want to see her defeat, so on and so forth.
Compare to Garrosh; We see him in the… 5.1 campaign. He disappears for 5.2 because Isle of Thunder. 5.3 is the rebellion quest and 5.4 is the final confrontation. He’s in the very beginning of the release content sending Horde to Orgrimmar, but otherwise is absent for 5.0.
Sylvanas and her actions are all over 8.0. 8.1 is a continuation of her war, with the rebellion getting sorta-kinda-not-really started. 8.2 is further a part of her machinations, though in a more distant sense. And then the final patch has the combined forces finally confronting her, until she just leaves. Sylvanas’s presence in BfA is at worst equal to Garrosh in MoP. Her actions drive the plot right up until she leaves, right as N’zoth is finally showing up.
And comparing her to Deathwing is an almost laughable difference; he blows up the world, spends the rest of the expansion flying around, then shows up just in time for a raid. Comparing her to Kael’thas and Illidan’s involvement combined still sees her more a part of the plot.
You brought up the Lich King, and he might be the only big bad we see or are indirectly affected by more than Sylvanas (which is a certain kind of irony, all things considered). Every other one sees less exposure or influence/impact than Sylvanas. You can argue the Legion as a whole certainly exceeds her, but they’re just the forces of their Big Bad; Sargeras, whom we also don’t directly defeat or even confront. And Sylvanas certainly is more involved in BfA’s plot than Sargeras, who doesn’t show except as a disembodied voice criticizing his followers until the very end when he’s just a cinematic.
And if you want to bring N’zoth into it, then we need to be honest; the BfA plot had little to do with him. He was clearly presented as the same type of B-plot that the Zandalari were in MoP; impact in a few zones, then a raid and zone dedicated to them. The only difference being that when Blizzard decided we couldn’t fight Sylvanas in the end, they had us fight N’zoth in a raid and his minions in two slightly modified zones.
So yeah, Sylvanas is absolutely the big bad of BfA (such as the plot was), and certainly got her “win” in the form of achieving all of her goals.
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I’m still a supporter of a more grounded story back on Azeroth right now. There’s interesting aspects to the cosmological stories/Afterlife stories, but a large part of it i find hard to get interested in. It just feels so disconnected from the roots of the story for me. It just feels so over the top and hard to get into. I’ve said this before but in the overall current story, im more interested in what’s going on back on Azeroth with the Scourge rampage than i am with what’s happening in the Shadowlands itself.
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I feel exactly the same, the only parts that are feel invested are Loa and Vol’Jin and even I could live without this content, as I see SL as another form of harming troll stuff (what they did with Rezan and Damabala is a crime) - and not just troll stuff as it damaged the established lore about the afterlife for other races.
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Garrosh didnt feel like the Big Bad of MoP, the Sha did.
Ehm… uhm… speak for yourself in this case.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree, because I disagree with pretty much every aspect of this sentence.
I think BFA was a mess in terms of storyline, but Sylvanas seemed like more of a background story we interacted with every few months and foreshadowing for the next expansion.
N’zoth is referenced in Uldir (corruption, old Gods, Zek’vos Herald of N’zoth, etc), Crucible of Storms (Xal’atath’s role in freeing N’zoth), Azshara (N’zoth’s pet/monster/whatever), Ny’alotha, the invasions, visions, etc. N’zoth gets more player focus and interaction throughout.
I spent more of my time helping those little fish goblins and the tiny robots than I did doing anything for or against Sylvanas. She made me run a few errands with a knife, there was some Saurfang stuff, and Nathanos was always around annoying me.
N’zoth “shows up” before Crucible of Storms (and that’s ignoring the references in Uldir). That’s 8 months into the expansion? We spend the next 18 months dealing with N’zoth-related shenanigans. Sylvanas starts the expansion off with a “shock moment” and then serves the rest of the time as a perpetual pre-launch stand-in for Shadowlands.
And her “big win” was having lots of people kill each other before she hid.
You know the entire 4th war was Sylvanas’s machinations towards her end-goal, right? That war campaign, the continuation of it, even us going into Nazjatar, was all either in service to her plans (Horde) or trying to stop them (Alliance). Sylvanas canonically sent us there as part of her plan to get the magic dagger to Azshara. Sylvanas is literally why we have a plot in BfA. N’zoth’s actions are just taking advantage of Sylvanas’s moves.
Yes, N’zoth was involved in more raids than Sylvanas. His involvement in the actual plot of the expansion was minimal.
Nobody has stated otherwise. Her end-goal with the 4th war was to have the highest body count to feed into the Maw. She succeeded. The villain succeeded, and led us into Shadowlands, her edgy new boyfriend’s big plot.
The, err, guys who all but one had been put down before the first patch? And that lonely one survivor was an early boss in the Garrosh raid?
IDK, they didn’t feel very big bad to me.
Wasn’t G’huun just some fake old god the titans made to study them? I remember having 0 investment in that plotline when I read about that, but I also remember not liking Nazmir in general.
I also thought that the old god stuff was mostly the B plot of the expansion and that the faction war was supposed to be the main focus. It’s the entire premise behind why you go to the new content to begin with, it’s the focus of a raid, and it also seemed to be the only thing the NPCs really cared about. I feel like the alliance-side questing may have had a relatively better lead into it because Azshara’s forces actually play a part in one zone, and she’s been a long-time villain whose minions every player has run across at some point.
G’huun was more like G’who in comparison. And if BFA was supposed to primarily focus on old gods, then it would be the first expansion whose trailer didn’t focus on the big bad.
Edit: Small correction, WoD technically didn’t either, but Grom really was the intended final boss at the time the cutscene was made.
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I agree 100%. The trailer did make it seem like it would be a giant faction conflict. It just completely failed to deliver that and we got a jumbled mess of plot points. It’s why I’m saying N’zoth is the closest thing to a big bad - or maybe void corruption in general. The entire expansion felt disjointed.
From the perspective of the faction conflict, we got BoD, world PVP, assaults, some of the usual faction vs faction quests (which are present pretty much all the time) and then most of the actual faction conflict plays out on a mission table.
For me, Sylvanas felt mostly as a plot device foreshadowing the next expansion. We get to play “let’s help Saurfang … commit suicide” and “let’s run sketchy errands for Sylvanas who wants to see us all die.” Yes it becomes “she orchestrated this war to cause as much death as possible,” but the war aspect just doesn’t live up to it. The beginning has these shock-factor city destructions and then … there’s really not a lot of substance to it after. It’s just this underlying “thing” going on, while we fight against bigger “things” or try to impress smaller “things” (sea people and little mostly-robots). Yes, she got her war and a body count - it’s a win, even though she loses control of the Horde and hides, but she doesn’t really seem all that “there” to be considered a big bad.
I don’t think BFA was supposed to focus on the old Gods, I think the storyline really failed in developing Sylvanas into the “big bad” and there were so many threads it just didn’t deliver.
My tinfoil hat theory is that the super negative responses to the burning of Teldrassil may have had them lean away from the intended direction of spending more time focusing on Sylvanas and … you know, the whole mass murder thing (shocker, people don’t want to be forced to do it or suffer it).
I’d also argue that if Sylvanas is the Big Bad, this is the first expansion I can think of where we didn’t even face off against the Big Bad (and most of the time they appear as the final boss).
BC was Illidan (we fight Kil’jaeden after but that was tacked on due to development issues), WotLK was the LK, Cataclysm was Deathwing, MoP we face Garrosh, WoD is… whatever, I don’t know… we face all the Orcs and Cho’gall and Archimonde so maybe it’s last or maybe not, and Legion we face the Burning Legion and Argus/Sargeras (kinda).
Sylvanas seems to exist in BfA to “evil her up more” and “get us ready for Shadowlands.”
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It’s actually been a theme of the last three expansions where we don’t face off against the big bad, exactly as you bring up.
WoD had Grommash as the big bad, until DRAENOR IS FREE!! Legion had Sargeras as the big bad, until he was a space cloud we never interacted with and fought “a wild Argus suddenly appears” instead. Sylvanas, much like Grommash, is the big bad we not only don’t fight, but isn’t even relevant to the final raid boss.
There are three expansions where the big bad is the actual final boss (Wrath, Cata and MoP). Extrapolating from those three on trends for the expansion’s big bad is a bit off when three other expansions show a different trend entirely.
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And BC, with Illidan? Or was the final raid the Sunwell? Can’t remember now…
Legion was literally the Burning Legion. Sargeras led the Burning Legion and we killed off the baby Titan Argus, and freed the Pantheon so they could imprison Sargeras. Arguing that we don’t face off against the Big Bad is a bit of a stretch.
WoD was a mess - I’m not going to argue one way or another.
BC’s last raid was the Sunwell, but they had development issues and couldn’t release WotLK, so Sunwell was tacked on after.
I mostly set BC aside, because it was the very first expansion, and follows clearly the Vanilla-era design model of “just throw it in there, and worry about making sense later”. Kil’Jaeden is the true final boss, but not the Big Bad, but that’s mostly because raids in BC were thrown together with Rule of Cool first, Rule of Logic second. It’s why we have a “and suddenly, CoT Hyjal” raid. Had the developers at the time not had a bunch of issues with developing BC, Illidan certainly would have been the final boss, and Sunwell and BT would have swapped places.
In the same sense that Wrath was the Scourge, Cata was the Twilight’s Hammer, WoD was the Iron Horde, and so forth.
The Burning Legion was the threat because of sheer numbers and threat, but the big bad was always their leadership. It’s why in BC we fought KJ as the leader of the invasion.
It’s really not, because we really don’t face Sargeras. You can pretend Sargeras wasn’t the big bad, that we did face him when we fought his newborn surrogate, but you have a pretty big uphill battle there.