I find TWW okay. Just okay.
I’m a bit surprised, because I do like WoW’s dwarves, so I thought I’d be enjoying this more. Dagran is a treat, Moira has been everything I wanted her to be… but now the few minutes of that is over, and I find I don’t care about the earthen or the Arathi.
I should have learned from Malfurion’s return in Cata that meeting one’s heroes always falls flat - I loved the character of Alleria but find her more grating each time she shows up in the story. At least after going through all that, she’s mellowed out to the point where I consider her neutral again instead of an annoyance. I’m really hoping there will be some future stories of her and Turalyon doing stuff together, because I’m bored to death with the overly-repeated story beat of her pushing him and everyone else (except for Anduin, because everyone loves Anduin) away - the in-game cutscenes just aren’t long enough to show the full circumstances, nor emotionally deep enough to handle the characters’ headspace, for those moments to feel anything but contrived.
Falstad and Thrall training the new stormriders was also quite fun, and I like the Alliance and Horde fleets. I’d like more time with them, though - their relevance is over so quickly that it’s hard to remember they exist.
The main thing I love to see in WoW’s story is the progression of the main factions - how each expac’s story affects them and how they respond to it. It’s why I was glued to BfA even if I absolutely hated the direction the factions were going in it. And I feel that TWW gives me too little to chew on. Dalaran is destroyed! The factions’ fleets are assembled, their might brought to bear! …aaaaaaand the ongoing effects are so mild that I regularly forget that happened.
Hopefully there is plenty of old Azeroth interactions upcoming in the next patches of the campaign, but I don’t feel that the stage has been set for that. The NPC dialogues in Hallowfall were cool, the Dalarani zone treasures and one warden hunting escaped prisoners was nice, but I want whole Dalarani camps as questing hubs, Bilgewater wildcat miners setting up shop instead of just the Venture Company, and so on. Give me more Westfall Brigade-style hubs, full of old characters to recognize and who also conveniently exemplify our factions’ interests in the new expac zones/story.
I know MMOs aren’t good formats to tell conventional stories, but I feel like there’s a lot of easy targets that were missed, like the above-mentioned questing hubs made up of familiar factions/characters. Or: Why not have the skyriding WQs be given by Thrall/Kurdan as stormrider training circuits, with the gold/silver/bronze outcomes styled as beating various stormrider recruits’ best times and teaching them something?
Eh. I think I had more fun writing this review and coming up with examples than I did when experiencing the TWW story. Still, I don’t feel like the existing mediocre story has permanently wrecked anything (unlike BfA and SL stories), so I’m just bored instead of angry. Yay?
those were AWFUL.