This expansion’s story is taking so many timegated tolls that I can only assume the majority of players just don’t care wtf happens now. Like seriously almost every single thing we get storywise has a ton of questions behind them. WE NEED THINGS RESOLVED.
Who the F killed Vol’jin and prevented him from healing wounds that ANY TROLL WOULD HEAL OFF!?!?!?
WTF IS SYLVANA’S PURPOSE IN THIS EXPANSION?!?!?
Will the Night elves ever get some revenge out of their storyplot? and HELL NO darkshore doesn’t count.
4.Did Sylvanas really send undead to kill Thrall or is Saurfang lying? Because right now that doesn’t make any sense.
Who the F won in Arathi Basin? Can Assume Night elves won in Darkshore but that’s about it. WHy didn’t these warfront get in game cinematics? They make absolutely no sense. I don’t even know in what timeline are they in.
How did lady Ashvane end up with Azhara? This plot needs to be explained asap.
Is Spirit Walker Ussoh a liar an invented Baine’s deathplot to diverge a co op help in Orgrimmar? They literally knew ppl where coming to help Baine. How does it make sense? we need to know.
Calia Menethil absurdly AFK the entire expansion (>_>)
So many other storyplots need resolve. Please. I don’t care if it takes months like 8.2 did. Make sure we get these things resolved.
8.) Does no one care at all about the giant sword that stabbed the planet and it still very much stuck there?
Honestly, the story went off the rails very early when they left that in the dust to focus on faction war. The “Wow, N’Zoth is free, maybe we should finally work together” moment rang completely hollow to me because of it. If a titan stabbing your planet, and your planet bleeding out with the sword still stuck in the wound, isn’t enough of an existential crisis to bring people together, I’m not sure what is.
This is a valid point though. The Horde freed Ashvane, right? For “reasons”? If that’s the case, it can only mean that either 1.) Sylvanas delivered Ashvane to Azshara, 2.) Ashvane left of her own free will, so the Horde are incompetent (and who knows what they really needed Ashvane for), or 3.) Sylvanas is way smarter than Azshara and is playing her for yet unknown scheme (which goes to your second point).
Who the F won in Arathi Basin? Can Assume Night elves won in Darkshore but that’s about it. WHy didn’t these warfront get in game cinematics? They make absolutely no sense. I don’t even know in what timeline are they in.
Is Spirit Walker Ussoh a liar an invented Baine’s deathplot to diverge a co op help in Orgrimmar? They literally knew ppl where coming to help Baine. How does it make sense? we need to know.
I have answers to these ones.
So the Arathi Warfront, it’s just a throwback to Warcraft 3’s opening cinematic where orcs fight humans. The armor you can get for Alliance is very similar to the warrior in that cinematic. I couldn’t understand why the Horde was there either, it seemed like Darkshore should be orcs and Arathi should be forsaken.
Then when doing it I saw the kodo drummer NPC and it hit me. It’s all meta reasons. It makes basically no sense in world but it’s that “race fantasy” of the opening WC3 cinematic.
Now, the Spirit Walker’s vision of Baine, it was probably compromised like Vol’jin’s vision. No real proof but I just think it is very likely. There is no other reason he needed to exist, it could’ve just been Lor’themar himself that gave the quest directly, but they put the Spirit Walker in.
Add the fact that the Island Expeditions had quests that are supposed to tease events that will occur this expac. I recall some one from Blizzard said at least some of those IE quests will lead to events in BfA.
It just feels like there is too much going on. That would be awesome, normally. It normally means many avenues to take the story. However, Blizzard is setting things up and seemingly dropping them into irrelevance with the next “Big Moment.” Leaving a host of things unresolved and ignored.
Speaking as someone who is still mildly irritated that we never got an explanation of how Garrosh survived that massive explosion in the Tides of War book, I really hope that they do clear up all of the OP’s points and any other hanging plot hooks.
I think it is because they did not have the 3D assets to make a whole Horde base like Stromgarde but canonically the forsaken should have been in Arathi Highlands.
This whole expansion seems to be one giant missed opportunity.
This.
in one hand blizzard is like “there is so much going on” but the main storyline still feels… empty, we got only 3 chapters in nazjatar, we defeat azshara and see you in 6 months!
i guess that ashvane was working with azhara all along, and sylvanas as well, playing 80d chess, who the hell knows.
I don’t think Ashvane was working with her all along. I think Ashvane simply wanted to take over. She clearly didn’t want to get caught, and was surprised when the Horde broke her out.
However, that’s the most confusing implication of it all. Sylvanas clearly knew where Nazjatar was, to the point that she used Nathanos/Xal’atath to find it and lead the Alliance fleet right into it. She also had a greater need for Ashvane. Although, I don’t know what Ashvane was needed for. Does Azshara, the most powerful mage on Azeroth, really need someone to help make some Azerite tridents for her naga minions?
So, either a.) Sylvanas was helping Azshara’s plot directly (as deus ex machina as it is to wait thousands of years for the moment Sargeras stabs Azeroth, Azeroth bleeds, and a random hero gets an Azerite necklace that is the last thing she needs to free an Old God), b.) Sylvanas is so reckless that she is willing to let Azshara’s plan go through so she can break some Alliance ships, or c.) Sylvanas has a plan for something unknown to us that is actually using the freedom of N’Zoth to her advantage, which I can’t figure out how there is any good in that.
EDIT: I totally forgot Azerite was discovered long before Sargeras stabbed Azeroth. The goblins found it after they mined too deep, and Gallywix’s cane/stick has a piece of it on the end. I find it hard to believe Azshara couldn’t figure that out and just dig down to get some Azerite herself to break out N’Zoth…
1.) A spooky new antagonist in the Shadowlands who has remained as yet unnamed but is strong enough to stop souls from going where they should and trucked Vol’jin into thinking he was speaking to the loa. Unknown if he is aligned with Sylvanas or not.
2.) Main antagonist for the Alliance and secondary then likely primary antagonist for the Horde. May be evil genius, may be psycho crazy, may actually be heroicly doing ‘what must be done’ depending on what plot threads get cut and which get followed. Ambiguous, but likely not for much longer.
3.) Probably, but it likely will still not satisfy anyone who is thirsty for revenge since they won’t literally delete the Horde from the game.
4.) The Warfronts are ongoing and have not been ‘won’ by either side as of yet. That is why you are still contributing to the Warfronts every few weeks. Control of the Warfronts shift back and forth. Unknown at this time of there will be a final ‘winner’ declared in the end, though data mining suggest there may be.
5.) Ashvane was working for Azshara the entire time and was encouraged to get in contact with her once she was broken out of prison by the Horde under Sylvanas’s orders. Likely those contacts are able to take her to Nazjatar while the players were busy fumbling around in the Crucible of Storms and of rescuing Baine.
6.) It’s possible that the spirits that shows Ussoh the vision of Baine’s execution were the same spirits under the spooky entities control, as the impending execution was apparently staged as a possible trap to lure in Suarfang and Jaina. The follow up heritage quest for the Tauren seems to confirm this as Thunderbluff is shortly attacked by spirits from the Shadowlands afterwards that try to silence their spirit guides.
7.) This isn’t an in game plot thread but a book one. Expect it to develop further in the books rather than in game.
Blizzard doesn’t know how to do story telling.
When they tell you “there is too much going on” it is completely their fault.
They can’t reliably introduce storylines and finish them satisfactorily, so they just abandon them and use this excuse to push their books where it acts as a “Loose Ender Machine” which makes for a terrible, terrible read most of the time.
This is a particularly glaring oversight for me. We last saw her leaving with Sylvanas after being released from prison, then she’s just suddenly “there” in a Nazjatar cutscene, commanding naga troops to fire on us. How? Was she on one of the Horde ships and ran off to Azshara after they crashed? Had she somehow managed to escape Horde custody after her liberation and connect with the naga on her own? How was she even working with Azshara in the first place? What was she supposed to do for Sylvanas? Where did she and the Ashvane company fit into helping Azshara unleash an Old God on the world? If Azshara and N’zoth knew all about the Azerite/HoA all along, why is it suggested in questing that the naga only have their own Azerite to weaponize because of Ashvane? The only reference to her even knowing Azshara was, as I recall, beta-only content that got removed along with the “Zul is allied with Azshara” foreshadowing that never made it live Horde-side.
And since she’s dead as of the end of the raid (not just human-dead either, which might lead to her becoming Forsaken or something; she’s “transformed into an eldritch abomination and then raided to death” dead) what are the odds we’ll find out any of this? It feels extremely unlikely that we’ll be regaled with big reveals about the circuitous scheme surrounding what turned out to be just a mid-tier throwaway boss in the Eternal Palace going forward.
It just comes across like they removed most of her story post-arrest, but were then compelled to keep the very end of it in. The whole exchange between her and Azshara felt like it was being sold as this well established minion being shockingly betrayed, but the “twist” of her getting transformed falls flat because by that point she’s only been portrayed as a servant or ally of Azshara in-game for a whopping ten seconds or so.
This is the problem with WoW’s storytelling, they treat it like WoW’s game mechanics. The thing about a carrot on a stick, is that you need to give the carrot at the end of the day, otherwise the horse is just going to kick you off.
Blizzard constantly hypes up their storytelling, promising all these great reveals, and then they either never deliver on it or the delivery is extremely underwhelming (such as the eternal palace raid cinematic.)
They really only have themselves to blame over this. If you spend all of your time hyping how great the story is, don’t be surprised when players have a higher expectation for conclusion than you intended.
Zul being allied with Azshara is in game and canon. It’s a bit obscure but there is a letter from Azshara to a ‘member of the Zan’chuli Council’ regarding their plans to undermine King Rastakhan’s rule.
Zul, as the chief advisor of the council was the likely intended recipient, given he murders the council members loyal to the king before he and the council members loyal to him go on to make an attempt on Rastakhan’s life and attempt to free G’huun.
I don’t know. I don’t remember there being any indication that her motives were higher than wanting to take over Kul’Tiras from the Proudmoore family. However, Sylvanas wanted to break her out for a specific reason, which Ashvane was not privy to at the moment. Ashvane even says something along those lines.
If she did act as some form of intermediary, that kind of means Sylvanas was in cahoots with Azshara. Although why she would need Ashvane for that is beyond me. Ashvane wasn’t special in any regard, although the storytelling is subpar enough that maybe they just poorly conveyed how much better her knowledge of Azerite was over everyone else (which, again, didn’t sound like Azshara really needed).
And along those same lines:
It all insinuates a “quid pro quo” arrangement which, as you can tell from the conversation, no one has any details on. Ashvane was obviously promised the ubiquitous “power” for something in return, and then was SHOCKED to find out she got her “power” in a totally, unexpected way. I just can’t figure out what was so important that only Ashvane could provide other than making some azerite infused weaponry for Azshara’s cannon fodder. That doesn’t really seem necessary with Azshara’s power and the Tidestone that she just used to open a hole in the ocean. An azerite trident really doesn’t seem that integral to her plan.