No? Shadowlands/Jailer threatened the whole universe. Fyrakk was just another huge dragon whose damage would have stayed local going by Azeroth metrics.
I don’t really think it’s that stupid. The undead or death beings weren’t really a thing and definitely not permanent part of the mortal world until the Scourge. Having demons observing death magic and then weaponizing makes some sense, since the Shadowlands wouldn’t have any access to living beings, it’s something they never could have mastered.
But I guess if the direction of the story is that Ner’zhul really didn’t come up with anything and was just given a list of things to do, why wouldn’t the Legion have picked someone more loyal? Oh well.
I think it comes down to the nature of the way they write their expansion stories as they go. The Jailer was already decided to be the big bad, but then all the pivots, Denathrius being popular and giving him a bigger outreach into the story, trying to explain whatever Sylvanas was doing. It’s part of the reason no on really knew what Zovaal was trying to do. Yes, get his power back, but why? So he could use Anduin to unlock the first one’s power to fight “what is to come.” That’s probably why whatever he was referring to is so vague, they don’t know what it is yet.
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Metzen and company were dnd fans, as were the folks who bought into the series.
Barovs? The Barov peasant caller? All of EPL/WPL and Stratholme? All giant nods to dnd, dragonlance, domains of dread, barovia, etc.
We’ve all been expecting death as a power for a long time now. Frostmourne now being a death power artifact is fit, good, correct, and should never be related to demons or chaos again.
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The worst part of BfA has to be that moment in the loyalist campaign when you “ironically” help out Jaina and Shaw to “ironically” free Baine by “ironically” slaughtering Sylvanas’ loyal elite soldiers and “ironically” breaking their magical prison crystals, which “ironically” lead to Baine, Saurfang, and Thrall aiding the Alliance in the Siege of Orgrimmar. 
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We just need to be patient. I’m sure our playing along with that scenario is going to pay off any day now…any day…
But yeah, that scenario is even better if you’re a loyalist and a Zandalari troll. “Ironically” helping your king’s killers to “ironically” free the guy who suggested negotiations with them at said king’s funeral.
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Remember, you only got that much because Sylvanas stans wailed on the PTR forums when they were forced to kill the dark ranger hit squad in Saurfang’s swamp. A repeat of MoP’s Horde rebellion without even the pretence of choice was the original plan. BfA’s A plot was total garbage, a blight on this game’s story, and all stories it has yet to tell.
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Interesting BFA, reminds me of when your trying to set up a DnD or RPG campaign with your friends and most friends dip out and new players come in? You end up with an amalgamation of stories and basically ended doing a completely diferent adventure or quest that leaves everyone not satisfy…
Or you work with a team of brilliant devs but they have clashing ideas on how to move forward with the product/update/program, all good ideas but none can fit what we already have on the table to work with. So you compromise and bugs start showing up everywhere!
Not sure if many can relate to this, but to me BFA felt like they were discussing/disputing/developing ideas and could not agree and as the deadlines grew closer they were like; “lets just go with X or Y to compromise and work from there”.
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The whole Sylvanas loyalist thing is sort of an admission that they had been making you be her loyal “champion” and then do a 180, while never been given any agency in it.
I don’t think I can agree with that. Metzen didn’t have as much foresight and planning as you are implying. His own Chronicles got retconned so the Shadowlands could exist.
Warcraft has paid homage or copied plenty of other medias, it doesn’t mean it’s building to something. Most of the people that got into WoW knew nothing about dnd, So saying that folks that bought into it were fans is inaccurate.
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No, they didn’t, because he made the Shadowlands as a concept.
His Chronicles got retconned so that his Shadowlands could be butchered.
I don’t think Metzen was a schema writer. I think he was a planter writer. He knew the seeds he was sewing, and he knew the plant he would get, but not how big it would get, nor how diseased.
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Hmmm A topic from Erevien I’m more than happy to throw my $0.02 in.
I don’t “hate” BfA. In fact I in fact enjoyed it. I enjoyed the pre-event of BFA EVERY LITTLE BIT. And back in 2019 I made it no secret.
I liked the Zandalari Trolls and as a black women I was enjoying the African accents and loved the Zandalar setting. I hated BfA for wasting my time with the Horde vs Alliance story only to end up fighting an old god out of nowhere. To this day my character going Kamahamaha (RIP Akria I hope to see you on Snake Way) on N’Zorth was a well deserved ending to BFA that I cant help but love it.
Overall I liked BFA. Faults and all.
I hated the fact we attacked our own Capital again and made Saurfang suicidal.
I’m not crazy about any of that, but I find it all easier to ignore than the ruination of my faction. I mained Alliance for a while, and it was fine, but seeing my Horde characters neglected and undergeared just made me sad.
That’s what people were begging for on this board all through SL, though—a de-escalation of stakes.
Eh, I think it was fine under the old cosmology. Before that cosmic chart was unveiled, things were a lot more fluid. It wasn’t so important to slot everything neatly into one of those cosmic power slots.
According to behind-the-scenes gossip, Afrasiabi never told anyone what his long-term plans were for the follow-up to the burning of Teldrassil. The best guess is that he was booted sometime during the development for patch 8.2, so the rest of the team had to really scramble to figure out how to move the story from there. This is just speculation, but I wonder if they might have even had to cannibalize plans for a future expansion in order to finish BfA.
Can you explain what you mean by these terms?
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Schema writers know the full minutia of every detail of their story. They have schematics like an architect with a house. They know exactly what they’re writing and every detail they need to hit along the way.
Tolkien is a schema writer.
Planters know their seeds. They know the plant they’ll get. They know to water it, get rid of pests, and fertilize the soil, but they don’t know the full detail of the story. They ‘feel’ it out along the way.
GRRM is a planter writer.
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Same as Plotter vs Pantser.
Plotter has a fully plotted and planned story.
Pantser just goes with the flow.
Obviously those are extremes and most of us are a blend of the two.
Just pointing out the other set of terms for those concepts.
It was two things for me:
- The story was horrible. Like really bad. As Alliance you just felt your whole faction was neutered and made completely incompetent. As horde you are just constantly wondering why you and your faction leaders are serving an obviously evil war chief committing horrible atrocities.
Then you completely waste one of the last significant lore baddies in Azshara. And rush the demise of one of four old gods in the game.
- Game mechanics. For some reason Blizz thought Azerite powers and doubling down on borrowed power was a good thing. That plus insisting that adding global cooldowns to absolutely everything was a good idea despite their entire playerbase screaming ‘no’.
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Things that I hated in BFA were Nazjatar and Black Empire being in the Expansion when they were clearly could have been expansions of their own, Allied Race System just wasn’t really fullfilling in terms of being level 10 instead of 1, requested races got denied like Wildhammer Dwarves, Mok’nathal Orcs, San’layn, High Elves, Broken Draenei, Forest Trolls, and etc when clearly they could have done a much better job of doing the allied race system with subrace features, scrapped warfronts that could had been great like the barrens one and quel’thalas, Saurfang getting way too much of cinematics when BFA Could had gotten other characters to fill in the holes like Jaina, Lor’themar, Baine, Nathanos, Tyrande, Maiev, Shandris, Alleria, Muradin, and etc, Azerite system was dull and forced, no class tier gear, and just overall disappointing.
before the SL level squish, you started at level 20 out of 120 for allied races.
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When I saw the clip of him saying, "My daughter asked me(during the dragon soul cutscene), ‘why are they in bikinis’ and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ " That sorta cemented the fact he doesn’t really put much deep thought into his actions.
Wrath Shadowlands was just some hazy zone with wraith, it didn’t have a hierarchy and lords.
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It’s actually a little funny to think about it. I remember seeing ads or commercials for BfA. People riding the bus and having some Horde or Alliance tribal mentality…(A little sad because that’s what politics is now… but I regress) And the game was every except that. The leveling experience I think was great, the zones were very immersive, but the overarching story? It was terrible. There was a war going on? But in the Warcraft universe, attacking random, isolated locations with no objective is the norm.
A standout moment for me was during the Alliance war campaign, sneaking into the Dazar’alor vault to sabotage a gold elemental? It hurts my head trying to understand it. Blizzard has no idea how war is fought or even develop food. Nothing changed… they fought on kul’tiras and zuldazar… and it ended with Sylvannas just flying into the sunset.
Oh yeah, Azshara made a deal with Sylvanas for some reason. Umm why? N’zoth thought this was his moment to break free. Um Why?
Well, some robot man, in a timeless realm, wanted his powers back.