The problem is we constantly kill them immediately, so there’s really never any “wow” or interesting story moments revolving around them
Like dragonflight, nobody knew anything about Raz and we just kinda yelled a bit and then died, so like big whoop that raids over. Sarkareth was at least… kind of important a bit but barely at the same time, if you didn’t play Evoker to actually see their intro or realized it was them during cutscenes since they were just a generic Dracthyr, he was another big whoop hes dead moment.
How many recurring villains do we have now anyway? Azshara and Hakkar? Not exactly an amazing list, just so many one and done scenarios
There just cannot be any compelling, recurring villains in WoW, just because the very nature of the game has us taking them out regularly like we’d take out the trash.
Either the villains come back from the dead entirely, defeating the purpose of killing them in the first place, or they just die and are never heard from again.
We just mow them down too quickly for content.
Ashzara is out there, but she’s either gonna become our friend, or join the pile.
Azshara and Denathrius both survived their respective raids. Legion had Gul’dan who was survived WoD.
The problem Blizzard has had lately is they can’t do a really good major villain. Their minor villains are still good, but Zovaal flopped hard and N’zoth did not receive the proper focus to live up to his reputation. Dragonflight also has good minor villains, but I fear its big bad is going to get N’zothed.
Obviously because the goal of the game is to defeat each villain, they can only do the whole “you haven’t seen the last of me” thing so many times.
My little green goblin friend, we have had a villain that has played an intricate part throughout the history of Azeroth and beyond. Surely you have not forgotten about Zovall? He was the master-manipulator of all things - it was even shown that he could rewrite history! However, it only took a small party of heros to bring him to an end.
Its just more that I dont see this as a turnover and red tape issue. Its just been part of their consistent set of actions for 15 years.
They have never done well with an over arching story (which a key part of that is the villain), ever. From day 1, I just dont see this as something they cared about.
They’ve done great with side quests, side stories, side villains. But the main? Meh.
Even the expansion many call the best, was based on using a pre-WoW asset, and making him rather silly.
I mean, it’s kind of the RPG trope to have a BBEG for any purpose but I feel like WoW jumped the shark when we went and fought death itself for some reason. As artsy as Shadowlands was it did not really need a reason to exist as an expansion.
DF is a start with lesser troubles to worry about since a lot of the focus is towards the Dragon Isles itself and towards the rest of the world since the threat is centralized. It’s also kind of the reason why people don’t feel an urgency to help out as well.
WoW doesn’t really need an overarching villain just to give people a sense of the danger they’re always in IMO. It just needs a more lively world and a reason to go outside the major cities.
I gotta say, The Division franchise knows how to spread the BBEGs.
Every season you may end up with a random bad guy or HEY, here’s that BBEG you chased for 4 seasons!
Then back to small dudes and switching between them.
Hell, we only caught Aaron Keener in the expansion of the second game during one of the seasons.
I think WoW needs to start trusting the playerbase won’t leave if we don’t fight the BBEG now. If the story is good, we are more than happy to keep going after them.
I’m kind of hoping Iridikron, being a guy who is allegedly a little cautious, goes “hmm, maybe I should bide my time for a few more years and prepare” instead of being at the end of a DF raid.
I fully expect Fyrakk and maybe Vyranoth to get killed off by the end of Dragonflight, but Absolute Earth Unit seems smart enough to make himself a problem later. Join the club with Azshara and Daddynathrius.
Step 1: Kill off or lock up all your major villains.
Step 2: Have a talent-impaired writing team so there’s no one of interest left to go up against.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT!
