A lot of people say this in response to someone complaining about the tone of lore of the last couple expansions. I feel like people who claim that WoW was never dark or gritty either haven’t played old expansions or they weren’t paying very close attention.
Going back to Vanilla, there were a lot of dark and disturbing stories and quests especially in the Western and Eastern Plaguelands. Ras Frostwhisper was described in a quest as slitting his own throat from one ear to the other while smiling in Stratholme’s Slaughterhouse. His body crumpled onto a pentagram known as “Menethil’s Gift” which can still be seen in game today.
In Scholomance, Eva Sarkahoff described in detail how she and her husband were captured and then stripped naked where they sat for days. She and her husband were then subjected to torture that was so painful, it should have killed them. Instead the cult of the damned used necromancy to keep Eva and her husband alive so that they could be experimented on endlessly.
Finally, Thaddius has some of the most disturbing lore in game. You can hear him torture either a woman or child while the victim cries out for help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn4GYI8S3dU
Many of WoW’s short stories during Vanilla were dark and gritty. The final portion of “Road to Damnation” details how a human woman becomes undead and then murders and eats her husband. The story is pretty graphic.
Even though this type of content wasn’t in the beginning or middle sections of Vanilla, Blizzard still masterfully built up the story to reach these moments of high impact in the later zones.
The examples I posted above show that WoW did have content that was dark, violent, and gritty. However, it also shows how much the game’s tone has changed since then. You would never find the type of quests I mentioned above in today’s game. I personally would like to see the Devs add more of it back in so that there is a balance between the lighthearted and heavier moments.
I started reading authors like Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, William Peter Blatty, Michael Crichton, and Peter Benchley when I was 9… using those as a baseline, WOW has never really been dark and gritty. Sure it has a few darker stories but it really never truly rises to the dark and gritty occasion for me.
I don’t get why people conflate overall tone with singular examples that are essentially one offs.
If you actually bother to look, there are still plenty of dark and creepy things in the current expansion. Did you miss the cave with the guy who got his eyeballs eaten by spiders? That still doesn’t change the fact that the overall tone of the game is a pg-13 action adventure not a M grimdark.
The thing is doing that requires admitting that a) older content wasn’t really the unrelentingly dark and gritty thing they remember from their childhood and b) that this hasn’t really changed
Even DF had a fair bit of dark stories in side content
Firstly to address your OP, yes I think adding in some Grim Dark elements would be nice.
To address the greater theme of the topic, no, I don’t think WoW would be classified as a Grim Dark game.
It’s more of a High Fantasy with an amalgamation of sub-genres that has now generally been more on the Superhero-style storytelling. Which may seem odd, but you can see it with the focus on their expansion main characters and their personality/thoughts/ethics/actions and how they are going around fighting crime/villains.
You could see elements of this all the way back in Cata. So this isn’t a brand new or sudden thing that popped out of no where, it might just seem more prevalent now. It’s also why you had to go all the way back to Vanilla to pull out examples because Vanilla/BC was generally where that style of storytelling was not very prevalent. It started taking form in WotLK and fully went off from Cata onwards where you’re having pony rides with Sylvanas and flying around Stormwind with Anduin.
I didn’t have to go to Vanilla/TBC to pull examples. I chose to do that to illustrate that WoW’s beginnings were much darker than current expansions and there was clearly a lot of intention in the different types of content WoW included at its inception. I could have added more examples from Legion, but wanted to focus on Vanilla.
What? who u run into that said this? Arthas literally exterminates an entire town for being infected with an undead plague, Shadowlands WAS RECENT! It just is slightly less dark than Diablo and im loving the Diablo tier sets they came out with. Literally the best DK set ever!
I also came from Vanilla. But I was lazy to read all the texts from the quests. I just ACCEPT the quest and got over it. No time to read them all.
I did MC, BWL and NAXX 40. I had a blast doing all of them. Unfortunately, I never read any of the quest givers long texts. I was more paying attention with the actual game. Same, up to now.
The only dark and gritty that I saw visually was in the Maw in Shadowlands. No need to read long texts from quests… It’s there in front of my EYES to behold how HELL looks like. The Art was great.