Growing up did you ever have a friend that you got along with swimmingly and had some amazing times and then something changed. You aren’t exactly sure what changed but there was a shift where they moved from being this loveable goofball that you cherished time with, to being something that just could not ever seem to get their shit together. You would try and go hang out with them again, but you always felt worse about everything after spending a significant amount of time in their aura. You would try and offer advice or attempt to help them get their shit together, but it always ended up backfiring somewhere along the way. Eventually, you found yourself distancing from them just to keep your own hopes and dreams from coming crashing down around you as they pulled you into their void.
I’ve had that friend, actually more than one of them over the years. I’ve also had a very similar relationship with Blizzard and more specifically World of Warcraft. When you are in this situation you want the world for this person that you love, but also know that it is actively harmful to have them in your life. The thing is I have learned to cut myself off from those influences in the real world, or at least significantly distance myself from them to where they are no longer impacting me. I’ve never really managed to do the same with World of Warcraft because even though I know it is bad for me… I still care.
So as a result it hurts a bit when news comes out that they are flailing and are not so great condition right now. In part, I am talking about the supposed leak that was circulating or the long-winded rant thread by Grummz the other day adding to it. Side note… that is not a leak friend. That is not something that came from official company emails or documents that were then circulated without the permission of Blizzard. That is someone having a rant and while I don’t know the circumstances of that rant, it was purposeful and very much not something that leaked out. I am not sure if it is real and someone thought they were venting in a safe place… and someone copypasta’d it onto Imgur or if it is corporate cosplay. Whatever the case it is still a bad look at a bad time when World of Warcraft is seemingly already reeling.
I’ve been following this drastic turn from the zeitgeist on their opinion and general sentiment about World of Warcraft. The thing is it isn’t like we have not been collectively “mad” at the game before. This always seems to be a cyclical happening and there is always something in every single expansion cycle that pisses someone off enough to start sharpening that axe. However this time it feels a little different. For years on the podcast, we have raised the question of what happens to Warcraft when they release two poorly received expansions in a row. Blizzard had been on this cycle of a good expansion and a bad expansion and the goods are always high enough points to pull up the public sentiment creating a mindset of “just wait for the next expansion and everything will be alright again”.
Battle for Azeroth was not well received and for me personally, it was the doubling and tripling down on the big dumb Red versus Blue narrative of factional conflict. I enjoyed the storyline Horde side quite a bit but never could seem to get into the Alliance narrative in spite of on paper it seeming to have a bunch of elements I would care about. Shadowlands had moments of brilliance like the Maldraxxus but zones I had to force my way through like Bastion… which unfortunately was the very first zone of the expansion. Normally I manage to level my main and an alt before bouncing from World of Warcraft but I only actually made it to the new level cap on a single character before tossing the game aside.
I am not a proponent of Classic World of Warcraft because it creates this revisionist narrative of the past. Coming back and playing that game made me realize that so many of the elements that I deeply cared about and remembered fondly… specifically involved the people that I remembered them fondly with. There is no going back to a better time in World of Warcraft because you will never actually capture that lightning in a bottle that was gaming at that exact time in history. However, I do look fondly upon the first trilogy of World of Warcraft like a magical time and I have been trying to understand why it felt so much better back then at least compared to the more modern incarnation that really started with Cataclysm.
The thing is if you follow the arc from World of Warcraft to The Burning Crusade and into Wrath of the Lich King not only did you have a strong narrative path that connected directly to Warcraft 3, but also a game that was built on constant and iterative improvements to the existing formula. Sure there were some wild changes here and there, but for the most part, each expansion added to the things that were available to the player base and offered not only quality of life improvements but also changes that enrich the existing systems rather than radically changed them. An example of this is Gem Sockets, which is a system that layered on top of the existing gearing systems and enriched them adding another layer of customization to something that already seemed to be working.
With Cataclysm we started what I will refer to as the “Wild Moodswing” era of World of Warcraft. This is marshaled by what seemed to be a desire to erase the past and create something completely new. They were not going to actually create a Warcraft 2.0, but with each expansion, it felt like they were making radical enough changes that they might as well have called it that. Cataclysm started this off by quite literally nuking the world and replacing almost every single old-world zone with a slightly different version. It was ambitious as hell, and while it didn’t work for me I think the concept was cool. For me, it was oversteering while you are already hydroplaning and I think the game ended up in the ditch as a result.
The problem with radical change is it ends up creating a vastly unpredictable user experience. We all have a love for World of Warcraft and all of this nostalgia… but end up having them try and apply those feelings to a game that no longer feels like we want it to feel. The end result is you wind up with great vacillations between moments of unexpected brilliance like Legion and extreme low points like Warlords of Draenor. So the thing with WoD is that on paper it seemed like everything going into that expansion was going to be awesome. I actually greatly enjoyed the leveling process, but the huge gaps between content after the initial burst left a bad taste in so many mouths. I will always remember it fondly because it gave me the one-player fantasy I have always wanted… DPS Warrior with Sword and Shield.
After years of gnashing my teeth about what makes an MMORPG great, and I think I have ended up with a basic template. Here are the bullet points I have boiled it down to:
Small iterative changes over time that feel like they improve not only the quality of life for the player but enrich the existing systems and build upon them.
A predictable release cadence that allows your player base to know when then the next content drop is going to happen so that they can play their schedule around it. Additionally, the content quality needs to be consistent and meet most of the player’s expectations.
Support multiple styles of play so that your raider, pvper, crafter, and your extreme cosplay aficionado all have a home and feel like they have equal footing in your game. The content drop should give each of the groups of players something they feel is theirs and can be excited about.
Make additive content not subtractive content. The world should feel like it is getting bigger and there should be systems that make the older content evergreen and still relevant in spite of times changing. The alternative makes you feel like the world shrinks each time content drops as this new thing is the only part of the world that now matters.
Catchup mechanics that allow new players to easily slide into content if they have walked away for a while. Games need to support the ability to fade in and out of a game as your life changes and not feel like the player has sacrificed too much in the process.
The thing is there are a number of games more or less following these bullet points. You have games like Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV that have slowly been building momentum for years. There is also Guild Wars 2 that is doing its own thing but should probably be mentioned even though the thing that it is doing is not really in my wheelhouse. The problem is there are two games that I love that are absolutely NOT doing these things… namely Destiny 2 and World of Warcraft. I struggle in both cases because the world seems to shrink each time a content drop happens as the players are funneled towards this new thing that just got added in, with no real reason to keep doing the older things that were still enjoyable. That is something that Final Fantasy XIV has excelled at is bribing players to keep doing the back catalog of content because it is good for the health of the game to make sure everything stays active.
I think another important note we should talk about is console support for games. World of Warcraft does not have console support, nor does it appear like they are heading in that direction. Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online both jumped early on the console bandwagon, and while at least in the case of FFXIV system design being initially limited because of the PlayStation 3 I think that flexibility has paid off in other ways. Folks might have been PC gamers in their High School or College years but found as an adult that sequestering to a dedicated room of the house to play games no longer fits their way of life. Having the flexibility of still playing the MMORPGs that you loved in your younger years, on the console that is more practical in your older years is a big boost in the total pool of players that you can draw on.
So I have said a lot of words today and unburdened myself with a lot of concepts I have been thinking about. I want to close things out, but I feel like I need to draw back a specific point that I feel is extremely important to underline. I do not want World of Warcraft to fail. I do love and want Final Fantasy XIV to be successful, but I do not want it to be entirely due to the failure of what was a long-time friend of mine. World of Warcraft is that friend that cannot get their shit together, but even though you have been distancing yourself… you still really want to see them succeed. I would love for us to tell in a decade’s time the riveting tale of the revival of World of Warcraft and how it is the second greatest comeback tale of all time… because let’s be honest no one is going to outdo the FFXIV 1.0 to FFXIV 2.0 story. As much as I want this success for an old friend, I am just resigned to the fact that we are going to get more of the same with an added focus on mobile game mechanics and alternate streams of monetization. I want World of Warcraft to be a better game than it is today, but I have lost my faith that it can be.
The post The Battle for Azeroth’s Soul appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Lately as you all know I have been playing an excessive amount of The Elder Scrolls Online, and in doing so it has made me realize one of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft and more importantly the cosmology of Azeroth. There are not actual gods. There are beings that they place in the same position as gods but those largely serve the role of large monsters that we will eventually take down in a raid. This morning I am going to try and explain the difference from my perspective, or at least my particular point of view.
Over my years on this planet there have been a number of games that I have played with baked in pantheons of worship. Likely the first of these was when I got my hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods it seemed both really cool and also extremely natural. I had been studying mythology and the fact that I was also catholic… which sort of has its own pantheon of saints… it all made sense in my tiny brain. I personally was super engaged with the Norse mythology and my deity of choice has almost always been Tyr the Even-Handed. In part because it was really fucking cool that he sacrificed his arm in order to bind Fenrir and in essence stop Ragnarok from happening. It is only as an adult that I tend to feel more for Fenrir in this scenario.
The key characteristic of the gods in a good RPG is that they don’t actually have the ability to directly influence the mortal plane. They can occasionally manifest themselves in the form of an avatar, but for the most part they wage a proxy war for control of territory and the hearts and minds of people. As such various cults spring up that worship a specific deity and generally speaking the only difference between these and the accepted religion of a people is whether or not it actually aligns to their collective morals. As I moved into online games, I found Norrath to be a very believable and vibrant setting in part because it had so many deities vying for power over the world.
In Norrath we had a core pantheon of gods with various alignments and realms of influence:
Good Aligned
Mithaniel Marr
Quellious
Rodcent Nife
Tunare
Neutral
Brell Serilis
Bristlebane
Karana
Solusek Ro
The Tribunal
Evil Aligned
Bertoxxulous
Cazic-Thule
Innoruuk
Rallos Zek
Anashti Sul
In addition to these there were a whole slew of other minor deities and demigods and general forces of nature that were in various states of activity an influence on the mortal plane. So many of the best storylines in Everquest involve the gods working against each other and attempting to exert influence on one part of the world or group of people. This also ends up creating interesting dualities as different races within the world view the same god in vastly different ways. Brell Serilis for example is the creator of the Dwarves and the Gnomes, but also is referred by the Goblins of the Runny Eye clan as their deity as well along with all of the neutral earthen elemental forces. The gods also work in concert with others for example Cazic-Thule, Ralos Zek and Innoruuk have an unsteady alliance because they all collectively hate Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr and actively seek to do harm to them through their followers.
Elder Scrolls similarly has an extremely rich pantheon of gods and demigods that vie to influence Mundus aka the physical world. In later games this coalesces around an imperially mandated pantheon of the nine divines but there are so many other pantheons present and active in the world. Not the least of these are the Daedric Princes which have a wildly varying number of approaches to their worshipers and motivations. Ultimately what separates a Divine and a Daedra seems to largely be the favor of the government as many of the Daedra themselves took up roles in older Pantheons within the races of Nirn.
Similar to Everquest a large number of the questlines that you find yourself on involve one or more “Gods” moving against each other or trying to exert their influence in a specific sphere of power. The core storyline of the base game of Elder Scrolls Online centers around a plot by Molag Bal the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement attempting to merge his realm of Coldharbour with Tamriel effectively giving him power over both. Meridia another Daedra who is associated with the energies of living beings is aligned against Molag Bal and often times offers assistance to the players in order to fight back against this aggression.
Other deities like Nocturnal are closely tied with specific organizations within Nirn, more specifically the Nightingales are her sworn servants but there has often been a rumored connection between her and the Night Mother revered by the members of the Dark Brotherhood. The keys to both Everquest and Elder Scrolls and honestly Dungeons and Dragons before it is that the gods are alive and well and actively trying to influence the populace. I contend that there doesn’t really seem to be an equivalent of this sort of interaction happening within World of Warcraft.
Roughly five years ago from the time of writing this, Blizzard released a book called World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1 that attempted to take the wildly disparate lore of the World of Warcraft and condense it into a unified world view. This was effectively the equivalent of an ecumenical council and attempted to sift through the various lore and discard the bits that didn’t quite fit while modifying some in order to fit into this neat cosmology. I was fully in support of this notion because Warcraft lore was a complete mess. However what came out of this as well was the fact that this larger world view didn’t have room for dieties really.
In the early days of Warcraft however I thought there was effectively a pantheon of good deities aligned against a pantheon of bad deities. The good represented by the Titans and the bad represented by the Old Gods and this nebulous concept we kept hearing known as the Void Lords. The longer the game has run however it is very clear that the Titans are effectively just a different sort of race of beings birthed out of the core of a world and not really immortal gods. Similarly the things that keep being referred to as “Old Gods” are just sort of this race of elder beings that defy logic and reason but also can absolutely be killed as we have done this to several of them.
The closest thing that we really have to a proper pantheon of deities comes in the form of the Loa that the Trolls worship. However apart from Bwonsamdi and Hakkar we really don’t see a lot of interaction between these individuals and the races of Azeroth apart from the Trolls consistently figuring out ways to “eat” their gods and drain their power. As a result these are also very mortal beings that maybe exist in a different manner but cannot really be thought of eternal forces quite in the same way as a Quellious or a Dibella. The absence of this clear pantheon of power aligned with and against the players has always ended up making the world of Azeroth feel every so slightly hollow. There was always something missing that I never could quite put my finger on until I started to think about it more recently.
Up until this point I could still sort of lean on the Wild Gods of Azeroth as being this eternal force that impacts the world. However Shadowlands even closed the loop there and taught us that what we think of as the Wild Gods are just beings with a different life cycle where they travel to Azeroth, live a cycle there and then return to the shadowlands to regenerate before manifesting again. This makes me not really consider them to be a true pantheon of gods either. There is this new Pantheon of death that we have been introduced to, but they also are very much killable which again makes me question if they represent gods either.
I think the truth is more that World of Warcraft exists largely to create powerful figures and then allow the players to kill those powerful figures. A major force cannot exist for very long without it eventually turning into a raid encounter. Maybe this comes from early frustrations of the folks who shaped the raid content of World of Warcraft being long time Everquest raiders and travelling to the seats of those gods powers… and only ever killing an Avatar and never being able to actually slay the god themselves. I think the storytelling potential of a game is weaker however if you don’t have all powerful beings with their own motivations pulling the strings of “mere-mortals”. World of Warcraft plays at this, but in every case those forces eventually end up on the chopping block as the players end those threats permanently.
I think I like the concept of having endless beings that we can momentarily defeat, but never quite go away and never forget the actions we have taken against them in the past. Everquest has managed to churn out so many expansions in part because they keep relying upon familiar enemies to invent new schemes to take over the mortal plane of existence. Instead World of Warcraft feels more akin to Dragon Ball Z or Bleach where they keep having to invent more extreme versions of cardboard cutout villains for us to eventually knock down in the end. The end result is also a lot of retroactive changes to storylines as new forces and shoehorned into existing events.
That neat cosmology chart that I posted earlier from World of Warcraft Chronicles has already been mostly nullified by the expansion we are going through in Shadowlands. Without a reoccurring cast of Gods, new and more extreme versions of evil need to be invented in order for us to keep prevailing over them.
The post Azeroth Needs Gods appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Lately as you all know I have been playing an excessive amount of The Elder Scrolls Online, and in doing so it has made me realize one of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft and more importantly the cosmology of Azeroth. There are not actual gods. There are beings that they place in the same position as gods but those largely serve the role of large monsters that we will eventually take down in a raid. This morning I am going to try and explain the difference from my perspective, or at least my particular point of view.
Over my years on this planet there have been a number of games that I have played with baked in pantheons of worship. Likely the first of these was when I got my hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods it seemed both really cool and also extremely natural. I had been studying mythology and the fact that I was also catholic… which sort of has its own pantheon of saints… it all made sense in my tiny brain. I personally was super engaged with the Norse mythology and my deity of choice has almost always been Tyr the Even-Handed. In part because it was really fucking cool that he sacrificed his arm in order to bind Fenrir and in essence stop Ragnarok from happening. It is only as an adult that I tend to feel more for Fenrir in this scenario.
The key characteristic of the gods in a good RPG is that they don’t actually have the ability to directly influence the mortal plane. They can occasionally manifest themselves in the form of an avatar, but for the most part they wage a proxy war for control of territory and the hearts and minds of people. As such various cults spring up that worship a specific deity and generally speaking the only difference between these and the accepted religion of a people is whether or not it actually aligns to their collective morals. As I moved into online games, I found Norrath to be a very believable and vibrant setting in part because it had so many deities vying for power over the world.
In Norrath we had a core pantheon of gods with various alignments and realms of influence:
Good Aligned
Mithaniel Marr
Quellious
Rodcent Nife
Tunare
Neutral
Brell Serilis
Bristlebane
Karana
Solusek Ro
The Tribunal
Evil Aligned
Bertoxxulous
Cazic-Thule
Innoruuk
Rallos Zek
Anashti Sul
In addition to these there were a whole slew of other minor deities and demigods and general forces of nature that were in various states of activity an influence on the mortal plane. So many of the best storylines in Everquest involve the gods working against each other and attempting to exert influence on one part of the world or group of people. This also ends up creating interesting dualities as different races within the world view the same god in vastly different ways. Brell Serilis for example is the creator of the Dwarves and the Gnomes, but also is referred by the Goblins of the Runny Eye clan as their deity as well along with all of the neutral earthen elemental forces. The gods also work in concert with others for example Cazic-Thule, Ralos Zek and Innoruuk have an unsteady alliance because they all collectively hate Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr and actively seek to do harm to them through their followers.
Elder Scrolls similarly has an extremely rich pantheon of gods and demigods that vie to influence Mundus aka the physical world. In later games this coalesces around an imperially mandated pantheon of the nine divines but there are so many other pantheons present and active in the world. Not the least of these are the Daedric Princes which have a wildly varying number of approaches to their worshipers and motivations. Ultimately what separates a Divine and a Daedra seems to largely be the favor of the government as many of the Daedra themselves took up roles in older Pantheons within the races of Nirn.
Similar to Everquest a large number of the questlines that you find yourself on involve one or more “Gods” moving against each other or trying to exert their influence in a specific sphere of power. The core storyline of the base game of Elder Scrolls Online centers around a plot by Molag Bal the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement attempting to merge his realm of Coldharbour with Tamriel effectively giving him power over both. Meridia another Daedra who is associated with the energies of living beings is aligned against Molag Bal and often times offers assistance to the players in order to fight back against this aggression.
Other deities like Nocturnal are closely tied with specific organizations within Nirn, more specifically the Nightingales are her sworn servants but there has often been a rumored connection between her and the Night Mother revered by the members of the Dark Brotherhood. The keys to both Everquest and Elder Scrolls and honestly Dungeons and Dragons before it is that the gods are alive and well and actively trying to influence the populace. I contend that there doesn’t really seem to be an equivalent of this sort of interaction happening within World of Warcraft.
Roughly five years ago from the time of writing this, Blizzard released a book called World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1 that attempted to take the wildly disparate lore of the World of Warcraft and condense it into a unified world view. This was effectively the equivalent of an ecumenical council and attempted to sift through the various lore and discard the bits that didn’t quite fit while modifying some in order to fit into this neat cosmology. I was fully in support of this notion because Warcraft lore was a complete mess. However what came out of this as well was the fact that this larger world view didn’t have room for dieties really.
In the early days of Warcraft however I thought there was effectively a pantheon of good deities aligned against a pantheon of bad deities. The good represented by the Titans and the bad represented by the Old Gods and this nebulous concept we kept hearing known as the Void Lords. The longer the game has run however it is very clear that the Titans are effectively just a different sort of race of beings birthed out of the core of a world and not really immortal gods. Similarly the things that keep being referred to as “Old Gods” are just sort of this race of elder beings that defy logic and reason but also can absolutely be killed as we have done this to several of them.
The closest thing that we really have to a proper pantheon of deities comes in the form of the Loa that the Trolls worship. However apart from Bwonsamdi and Hakkar we really don’t see a lot of interaction between these individuals and the races of Azeroth apart from the Trolls consistently figuring out ways to “eat” their gods and drain their power. As a result these are also very mortal beings that maybe exist in a different manner but cannot really be thought of eternal forces quite in the same way as a Quellious or a Dibella. The absence of this clear pantheon of power aligned with and against the players has always ended up making the world of Azeroth feel every so slightly hollow. There was always something missing that I never could quite put my finger on until I started to think about it more recently.
Up until this point I could still sort of lean on the Wild Gods of Azeroth as being this eternal force that impacts the world. However Shadowlands even closed the loop there and taught us that what we think of as the Wild Gods are just beings with a different life cycle where they travel to Azeroth, live a cycle there and then return to the shadowlands to regenerate before manifesting again. This makes me not really consider them to be a true pantheon of gods either. There is this new Pantheon of death that we have been introduced to, but they also are very much killable which again makes me question if they represent gods either.
I think the truth is more that World of Warcraft exists largely to create powerful figures and then allow the players to kill those powerful figures. A major force cannot exist for very long without it eventually turning into a raid encounter. Maybe this comes from early frustrations of the folks who shaped the raid content of World of Warcraft being long time Everquest raiders and travelling to the seats of those gods powers… and only ever killing an Avatar and never being able to actually slay the god themselves. I think the storytelling potential of a game is weaker however if you don’t have all powerful beings with their own motivations pulling the strings of “mere-mortals”. World of Warcraft plays at this, but in every case those forces eventually end up on the chopping block as the players end those threats permanently.
I think I like the concept of having endless beings that we can momentarily defeat, but never quite go away and never forget the actions we have taken against them in the past. Everquest has managed to churn out so many expansions in part because they keep relying upon familiar enemies to invent new schemes to take over the mortal plane of existence. Instead World of Warcraft feels more akin to Dragon Ball Z or Bleach where they keep having to invent more extreme versions of cardboard cutout villains for us to eventually knock down in the end. The end result is also a lot of retroactive changes to storylines as new forces and shoehorned into existing events.
That neat cosmology chart that I posted earlier from World of Warcraft Chronicles has already been mostly nullified by the expansion we are going through in Shadowlands. Without a reoccurring cast of Gods, new and more extreme versions of evil need to be invented in order for us to keep prevailing over them.
The post Azeroth Needs Gods appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I realized I tweeted this out yesterday, but it is Friday and I am not sure what else I was going to write about. Yesterday I was thinking about the Warcraft movie and the Tweet by Metzen that folks are taking as acknowledgement that there is a second movie in the works. The truth is I remember very little about the early lore of the Warcraft universe apart from a vague sketch of the flow of the timeline. I played the hell out of Warcraft II, but mostly in multi-player and while I am certain that I played through the campaign I remember very little of it. When Warcraft 3 came out I was already deeply engaged in MMORPGs and either playing Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot and never quite got around to playing it other than in office LAN parties.
That means there are large chunks of the story that I only know from the perspective of how World of Warcraft presents that information. Doing some googling I stumbled onto this recap video by Drew Peezick aka @dpeezick/ lawllypop. What I particularly like about the video is that it takes either real or created Hearthstone cards to represent the major players and presents the story in fairly simple terms. Warcraft as a universe is this sort of self contradictory mess that has evolved over time and rewritten bits as needed to support whatever the new story initiative happens to be. We are in truth heading into this territory as we approach the Shadowlands expansion and the lore that is being spun up about the pantheon of death.
I had originally arrived looking for the lore of the first two games but found that this is apparently a sequence of videos that carries forward with the first chapter being “before warcraft 3” the second chapter being “Warcraft 3” and then moving forward into classic World of Warcraft and through each off the expansions. It is funny that for even not playing the game Warcraft 3 I found myself familiar with a lot of the lore that was presented. I guess this comes as a result of playing the game for some sixteen years and having bits and pieces of it fed to me in a very slow drip through quest lines. World of Warcraft is a game that has regularly strip mined its past in order to present a path forward.
I think the thing that I really enjoyed the most while watching these videos is the way that they attempt to weave modern and past lore together into something that makes a reasonable amount of sense. Things get messy at times when you try and figure out the actual canon story of the dungeons and raids since these are ultimately multi-player experiences. The videos however do a really good job of shifting back and forth between the perspective of the Horde and Alliance and weaving our way around some of the key plot points that ultimately lead to the phases of the Classic wow release schedule and the key conflicts that were involved in each. For now a large amount of the Troll lore has been pushed off to its own video in the future.
I really enjoyed the Burning Crusade video because having not played horde during this era, I found some of the motivations of the Blood Elves to be a little obtuse and how exactly Kael’thas, Lady Vashj, Akama and Illidan fit together other than just being large set piece battles for us in the raids. I’ve never been a fan of Night Elves so I was turned off pretty early when I attempted to read War of the Ancients, so I greatly appreciate all of the lore bits from the novels, game and other canon sources woven back together into something that makes sense. Nobbel does an excellent job of deep diving into specific segments of lore, but what I was craving was an overview to understand how all of these disparate pieces are supposed to fit together… or at least a narrative that weaves them into something that makes sense. I think there exists a need for both types of content and I am happy to see that this channel is approaching it from a primer standpoint.
When we get to the Wrath of the Lich King, I think is where lore starts to become extremely cogent given that Shadowlands in essence feels a bit like a return to the themes of this expansion. Legion felt in many ways to be a return to the themes of Burning Crusade, so it makes sense hat we would have an expansion that attempts to continue the story forward from Wrath as well. Most of this lore I was already familiar with because I was actively raiding during this time and also I think in Wrath the way the stories were presented did a significant better job of pieces together the bits into a cohesive narrative. That said there were still a good number of things that I learned along the way and the video was well worth a watch.
With Cataclysm we reach the end of this journey so far. This video came out on September 19th, and I am certain that the creation of these requires a significant amount of time. The Pre-WC3 Lore video came out a year ago, Warcraft 3 9 months ago, Classic WoW 4 months ago, and then it seems like things have accelerated considerably with BC, Wrath and Cata coming out roughly a month apart. I would love to see a new video each month, but that still seems like an awful lot of work considering how much sifting through storyline it has to take and then the creation of the really cool Hearthstone style assets. It did remind me however that there were absolutely bits of story that I used to love about this game, and that while time and layers of story on top of it have muddied the water, the core is still enjoyable.
Even though the cosmology of this World of Warcraft has shifted and changed over time, I find it terribly interesting to at least mentally revisit the stories from its past. I think this video series does an amazing job of simplifying things enough to make it all work together. I think this is in essence what Blizzard has been trying to do over the last few expansions, is meld everything that came before with everything that is happening currently and attempt to lay out the cards in a manner that makes sense. All of that said I think these videos do a better job of presenting the core thrust of these expansions, and while there are hundreds of important side bits that blur our perspectives I greatly appreciate the way these present backstory at the moment it is important rather than trying to lay everything out in a strict chronology. I highly suggest you check it out and I greatly applaud someone who can make the nonsense that was the comic book series blend cleanly into the timeline. The entire playlist of six videos is just shy of two hours, and I personally consider that to be time well spent.
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