We're now a few months in to Mists of Pandaria. Generally, the reception for the expansion has been good - there's a whole big continent to explore, satisfyingly large raid tiers, and a ton more story to sink our teeth into - story that we get to actually experience instead of hearing that it had been established in a tie-in book.
The Legendary quest chain throughout Mists of Pandaria is focused on Wrathion, the Black Prince, choosing you to serve as his champion as he attempts to create a united Azeroth. His methods are suspicious, and his ultimate vision for what this united Azeroth would look like are hazy, but nevertheless, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he probably does, legitimately want to save the world.
One of the constant themes of WoW is that Azeroth would be in amazingly better shape if the Horde and the Alliance buried the hatchet once and for all, but that the old wounds of past conflicts have, so far, made any coalition between the two a temporary affair at best.
The vision that Wrathion shows us of a destroyed Azeroth clearly implies that he thinks the Legion is coming to invade. It's not exactly a shocker - the Legion has been trying to invade for tens of thousands of years.
Mists of Pandaria is all about the Allliance/Horde conflict. Sure, Pandaria has a lot of its own identity, but after dealing with the Mantid and the Sha (though the Sha will probably never go away completely - especially as Garrosh attempts to weaponize it) and seeing as we're about to put down the Mogu threat in the next patch, the real focus and climax of the expansion will be the fall of Garrosh.
Blizzard people in various interviews have referred to a Horde coup d'etat. I expect we'll get a build-up to this in 5.3, and then 5.4's raid will of course make it official. The Alliance will of course also get in on the defeat of Garrosh, but this leaves an interesting question open - and one that will have huge ramifications for WoW going forward.
The question is whether the Alliance and the Horde Resistance work together to topple Garrosh, or simply come at him from different angles.
If it's the latter, then we will probably not see the status quo all that upset: the Alliance celebrates a victory against the Garrosh, but the conflict with the Horde could continue much as it had. The Horde would be in a weakened position, dealing with the aftermath of regime change - presumably needing to sort through the Kor'kron and figure out who was just loyally serving the office of the Warchief and who was a crazy evil bastard, all while trying to determine who, if anyone, should be Warchief now (and there's a whole other article right there.)
If it's the former, though, we might actually see a return to the uneasy cooperation between the factions we haven't seen since the Wrathgate. Before you scoff at this, think about something that Velen has been talking about: the Army of the Light. Velen (and really, it wouldn't hurt to give the Draenei some screen time) knows the Legion is destroying worlds constantly, but that we could stand up to them if we all formed one giant coalition (I'm avoiding the word alliance for reasons that I think should be obvious.) If we are going to face down the Legion, there could be some serious shift in 6.0.
With the full might of the Alliance storming Orgrimmar, it's hard to imagine the war as it is currently going will be able to just keep going.
I doubt we'll ever seen the two factions totally merge - the way that PvP and even just questing work would make that unfeasible - but I definitely think we'll see a cool-down in the conflict between the two sides and, if Blizzard wants to really play around with the fundamentals of the game, we could even see a relaxation of the restrictions against cross-faction cooperation in-game.
So, the expansion itself: I doubt we'll see another "remaking of Azeroth" expansion after Cataclysm taxed their resources so heavily. What that means is that we're probably going to have something like the Scourge Invasion that occurred pre-Wrath (and pre-Naxxramas 40, but that's beside the point.) We'll have an attack that really makes it clear we need to act. To do so, I expect we'll travel to the stars once more.
Will there be another fragment of Outland to explore? Perhaps. Or we might travel to other worlds.
In the faction leader short stories, we discovered that the Draenei have fixed the Exodar. Imagine, then, that Velen gets the thing flying and says "Alliance and Horde, all aboard, let's take out the Legion!" Most expansions have had a fairly epic introduction to bring you into the new world - I think taking off in the Exodar would qualify.
Assuming there is a Burning Legion expansion, we could also probably guess that we'd be seeing some kind of return of Illidan. Blizz has talked about bringing him back in some way or another to redeem him. In fairness, we don't know if they're just talking about redeeming him in the eyes of history (though the guy was far from blameless.) If Illidan does return, the manner of his return I would hope for would be as the new sort of class leader for Demon Hunters, which would be an awesome addition to the class roster (I'd make a Worgen Demon Hunter. Please let me make a Worgen Demon Hunter.)
Blizzcon is several months away still, but I'm confident we will find out about the next expansion there. Not that I'm tired of this one yet, mind you, but given how well the story is integrated into Mists, I'm extremely excited about where the game is going in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment