Moving The Story Forward

I don't know what the general reaction was when Chris Metzen began to talk about the "biggest badasses in Warcraft history" coming back (ahem, Lothar was more badass than all of them combined, but that's another argument,) but I had to stifle a groan. Partially, it was another big old splash of fuel on the fire of how Metzen is obsessed with the Orcs and the Horde, and has little interest in the rest of the wide-ranging Warcraft universe, following up an expansion that built up to us fighting a Horde that had reverted to its old-school ways with… fighting the old-school Horde.

But the bigger worry I had was that this didn't feel like it was moving the story forward.

There is a ton of interesting stuff going on in Azeroth, from the upheaval within the Horde, to the burgeoning power (and scariness) of the Forsaken, to the reformation of Dwarven society, to the bitter guerrilla war being fought to free Gilneas.

We seem to be getting a lot of messages from Blizzard that are meant to be reassuring - that the Iron Horde is not going to change our history, and that it will be a self-contained adventure within this alternate Draenor. But you know what? That's the opposite of reassuring to me.

Big changes are good for a game that is designed around a vibrant, living world. We want to see those changes reflected in the world and our experiences. I realize we can't have a Cataclysm-style revamp every expansion (in fact, I think it would probably be wiser to never do such a thing again,) but it adds weight to our actions when, for example, the bitterly won victory over the Scourge has nevertheless cost Stormwind a huge portion of its treasury, which inadvertently led to the (admittedly short-lived) resurgence of the Defias.

So when they say that the Iron Horde will not have much of an impact on our Azeroth, I worry that this undercuts the stakes of the entire expansion. With no new race or class added to the mix, I would say they have even more of an obligation to make the story hit us, and hit us hard.

They don't have to do it in a time-travel sort of way, though. In fact, I think that most of the "reassurances" have mainly been about that aspect of the story. As I said before, time-travel is the origin of the Iron Horde, and not the key to its nature.

So while we're going to fight Grommash, Blackhand, and all those dudes, they aren't truly the people from our past. They're duplicates.

But for this expansion to have any serious impact, we need to see their interaction with our people, if not with our world. We know that Thrall's going to meet the father he never knew (and presumably his mother… hey Blizz, how about some focus on female characters?) But I think that the villains of WoD need to be fleshed out too. It won't be all that interesting to just see Blackhand again, or just see Kargath again.

Here's what I think Blizzard needs to do as a kind of ignition point to make the story relevant: the Warlords, at least some of them, need to find out about our universe.

Consider, for example, that Ner'zhul discovers what his fate was in the main timeline. How might that change the way that he views us? Gul'dan has been unable to convince the Iron Horde to drink the blood of Mannoroth, but that might not be necessary. After all, his entire goal was to use the Horde to clear the way so he could pillage the Tomb of Sargeras. Might he find the wider, more chaotic world of today an easier place to slip through and reach his goal (knowing, also, the fate of his doppelgänger and thus potentially being better prepared this time?)

It's very important to me that we get to see what the Alliance and Horde themselves are up to in the aftermath of the Siege of Orgrimmar. I want to see Vol'jin wrestling with his new responsibilities, and I want to see Varian making good on the promises he makes in Garrosh's throne room. These things don't need to be the focus of the expansion, but what we do need to see is how the struggle against the Iron Horde affects these ongoing plots.

There is some reason for hope, though. While I know plenty of people had a pretty serious negative reaction to the Pandaren, I think that the story of Mists actually integrated far better into the overall Warcraft narrative than I could have imagined. I had been worried, when I first came to Pandaria, that this would all be a fairly isolated story, and that the villains we fought would be totally self-contained, and never really mentioned again.

And to an extent that was true. I don't think we'll ever fight the Mogu or Mantid in any serious way again. But these figures nevertheless left their mark on Warcraft lore. The Mantid gave us a far greater insight into the minds of the Aqir than ever before. The Mogu showed us that, yes, sometimes the creations of the Titans, without any Old God or demonic taint, will still turn evil, and that perhaps we should not be so quick to trust that the Titans have our best interests at heart.

In fact, Mists of Pandaria had perhaps the biggest developments ever in the ongoing story of the Old Gods, even more than in Cataclysm, which was ostensibly the most Old-God-themed expansion. Not only did we discover just why the Titans were unwilling to kill the Old Gods, but we also discovered that the Titans had been wrong in their assessment of the situation. We've beaten C'thun and Yogg-Saron, but not truly killed them. But with the destruction of the seven Sha and the utter draining of the Heart of Y'shaarj (Garrosh's inadvertently positive contribution to the world, even if he did so with the absolute wrong intentions,) we have actually managed to totally purge one of the Old Gods from Azeroth for good.

When I first heard about Mists of Pandaria, I was concerned that what we did there wouldn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but the truth is that I couldn't have been more wrong.

And that's why I'm hoping that, as the greater story of Warlords of Draenor gets revealed, the trajectory for the story of Warcraft will grow clearer.