WoW has, through most of its expansions, generally focused on a particular villain. Sometimes it's a red herring - Illidan wound up not being the final boss of Burning Crusade, which would seem obvious given the name of the expansion, and in Warlords of Draenor, the Iron Horde wound up being a paper tiger that fell in order for us to fight what I like to call the "Fel Iron Horde" as a kind of prologue to Legion. This time around, we're facing the Legion, even if the final boss is not Sargeras, but another Titan we'd never heard of (though the planet whose name he shares is well-known.)
However, I would point to two previous examples of times when it wasn't really clear what main villain we were building up to (other than out-of-game announcements.)
The first of these periods was not an expansion, but rather the original World of Warcraft. At the time, the game was not designed around particular stories, even if we got some, but was instead much more about exploring the, well, World of Warcraft. One could make the argument that building up toward C'thun as a final boss sort of worked as the original arc, given that we dealt in previous raid tiers with Ragnaros, who had served the Old Gods, and then Nefarian, a Black Dragon whose flight was corrupted by the Old Gods.
Of course, following C'thun and Ahn-Qiraj, we then got Naxxramas, which, unless we get some new unexpected lore about the Scourge, has nothing in particular to do with the Old Gods.
Even if the Old Gods were a theme through much of Vanilla, in part I think that was because they had only just been invented - we saw the first glimpses of them in the Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III, but Vanilla was when they were explicitly named, and obviously they've become a crucial part of Warcraft lore.
The next period like this was Mists of Pandaria. While Blizzard let us know rather early on that Garrosh Hellscream, then Warchief of the Horde, would be the final boss of the expansion, the in-game plot didn't really suggest him as the big bad until he tried to have Vol'jin killed. While the Alliance was never going to defend Garrosh or his actions, especially after Theramore, it was this act against a fellow Horde leader (one who had, to be fair, threatened him in the past) that created the need for Horde players to turn against him.
But the key to that expansion was that it was also very much about exploration. Yes, threats like the Sha and Lei Shen emerged, but both of them were somewhat tied to this idea of outsiders coming in and disrupting an existing culture (the Zandalari, as a kind of third faction, were responsible for Lei Shen's resurrection.)
In Battle for Azeroth, there is once again a kind of arms race between the factions - much of the motivation for going to Pandaria was to make sure that "we" got it before "they" did. But in BFA, we're actually dealing with somewhat familiar territories, and it's less about winning land an resources than about ensuring that "our" side can firmly establish people who would be natural allies (to be honest, I think the Alliance getting Kul Tiras seems like it ought to be simpler than the Horde getting the Zandalari, but I'm sure there will be plot complications on the Alliance side to make it a bigger challenge.)
What's interesting is that even if Mists did focus a great deal on the faction conflict, it was still putting exploration of this new land front and center. While I'm very excited to see... well, every new zone they announced on both continents, the theme of the expansion seems to be focusing on the factions themselves.
And there is some logic to this, actually. When you've beaten the Burning Legion, who else do you have to fear? The uplifting stories we hear about how the mortals of Azeroth are actually the strongest force in the cosmos actually becomes a dire threat when you consider that those speeches aren't just about you, but also your hated foe.
Now, I count myself among the players who wish that we could at least get the option in-game to be the kind of character who wants to work with the other faction. If this were a free-form RPG like a tapletop game, I think you would naturally be capable of making that decision, and I long for the day of a motley dungeon group that's half Horde, half Alliance (remainder 1?)
But where does it lead?
There are two issues that arise with an Alliance versus Horde expansion, even if we ignore the large portion of the playerbase that doesn't want to see the plot go in this direction (and I surprise myself here by feeling kind of ok with it.) The two issues, as I see it, are the following:
First, the main threat can't be different between the factions. Yes, we got Alliance and Horde variants in the Icecrown Gunship Battle in Icecrown Citadel, but ultimately, the end of that raid was the defeat of the Lich King, a huge threat to both Alliance and Horde.
Having both sides come out victorious against one another would create confusion as to what was canon. Consider the original Warcraft game, where they had to retroactively explain that the Human campaign took place before the Orc one, retconning the fact that the game's ending played out totally differently depending on which side you played.
Now, this is something that Blizzard people have already addressed: they say that there's an insidious threat lurking underneath everything in the expansion, and that we'll eventually have to turn our focus to that. How that plays out is an open question, as is what that threat happens to be (I'm still thinking N'zoth, but we'll see.) Having the two sides put their differences aside to face a common threat would hardly be a new plot, but you could also have them kind of ignore each other when the bigger threat is revealed, maybe even competing to be the side responsible for saving the world.
The second issue is how the story gets resolved. We've heard Blizzard people talking about taking this Alliance versus Horde plot to its conclusion, but hold on, how does this plot conclude? They've said time and again that AvH is always going to be part of Warcraft, but that makes me wonder how one would conclude that plot. Even if, Light forbid, this is actually the last expansion and they're going to end the game, you still couldn't just come to the end and say "oh yeah, and the Horde wins in the end" because that would seem to invalidate over a decade of heroism for half (more than half, given that a lot of us play both sides) the players.
There are only two ways I can see this "resolution" of the Alliance/Horde conflict playing out: the first is that it doesn't actually get resolved. We maybe see this flare-up of war end, but the factions are still opposed to each other and struggling for the planet. The second is exactly what they've been telling us we'll never actually see, which is a permanent peace between the factions.
We're sure to see more shocking developments, maybe character deaths and great offenses between the factions over the course of BFA, but I do think that the ultimate arc is going to curve toward some greater villain who poses a threat to both sides.
Frankly, I'm really suspecting that this war, which seems to get kicked off with the burning of Teldrassil, is actually being orchestrated by someone outside of both factions, with the explicit goal of exploiting the mirrored strength of both sides in order to cancel them both out. I'm thinking Teldrassil will be a third party, and we're going to spend much of the expansion playing into this manipulator's hands, fins, or tentacles.
Is it N'zoth? Azshara? Bolvar? Time will tell. But this is a premise that does not announce its big bad immediately. That gives us an opportunity to speculate for months or even years (well, year and change, probably) to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment