For some reason, I see a lot of people speculating that there will be no 8.3 - that the end of the War Campaign is the end of Battle for Azeroth.
Now, I'll always preface any of my predictions with the statement that I'm often wrong about these things. We're now actually only about a month out from Blizzcon (plus a week or so) and are starting to get into the period where trademark hunting could tell us something.
Two major plots have been going on in BFA. The wound inflicted by Sargeras has been threatening to kill the nascent Titan Azeroth, and we have been collecting Azerite - essentially her congealed, magical blood, we think - to empower the Heart of Azeroth, which we're then, presumably, going to channel back into her to heal her.
However, at the Eternal Palace raid, we discovered that, in some manner, Magni had been manipulated into having us do this. Was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to heal the planet? And furthermore, has he even been hearing her all this time?
That'd be the really big twist, though given that he was able to hear Argus - a world that, while deeply corrupted by demons, was not suffering the same kind of void corruption Azeroth has - it seems like his ability to commune with the Titan is legitimate (the ritual that turned him into the Speaker was found at Ulduar, which suggests it's legit Titan magic, though on the other hand, Ulduar was under Yogg-Saron's control for a long time.)
But while this crisis sparked the war between the factions, in a lot of ways the Alliance/Horde war has been a kind of separate issue.
As I said earlier, the war ends not with a bang, but with an ellipsis.
In theory, the war between the factions is over. But there are many, many ambiguities:
First off: is it though? Most of the Alliance is on board with Anduin, and over time, most of the Horde got on board with Saurfang. The latter's martyr-like death in the name of peace has inspired even some former Sylvanas loyalists to embrace the idea of peace (her dismissal of her people as "nothing" probably didn't help keep them from doing so.)
But Sylvanas is not dead, and she does still have loyalists. Sylvanas' faction within the Horde has simply been pushed underground, but it's evident that she's still expecting to come out on top here, and some player characters are now on that side of things.
Meanwhile, Tyrande was notably absent from the attack on Orgrimmar. It stands to reason that she is not going to forgive the entire Horde for their genocidal attack on Teldrassil simply because their leadership has changed. As history has taught us, "just following orders" is no defense for war crimes.
What I can imagine is an official detente between the factions - an end to open hostilities. But we'll see fracturing in both factions - Tyrande's faction will wage a guerrilla campaign against the Horde and Sylvanas will manipulate things behind the scenes. (I feel like there's something to say about the fact that Blizzard has chosen two of its most prominent female characters to be the agents of continual bloodshed, but I think that's a bigger topic than this cis straight dude is ready to bite off in this post.)
Next, we also don't know who is even leading the Horde at this point. Saurfang was sort of setting himself up to be the next Warchief, bringing with him the heroic reputation of an old veteran combined with the wisdom of recognizing how wrong the Old Horde had been (essentially being what Thrall had hoped Garrosh would be.) But Saurfang has earned his honorable death, finally (incidentally, this was something that felt so inevitable that I didn't even register it as a surprise. Just "oh yeah, here's where it happens.") And that leaves a leadership vacuum.
Now, Thrall is a pretty obvious choice, given that he had the job already. Indeed, aside from the utter disaster of naming Garrosh his successor, Thrall actually did a very good job as Warchief, establishing Durotar, giving the Tauren the safety of Mulgore, and really transforming the Horde from invading... well... horde into a global superpower.
That being said, the shame of Garrosh has always been a massive weight on his conscience, and lost him a tremendous amount of credibility. While his ascension would be a pretty direct way of indicating a restoration of the promise many of the races of the Horde joined under, one wonders to what extent the general populace is willing to give him a new chance.
Of course, if things are to really change, one also wonders if the Horde needs to undergo serious reformation. At this point, the Horde has had Blackhand, Doomhammer, Thrall, Garrosh, Vol'jin, and Sylvanas as Warchiefs. You have three pretty unambiguously evil ones, two pretty clearly good ones, and one that was a pragmatist that was complicit in a bunch of evil even if he wasn't necessarily evil personally (a kind of Lawful Neutral leader of a Chaotic Evil - at the time - faction.)
Is it really such a good idea to have some individual who is given infinite authority without checks and balances? I don't want to get too much into modern politics in a video game blog, but it does seem to me that stable societies are the ones that put a check on individuals in power in the name of preserving the institution for future generations. Even the good warchiefs occasionally abused their power. Maybe the Horde needs to restructure itself and not continue operating in a way that freaking Gul'dan of all people established.
But let's talk about practicality. What is going to happen in-game?
Again, we're just over a month from Blizzcon, at which we are almost certain to get the next expansion announced. In fact, in most expansion cycles, we'd be looking at the final patch of the expansion coming out within the next couple months - before the end of 2019. But we don't know what 8.3 will entail, and some have speculated that there won't be one.
To which I say: hogwash. Blizzard has never given us a final patch without telling us first. Even 6.2, which ended Warlords after a mere two raid tiers, was still announced as the big finale to the expansion. I am very skeptical that they would pull the rug out from under us. They're not going to release an expansion without a beta, which means there's no freaking way that 9.0 is going to drop this year.
Plus, it is pretty obvious that we're building to a confrontation with N'zoth. I think some people don't want to believe that because we haven't spent enough time building up to him, and I think that's a valid critique.
N'zoth is the most interesting of the Old Gods. In part, that's because we actually heard about him before the expansion (gamestate? Vanilla wasn't an expansion, but... you get it) in which we fight him. But also, I love the sorts of villains who manipulate things behind the scenes. My favorite guild in Ravnica (a setting for Magic: The Gathering that last year also became an official D&D setting) is House Dimir, which intentionally lets itself be perceived as the weakest and smallest of the guilds - just a bunch of couriers, postal workers, librarians, and private investigators - when in fact it's a massively powerful network that has spies embedded in all the other guilds.
N'zoth always intentionally made himself out to be the weakest of the Old Gods, holding the least territory during the Black Empire and weathering assaults from the forces of C'thun and Yogg-Saron. But all along, he's been the one who has had the most ongoing plots. The very fact that he seems to have usurped the entire Emerald Nightmare from Yogg-Saron demonstrates that he's actually probably the most powerful of the three remaining Old Gods. And given his propensity for making his seeming defeats work out in his favor, I even think he wants us to come kill him.
In fact, with the war out of the way, 8.3 has a great opportunity to focus the remainder of this expansion on the cosmic stakes in a really exciting and lore-heavy way. What does N'zoth ultimately want? What might he do?
To a large extent, I think the fantasy genre is basically supernatural horror, but in which people can actually fight back against the monsters (the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings, for example, are totally horror story monsters.) And so I think we could get a lot out of really delving into the cosmic horror of N'zoth. We've fought two Old Gods. The first was in Ahn-Qiraj, which Blizzard later stated was a former Titan facility (my headcanon, though, retcons that, saying that Ahn-Qiraj was actually C'thun's capital city before the Titans came, which I think is supported pretty well by the art we've seen of the Black Empire) and the second was in a Titan facility that still looked very Titan-y.
If we go to Ny'alotha to fight N'zoth, I want to see a total nightmare city - I want to see Blizzard's take on R'lyeh. I want to see madness and mutation that we need to fight valiantly against.
I think we need a really good 8.3 to send off Battle for Azeroth. The expansion has been a mix, certainly, but there's still potential here for really interesting stuff. I don't think it should be written off like Warlords was.
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