All of a Sudden, the Black Empire Expansion

There is a lot of stuff to do in 8.3.

Naturally, the heart of the patch is the invasion of Ny'alotha into our reality as N'zoth attempts to reestablish the Black Empire and complete the corruption of Azeroth.

So far it's pretty cool, and I love the creepy, Lovecraftian monsters and such that we've been seeing. Tentacles coming out of the hills of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms? Cyclopian obelisks floating in the air covered in profane runes? It's all good stuff.

The thing is, I wish this had been the whole expansion.

Other expansions have had multiple major storylines. Wrath of the Lich King had a pretty lengthy and involved story that involved Ulduar and the machinations of another Old God, Yogg-Saron.

The thing is, I think that it's been handled better in the past because there's been a clear sense of which of these stories is the focus.

In Wrath, the Yogg-Saron plotline was always clearly going to be a secondary plot, even if it was important and introduced a lot of big plot elements to the game. Wrath was always the Scourge expansion.

In BFA, it feels as if there's been this kind of identity crisis. It's the Alliance versus Horde battle expansion, but it's also the N'zoth/Old God expansion. As it turns out, N'zoth gets to be the only Old God to ever be its expansion's final boss (C'thun kind of retroactively got to be that for vanilla after the original Naxxramas was removed, but Kel'thuzad is really the final boss of vanilla.)

What I find sort of surprising is how the two plots easily could have been closely related, but they weren't.

N'zoth is infamous for his ability to manipulate matters behind the scenes. As such, it would have made perfect sense if he had been orchestrating the war all along. He's seen two of his fellow Old Gods fall to the Alliance and Horde, and any bad guy worth their salt knows that things start to go badly for them once the two factions team up.

While the war does, in fact, turn out to be (it seems, at least) the machinations of an otherworldly figure outside of the two factions, it is instead the Jailor, whom we know next to zero about (though I expect we'll learn a bit more in Shadowlands, given that he's probably the final boss.)

There is a bit of a villain one-upsmanship here, with the unfortunate effect that each successive villain feels a less threatening than it should. Sargeras, after all, was the big bad of the entire franchise, and while we didn't get to fight him personally, it undercuts how scary a bad guy he was that he could be manipulated into opening the way for N'zoth to escape (we need to go pretty far back to see this, but if the Old Gods saw to it that Garrosh could escape and go to Draenor B, that ultimately led to the Legion's invasion and subsequently, Sargeras' big stab that put in motion the events that led to N'zoth's escape in Azshara's defeat.)

Now, maybe it's just that I'm getting older and after seeing so many expansions, a single expansion doesn't feel like enough time to build up to a threat like this, which legitimately could be my issue here. And likewise, perhaps for mechanical reasons (I can't honestly say, exactly,) I haven't been playing as much this expansion, and so the individual moments of it have felt more like just a series of blips every couple months instead of a massive crescendo build to the finale.

But I guess it feels weird that we're finally getting this massive, creepy Old God-focused content, only for it to be contained within a single patch.

To be fair, BFA has had plenty of Old God stuff, between Uldir, the Crucible of Storms, and The Eternal Palace, it's really only the Battle for Dazar'alor among the raids that isn't in some way connected to the Old Gods. And I think that some quest lines - like the main story in Stormsong Valley - have felt pretty appropriate in tone for an Old God expansion.

And you could argue that if N'zoth is the subtlest of the Old Gods, it makes sense that he's sort of coming out of the blue.

But I suppose it feels as if it would have been nice to get a little more focus on this stuff.

Let's be honest: while I do like the idea of using existing zones and telling new stories within them, I'm also very disappointed that we're not going to get Ny'alotha as a full zone. What we've seen of the raid itself looks very cool, but I'd have loved to see it either as an Argus-like final patch mega-zone, or even as an Icecrown-like "clearly the location of the final raid, but we can't get in there yet" sort of zone.

I don't really think it was necessary for us to go into an Alliance/Horde plot so relatively soon after we had finished the previous one in Mists of Pandaria. And naturally, that gets me wondering what BFA could have been like if the focus had been very strongly on the Old Gods, with perhaps a focus on the way that they've influenced the people and cultures of Azeroth from the very beginning.

Naturally, the announcement of any expansion before the final patch of the current one comes out does create a sense of conflicted stakes. I'll be curious to see how and if the in-game plot develops to make the confrontation with N'zoth feel crucial and big, as it should. I am so in to go planes-hopping in Shadowlands, but I also really hope that N'zoth (certainly the most interesting of the Old Gods) gets a satisfying ending.