WoW has been around a long time now - this year will mark its 18th (yes, it'll be a legal adult!) and when you have a game that is telling an ongoing narrative, things get tricky when you, for obvious reasons, can't really have an "end" in mind.
Consider Legion. Since Warcraft III, The Burning Legion had been the ultimate big bad of the Warcraft cosmos. It was always felt that the "final boss" of all of Warcraft would be Sargeras. Legion could have, and you could even argue, should have, been the finale of WoW, if it were the sort of game for which a finale made sense. Look at, say, Mass Effect, where you knew it was all building to a full-on war between the galaxy and the Reapers, and the third game in the series made that its main focus.
Now, Mass Effect also demonstrates the pitfalls of trying to tie up a massive story. The third game in that series was, to most, a bit of a let-down (really just in its ending,) but the series also struggled to remain a relevant IP. Mass Effect Andromeda by its nature had to tell a story that was isolated from the original trilogy, and I think that's why (among other reasons) the game was an even bigger letdown.
WoW is never really meant to end - the whole model of the game is more or less built on players feeling like they're constantly progressing. Now, the gear reset with each expansion (and arguably each patch) and especially the item and level squishes we've experienced have sort of laid bare the fact that we're not really getting more powerful over time, but ideally, the players always feel like they're gearing up for a bigger fight.
The first several expansions really pushed this sense of raising stakes. Vanilla was more or less "look at this cool world with these dangerous monsters in it" while Burning Crusade had us going up against Illidan, and later a half-baked Burning Legion invasion (which was tacked on because they released Black Temple too early). Then, Wrath of the Lich King established Arthas and the Scourge as a bigger existential threat than Illidan had ever represented. Then, though he was a far less fleshed-out character (and sadly remained so during his own expansion,) Deathwing was presented as even a bigger threat than the Lich King had been.
Mists of Pandaria, then, turned the focus inward - the inter-faction conflict took center stage, with a new land to explore and subject to light colonization. While I had mixed feelings about Mists, it's remembered by many as a favorite expansion, which I think is in part due to the sense that it was very story-focused and introduced a charming and interesting new part of Azeroth.
And, at least for the Horde, the stakes in Mists felt different - the big bad was one of the two factions' leaders. Rather than some external threat, Horde players had to reckon with their own leader becoming more and more monstrous over time (sadly, aside from Jaina being too zealous in punishing the Sunreavers for their acts of collaboration with Garrosh, the Alliance mostly experienced this is as yet another external danger, which was part of the "Horde bias" feeling that felt turned up to eleven with Warlords).
Warlords, I think, sought to reestablish the ever-rising stakes established in the first few expansions, and Blizzard really pushed the Iron Horde as these world-threatening menace, but the logic of it never actually made sense: how would a bunch of pre-industrial orcs who had only just acquired modern technology be a threat to the combined Alliance and Horde who are from the time period from which that technology was derived?
Anyway, if Warlords marked the start of a decline in WoW's quality (though I'd argue Cataclysm was the real start of that) Legion was a big peak that suggested perhaps this old game had some tricks up its sleeves. My sense is that for most people, Legion was a pretty big success.
But Legion also started a pattern of domino villains. We did not actually fight Sargeras himself, and his presence in the expansion was shockingly minimal given that this was, in theory, the big Burning Legion expansion. Mainly, he was defeated (though not killed) in a more serious way than ever before.
However, over the course of Legion, there was this subtle and not-so-subtle hinting that the invasion was actually a long-term machination on the part of the Old Gods - specifically N'zoth, who was known to be the "weakest" Old God who somehow always managed to come out on top. N'zoth would go on to be the final boss of Battle for Azeroth, but was he really the Big Bad?
See, BFA was two stories simultaneously - it was the crisis of saving Azeroth's World Soul while also being a big battle between Alliance and Horde. And N'zoth really played more into the former while the manipulator in the background wound up actually playing into the latter.
Thus, is Shadowlands, we got the Jailer.
There are a couple problems with the Jailer. First, he's boring as shit. For an embodiment of death - and not just death in all its forms but the domineering, necromancy-infused, oppressive sense of death - he's weirdly just... a big dude. I get that they didn't just want to straight up make him the Grim Reaper, which would be a bit cliche, but in terms of visual design, he's just profoundly boring. And then, personality-wise, he doesn't have one. This might have worked if he were kept as a sort of dark presence - I think it would have been cool if, say, he never spoke, or if he were more intensely inhuman, maybe a kind of unmoving form that radiated a voice more than speaking. But given the more human-like form they gave him, he really needed to have a personality beyond "pitiful mortals."
One of the frustrations about Zovaal is that he was, in many ways, given credit for much of the long-term plotting that it seemed should have been N'zoth's. Here we had a character established Cataclysm, and whom we had seen hints about for many years, who had been built up as this really cunning, clever manipulator, but who ultimately was just fried at the end of BFA in an expansion that was only half about him in the first place.
The Jailer, who came out of nowhere, then got to be the one who was behind everything, kind of usurping the agency of many of WoW's longrunning villains.
Furthermore, his last words imply that his goal to dominate the entire cosmos was actually intended to unify the universe to fight off "what is to come."
Now, I think that having villains believe they're the good guys is actually a good call - it's true to the real world. But I also think that this constant nesting doll of who the actual big bad of Warcraft is leads to diminishing returns. If every villain is actually less of a threat than the next one, no victory actually feels significant.
So I'd propose the following model for future WoW expansions:
First, let them stand on their own. Since the end of Mists of Pandaria, we've had each expansion's finale kind of push things into the next one, and while that creates a sense of momentum and continuity, it also makes WoW's story feel like a run-on sentence. WoW is a big enough world that we can have multiple stories going on that don't immediately follow from one another. One thing that those first few expansions had in their favor was a sense that we were getting something totally new each time, and it also meant that killing Arthas or killing Deathwing felt like we had truly ended the threat.
To be fair, Shadowlands looks like, for all its flaws, there's no real specific threat on the horizon. The chain of expansion stories that started in Mists seems to have finally come to a real sense of finality, with only a vague threat of some greater cosmic danger.
I think we need to allow expansions' stories to stand on their own a bit more - naturally character development can still be a thing, but I think we should have a moment to celebrate. I think we could use a story that begins not with some massive crisis to be resolved, but with a sense of curiosity and exploration.
Second: give us time to build up a big bad. The Jailer was introduced and dispatched in less than two years. Yes, given that WoW doesn't work on comic book/Arkham Asylum rules, it tends to chew through its villains. But the Jailer suffered in part because he had come out of nowhere - indeed, the whole of Shadowlands as a metaphysical element of the Warcraft cosmos was added in the expansion that most focused on it, and I think to a lot of people, that felt jarring - we knew that Death was a major force, one of the six primordial forces in the cosmos, but there were practically no specifics. Indeed, outside of the Scourge, the only other element in the physical world we saw of it was the magic of the Drust, and they were ultimately kind of a minor side-threat within the grander Shadowlands story.
I think the game should give itself time to build up lore - not just threats, but other elements as well. I think it would have been really cool if we'd heard about Ardenweald while doing the Emerald Dream content in Legion, or if we had heard about the connection between the Val'kyr and the Kyrians prior to our arrival in Bastion. Basically, don't play things so close to the vest. If we hear about a place before we get to go there, it makes it that much more exciting for us to actually see it.
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