Next year marks the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft. That kind of floors me, because I started playing the game when I was 20, and while that was two years after its launch, I think it invites me to reflect on the passage of time and my own journey out of youth and into middle age. (By my generous reckoning, I consider middle age being one's 40s and 50s, though I suppose that's really more "middle adulthood," but still, it lets me cling to my youth for another two and a half years.)
WoW itself had, as part of its original cinematic, a kind of celebration of being the tenth anniversary of Warcraft as a series - now the old RTS games are almost fully eclipsed by the MMO (and Starcraft was a bigger RTS than I think Warcraft ever was). But just from a human timescale, that's adding up to a really big chunk of time. I was a college freshman when the game first launched, and that means that a kid the same age now would have been born after that point.
With the 20th anniversary approaching, the plan is to try something new, story-wise, by telling a multi-expansion arc. There's some talk (I can't remember how much of it actually came from Blizzard) about this "tying up all the current stories" of WoW, which is surely pretty ambitious. But I also don't know if it's possible to do that and retain any sense of continuity.
In WoW's early years - which I still think of as being recent but that's just because I'm getting old - the focus was very much on following up on stories begun in the RTS games - and even then, its most iconic antagonist characters from its first couple expansions were actually really recent additions to the lore - Illidan and Arthas were both introduced in Warcraft III, which came out only 2 Years before the original World of Warcraft. Like, for real: we got all of WCIII and its expansion, the Frozen Throne, in the space of a single WoW expansion. From Illidan's initial introduction to our defeating him at the Black Temple took just five years of real-world time.
Mists of Pandaria was the first expansion that really had to stand on its own using elements that were introduced in WoW itself - it was the first time we had a final boss (not counting Halion in the Ruby Sanctum as the final boss of Wrath, even if that was technically the case) who wasn't a character from the RTS games. (Retroactively, C'thun became the final boss of Vanilla, but only because Wrath moved Naxxramas to Northrend and made it a level 80 raid.)
The thing about WoW's story, though, is that I think you need to think about it the way that you think about comic books - well before the MCU, Marvel was placing all of its superhero stories (or at least the vast majority of them) in the same world, so that Spiderman could hang out with the Fantastic Four. Epic events could transpire that would seem to blow up the whole universe, but these would just allow for resets of the continuity to explore the same characters - heroes and villains - from slightly different angles.
I actually don't think we'll see WoW go in for quite as massive a transformation, but I do think that we're going to gradually see new characters rise to prominence as old ones fade into the background. We're seeing a lot of highlighting of Alleria, Thrall, and Anduin with the Last Titan - all characters who have been somewhat in the background in Dragonflight (which, admittedly, has rather focused a lot on the dragon characters, shockingly). Alleria of course dates all the way back to Warcraft II, but we only finally got her return in the final patch of Legion, and aside from her role alongside Valeera in their sister Sylvanas' story, she's largely been on the back burner.
There are questions that remain surrounding certain cosmic elements. To an extent, I think the fans sometimes treat these things as more immutable than they truly are. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say, definitively, that the Old Gods are still around - with the exception of Y'shaarj, who was destroyed long before any of the major stories in Warcraft canon, it seems as if most people believe that Yogg-Saron, C'thun, and N'zoth are all still kicking somehow. But I actually think they are truly dead. Blizzard has said so explicitly and, if I am getting their tone correct, somewhat emphatically.
Likewise, I think that we're meant to understand that the Burning Legion is truly done for - not to say that there can't be fragments and remnants of it that are still active. But Kil'jaeden and Archimonde are perma-dead, and the Legion as we know it is just not really a thing anymore.
Because even if, on a certain level, to maintain an ongoing narrative, we can't fundamentally solve the underlying issues that give WoW its identity (though I'll be pleasantly surprised if we never really go back to the endless war between factions that have, time and again, put their differences aside to deal with the bigger threat) there is just as crucial a need for our efforts to actually accomplish something.
I think it's wise to start looking at these farther-reaching stories. I don't think WoW has ever had a more satisfying villain to defeat than Arthas, but I think that had something to do with how much of an impact we felt from him playing the game. The first character I ever got to max level (back when that was a pretty arduous task that you'd be unlikely to do on more than two or three characters) was my Undead Rogue, and so the legacy of Arthas and the Scourge was a deeply felt throughline for the entire experience of playing the game. Arthas was also the first villain who was really present throughout the entire expansion's story, showing up in quests in nearly every zone and then getting a super-cool dungeon appearance that sold how dangerous he was by making the challenge merely to survive, and not to actually strike against him.
But Arthas had the benefit of being the breakout star of Warcraft III, the central focus of its Frozen Throne expansion, and extensive build-up to him in both vanilla and Wrath.
The Jailer was basically supposed to be the Lich King on a cosmic scale (setting aside the "Primus was the puppetmaster all along" conspiracy theories) but we just did not have enough time to learn to fear him. Yes, I think you can criticize the rote and generic writing for him ("Pitiful mortal" being the first thing we ever hear him say) or his somewhat uninspired character model (big void in the chest: very good. Being otherwise just a big shirtless dude: not so great) but fundamentally, I think the tragedy of the Jailer's underwhelming performance as big bad could have been severely avoided if we'd gotten time to build him up. If we had spent an expansion hearing whispered rumors about some terrible death-god called the Jailer, and perhaps even had him show up during a subsequent expansion for brief, tantalizing moments... it could have made a final confrontation with him that much cooler.
And I think they learned that lesson. I was, frankly, kind of shocked when they confirmed that Fyrrak would be Dragonflight's final boss. Honestly, a big fire-breathing dragon is actually pretty perfect for that, but we've also been pretty clearly told that Iridikron is the actual most dangerous of the Incarnates.
But Iridikron is getting saved for later. And already, just from what little we've seen of him this time around, it feels like that confrontation will be quite epic. (It also helps that there's been some subtly good writing of him - for maybe the first time ever, we have a major villain who actually seems to appreciate that most of Azeroth's big bads wind up getting killed by a group of 10-25 adventurers - and so far he has proven very clever in not becoming a raid boss).
I do think that there's some positioning here to distance us from the Titans as a force. I'm not sure I love this direction - if we wind up having to fight Aman'thul as the final boss of the Last Titan, it will certainly be epic, but I also feel like... we never really got to see the Titans as god-like presences in the world in the first place, so a kind of "rebellion against the gods" feels premature. I still don't think I could tell you the difference between Khaz'goroth, Norgannon, or Golganneth. If we are going to fight these guys, at least let them develop individual personalities first.
Still, I do think that the writing of the story has matured and incorporated greater nuance in recent years, which is great - nuance is what made me like WoW in the first place, and I remember feeling the rug pulled out from under me during the times when they had the Horde (particularly the Orcs and Forsaken) going back to playing largely villainous roles. Seriously, how many other fantasy RPGs have a faction of playable Undead who are (at least capable of being) good guys?
Dragonflight entertains the notion that the beneficence of the dragon aspects and the Titans could be a little bit of "history written by the winners," and while I still think we're meant to come away continuing to feel that, for example, Alexstrasza is a deeply good and kind-hearted person, it's also clear that there were some moral compromises made in creating the world as it is, and the things we fight to defend are not immaculately free of sin.
You need to strike that balance, though. If you make everything too black-and-white, you lose a lot of what makes the game work. But at the same time, I think WoW has an overall positive view of humanity (and we're talking all humanoids rather than just humans here) and is somewhat optimistic in tone even as we struggle with cycles of hatred and violence. And I think that's also a crucial component to what makes the game work.
Anyway, we're still likely about a year out from The War Within, which is only just going to get us started on this new three-part story (and I'm not feeling hugely optimistic that we'll have a lot of victories to celebrate in an expansion called "Midnight.")
It's a little premature to think about what will come after the Worldsoul Saga, but its very existence kind of invites that speculation. I mean, we've never gotten multiple expansions announced at the same time. But if this represents a new longterm plan for the game, it's natural to wonder what that plan is building toward.
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