We are, evidently, not actually that far from the release of Midnight, World of Warcraft's eleventh expansion. This is, as I said in a recent post, far ahead of schedule (with most expansion releases coming in either late summer of autumn of even-numbered years, the biggest exception being Burning Crusade, which didn't come out until early 2007 - but hey, it was the first expansion, so the pattern hadn't been established yet).
For the prior ten expansions (well, at least the prior nine - by the time I was playing WoW and paying attention to it, BC had already been announced, so I could be wrong about that one) the pattern was typically that we wouldn't know what it was for sure until Blizzcon or some other major convention in an odd-numbered year, essentially each year alternating between announcements and releases.
But in 2023, we got the fairly shocking news that we were going to learn about not just the next expansion, but the next three - a trilogy of expansions that would be known as the Worldsoul Saga.
The likely inspiration for this was the MCU, which (somewhat retroactively) dubbed its initial eleven years of movies "The Infinity Saga," loosely centering around the five Infinity Gems. The MCU had already divided its film releases into "Phases," and then created this sort of super-structure of "Sagas" over it.
By the time that Blizzard announced its Worldsoul Saga, Marvel was already sort of flailing, failing to recapture audience enthusiasm with the follow-up Multiverse Saga (the fact that Covid prevented anyone from going to the movies for over a year did not help - as someone with a lot of friends who work in Hollywood, let me tell you that things are looking fucking grim for the film industry).
Now, two years past that announcement and a year into The War Within with its follow-up coming fast on its heels (potentially making War Within WoW's shortest expansion if Midnight truly launches early next year), there's an interesting question to be asked: What, really, is the Worldsoul Saga?
Mechanically, of course, the expansions sort of have to work like expansions have worked for over a decade now. We get a new level cap (which was, in one instance, actually lower than previous caps) and must level up, thus fully degrading our existing gear to effect a kind of reset and even playing field. We get new zones (usually connected to one another) to explore, and all the new instances, quests, etc. that we need to make the experience worthwhile.
So what, then, links these expansions together in a way that previous expansions weren't?
In fairness, I think you could retroactively link some of the old expansions. Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were fairly independent of one another in terms of story and setting, but they were both largely concerned with bringing the plotlines established in Warcraft III to a conclusion. Illidan's conquest of Outland was brought to an end (though this required making figures like Kael'thas and Illidan into more egregiously villainous figures than they had initially been presented) and Arthas' assumption of the role of Lich King gave us a villain a mythic heft that I don't know any later antagonist quite matched.
Starting with Cataclysm, I think you could argue that you can trace a causal line all the way to Shadowlands. The Cataclysm led to the regime of Garrosh Hellscream, as well as the failure of the ancient protections shrouding Pandaria. Garrosh's deposition led to the utterly convoluted path to alternate-universe-past-Draenor, which then led to the invasion of the Burning Legion, which then sparked a renewed war between the Alliance and Horde, which then led to Sylvanas abandoning the Horde to open the way into the Shadowlands and work directly with the Jailer.
While you could link all these expansions together, I don't think that it really works all that well. It doesn't feel like it was really plotted out with great care. I also think that, if you compare this with the MCU, you run into a lot of the same problems: expansion stories don't really lead to satisfying conclusions. Legion remains probably my favorite expansion overall, but as fantastic as it was, the ending didn't really... end much. It's sort of ambiguous whether the Burning Legion is truly disbanded (while later content has actually suggested that it likely is, that feels like something we should have really felt at the end of Legion,) and even as Velen sighs in relief that the worldsoul of his home planet is finally put to rest, we're immediately confronted with the problem of Sargeras' sword sticking out of Silithus - and we even find out that Argus' death only screwed up the Shadowlands, denying, not granting anyone peace.
Even after introducing the Jailer as this mastermind behind all the evil things that have been going on for eons in the Warcraft cosmos, only for us to kill him in that expansion, Shadowlands nevertheless still ended with some ominous hint that he had only been doing what he was doing for some perceived greater good, to fend off some greater threat.
I think it was good that Dragonflight basically gave us a fresh start. There was an implied time-skip, and truly nothing seemed to really flow directly from Shadowlands (I will say that while the execution of Shadowlands as an expansion was deeply flawed - and also rocked by both Covid and scandals coming out of Blizzard - the idea of it was one that I really liked, though I think Sylvanas was much cooler as an antihero than as a full-blown villain).
I think a likely unifying element to the Worldsoul Saga will be its villains: Xal'atath has unquestionably been the big bad of War Within, but she escapes the expansion without our having fought her as a raid boss.
It does make me wonder, a bit, if we'll wind up retroactively placing Dragonflight within the Worldsoul Saga umbrella. Like with Xal'atath, Dragonflight's primary villain, Iridikron, manages to fly below the radar, so to speak, avoiding a direct confrontation with us (apart from an undone-via-time-travel fight in the Dawn of the Infinite).
I've really liked these villains: Iridikron seems to be the first major Warcraft villain to truly understand the threat that we pose to his plans, and that immediately makes him seem smarter than basically every other villain we've ever had. Likewise, Xal'atath plays the "manipulative chessmaster" role far better than we've seen with other figures who seemed like they were supposed to be that kind of villain, such as N'zoth or the Jailer. Just the line "Drenden's been dead for years" as Alleria realizes the peril that Dalaran is in at War Within's start so deliciously signals that it's too late for us to spot the trap that has been set for us, because it has already been sprung.
But where is this all taking us?
My best bet is that Midnight will end with us finally confronting Xal'atath once and for all, but does that just set the stage for Iridikron to act in The Last Titan?
There's also a question of actually how really planned out all of this is. I, for one, strongly suspect that K'aresh was meant to be a part of Midnight, and that Harandar was intended for the War Within - admittedly probably at an early development stage. After all, K'aresh is all about fighting the cosmic void forces and Harandar is an underground zone.
So, are these clever villains actually being clever? Will their ultimate plots actually feel as ingenious as they've been built up to be?
And am I totally wrong? Are both of these figures red herrings for us to follow? Blizzard has been working hard for the past several years at complicating the things we think we know about the primordial forces - that forces like the Naaru and the Titans, whom we've tended to see as the main bastions of goodness, are best more complicated than that. I can't say that I'd rule out the possibility that our final boss of Last Titan is going to be Aman'thul.
I will say that I don't love the idea, if only because the Titans have been these established figures in the lore for so long without ever actually getting really fleshed out as characters (to this day I could not tell you what makes Golganneth, Khaz'goroth, and Norgannon different from one another). If it turns out Aman'thul is a bad guy, it kind of undercuts the whole premise of Sargeras as the fallen Titan. But hey, maybe there's an interesting story to explore there, and maybe I'm totally off-base about where this plot is heading.
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