Blizzard's PR Blitz has been going on for a good while now. They're clearly proud of 5.2 (as they should be) and trying to drum up excitement (and probably entice lapsed players.) The thing that struck me was a recent interview with Ghostcrawler on MMORPG.com, particularly the discussion of WoW's future.
For much of WoW's lifetime, new content was not planned very far in advance, but today, it appears that they've got the whole expansion cycle and indeed the next expansion is in the works. So far, we've seen content in Mists come at a pretty healthy pace. 5.1 came pretty shortly after the expansion dropped, and I, for one, had just gotten pretty satisfactorily geared up in raid finder by the time 5.2 hit, allowing my two top toons to head in there and start smashing some Troll and Mogu heads.
Anyway, GC talks about the way that they're able to hint at the next expansion because it was planned out so early. Not only are we getting a single, cohesive story in Mists (even as recent as Cataclysm, there were some things that seemed to have been pulled out of thin air, like the Zandalari turning out to be evil or the de-powering of the Aspects after Deathwing's demise) but we're also getting some serious lore reveals that could mean big things for the next expansion.
So here's the thing: I've been talking about the Burning Legion a lot in my speculations. We haven't heard much about them since BC, other than the now-defunct Battle of Undercity quest and a couple of sort of sad Terrorfiends up in Hyjal, being pushed out by Twilight's Hammer.
And we haven't heard much about them in Mists. What we have heard about a bit is the Titans. The Mogu are Titan constructs, much like the ancestors of the humans, dwarfs, gnomes, and tol'vir (hey, remember the Tol'vir? No?) There's still a great deal of mystery as to what, exactly, Pandaria and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms are, but it's clear that the Titans had a great stake in the place. The Mogu also demonstrate how Titan agents can go bad even without being corrupted (well, ok, there was the Curse of Flesh, but that afflicted everyone else and most of those guys turned out decently, with some exceptions, of course.)
BC was a kinda-sorta Legion-themed expansion. Ironically, the name of the expansion better fit what turned out to be a sort of bonus-raid at the end of the expansion, even though Illidan was supposed to be the big bad.
One thing that Blizzard has said in the past is that, no, we have not yet met a true Titan. Figures like Thorim or Hodir (or Ammunae or Isiset, or finally, Ra-Den) are certainly powerful, but they are only constructs - presumably beings like the mortal Titanic races were once, but the Watchers seem to have escaped the Curse of Flesh for some reason.
The Titans are a pretty interesting group of movers and shakers in the Warcraft universe. They're theoretically good guys, attempting to bring order to the cosmos, but they are beset by two very powerful foes - the Old Gods and the Burning Legion.
We've been dealing with Old Gods and Old-God-affiliates a whole lot lately, what with C'thun and Yogg-Saron, Deathwing's madness, and the Sha. Unless the Old Gods were instrumental in causing Sargeras to turn (and please, let's not make that the case - Sargeras shouldn't just be Deathwing on a larger scale) we can probably afford to leave them off for a bit.
One of the tidbits from the Warlock Green Fire chain that I find fascinating is the fact that Doomguards were originally kind of "bad magic detectors" for the Titans, who were attuned or designed to seek out sacrificial magics so that the Titans could put a stop to it. This would seem to suggest that, in a lot of cases, the Titans themselves may have not just locked away, but actually created the demons who now form the Burning Legion. The Legion may be less of a universe-spanning prison revolt and more of a radical splinter group from the Titan hierarchy.
Burning Crusade was during an era when Blizzard was not quite as adept at presenting the story of the game through the gameplay. We actually didn't get much about the inner workings of the Legion, as the focus was more on the Illidari's desperate bid to hold onto Outland.
So it would be cool to have a Legion expansion that delves farther into the depths of the Legion's history and how the whole thing works. And if most of these demons are, in fact, former Titan constructs, it would be fascinating to see what they were before, and what has changed.
And of course, this would open up some new opportunities to get at the real motivations of the Titans. We think of them as benevolent figures, creating worlds where life can thrive, but these are the guys who created the Mogu, and left our world with a giant self-destruct mechanism. They might be well-intentioned, but there's a kind of Lovecraftian creepiness to the way that they seem to see us mere mortals as insignificant - that our individuality and free will is a strange malfunction in what is meant to be an automated system.
What is Azeroth for? Why did the Titans come here at all? What was here before?
Why is there a little girl in Blade's Edge Mountains who claims to be from "Eng-land?"
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