Friday, October 12, 2018

Void and Death, Battle for Azeroth and the Expansion That Follows

I'll admit that there's a good chance I'm repeating myself here, but I do think that there are some big questions surrounding two primal forces at work in the current state of the Warcraft cosmos.

While far from achieving its ultimate goal, we should not discount the Burning Legion. Sargeras is the most powerful single entity we have encountered in the game, and while we did not get to fight him directly (somewhat to my chagrin, but the previous part of that sentence might explain why,) we did witness his capture.

How permanent is that capture? I don't really know. Sargeras managed to fight every other Titan and slay them (though clearly not permanently) in the initial conflicts, but perhaps with the entire Pantheon all focused within this cosmic prison, and with Illidan there to distract him, perhaps the Dark Titan might truly be under control.

He certainly is in the short term. And that means that, especially after the deaths of Archimonde and Kil'jaeden, the Burning Legion is scattered and leaderless. The engine of Antorus, powered by the soul of Argus' own Titanic world soul, is no longer functional. We don't really know what Antorus did, exactly, though I suspect it either allowed demons to come back even if slain in the Nether, or allowed them to come back far sooner than they otherwise would, or perhaps both.

The point is that the Legion as it was for 25,000 years is no more. Might we see some of its former members band together to continue their grand work? Certainly a possibility. But at least for now, that massive chess piece is off the board.

While that means that Azeroth and other populated worlds are safe from the destruction and demonic corruption the Legion wrought, there is a clear downside to this as well - the Void infection of the Old Gods can continue without much interruption. Yes, the people of Azeroth have proven effective at fighting off any dangers, but you don't see us building a fleet of Vindicaar-class frigates and blasting the hell out of Cthuloid-monstrosities across the cosmos (though that sounds freaking awesome.)

It is very clear that Battle for Azeroth is going to start shifting toward a greater focus on entities of the void. After the upcoming raid, which at the time of this post has most recently been renamed the Battle of Dazar'alor, our next will be the Crucible of Storms, which puts the Naga and N'zoth front and center.

Generally, most popular commenters that I have been reading or watching on Youtube are in agreement that we are most likely to visit Nazjatar quite soon, and possibly move on to Ny'alotha for BFA's final patch.

On the other hand, some hold the opinion that we might not face N'zoth this time around, instead getting a fight with Azshara followed by a greater focus on the faction conflict for BFA's climax.

Another theory goes that if we fight N'zoth as the final boss here, we'll be going to fight the Void Lords - the beings that created the Old Gods - on K'aresh, the homeland of the Ethereals.

On the other hand, anyone paying attention to the lore will note a strong presence for Death magic as a primal force that plays a big role in BFA.

Now, some unify these things, suggesting, for example, that Ny'alotha might be in the Shadowlands and not on the material plane of Azeroth.

To my mind, however, I think that Blizzard's creative team would benefit from introducing a new threat that could rival the Void and the Fel. With the Legion on ice as it were, WoW could be in danger of falling into the trap of having only one real villain. One of the things that makes the Warcraft cosmos so compelling (and more interesting in my mind than Diablo's, even though I thought Reaper of Souls provided a really interesting twist on its black/white mythos) is that while there are good guys that disagree and even hate one another, there are also many different villains who detest one another and have separate and conflicting goals. It lets us do fun things like ally with a powerful eldritch entity trapped in a knife against the Burning Legion.

So with the Legion put to bed, it's important to build up something that is powerful on a cosmic scale that is on par with the Old Gods. And I think that the primal force of Death is a pretty good one.

Plus, Warcraft does gothic/spooky really well (it probably works so well because it's not the whole game, and so you can get excited about it when it comes along and not feel bored of it like Jack Skellington in Nightmare Before Christmas.)

Between Bwonsamdi, repeated references to Arthas, the Drust, and Bolvar Fordragon's daughter, there are a bunch of things revolving around the force of death in BFA, and that's before we even get to the fact that Sylvanas is the instigator of this war - someone who has been seeking to master Death to preserve her people and herself.

In my mind, I think this serves much the same purpose that the many Old God references in Legion did. Legion was very much about the Burning Legion and ended with our assault on their homeworld. I suspect that BFA could very likely have us end up fighting N'zoth directly and ultimately leaving all these Death/Shadowlands references for what comes next.

I think that the most important story in regards to the next expansion is that of Vol'jin. We've seen that Bwonsamdi lost his soul, and after some time (now that G'huun is killable in LFR,) we've been able to continue those quests and see Vol'jin truly return as a spirit and begin to advise Talanji - presumably setting her up to be the Queen of the Zandalari Empire and perhaps not be bound to Bwonsamdi as Rastakhan seemed to doom her to do.

8.1 Spoilers Ahead.


Vol'jin's ascension as some kind of holy spirit, possibly a Loa, appears to have been granted to him by some entity known as the Hand of Valor - likely a creation of the Titans. But the being who told him to name Sylvanas as his successor was something else, and neither Bwonsamdi, nor the Lich King, nor Eyir seems to know who it was.

My bet is that it's some powerful entity from the Shadowlands. In fact, I suspect there's some being in the Shadowlands that reigns supreme, and that this was likely the one that took Odyn's eye as payment to teach the Titanforged Keeper the magic of necromancy so that he could create his Stormforged Vrykul.

And if you're trying to name that powerful entity, I think that's something where we should probably hold back. Blizzard needs to come up with new things, and I imagine this entity will be something we haven't seen before.

Now, what would be best is for them to start building toward it ahead of time. Ny'alotha is a word we started hearing in Cataclysm through the Puzzlebox of Yogg-Saron, and every time it comes up (which is rare) it gets us more excited to find out more about it.

In contrast, if we had then gone there at the end of Cataclysm, it would have just been another endgame zone.

If there's one criticism I have of the story of Legion, it's the way that Argus (the Titan) came out of nowhere. We didn't even see him prior to the raid itself. Now, to be fair, the grand reveal that Azeroth was a nascent Titan could be seen as a hint that another planet we had heard about was also a Titan, but there wasn't much of a chance to get a sense of Argus as a character.

N'zoth would make a really compelling end-boss because we A: know what the Old Gods are like, so he's not totally out of the blue, B: have a sense of his personality, even if it's all second-hand, and C: have heard about him since Cataclysm, where he was implied to be behind Deathwing's return and his initial madness.

One of the reasons Illidan didn't work that well as a villain in Burning Crusade was that we more or less never saw him until we fought him. Legion did a lot more with him as a character, and presented an interesting Chaotic Neutral character whose intention were largely good even if he was willing to do literally anything to achieve them.

Arthas, on the other hand, even if some complained that he showed up a few too many times only to walk away without murdering us, was built up incredibly, and I really haven't felt more personally invested in a boss fight than the one against the Lich King.

The point of all of this is that it's good to build up villains. They can be hyper-visible like Arthas or lurking in the shadows like N'zoth. I studied screenwriting in college, and one of the simplest tricks to make people think you're a genius writer is to set something up early and pay it off later.

Now, writing a screenplay is a different thing than managing the narrative on an ongoing story like World of Warcraft. When you're writing a screenplay, if you need the hero to have some special skill that they use to dispatch the bad guy, you can write that into the climax and then just go back to page twelve and introduce it as an element (for example, I wouldn't be shocked if when they were writing Aliens, they had Ripley come and fight the alien queen with the power-loader and then go back and write in the scene where she demonstrates her skill with it early on only after having written the climax.)

In WoW, they can't just go back and edit the earlier patches of an expansion if they have an idea for the last one, because at that point it's already out. This means that things have to be planned out far in advance, or they need to allow for some jarring moments.

I think most people would agree the "plan it in advance" strategy is more satisfying. Personally, I'm much happier to see a twist or reversal telegraphed far in advance than one that comes out of nowhere and doesn't make sense.

Personally, while it's not a prediction, one way I could imagine seeing Battle for Azeroth go is that we wind up fighting N'zoth as he's on the cusp of burrowing to the heart of Azeroth and corrupting the Titan entirely. We manage to slay him in the final fight, but in the end, while we save her from corruption, Azeroth dies.

But being a Titan, it's more complicated than that. We find that while she's dead (and perhaps there are massive consequences to that, like the massive reserve of Spirit Energy that she had been feeding on unleashes ravenous plant life like we saw on Draenor. Alternatively or concurrently, we also see the dead rising from their graves, with Azeroth's life force feeding the undeath of the Shadowlands, and entities like Bwonsamdi are overwhelmed and unable to contain the spirits within.

The goal then would be to ultimately resurrect Azeroth and extract her from the Shadowlands, only to discover that the ruler of that place wants nothing more than to control the very soul of the world.

Drawing a distinct contrast between the Void and Death would also be interesting philosophically. The Void represents nothingness in theory, but in practice it seems to be more about infinite possibilities. It's sort of Zen in that way, only in certain expressions, it can represent madness.

Death, on the other hand, seems to be a very stagnant force. Much as Sylvanas wants to perpetuate the Forsaken as they are, and seems to have abandoned entirely their original goal of restoring themselves to life, it seems that the forces of death want to shut things down. It's actually very Dark Souls (though Dark Souls always had this interesting question of just which choice was stagnation and which was acceptance of how things would change.)

The big thing is that I think we need a counterbalance to the Old Gods. If you want to give each of the three more traditionally evil primal forces an expansion count, I would say that Void has the most, with Vanilla, Cataclysm, Mists, and now Battle for Azeroth. Chaos/Fel has Burning Crusade, Warlords of Draenor, and Legion. Death really only has Wrath of the Lich King, and I think it's due for more.

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