Ny'alotha has, since at least the Emerald Nightmare raid, but also I believe the Puzzle-Box of Yogg-Saron from Cataclysm (an archaeology reward found in Nerubian sites,) been teased as Azeroth's R'lyeh, a profane, ancient city of the Old Gods where we might come face to face with the nightmarish evil of these unspeakable eldritch monstrosities.
For those less familiar with their Lovecraft, R'lyeh is an important location in The Call of Cthulhu. The city spends most of its time on the bottom of the ocean, where its inhabitants - the most important of with is Cthulhu himself - lie in some state between death and sleep, essentially in stasis (and given that Lovecraft's horror was a blend of science fiction and supernatural, stasis might be the more appropriate term,) the city only emerging "when the stars were right" and possibly heralding in some apocalyptic return of the horrific Great Old Ones. In the novella, a group of sailors discover the city accidentally and explore its greater-than-three-dimensional structure before witnessing Cthulhu's emergence from his tomb-like chamber and then flee for their lives.
The Old Gods are very obviously homages to Lovecraft's horror - indeed, most fantasy has had some kind of Lovecraft reference, from the Watcher in the Water in Lord of the Rings (which pointedly does not fit into the established cosmos of Valar, Maiar, and other creations of Eru Illuvatar) to the "Drowned God" in A Song of Ice and Fire that the Ironborn worship, to Great Old Ones and Elder Evils in Dungeons and Dragons like Tharizdun. The names of the first two revealed Old Gods - C'thun and Yogg-Saron, are pretty clear nods to Cthulhu and Yogg-Sothoth, both popular monsters out of Lovecraft. (Also monstrous: Lovecraft's terrible racism! Basically, if you're going to read his stuff, get ready for some cringe-inducing descriptions of basically anyone who's not anglo-saxon.) N'zoth's Lovecraftian namesake is less obvious (same with Y'shaarj, the posthumous Old God,) though I've wondered if it might be Nyarlathotep, the Great Old One who often takes the form of a human (I really wanted it to turn out the Prophet Zul had been a projection of N'zoth all along.)
The use of Lovecraftian monsters - the term I like to use is Eldritch Abominations, which has a good TVTropes page - provides fantasy universes with a great alternate threat to the typical demonic tempters and destroyers or your ravenous undead hordes. Ironically, in the Warcraft universe, the Cosmic Horror monsters have actually managed to overtake the demons as the real "ultimate big bad." Now, in pure cosmic horror, what we see as classic demons and monsters are just expressions of the eldritch truth - a horned devil is either just the form we're most comfortable interpreting something truly alien, or it's some formerly mundane thing that has been warped by the alien force, or it's a sign that we're all actually the product of the seemingly alien, and that this is just some example of something that isn't hiding that "alienness" as well as the rest of us.
In the Warcraft cosmos, we know that at some point there were Titans and there were demons, and that the Titans (particularly Sargeras) fought demons. Where the original demons came from? No clue. Though we do know that the Fel seems to be some kind of product by the mutual annihilation of void and light. Given that the Fel's opposite power is the Arcane, one wonders if the Arcane is some kind of orderly arrangement and preservation of Void and Light. But that's a whole different rabbit hole.
The evil of the demons was originally what was cited as the thing that caused Sargeras' fall from grace. But around the release of Legion, we either got that updated or simply better spelled out - and it turned out that the demons were just the ones who led him to the real threat - the Void. Finding a planet (almost certainly Telongrus, the shattered world upon which Void Elves have their little allied race starting location) whose Titanic world soul was infected by the Old Gods - beings that were created to spread the void into the material plane - Sargeras killed it, and his desire to destroy everything rather than giving the void any place to infect created the rift between him and the other Titans, which then had him recruit all the demons he had been imprisoning.
The Old Gods are scary enough to a Titan - basically a major god in the Warcraft cosmos - that he would turn around and unleash all the most heinous monsters he had ever fought if they would help him just kill off anything the Old Gods could feed on.
That is, to be frank, a pretty bleak cosmic horror kind of story (and cosmic horror tends toward the bleak.)
The point is that the Old Gods represent the most horrifying evil in the Warcraft cosmos. The weird thing is that the last two times we've fought Old Gods, they've been sort of side-plots.
To be fair, in Vanilla WoW, there was no "A" plot - so much of the game was dedicated to just fleshing out the world and introducing all the new plotlines that would develop over the past fifteen years. With Ragnaros and the Black Dragonflight both playing big roles in much of Vanilla, it did make some sense to then see one of those Old Gods that had manipulated things for so long. In Wrath of the Lich King, we got another one, but in his case, we didn't really see Yogg in his native environment. Ulduar was more about seeing a mostly-intact Titan facility where the main prisoner had taken over. Blizzard claimed Ahn'Qiraj was a Titan facility in Chronicle, but to my mind it seems far more likely as the ruins of a Black Empire city. In Ny'alotha, we're going to see one that is not at all in ruins.
There are some very big questions, though, about Ny'alotha. First off, it's not really in the same reality that we are. That was actually a bit of a surprise, though once we discovered that N'zoth's physical prison, like Ulduar or Ahn'qiraj, was "the Circle of Stars," it makes sense that Ny'alotha would be something different.
Warcraft plays a little fast and loose with alternate planes - we have yet to get real confirmation that places like Thros, Helheim, and even potentially the Halls of Valor, are actually in the Shadowlands, even if I strongly suspect that at least the former two are. But I wonder if Ny'alotha is truly its own entire plane or if it, too, might exist within some larger planar framework.
Ny'alotha's extra-planar nature is what has allowed them to have it "invade" various zones all of a sudden. In 8.3, we're going to be seeing Ny'alotha infect the Vale of Eternal Blossoms and Uldum, and access to the raid will actually be in whichever zone is being attacked. It reminds me a bit of a plot from Magic: the Gathering back in the late 90s:
Magic just wrapped up the second of their massive years-in-the-making arc plot, but before then, there was a buildup to monsters known as the Phyrexians (sort of Lovecraftian, though there are other Magic monsters that more obviously fit that trope) invading the central world of Dominaria. Established previously, the Phyrexians had created an entire world called Rath that was built specifically so that they could "overlay" it with Dominaria, fusing the two planes and instantly having their forces present all over the world.
N'zoth seems to be doing something similar with Ny'alotha. It's as if he has created a version of Azeroth in which he's already triumphant, and is simply leaking that world into the real one to effect it into reality.
And that is, actually, pretty damn cool conceptually.
So what am I complaining about?
Well, I want to see more of it. Right now, the invasions in Uldum and the Vale are basically just the appearance of some - admittedly very cool - assets. Floating temples and obelisks, banners and profane hieroglyphs, and tons of mutant alien monstrosities.
We'll be delving into Ny'alotha in the raid, and that promises to be its own stand-alone environment that is not simply a copy of existing ones.
And you could argue that Ny'alotha itself - the "Waking City" - is too dangerous a place for us to ever venture on our own. That you need a full raid group to survive anywhere in it.
But it does bring a recurring problem with BFA: we're seeing all these places that have been teased for years and years, and we're blowing through them.
We had heard of the Broken Isles before Legion came out, and Highmountain and Suramar had been mentioned. But for the most part, it was just new lore. We found the place where Malfurion and Illidan were born. We found a bunch of Vrykul who had been cut off from Northrend. Anything we got was on top of what we already knew.
BFA has been all about visiting established locations. We've been waiting to see Kul Tiras, Zandalar, and Nazjatar for a very long time.
Now, I will say that the former two were pretty big successes. I had always expected Kul Tiras to be just a single zone, but we've gotten an entire mini-continent that feels as substantial a human kingdom as Stormwind or Lordaeron. Zandalar, likewise, is bigger than the single zone I had expected it to be, though it perhaps feels less like an ancient island kingdom and more like one very impressive city and a bunch of dangerous wilderness.
Nazjatar has some very cool elements (and I love the wall of water surrounding it) but one does wonder if we could have gotten a whole continent and a whole expansion out of it. Again, as an ancient empire, we don't really get the sense of it being a huge capital city for the vain Naga queen. And likewise, it's a pretty big shock that we aren't getting a Ny'alotha zone.
Blizzard does have a challenge to deal with - you don't want to pad things out too much with filler while people are begging to see the exciting stuff that has been built up to. But at the same time, in the past couple expansions, we've burned through locations and stories that might have held up an entire expansion.
I loved Legion, but I'll also confess that Argus - while enormous and setting a new standard for end-level zones (though I'd have preferred a Suramar-style deep line of deep story quests) - ultimately felt a little too quick. Surely, we could have spent an entire expansion fighting the Legion on the Eredar homeworld. And then maybe we could have built up to the Titan Argus as a real lore figure rather than a consolation prize for not letting us fight Sargeras himself.
Hilariously, but also problematically, I still hear people talking about how they think the next expansion will be the fabled "South Seas" expansion. I am utterly baffled by this, given that Battle for Azeroth is that expansion. I mean, we've gotten Kul Tiras, Zandalar, and Nazjatar, and a whole nautical theme with the Island Expeditions. Guys, this is it.
And this does illuminate the problem with the position that any creators with passionate fans will deal with: sometimes they won't accept your version of something if it doesn't live up to the one they had in their heads.
With Ny'alotha appearing in 8.3, BFA looks as if it will technically also be the "Black Empire" expansion people have speculated about. And to be fair, the presence of the Old Gods has been everywhere in BFA - from Uldir to the Crucible of Storms, and now the Naga and N'zoth himself. You can't say this wasn't an Old God expansion.
But was there room for one in which we were truly spending the entire time fighting our way through the cyclopean architecture of the Black Empire? One in which the focus was entirely on these eldritch abominations?
The thing is, no expansion has been 100% focused on a single issue. I'd argue Cataclysm was the closest, and frankly, there was a kind of sameyness to a lot of its content - which made it something of an unfortunate choice for the expansion in which the old world was redesigned. Wrath had us dealing with the Nexus War and Yogg-Saron as well as the Scourge. And Mists of Pandaria introduced the Sha and the Mogu as new and interesting antagonists who shared a history but certainly not a fundamental nature, even though the final confrontation was with Garrosh.
But on the other hand, in Wrath - a pretty popular example of an expansion that worked well - we still did get plenty of time fighting the Scourge. The Lich King appeared in nearly every leveling zone at least once, and we had Icecrown as a zone that really reinforced the sense of dread and power that the Scourge commanded - indeed, I think that even the Antoran Wastes didn't quite do as good a job of building up the Legion as a threat.
What I have seen of the raid looks tremendously cool. But if it is shut away in an instance, it won't really seem to threaten the world. In 7.2 and 7.3, we had Argus hanging in the sky for all to see - it was extremely clear, regardless of your level, that Azeroth's confrontation with the Legion had come to a head.
Yes, N'zoth is insidious and likes to work in the shadows, but given that 8.3 is his big debut on the world stage for the first time in thousands (if not millions?) of years, I am a bit disappointed that we don't have some massive landmass that has risen, like R'lyeh, from the ocean's depths. Imagine if we had a new zone and from its shores, you could look up and see N'zoth towering above it in his full, eldritch glory.
Oh well. What we imagine cannot be the expectations we judge the game upon. I am, to be clear, still pretty excited about 8.3. But I am a little sad that the only way I'll see Ny'alotha is in a goal-oriented rush of a raid group trying to down bosses for loot.
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