A wise Pandaren once said, “Slow down!” and I keep revisiting the mantra subconsciously when writing about World of Warcraft lately.
World of Warcraft’s patch cadence is incredibly welcomed from a gameplay perspective overall. There’s a ton of stuff to do. As soon as you get tired, Blizzard seems to add new stuff on top. Mechanically, the downside is quality has suffered a bit. I wrote in my World of Warcraft: Midnight review that bugs and polish issues are becoming too commonplace in the game, as Blizzard opts for pace over polish. But little bugs and annoyances aren’t a game-breaking deal necessarily.
SPOILERS: World of Warcraft: Midnight “Season 1” ends with another set of vague statements
I’m not glossing over the challenge of writing an on-going story for a 20-year-old live service game. The fact we even get something on this scale and scope, with hundreds of characters across literal thousands of years worth of lore consistency considerations is impressive in of itself.
I suppose a lot of the frustrations come from knowing how easily potentially things could be better.
World of Warcraft: Midnight is yet another Alliance story, despite the fact it takes place in and around a Horde capital. You wouldn’t know that it’s a Horde capital really, as there’s almost zero involvement from Horde races and figures. There are no orcs, trolls, tauren, or even neighboring undead helping out the Blood Elves with their defence against the forces of the Void. The conclusion of season 1 was perhaps a vague opportunity to rectify this fact, but instead, Blizzard once again opted for Alliance characters doing the heavy lifting.
It’s Alliance High-Elf Vereesa Windrunner and her nephew, Arator, son of two Alliance heroes, who take center stage. They enter the corrupted Sunwell (which everyone now collectively agrees is now named the Darkwell), to face off against saga antagonist Xal’atath. Inexplicably, former Horde Warchief and genocidal pariah Sylvanas Windrunner shows up via a portal, deus ex machina style, and deters the all-powerful Xal’atath by firing a single arrow.
Always the softy, Vereesa hugs her genocidal sister, who then proceeds to explain … well, nothing.
Sylvanas Windrunner is supposed to be trapped in the Maw, watched over by Tyrande’s spirit owl Dori’thur. I guess Dori’ was having a nap or something, but I digress. Sylvanas explains that she can escape the Maw temporarily, luckily. She also vagueposts that the Shadowlands apparently aren’t all what they seem, and then vanishes back into it saying she needs to uncover the “truth.”
I can’t help but feel like there were several big missed opportunities with this cutscene. There was no Blood Elf representation in the cutscene, no Horde representation. There was an opportunity to show why Xal’atath might actually be afraid of confronting Sylvanas — there has been some speculation that death and undeath have some kind of advantage over the void, for example. Sylvanas also leaves us waiting for the next “episode” without really giving us anything concrete to chew on. Like Shadowlands itself, The Jailer leaves us with the passing phrase “a divided cosmos will not survive what is to come.” Will we ever find out “what is to come?”
Cliffhangers aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but the problem with World of Warcraft is, Blizzard has kind of built up an expectation that the pay off won’t be worth it. Evoking Shadowlands is a big risk in this vein, as we waited literal years to find out why Sylvanas was behaving the way she was — for the reasons to materialize in the least convincing way possible.
Putting aside criticisms of Horde representation, even beyond that, the benefit of the doubt runs shallow at this point. But what IF Blizzard ends up pulling off something good here?
The Shadowlands once against casts its shadow
The Shadowlands expansion remains World of Warcraft’s most controversial lore topic in history. In the Sylvanas book, we learn that the Shadowlands contains infinite afterlife scenarios for millions (billions?) of species across the Great Dark. Sylvanas joins forces with The Jailer after learning that afterlives are dictatorially assigned on an individual basis, potentially separating families across dimensions and consigning souls to an eternity in afterlife scenarios they actually might not fancy.
Sylvanas then resolved to help The Jailer re-write reality, Thanos style, by accessing reality-bending machines hidden deep in the Shadowlands created by a mysterious race known only as “The First Ones.”
Those are the basics, anyway. The lore proved controversial for a variety of reasons. The fact people can seamlessly step into and out of the afterlife undermines the very nature of death in the World of Warcraft universe, lowering the stakes for everyone involved Dragon Ball Z style. But furthermore, Sylvanas’ character was pretty heavily undermined.
Sylvanas is supposed to be a tactical genius. She unapologetically committed the Teldrassil genocide to send souls to The Jailer to help power his machinations, fully invested in forcing all of reality to accept her new reality. The fact she couldn’t foresee the painfully obvious real plan was to use the machines of the First Ones to enslave reality rather than help it — was more than a bit frustrating.
Hypocrisy in leadership is nothing new (in fact, it seems to be a feature if you look at politicians across the world), but these inconsistencies are rarely acknowledged or explained in the narrative. It’s why so many now find any appearance of Sylvanas in WoW’s story as irritating at best, and many hope that Blizzard would just ignore the fact Shadowlands ever even happened.
I disagree, though. Although my reasons may be naïve.
The Shadowlands and simply having some form of “afterlife system” is absolutely crucial for WoW’s cosmology. Fully explaining the consequences of death was a mistake in the first place, but we don’t have a time machine to prevent it from happening now. Trying to mechanize the afterlife robbed it of its mystery and fear factor. When Sylvanas returned from near-death saying that all she could see beyond was darkness, was far more harrowing to imagine than what we ended up being shown in Shadowlands.
But now the curtain has been peeled back, Shadowlands and its nature leaves WoW with a lot of issues. Death is supposed to be the great equalizer and consequence all mortal and immortal races should fear. For the long-term health of the game’s narrative, Shadowlands needs to be “fixed,” and I think if Blizzard execute here, it could be a good thing overall.
However, that’s a big if. And if that’s what Blizzard is going for as we head into Northrend for the next expansion “The Last Titan,” where the Shadowlands plot arc arguably began all the way back in Warcraft 3, Blizzard NEEDS to slow down and take a breath.
Blizzard, please get this right, even if it means slower patch cadence
Shadowlands and its execution has been the singularly biggest lore black hole in Warcraft history. The demystification of death, the haphazard handling of classic characters, the missed opportunities to experience lost heroes … the weird Covenant system … Shadowlands was a whole thing, for sure.
Blizzard seems to be exploring repairing some of the damage without ignoring the fact it happened. That’s a noble goal. But also, a goal fraught with peril and landmines. There’s an opportunity to improve upon the Shadowlands lore here, but there’s also an opportunity to make things worse if poorly executed.
I can only assume that one of the things making WoW’s story delivery poor right now is the rapidity at which Blizzard is pushing forward. Some of World of Warcraft’s side-quest writing has been truly incredible this expansion, with tear-jerking moments for characters you literally only just met. The capability for good writing undoubtedly does exist at Blizzard. But when dealing with big cosmological concepts and arguably the more crucial story beats, World of Warcraft just hasn’t been landing lately.
I really think Blizzard could afford to slow down a bit here. I would rather wait an extra few weeks and get more powerful story beats than get more rapid content drops bearing rushed quality. I’m sure with more iteration and forethought, Midnight Season 1 conclusion could’ve packed in more depth, and more detail, while representing more of the characters and fleshing out some of the world building going on here.
I truly think the overarching concepts are good ones here. There are myriad good ideas being presented, and some parts of Midnight’s writing have been fantastic. Shadowlands itself isn’t even a bad concept, it was all about its execution in my view.
I’m invested in the Zul’Aman story, the side questing in the Voidstorm was arguably the best I’ve seen in the game ever. And, I would be lying to suggest a shallow part of me didn’t feel moved seeing Sylvanas back again … but the frustrating part is knowing how easily it could reach a higher clip, just with a bit more iteration.
Blizzard, slow down!
Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.