The old gods were more interesting when we knew less about them

[Athorha]

There's not a single thing in WoW's lore that got more interesting as it was expanded and explained. The Legion/demons, the Light, Elune, Titans, the afterlife etc. all got significantly less interesting the more they revealed about them.

Warcraft's universe was pretty good when it was centered around Knights and Orcs and the things mentioned above were mostly just the background scenery. The moment these things take centre stage they're necessarily demystified which then devalues the setting as a whole.

So over telling the story that portrayed a "barbaric horde who ravished noble human lands" falls inferior to vague portrayals / implication and what they create in our imagination?

I think its overdone in the wow universe so much at first that the obvious of certain central themes is very easily lulled over. The story of the sha and how they manifest from within, how the old gods represent very archaically symbolically persistent themes in human culture.

How much surprise do you expect there to be when you dig deep at what the God of death shall be. Sure you could tell it 50 different ways, but they would all sound obvious for the God of death, common sense would anticipate where the story goes.

The weaving together of different themes is what I think warcraft is becoming more. They've built a fairly strong basis to expand on things like light vs. Nature death vs. Void etc. But I think they needed to get everyone on the same page with the story of "this is what death is" before we could really understand the future in the story as it is told. After all it is a story, they've just drawna line i shadowlands and defined death in their universe, maybe we redefine it in 10.0 but I think its the start of more complexity with the pieces you listed that they've only recently defined more wholly.

[Sialina]

I don't disagree with you Tietoso, but I think there are different types of villains, the greatest ones, like the lich king, Garrosh etc are fleshed out and well known, this far we agree, but cosmic horror is built differently.

In my opinion the less known about a cosmic horror the better they do, and I think WoW had a perfect set of cosmic horrors in the old gods. I would have preferred to know even less in the first place, not their number, how they were defeated in the past or anything. They imprisoned C'thun through great effort, or at least parts of him, there are others, Yogg is imprisoned under Northrend, there seem to be more. It would also have made finding Y'shaarj dead on pandaria even more interesting.

The void lords could be something else entierly and we could be left wondering what the old gods were, where they came from, who killed Y'shaarj and if there are more. Obviously after this don't make 50 Old god bosses either :P

[Nerovar]

The weaving together of different themes is what I think warcraft is becoming more. They've built a fairly strong basis to expand on things like light vs. Nature death vs. Void etc. But I think they needed to get everyone on the same page with the story of "this is what death is" before we could really understand the future in the story as it is told. After all it is a story, they've just drawna line i shadowlands and defined death in their universe, maybe we redefine it in 10.0 but I think its the start of more complexity with the pieces you listed that they've only recently defined more wholly.

I think all the work that goes into establishing and expanding these cosmic elements is ultimately futile. From my experience people generally don't care about things like "the machine of death" beyond its function as a plot device. What people do care about is the actual characters and their choices. Sure, extraordinary circumstances (like the afterlife) can be an interesting context to tell stories that wouldn't be possible in the regular "Orcs vs Humans" setting but it's not like Blizzard is really doing that.

Shadowlands' main plot is about an artificial ressource shortage driving once allied factions into bickering isolationism while an evil force is growing unnoticed. It could just as well take place on Azeroth or some other world. So why are we in the afterlife? Just to bring back characters? To hear some mumbled lines about free will from Sylvanas?

On the other hand, the toll it takes on the setting is quite obvious. Death will simply hold no meaning anymore after Shadowlands and many things associated with it (such as pretty much all the belief systems on Azeroth) have also been thoroughly demystified.

It simply doesn't work out.

[Itisamuh]

I disagree with most of you.
The more you know the more interesting they are, not having any information on something doesn't make it interesting, you just want to know more about it.

That is, well, basically exactly what interesting means.

The old gods were by far the most interesting enemies to me, I guess the void in general still is, but not as much now that they got more of an explanation behind them. Maybe the problem is that the explanation was just not very good, to be fair.

[darkoms]

giant blue dude from the end of WoD. and none of them had come close to Garrosh and the LK because they were fleshed out through the xpacs.

Forgive him, Lord Archimonde, he doesn't know what he's talking about

[DatToffer]

Same goes with a lot of things really.

The Old Gods.

The naaru.

The Shadowlands.

Elune.

The Cosmic Forces.

Over rationalization (and in our cases, simplification) kills the mystery and that kills the fantasy. Surely there are ways to know more about those entities without stripping them of what makes them odd and mysterious.

[Makabreska]

They were never really interesting. Same lovecraftian shit used in so many other medias. Bunch of tentacle one-liner spouting cosmic beings with only characteristic being "corrupting is in my nature".

[KOUNTERPARTS]

lol....ok the weakest of the old gods that most of his accomplishments were piggy backs from the others who got his butt handed to him not once, but twice before us. He got exactly what he deserved and then some.

N'Zoth accomplished more than C'Thun and Yogg-Saron. He managed to stay alive (much longer) than them and actually got himself free.


But in the scope of the Old God's strengths and the many threats we have faced before and after N'Zoth, I suppose it makes sense that the weakest Old God was the only one capable of succumbing to a super powered laser beam.

[Nnyco]

N'Zoth obviously isn't dead and will come back in 10.0 (or in a future expansion anyway), still he was treated horribly in BfA.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that he had dealings with the Jailer, but he definitely isn't to be underestimated.

Ye ye Nzoth isnt dead and voidelves are a very important part of warcraft lore. You need to find new material, you sound like a broken record.

Of all the old gods, N'zoth is the most obvious dead.

[Varodoc]

Really? He seemed the most 'dead' of all the Old Gods.

The entire shtick of the Old Gods and especially N'Zoth is deception, lying. N'Zoth was even noted to be special amongst his kin, since he always turns defeat in his favour. Don't be so easily fooled.

Even the "totally dead 100%" Yogg-Saron was still whispering to those who went to Ulduar in Legion. And Yogg-Saron wasn't even fully unleashed on Azeroth.

[Myradin]

Forgive him, Lord Archimonde, he doesn't know what he's talking about

I'd say he was correct. Both Archimonde and Kiljaeden, while instrumental to warcraft's plot, were 2D devil villains aiding a dude who wanted to destroy the universe. They played best from the shadows and whenever they popped up was usually a sign the legion was about to lose.

The draenei retcon made them slightly more complicated but not really.

[Queen of Hamsters]

The power of mystery.

The Ritual, my absolute number 1 favourite horror movie (on Netflix now!), was so amazing the first time around due to the unknown. And even as things become more known, they leave the mystery where it is. They don't turn the mysterious entity into a f-ing loot pinata.

Old Gods, Eldritch monsters, it all works at its best when it's vague and mysterious. The moment I saw N'Zoth's model I lol'd and my interest sank like the Titanic. Such a pity considering how amazing the animated short featuring him was.

[hydrium]

Eldritch horrors cannot be understood, that's the whole point of them.

That there is something out there so unfathomable as to drive you insane to even try to understand it. You can't fight them and you're so insignificant to them that they don't even register your existence, you're not even a speedbump in their path, you're an individual grain of sand.

So WoW was set up for failure to begin with when they tried to borrow Cosmic horrors, you just can't do it properly when they have to be a thing you can kill. They weren't even gods, they were just middle management.

[chrisisvacant]

Eldritch horrors cannot be understood, that's the whole point of them.

That there is something out there so unfathomable as to drive you insane to even try to understand it. You can't fight them and you're so insignificant to them that they don't even register your existence, you're not even a speedbump in their path, you're an individual grain of sand.

So WoW was set up for failure to begin with when they tried to borrow Cosmic horrors, you just can't do it properly when they have to be a thing you can kill. They weren't even gods, they were just middle management.

It doesn't help that they fumbled the ball so badly when depicting what the Black Empire would be. Turns out it's just a dark mode Azeroth with tentacles in the skybox. Wowie. Cool beans.

[Houle]

2. They are spawns of a greater darkness.
This definitely did reduce them a little. Their origin got explained. Not even just their origin, but their creation. They are but tools. This reduced their godhood by a lot. It would have been better, had they been avatars of this greater darkness. "And so the Void Lords hurled their own flesh into the universe, hoping to take root other worlds to infect". There being a "Greater N'Zoth" out there, of which ours was just a part of, would have been more interesting. Even there being greater gods among the Old Gods of the Void would have been okay. But being spawns did weaken their status as gods.

This is honestly one of the worst things about it. They coulve easily made the old gods into "avatars" of the void lords. Literal growths of them, seperated from the main being and sent into the universe. So N'zoth would basically just be an extension of a void lord N'zoth.

MTG explained it pretty nicely with their Eldrazi (their version of eldritch lovecraftian gods).
Imagine the universe as a lake. The Eldrazi are standing around the lake, watching it from the outside. And when they stick their hand in it, the fish in the lake (us, the races of the universe) just see the hand, and think its a big scary big monster, when its actually just a small part/extension of a far larger being, whos nature they cant even grasp.

And thats how they shoulve handled the old gods and void lords. Let an old god be the "hand" of a void lord, which he put into our universe.
Instead, they turned them into straight up servants, into lesser beings. Why should anybod give shit about them anymore now, when we know they are basically nothing more than loyal dogs.

I believe that the problem with WoW is that they have so much lore but they burn through it, the last great villian that most of you would agree with me that we had was Garrosh, then we had Deathwing, the jailer, Garrosh alt dad into Gul dan into the giant blue dude from the end of WoD.

Did you...did you just call fckn Archimonde "blue dude"? LOL. Archimonde was an important fan-favourite villain long before the idea of the character Garrosh even existed.

[Netherspark]

So were the Titans. So was Elune. So was the Burning Legion.

Take away the mystery and all that's left is bad writing.

[hydrium]

I'm glad that WoW has become progressively worse so that we now look back fondly on WoD when at the time it was considered absolute trash.

Wonder how bad it's going to be for us to look back fondly at BFA and Shadowlands.

[shoc]

That's the problem with excessive world building. New writers coming in, feeling like they need to patch up loose threads, when the loose threads were what made speculating about the lore and story interesting in the first place. Now there is nothing left to speculate about, GG.

[Kyphael]

None of them are interesting. The only one mildly interesting is Yogg-saron due to his location.

[ldev]

something something fear of the unknown