Brokers aren't necessarily dead mortals or anything like that though. Draka being in a military organization would have special priveleges compared to anyone else and such. The fact we won't see so many formerly alive individuals tells you that in some way you can't just walk back to the living.
#TeamLegion #UnderEarthofAzerothexpansion plz #Arathor4Alliance #TeamNoBlueHorde
Warrior-Magi
Hold it. Yes, of the four major Covenants that we saw, two do have means to leave and enter the Shadowlands... because that's a required feature for them to do their job. It also isn't available to every member. Neither the Venthyr nor Nightfae are shown to have this capability, however. We don't know what it is like for lesser Covenants, either.
It also isn't available to every member. Only ascended Kyrians can do so, and it doesn't seem like rank and file Maldraxxians may just leave whenever they feel like it.
Similarly, i'm not getting the sense that every Broker can just randomly open portals wherever, nor do they seem to be particularly willing to share that particular advantage freely.
And none of this applies to the souls of the recently dead who haven't yet achieved any meaningful standing in their Covenant. The ones that can leave are not technically mortal souls anymore, or, like in the case of the Brokers, may well never have been.
Again, none of what you are saying here is particularly new.
First we will address it not being known about, which is not the case as established by Chronicle. Using Wowpedia, because I dont want to search the source directly,
In fact, we've known since Cataclysm that spirits can force a return to the mortal plane through massive use of anima. It was the entire basis of Jin'do the Godbreaker return back in the day. We just didn't know it was "Anima" specifically, just spirits.Until recently, the nature of the Shadowlands was obscure, with the living knowing the realm only as a cold and nightmarish place of labyrinthine spiritual planes. While many believe that souls of the dead languish in the Shadowlands forever, others hope their souls will go on to a brighter place.
Summoning spirits, and hell. The Day of the Dead in WoW is built entirely around spirits coming and going. IT's not new lore. But they do stay spirits<Bloodslayer Zala points at the temple in the distance.>
When Jin'do was last ripped from dis world, he survived as a shade, weak and broken, in da spirit world.
But Jin'do always had power over da spirits. One by one, he broke dem to his will, and wit' each soul devoured, Jin'do got closer ta' rippin' a hole through to dis world.
Ta be here now...
Da spirits be wit' us, we must end Jin'do.
I doubt there's anything explicitly binding souls to the Shadowlands. I think moreso its probably that they require raw anima to function and exist. Its possible that the lack of anima in sufficient quantities makes them staying in other realms impossible in the long term. At least, I think that's the easiest way for them to establish why people don't just go back to the mortal realms.
They did explain that.
Spirits fundamentally change and lose a sense of time and urgency. Only rare individuals, like the above mentioned Jindo, that retain enough of that to A) gather and bind enough souls to fuel that, and B) stay under the radar enough to get away with that much anima, considering the people in charge are kind of big on gathering Anima
Discussing Shadowlands lore on a Sunday...must be a slow day.
I agree, but I also don't think it matters if it's encrypted or not in that sense - there's nothing we can do or say to affect it anyway. I'd much rather have the story beats (and mostly everything else, tbh) encrypted, even if they end up being disappointing. Better than to have everyone know everything months before the expansion launches.
Last edited by Shrouded; 2022-08-28 at 06:55 PM.
100%. Doesn't matter if it's going to be good or not. I rather it stay encrypted. However, I also do a REALLY good job at not spoiling the story for myself even when it is available (I simply ignore story related threads, videos, etc. or at-least glance over them just barely).
I don't think having a poorly-told story is WoW-specific. It's really not the sacrilegious travesty of fiction that people like to blow it up as.
I agree that it's better for them to keep as much under wraps as they can. Blizzard doesn't really gain anything worthwhile by being fully transparent about every major endgame story beat with this community just because they've been telling a bad story recently. Some teasers and synopses of the zones are more than enough. Keep the rest encrypted until launch, there's no reason not to.
Hmm, I'm somewhere in the middle
I like the seemless transitions between expansions. On the other hand, I don;t believe that MMORPG is not a proper genre to tell ambitious and mysterious stories, since the timespan between content deliveries is just way too broad. At some point I simply lose interest, especially when the storywriting is poor and too complex to keep track on that.
That's why "big bads" come handy. You can still introduce a character, develop it and put it to the final rest within a single expansion. Better - you can do that within a single PATCH (Lei Shen). On top of that, have secondary characters, leave some breadcrumbs, to lead the story into another expansion.
Zovaal is just a bad example - it was a lackluster, one-dimensional character, which served no other goal than to be a "big bad".
But then... Sylvanas - she was being developed since the beginning of Legion - just to become a total failure and possibly the biggest disappointment I ever experienced in this game storywise.
I guess there's a middle ground
WoWs story would be better if they just didn't give a shit about the whiny playerbase complaining about "unfair treatment" or "I don't care about that character" and just told a coherent story without changing it 5000 times because baby Timmy doesn't like Sylvanas and wants more Arthas and how it's not fair that the Night Elf tree burns down.