The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Super Dickmann]

Did some digging in the audio files and found several unencrypted voice lines that explain parts of the Voidspire and questlines after the Darkwell.

Also post Sunwell/Darkwell dialogue that adds a lot of context to the leaked animations going around.

Go on then.

[Cheezits]

Did some digging in the audio files and found several unencrypted voice lines that explain parts of the Voidspire and questlines after the Darkwell.

Also post Sunwell/Darkwell dialogue that adds a lot of context to the leaked animations going around.

Honestly you should go ahead and post them, as the twitter cabal has tanked community sentiment already.

[GeometryWizard]

We're somehow back to TBC level of storytelling where the main story ends too early and then the following patches are random sidestories. My prediction is that instead of this trilogy meaning anything it's just a means for them to keep putting off figuring off a coherent story until TLT even though everyone was saying to wait until Midnight for things to change and instead it looks like all the same problems as DF/TWW repeating. IMO the worst part is they're definitely aware of this but don't seem to have any clue how to change course or maybe even worse just look at Portergauge glazing 99% of the writing and calling it a day

[Joshuaj]

"The main story ends too early"

We got 2 patches of story left, btw. The conflict between the Light and the Void was just the beginning of the main story.

[Cheezits]

We're somehow back to TBC level of storytelling where the main story ends too early and then the following patches are random sidestories. My prediction is that instead of this trilogy meaning anything it's just a means for them to keep putting off figuring off a coherent story until TLT even though everyone was saying to wait until Midnight for things to change and instead it looks like all the same problems as DF/TWW repeating. IMO the worst part is they're definitely aware of this but don't seem to have any clue how to change course or maybe even worse just look at Portergauge glazing 99% of the writing and calling it a day

Porter glazing it means an iota of loreheads can put up with it so that's all they care about, considering the mass majority log on for their funny turkey mount and do their lfr runs while not knowing who Dimensius is.

But he also has a job with Wowhead so it's a bit nepo-y.

[Super Dickmann]

"The main story ends too early"

We got 2 patches of story left, btw. The conflict between the Light and the Void was just the beginning of the main story.

The entire story and lead-up deals with the void attacking Quel'thalas and threatening the Sunwell, which is decisively ended before the first patch. The Light and Ula'tek are side-stories branching off from this. I can see how this might be subtle, as it's only the cinematic to the fucking thing.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

We're somehow back to TBC level of storytelling where the main story ends too early and then the following patches are random sidestories. My prediction is that instead of this trilogy meaning anything it's just a means for them to keep putting off figuring off a coherent story until TLT even though everyone was saying to wait until Midnight for things to change and instead it looks like all the same problems as DF/TWW repeating. IMO the worst part is they're definitely aware of this but don't seem to have any clue how to change course or maybe even worse just look at Portergauge glazing 99% of the writing and calling it a day

I don't know, this is such a weird argument since The War Within the talking point was that Midnight was the real expansion and now its interchangeable with The Last Titan was the real expansion or 14.0 is the real expansion.

Again, relegating all discourse to a potential reset is quite silly and works in favor when Warcraft Team does their pity party "We're sowwy".

Ther's no real plan or direction, the point is to make this look confusing so that people will always think they can do better work when the reality is probably that they literally just got chopped up and fed to pigs and the leadership do not even think the Story is a thing.

[Nymrohd]

I don't know, this is such a weird argument since The War Within the talking point was that Midnight was the real expansion and now its interchangeable with The Last Titan was the real expansion or 14.0 is the real expansion.

Again, relegating all discourse to a potential reset is quite silly and works in favor when Warcraft Team does their pity party "We're sowwy".

Ther's no real plan or direction, the point is to make this look confusing so that people will always think they can do better work when the reality is probably that they literally just got chopped up and fed to pigs and the leadership do not even think the Story is a thing.

Not by Blizzard. It was the fanbase here that kept saying Midnight would be a second Legion.

What is real here is that there was a plan for one proper, 4 season expansion and now they split that into three expansions and just added a ton of filler to make it work.

[Super Dickmann]

I don't know, this is such a weird argument since The War Within the talking point was that Midnight was the real expansion and now its interchangeable with The Last Titan was the real expansion or 14.0 is the real expansion.

Again, relegating all discourse to a potential reset is quite silly and works in favor when Warcraft Team does their pity party "We're sowwy".

There would be something deeply funny if the last expansion to actually focus on and resolve its main premise by the end ends up being Shadowlands. I guess DF did resolve its premise about the Age of Dragons and didn't veer completely off-topic like BFA and TWW or awkwardly peter off the moment it started like TBC/Cata.

[Nymrohd]

There would be something deeply funny if the last expansion to actually focus on and resolve its main premise by the end ends up being Shadowlands. I guess DF did resolve its premise about the Age of Dragons and didn't veer completely off-topic like BFA and TWW or awkwardly peter off the moment it started like TBC/Cata.

DF's main plot was the primal incarnates and at the midpoint Iridikron just nope'd out of the expac.

[Super Dickmann]

DF's main plot was the primalist and at the midpoint Iridikron just nope'd out of the expac.

The Primalists were the main threat, but they weren't the main conflict. The main conflict was about the Aspects regaining their powers and becoming the guardians of the world again, which at the end they do. Iridikron doesn't even appear until the end of the zeroth patch and never physically contributes anything to the dragon on dragon conflict, as his aim is the Titans.

[GeometryWizard]

I don't know, this is such a weird argument since The War Within the talking point was that Midnight was the real expansion and now its interchangeable with The Last Titan was the real expansion or 14.0 is the real expansion.

Again, relegating all discourse to a potential reset is quite silly and works in favor when Warcraft Team does their pity party "We're sowwy".

Ther's no real plan or direction, the point is to make this look confusing so that people will always think they can do better work when the reality is probably that they literally just got chopped up and fed to pigs and the leadership do not even think the Story is a thing.

Something that started with the Danuser era and has carried on here is them being so afraid of ending plots for good or doing definitive endings that like 80% of villains just run away with a vague promise to return or with a plot ending but immediately having a teaser for something else that may or may not materialize into something and the end result is that the story has ground to a halt since so much of it is just asking you to wait and see what happens next and the next thing that comes asks you to wait and see what happens next in an endless loop

There's a very good chance Midnight ends on a limp note in 12.0, most of the minor patches have no story and by 12.2 it's just trying to get you excited for TLT and the process repeats. More and more WoW's story is just a vehicle to sell you on the idea of a story happening rather than actually telling a story it's like you're paying to read the writer's cliff notes and ideas rather than a finished product

[Nymrohd]

The Primalists were the main threat, but they weren't the main conflict. The main conflict was about the Aspects regaining their powers and becoming the guardians of the world again, which at the end they do. Iridikron doesn't even appear until the end of the zeroth patch and never physically contributes anything to the dragon on dragon conflict, as his aim is the Titans.

The idea was "we need to get our Aspect powers back because Razsageth low dif dropped Alex off the air and now three more of her are flying around." One of them is still loose so the conflict of the expansion was never resolved, it was shelved. The entire reason the Incarnate war started was because of the Titans and that will be considered again in TLT, even though it was reiterated in TWW launch, to no actual resolution. And the middle patches just have little to do with the primals proper; Aberrus is a side quest and DotI does involve Iridikron (in a gambit that has yet to make any sense after the events of TWW) but is primarily an Infinite plot.

Honestly I think only Wrath and Legion remain focused on their main conflict, both having 1 season out of 4 on a side threat and everything else focused on the Lich King/Legion, as befits the only consistent threats in Warcraft.

[allegrian]

There would be something deeply funny if the last expansion to actually focus on and resolve its main premise by the end ends up being Shadowlands. I guess DF did resolve its premise about the Age of Dragons and didn't veer completely off-topic like BFA and TWW or awkwardly peter off the moment it started like TBC/Cata.

At least Cata ended with its promised main villain. TWW, just like its tie in novel, is just a bunch of unrelated chapters.

The thing is that we thought that TWW was this way because it was scrapped mid-development to become a prologue for the saga, which would truly begin with midnight. But right now midnight feels even more of a mess than base TWW.

[GeometryWizard]

IMO one of the funniest parts of the pivot was that the story justification for doing horrific visions again is that we need to study the black blood to learn how to fight against it and then 3 months later Maria says in an interview the black blood story isn't coming back and Harandar's story was already totally rewritten to be about Light bad instead. You can't even trust what the story told you less than a half a year ago before it ends up meaning nothing and it shows how unable to react to any feedback or changes their structure is that this happened. Content that released in mid-2025 was based on a story that was already scrapped by the middle of 2023

[Super Dickmann]

The idea was "we need to get our Aspect powers back because Razsageth low dif dropped Alex off the air and now three more of her are flying around." One of them is still loose so the conflict of the expansion was never resolved, it was shelved. The entire reason the Incarnate war started was because of the Titans and that will be considered again in TLT, even though it was reiterated in TWW launch, to no actual resolution. And the middle patches just have little to do with the primals proper; Aberrus is a side quest and DotI does involve Iridikron (in a gambit that has yet to make any sense after the events of TWW) but is primarily an Infinite plot.

Honestly I think only Wrath and Legion remain focused on their main conflict, both having 1 season out of 4 on a side threat and everything else focused on the Lich King/Legion, as befits the only consistent threats in Warcraft.

The Primalists are just the physical and ideological threat to the premise, the premise being 'How do we become Aspects again, who are the aspects and what does this mean'. The Primals don't even appear in the opening cinematic, the dragons and the titan heritage does, as that's the plot. Razsageth is a big shouty dragon, but the point she's addressing is that their founding is flawed. The first patch deals with this by having the Oathstones fail to restore them even once they affimr their traditional premise. The first patch in Aberrus and the parallel Blue story, as well as Vyranoth's final patch Storm Flight all spin off from this, wtih the first focusing on the Black Flight and directly advances this point by appointing a new Aspect of their flight to occupy the original function and the final story resolves it by showing that the real Aspectral (god what a terrible word) powers were the friends we made along the way and Azeroth empowering them. I'm not saying that the plot is some masterpiece, far from it, it's mostly just boring and often rushed, but it follows a coherent logical throughline.

It doesn't occupy nearly the same level of completely tangential nonsense like BFA and TWW, or kill the main villain/destroy his entire powerbase on patch 0 like TBC or Cataclysm. The former would occupy the bottom rung, re @allegrian , with TBC and Cata being a step further in that at least the plot eventually gets to some facsimile of the starting premise (Demons and Deathwing respectively), I expect Midnight to go into that camp as well.

As for that list, WoD and Shadowlands are also completely focused on the primary plot and threat. WoD is based around defeating the Iron Horde and at the end, we storm HFC and do so. SL is based around defeating the Bald Man, every raid and movement of the plot is about the threat posed by the Bald Man and his allies and at the end the Bald Man falls down.

[Nymrohd]

IMO one of the funniest parts of the pivot was that the story justification for doing horrific visions again is that we need to study the black blood to learn how to fight against it and then 3 months later Maria says in an interview the black blood story isn't coming back and Harandar's story was already totally rewritten to be about Light bad instead. You can't even trust what the story told you less than a half a year ago before it ends up meaning nothing and it shows how unable to react to any feedback or changes their structure is that this happened

The hilarious part is when they were advertising the Saga they had those interviews about how much more consistent the story can be now that they are writing three expansions concurrently.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

There's nothing wrong with the in-game story being bad or corrosive but you cannot just deny any form of spend on Animated Shorts, Cinematics and IGCs in these expansion concepts when the premises are so grand and epic. You have to at least showcase some level of mental faculties that you have to give your paypigs some spectacle payoffs with concepts such as fucking Midnight and The Last Titan. Like I just cannot fathom a strict debudgeting where your Intellectual Properties value is risked can occur to this degree but we'll see.

I breathe much easier if we do get Midnight Animated Shorts Series but again, we're now just in a masking the problem phase akin to what BFAs Marketing and Saurfang Cinematics did for BFAs mess and trying to get ourselves to 14.0. There's nothing more that can be done at this point.

[Super Dickmann]

IMO one of the funniest parts of the pivot was that the story justification for doing horrific visions again is that we need to study the black blood to learn how to fight against it and then 3 months later Maria says in an interview the black blood story isn't coming back and Harandar's story was already totally rewritten to be about Light bad instead. You can't even trust what the story told you less than a half a year ago before it ends up meaning nothing and it shows how unable to react to any feedback or changes their structure is that this happened. Content that released in mid-2025 was based on a story that was already scrapped by the middle of 2023

This is why TWW edges out BFA in terms of complete structural incoherence and wins the lifetime award. At least when BFA teased N'zoth it ended up leading up to fighting N'zoth, as much as he was completely unrelated to the faction war and in turn completely unrelated to anything on Zuldazar. The only things that follows from launch to end in TWW is Alleria and Ky'veza.

[Nymrohd]

kill the main villain/destroy his entire powerbase on patch 0 like TBC or Cataclysm.

Wait, TBC had a main villain? I mean sure the promotion material sets Illidan up but the in game story leading to TBC sets the Legion returning to Outland as the main event and that . . . doesn't lead up to anything other than Kazzak/Doomwalker as raid bosses. TBC makes no sense and is completely sandbox.

As for Cataclysm, I never really understood the story there either from an in game perspective; Deathwing did not seem to have any plan than killing people and mocking Alexstrasza.