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

[Reive]

But that's part of what I'm saying. The story of WoW hasn't made the Warcraft universe, or Azeroth, more interesting since we dealt with the Legion.

They've rushed through cool concepts like Nazjatar and the Black Empire. They've given us Val'sharah 2.0 as the Emerald Dream. They've ruined Arthas' legacy with Shadowlands (and Uther's, and Sylvanas', and...). They've burned down Teldrassil and made a mess of the Undercity. Numerous great characters and leaders are gone for no reason other than shock value.

Let's not even begin to discuss how they ruined the Night Elves.

yeah. too many concepts were either rushed or delivered poorly. fixing retail's story will take a lot of work.

[Reive]

My blud, we quite literally had a patch where we fought twisted experiments of Neltharion, and now the Night Elves' future is on the line for 10.2

idk might be the writing, but they failed to give those things the right relevance or make them interesting.

[Hitei]

Uh, yes it does?

We'll know exactly what we need to change for those threats not to appear. For example, the Legion only returned because of the events set in motion by Garrosh.

The Legion returned because they were always going to return. Stopping Garrosh doesn't suddenly make the Burning Legion and Sargeras disappear. It just means they'll use some other opportunity to do the same thing. It just means that Archimonde himself will figure out a way onto the planet and trigger the invasion himself.

There's nothing to change to stop the Scourge invasions besides going to Northrend and doing WotLK slightly earier. There's nothing to do about Deathwing besides forcibly breaking into Deepholme and challenging him prior to the Cataclysm.

That's the entire problem with this idea, you're not actually generating new journeys, you're just repackaging existing ones. And even putting that aside, as said above:

what we need to change for those threats not to appear

Why are you bothering to reset and bring them back then? Just leave them defeated and move on.

[Well Done Steak]

You know, Yrel coming to us could be an excuse to update eversong, ghostlands, bloodmist and azuremist.

The draenie zones could be updated with a lightbound story and the belves with AU paladin garrosh acting as a horde ambassador for the lightbound.

Easy update too... They can all remain instanced.

The isles are isles so they need a boat ride anyway.

Eversong can be so that blizzard removes the invisible wall behind stratholm and EPL and replace it with a magical mist that ports you In front of the quel thalas gate.

The Mist can be spinned as their new magical protection

[Reive]

Amirdrassil is the main focus of 10.2, what do you mean???

do you see people hyped for it?

[meroes]

Here's how I know Metzen wasn't in on DF. The dracthyr wouldn't have looked like Jar Jar Binks

[Hitei]

do you see people hyped for it?

Yes. We have literally had dozens of pages of discussion about it, and where it is going, and what it is going to end up as, and what the Night Elves are going to do re: building on or near it.

[Nebron]

the purpose of dragonflight was to lower the scale of things and make us adventurers again, but it should have done that in a "warcraft way". blizzard's approach was too extreme

Yeah, but on the other hand to say that Dragonflight is 'wholesome and cutesy' is an overstatement imo. I'd rather blame it on Dragonflight being filled with half measures an so far, unmet conclusions. We'll see what 10.2 has to offer and if there's any continuation afterwards, but so far, Tyr's story is purposeless, Iridikron story is nowhere to be seen or he just serves as "see what comes next", Vyranoth making a snap decision without any significant build-up, Nozdormu and Murozond having no meaningful influence on the story apart from the MacGuffin void artefact that is in Iridkron's possesion.
There are simply too many parallel storylines that aspire to be grand and well resolved, but end-up being an obstruction to main story development.

The execution is just lacking in my opinion.

[pacotaco]

Danuser specifically wrote those new lines for a reason....

The tree may not be corrupted, but nzoth pretty much confirms that the void will use it SOMEHOW to their benefit.

With many eyes, they will see again. They will drink, and be uplifted.
Deeper, deeper its roots will reach. Welcoming our embrace.
Her dreams sing beneath the surface. Our dreams. Our song.

If I had to guess, he's talking about Alexstrasza. Too many things hinting at her ending somehow corrupted.

[Hitei]

I mean, the point is that the Void wins in this timeline. So even if we defeated all those external threats, we were still headed for armageddon. The idea here is that yeah, the Lich King sucked. Sargeras sucked. But we beat them once. The Void, we weren't able to. So our only hope was to go back, despite all of it.

The void "wins" because your proposal is that it be written as winning to necessitate the pointless reset that isn't doing anything. That isn't an indication of the narrative or gameplay value of resetting or justification that it's necessary, it's a proposal of how to explain in universe why a reset is happening.

[Santandame]

Sometimes it feels like y'all want WoW to be like Star Wars, wanting them to keep banking on the old shit and not doing anything new cause "nostalgia is cool".

What the hell are you going on about? Do you know anything about Star Wars? You clearly haven’t been following any of the new shows and direction because they’ve moved away from the original trilogy to focus on different characters and environments.

[Shadowferal]

I mean... what if?

What if they've decided, fuck it. We ran out of lore. Like Ion said, we dug ourselves into a corner (paraphrasing).

What if the new expansion is this:

- We lose. The Void wins. Our timeline is effed. Finally, we met an enemy that was just too far ahead of us. The Old Gods really did do their homework, and there's nothing we can do. Except...

- Chromie or somebody does a thing. We see one of those time-rewind effects, moving back through history at a rapid pace.

- *THUNK* The effect stops. A cinematic plays. We hear the first few musical notes of an enhanced Elwynn Forest soundtrack. We open our eyes. We've been given a second chance to stop the Void.

- The expansion is literally Classic+, but in the modern engine. Perhaps a few features are altered, but in general it's still the same game.

Lore is reset. Ton of characters and locations return. We set out on a new journey, and it's all in glorious HD.

I like this!
Too much to hope for, but I think it'd get a lot of former subscribers attention.

[Reive]

Yes. A lot of people.

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yeah not really. Most cinematics in dragonflight struggle to break 400k views when in the past 1m was the bare minimum. story is boring

"Make us adventurers again"

Lmaooo you did not play Dragonflight

Dragonflight was supposed to be a "slow burn" expansion like mop where you start as an explorer/adventurer and then the story starts to ramp up. Also strenght wise the primalists/raszageth were not comparable to villains like titan+++ jailer or n'zoth.

[Cheezits]

https://x.com/mrgmyt/status/1706774792597324160?s=46

UHHHHHHHHH

[Reive]

Yeah, but on the other hand to say that Dragonflight is 'wholesome and cutesy' is an overstatement imo. I'd rather blame it on Dragonflight being filled with half measures an so far, unmet conclusions. We'll see what 10.2 has to offer and if there's any continuation afterwards, but so far, Tyr's story is purposeless, Iridikron story is nowhere to be seen or he just serves as "see what comes next", Vyranoth making a snap decision without any significant build-up, Nozdormu and Murozond having no meaningful influence on the story apart from the MacGuffin void artefact that is in Iridkron's possesion.
There are simply too many parallel storylines that aspire to be grand and well resolved, but end-up being an obstruction to main story development.

The execution is just lacking in my opinion.

Agree with almost everything, but i still think dragonflight's vibe is incredibly off. It's incredibly evident when you play both classic and retail. retail feels way less serious (and cool)

[Dismayxz]

It's pretty much the same color, but that doesn't really mean a lot.

How so? It quite often actually means a lot in WoW. And the Left Wing and Arm being weird isn't exactly taking it either direction (AI or no AI), because that would also be expected of what clearly is a Void-related being? Faceless are essentially Void Related, they aren't exactly the Champions of balanced body proportions.

[Xilurm]

2004-2014 was sloppy as shit, and it took current expacs to course correct some of the shit that occurred from there.

Legion made Illidan into a proper anti-hero again, Shadowlands fixed the stupid asf "there must always be a Lich King" ending from Wrath, Dragonflight quite literally fixed the shitty Cataclysm ending, etc.

What am I even reading. Yes, they made stupid decisions. But if you think that Vanilla-MoP was worse than what we have now you're out of your mind.

WoD - Alternate universes, but make the legion the same in all of those anyway. It actually ruins everything, literally.

Legion - So called infinite Legion gets the floor wiped with them after we attack their home planet like it's nothing. In a damn patch.

BFA - Makes Sylvanas a villain for no reason, commit genocide for shock value. So called "4th war" (which should've technically been called 7th) doesn't even last that long and they quickly skip through things like Nazjatar and Azshara, and N'zoth which should've been their own expansions.

Shadowlands - You're delusional if you think that expansion brought anything good to this game. " fixed the stupid asf "there must always be a Lich King" ending from Wrath". No it didn't because the scourge is still running rampart as Bolvar said. Also they introduced a villain who apparently takes all the credit for uh, literally everything that has ever happened in the warcraft universe and then just fucking dies.

[Houle]

@Worldshaper

"If we think about it, has World of Warcraft really improved Warcraft's lore over the past decade?"

Lmao wot?

WoW quite literally expanded the Warcraft universe in ways the RTS never could. New threats are being made, new futures are being started, and old threafs have been eliminated thanks to WoW. Like, what do you mean???

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Also, remember when people thought we'd see Y'Shaarj or Yogg-Saron in DF?

Jesus fuck...

Everything that WoW did, an RTS couldve done better, story-wise.
In an RTS, the factions couldve actually been disbanded or changed over the years (as they logically should). The only reason the Horde and Alliance still exist as they do now is bc of the MMO format, no matter how little sense it made sometimes. In an RTs, the villains could win in some form every now and then (and they did, looking at both WC2 and WC3, where Ner'zhul ended up as the clear winner both times). In an MMO, we know the villain wont win or survive long-term, we know theyll eventually end up as raid bosses and get rekt.

New threats being introduced in an actual world-changing way, old enemies finally defeated for good, all of that wouldve been just as possible or more in an RTS, but on better scale and with ACTUAL consequences for the world, its races and factions. The world is allowed to change more. Thats just a fact.

Oh, and about that before: most people arent saying stuff like Maldraxxus or Torghast or the Fist Ones dont feel like WoW - what most people are saying is that they are simply cheap, weaker copies of the original stuff.
The First Ones basically got the role the Titans had before, as the mysterious, super-powerful beings above evertyhing else, of which we have very little information through their ancient artifacts and myths.
Maldraxxus and Torghast were shamelessly ripped straight from the Scourge, and then presented as the "original" version of it in the story.
Thats what people dont like - its stuff we had before, but without the build up, and desperately presented as "bigger and badder this time". And all of that is made even worse by the fact that the player character visited and basically lived in the fckn afterlife of the story - which is 99% of the time a shit idea for fanatasy stories, bc it devalues death in the overall story, both before and afterwards.

What dosnt feel like Warcraft, at least not the original, is the concept of neatly ordered "cosmic forces". They are straight up comic book material, and would neatly fit into Marvel or DC. But thats Chronicles (and thus partly Metzens) fault really, and thus cant be blamed on SL. SLs fault is doubling down on it.

[ChairmanKaga]

https://x.com/mrgmyt/status/1706774792597324160?s=46

UHHHHHHHHH

Yeah, what the...

[Hitei]

Not really, no. If you've been keeping up with the story, it does seem like the Void is winning.

It's the last one out of the universe's three major antagonistic forces to make its big play. So there's something final about it. We're also seeing the Titans undermined like never before, the pillar representing everything that's "good" traditionally. We've also got plenty of hints over the years to suggest that the Old Gods are a step ahead of us, corrupting Azeroth's world-soul wirthout us knowing, and so on. Not to mention the fact that we've run out of expansion ideas and landmasses. Shortly put, we're approaching the end of WoW's original storylines. Whatever comes next will be different.

Everything about this is wrong though.

The Void was the first to make it's play at the start of the planet's history. The Titans were completely undermined 15-30,000+ years ago when their prisons when the Void was so overbearing that it turned one of them insane, and they continued to be undermined throughout history, with their prisons being completely ineffectual containment and all of their servants being corrupted or transformed into new races.

The titans have never traditionally been the pillar represent "everything that's good". They've been the pillar representing creators. The Light is the pillar that has traditionally represented everything that is good.

Shortly put, we're approaching the end of WoW's original storylines. Whatever comes next will be different.

No, we already passed that. It was called Shadowlands.