Originally Posted by
Memory
I'll grant you that 'complexity' was a poor choice of words, for the BC is not complex in the same way as, say... I don't know, whatever complex story you may be familiar with and that wasn't written by some nerds copying Warhammer and D&D. But yes, I liked that Illidan was not the master mind behind every single leaf that moved in Outland.
And yes, he was just standing in Black Temple like everyone else was just standing: we didn't have phasing, and a lot of quests were more like 'kill 10 tigers, now kill 10 bigger tigers, now kill 10 huge tigers, now kill the queen of 'em all tigers'. Exactly, a different concept of game.
And I agree that WoW progressed a lot on this regard, but as such I don't mind that BC didn't focus as much on Illidan as WotLK on Arthas. Besides, the title itself wasn't about Illidan: The Burning Crusade. For the rest, for we had to kill so many different sizes of tigers, it was indeed a different concept, and we had better quest lines in WotLK (although I admit I don't like the opposite exaggeration either, I like WoW to be a bit 'open-world' as well).
I was aware that those references were ambiguous, but look, I didn't wanna bring them up because of game mechanics, although I mentioned the low difficulty level of Naxx. I only intended to refer to the narrative aspect of the issue. As a matter of fact, the Lich King was kept as the main focus through: a recycled Naxxramas (I may say a recycled tier of raids, as much as I liked both Sartharion 3D and Malygos); a poor content patch with a daily quest hub that you may like or not (I didn't), and with a raid dungeon that is regarded as possibly the worse in the history of WoW, not just because of the fight mechanics; a one-year long ICC release that bore people to death). All of the above are issues concerned with storytelling, not with game mechanics. Significantly, however, the best dungeon of WotLK (perhaps among the best ones of WoW), Ulduar, was the only one slightly unconcerned with the Lich King (aside from one-boss raid dungeons).
So, in the end, I don't mind that Illidan was reclusive: 1. it's fine with him being not the sole focus of the expansion; 2. I don't consider WotLK storytelling appealing as a concept nor successful in the outcomes.