After nearly a year away from retail WoW, I decided to take my elemental shaman for a spin on Monday, falling prey to the hype surrounding the release of the Midnight expansion.
Having only invested a few hours The War Within, I decided to pull up a few recap videos to bring myself up to speed. I knew where the story stood, generally speaking, but was excited to see what clever twists and turns I had missed since patch 11.0.
It took only a few minutes for me to realize that I hadn’t missed much of anything at all.
With the exception of Khadgar’s rescue, the plot consisted mainly of Alleria butting heads with Xal’atath, while the expansion’s obligatory McGuffin, the Dark Heart, dragged the story where it needed to go. There was little character development, no real exploration of the overarching conflict between Azeroth and Void Lords, no sense of stakes or scope, and no urgency. Just a succession of lazy plot points awkwardly woven together into a flat and colorless narrative tapestry.
As I let this unfortunate realization sink in, I started to think back on my years playing through the main story. When was the last time I actually enjoyed it? When was the last time it actually contributed anything to my enjoyment of the game? The answer probably dates back to 2016, when Legion was released and Illidan was defrosted as a sort of mea culpa from Blizzard following the poor reception of Warlords of Draenor.
Interestingly, the time skip at the end of Shadowlands provided Blizzard a unique opportunity to steer the narrative back in the right direction. An opportunity they sadly failed to seize. By then Teldrassil and The Undercity had both been destroyed and the world was heading into a period of relative calm, where the denizens of Azeroth would work to rebuild what was lost and piece back together their shattered lives. It was a solid premise with clear stakes for both the Alliance and Horde, rife with simmering tensions and tethered to places and characters that we cared about.
Instead, we got dragons and a new “big bad” called Xal’atath. We were introduced to a plethora of new characters, factions, and world-ending threats, all neatly packaged into something called the World Soul Saga, a multi-expansion narrative arc that would decide the fate of the world – for real this time.
And it seemed like a good idea at first. Blizzard chose this format in an effort to move away from short and self-contained narratives of each expansion, and give us something more cohesive over the long term. It was certainly a step in the right direction, and something that the franchise sorely needs.
Unfortunately, it fell completely flat right out of the gate.
There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most glaring is that Blizzard no longer has a deep-enough bench of compelling antagonists to support a three-expansion arc. All the interesting ones have long since been discarded, falling victim to the cyclical narrative requirements of each expansion. All that’s left now are the upper funnel cosmic-threats that have the emotional depth and texture of an Elwynn Forest tree.
Some might argue that the Old Gods can fill that role, but let’s face it: they were never interesting. They were never tangible enough. They just lurked in the recesses of the story, looming over everything as an amorphous concept of the ultimate evil and wielding their corrupting influence to conveniently produce whatever villain was required by the patch cycle.
The Void Lords are even worse. Where the Old Gods at least represented some abstract idea of corruption and madness, the Void Lords represent well… the void. The absence of substance, total and utter vacuity. Just a thick layer of empty calories on an unending pyramid cake of evil.
As a writer, I’m not sure what you can do with that. There isn’t anything here to latch onto or mold into something interesting. Who are they? What’s their motivation? They’re no one and have no back-story. They’re just hungry-hungry space hippos.
Xal’atath is perhaps the worst of all. First off, her name sounds like a prescription for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. “I didn’t know I could control my IBS until my doctor told me about Xal’atath. Side effects may include uncontrollable yawning, inability to focus and long stretches of boredom.” Second, and perhaps most importantly, she’s totally inert from a narrative standpoint. She was a discarded dagger two expansions ago – straight up vendor trash. How the hell are you going to give her character any depth? There’s nothing to build on. Want to explore her past to craft a tragic backstory à la Illidan or Arthas? You can’t. She wasn’t even a person, she was a knife.
And therein lies the problem. You can’t build the culmination of a 20-year story on the back of such vacuous arch-enemies. You can try to structure a story around them, but you can’t give it any heft. All they do is add volume and complexity to a narrative that needs depth and clarity instead. For the World Soul Saga to work, the writers are going to have to shift their focus to more interesting characters. We need to pivot from the Void Lords as soon as possible and steer the story back where it belongs: with Azeroth, Anduin, Thrall and the rest of the gang. Sargeras is still a perfectly acceptable nemesis and should be brought back as the endgame foil asap. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be where the story is headed, as the Midnight expansion is slated to focus squarely on our struggles against the big bad purple blimps.
I, for one, have zero interest in it and have decided that Midnight will be the only WoW expansion that I do not play. Maybe The Last Titan expansion will be all that we hope it is, and redeem the mess that this story has become. But I don’t feel like slogging through hours of pointless filler to get there. I’ll likely wait until Illidan is back from his vacation with the Titans, to poke my head back in to invest any more time into the game. In the meantime I’ll be chillin’ with my peeps on the Classic servers, where everything is a little clearer, a little simpler and a lot more fun.
