WoW’s Midnight of Lore

After spending 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 upcoming release of the Midnight expansion.

Having only invested a few hours The War Within, I decided to pull up a couple of recap videos to get myself back up to speed. I was excited to see what 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, no urgency. Just a succession of lazy plot points coalesced together into a dull and shallow narrative.

I sunk back into my chair and let out a deep, drawn-out sigh. Somehow Blizzard had done it; they had written something worse than Shadowlands. 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 the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Ironically, I also quite enjoyed the end of Shadowlands. Not because it was particularly compelling, but because it provided Blizzard another opportunity to steer the narrative back in the right direction.

The time skip following Zovaal’s death was the perfect opportunity for a fresh start. 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, which were 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.

As I understand it, 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. A noble goal, and something that the franchise sorely needs.

Unfortunately, it’s fallen completely flat right out of the gate.

One of the main reasons is because Blizzard no longer has a deep-enough bench of proper antagonists to pull that off. 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 enemies and they don’t have the required texture or depth to fill that role. Take the Old Gods, for instance. 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. They existed as concepts more than characters, ready to use their corrupting influence to conveniently produce whatever villain was required by the patch cycle. They were useful as narrative crutches but not so much as antagonists you could care about.

The Void Lords are even worse. Where the Old Gods at least represented abstract ideas of corruption and madness, the Void Lords represent well… the void. The absence of substance, total and utter vacuity. And that’s exactly how they come across. 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. Now I’m free to spend time on things that really matter, instead of the toilet. 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 weight. 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 forces of the void.

I, for one, have zero 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.