The strange versus the familiar

I’ve said before that one of the key factors that drove me to playing WoW was my love of Warcraft 3 and how I wanted to see through all the plot points that were left unresolved, namely the Lich King. Shortly into my WoW career when the rampant interest in the stories and lore on offer really set in, I ended up looking back over what I’d missed in the two or three years of vanilla that I’d not been present for.

It was an interesting experience because I remember looking at all the big threats, the big bad villains that we raided to kill… and realising that aside from Kel’thuzad in the final content patch, I didn’t know who any of the villains were. Ragnaros? He wasn’t in the RTS. Hakkar? Nope. C’Thun and the qiraji? Never heard of them. Onyxia and Nefarian? Well, I’ve heard of their dad… but nope, they’re drawing blanks with me. Again, Kel’thuzad was the first boss where I could actually go “Oh, okay, I know that guy.” It wasn’t even just the raid bosses. Pretty much every dungeon was filled with people I’d never even heard of and didn’t know anything about their story, but in the end just about all of them worked. They all filled their niche, they all fit their purpose, and they (mostly) all had their place in the flow of the story.

It was only when one crossed the Portal into Outland that suddenly familiar names are popping up everywhere. Once you cleared Karazhan and Gruul, you had Magtheridon, Vashj, Kael’thas, Illidan, Zul’jin, and eventually Kil’jaeden himself all wanting a piece of you. We suddenly went from killing entirely new and original threats to rehashing the old stuff from the RTS. I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad thing either, don’t get me wrong – some of us migrated from RTS to MMO simply because we wanted to see those guys and stick them with whatever pointy thing we had available at the time. But it did show a somewhat marked change from the vanilla content.

Sometimes I wonder which is better: treading the familiar ground and giving us familiar faces to encounter, fight against, and ultimately defeat… or creating new characters and enemies in the gaps of the lore to give us something without having to kill the supposed Holy Grail of RTS characters. Certainly, there are two schools of thought within the fanbase, but that’s always the case. You’ll always have the die hards who absolutely insist that because a character was in the RTS, they are simply beyond reproach and should not ever come into the story. Likewise, you’ll have those who say that they’d rather fight established figures rather than some no-name random that Metzen came up with while drunk.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with killing the characters. Then again, I’m a writer and so I understand that no matter how much of an ensemble darkhorse somebody might be, all characters have a part to play and a purpose to fill. Sometimes, that means being defeated to reward the new generation of heroes. We all have our favourites, but hey, no king rules forever. Again, it was the desire to continue the story of the Lich King and see him brought low that was one of the major motivating factors for me in starting up WoW.

Blizzard certainly received a lot of flak for turning an arguably Not Evil character (Illidan) into an insane and depraved enemy who only showed up a few times before we killed him. They received even more flak for doing the same thing with Kael’thas, who was Even More Not Evil in the RTS games and yet was so despicably bad and evil in Burning Crusade that we had to kill him twice. I think they learned from that in Wrath of the Lich King, though: The Lich King was well and truly evil, yes, but he at least had the chance to show up and make himself really hated and reviled several times before the inevitable conclusion. The previous post, though, suggests that maybe that wasn’t done to perfection either.

At the same time, however, an interesting thing occurred in Wrath of the Lich King. Remember when I said that my favourite raid is Ulduar? Well, the entirety of that raid – the story, the enemies, the characters both in and out of the raid itself – were entirely new, created just for this expansion. The watchers, Loken, Yogg-Saron, Algalon… it provided a great story, a really tough raid, and the ultimate ramifications of the raid had us take a long hard look at the thought-to-be benevolent Titans and realise that they might just be cold and uncaring, potentially even hostile. Ulduar really opened up a lot of doors… and again, the whole thing had absolutely no connection to the Lich King or, indeed, barely any existing lore from the RTS games at all.

Cataclysm finds us at a new impasse, then. Like with the previous expansions, we’ve been given a targeted villain that many RTS players are familiar with right from the outset to direct our hatred onto: Deathwing. Like WotLK, we’ve been told that he’ll show up and make his influence known all over the place as the expansion progresses. Yet… he doesn’t feel like the big threat. Yeah, he’s a threat, he’s a big bad evil dragon with enough power to make Azeroth almost collapse into the Elemental Plane of Earth. But he doesn’t seem like the big overlord that the Lich King was.

This is especially true when you look at the stuff that will be joining him in the game. The Lich King had centre stage because the whole expansion – sans the Ulduar deviation – focused on the campaign to bring him down. Deathwing… not so much. Yeah, he *caused* the Cataclysm, but he’s not the only destructive feature of said cataclysm. There’s all the invasions of the elemental lords, there’s the continued threat of the Old Gods (which Deathwing is but a pawn/champion of anyway), there’s the rampant animosity between Alliance and Horde… a hell of a lot is going to happen in this expansion, and Deathwing really doesn’t seem like he’ll be taking centre stage aside from being the penultimate trophy we kill.

But the reason I’m bringing all this up? Just about every single element of the Cataclysm beyond, say, the War of the Ancients and anything relating to Queen Azshara is entirely a product of the MMO rather than the RTS. Ragnaros and the other elemental lords are all products of the MMO if not completely new, the Old Gods were developed for the MMO, the figureheads of the Horde and Alliance are all brand new, most of Deathwing’s servants and aides like his resurrected son… pretty much everything is new, save for Deathwing and Cho’Gall.

And really, that might be a sign that we’re simply running out of material to draw from… there’s not that many loose ends left from the RTS that we haven’t already tied up. If Blizzard is serious about continuing WoW as they’ve said repeatedly that they are, much of what they’ll be doing is drawing a little bit from the remaining threads in the RTS series, and then filling it out with new creations. That means that sooner or later, the question of whether it’s better to have new lore figures and enemies to fight rather than drawing directly from the RTS is going to be completely irrelevant. There won’t be much left to draw from soon, and so we’re going to have to get used to the idea of fighting things that are completely new and made up just for the sake of continuing the juggernaught of the MMO industry that WoW has become.

That is… at least until they reveal that new MMO. My money’s on that being a Starcraft MMO, actually. More on that later.

So what do you guys think? Is it better to fight the stuff we know, or the stuff we don’t?

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