#and the game doesnt spoonfeed everything to you

[minijenn]

Having played a few hours, I can safely say:

Princess Peach Showtime is everything I ever hoped it would be

[swampgallows]

don't get me started on overlooked wotlk/bc lore? 🤔 (was going thru dungeons/raids from those xpacs and je suis annihilated over how much lore i never learned bc i didnt see the Little Stuff e.g. quest text and tooltips)

BROOOOO everybody goes to howling fjord “cause the music and it’s pretty” and then grizzly hills “cause the music and it’s pretty” and then sholazar basin “cause the music and it’s pretty” then ollie out because they outlevel the continent... every. single. time. AND IT SUCKS!!! in developing content for salt the roads i quested through borean tundra on several alts just to get the timing and everything right, both alliance and horde, and MAN the overall atmosphere of it can’t be beat, and there is SO MUCH that leads up to later content/xpacs. 

In the Riplash Ruins you help out the naga of all things because the vrykul/kvaldir are trying to use one of their own beasts against them. They’re straight up like “Azshara herself imprisoned this leviathan here centuries ago and now the kvaldir are making sacrifices to try and win it over!” like are you kidding? that shit would be like raid-tier now (in fact the leviathan uses the same model as The Lurker Below in Serpentshrine). 

how about the initial breadcrumbs in Fizzcrank Airstrip leading up to Ulduar? in the Alliance side of questing in Borean Tundra you learn that the reason their oil rigs are jammed are because they’re full of pieces of original mechagnomes. this was definitely foreshadowing for Mimiron and the other constructs that appeared in the Ulduar raid later in the expansion. Now, not only is Mechagon no longer a myth, but mechagnomes are playable!! I think a lot of people think it came out of nowhere, but there is a lot of really interesting dwarf and gnome lore that’s directly tied to the Titans and their constructs. The “curse of the flesh” is also incredibly cool, and I’m really glad they brought it back as a plot device for King Mechagon in BFA.

bro and oh my fucking GOD the people who skip Zul’drak are out of their fucking MINDS. Zul’drak and fucking Drakuru is one of the coolest story arcs with some of the best storytelling ever, and it really has a lot of its elements echoed in other troll areas, including Zandalar. For brevity, the Lich King is being interpreted by the Drakkari (and the vrykul, on another note) as a new Death God, one more powerful than the existing loa. Believing he can and will consume everything in Northrend, many of the Drakkari turn their backs on their loa and ally with this new god of death. This in turn weakens the other loa of Zul’drak to a point where some of them have been defeated or even consumed by Drakkari mortals, gaining their powers or using them for ill. The temples are abandoned and overrun with the Scourge, or their loas are crying out in madness and pain begging for help or revenge. You get to work alongside the snow leopard loa Har’koa to avenge her loa brethren and do your best to restore faith in the loa that still exist. It’s a fucking amazing campaign and was one of the first ones to naturally and neatly flow from one zone (Grizzly Hills) into the next (Zul’Drak) and culminate in the dungeons of the zone (Drak’tharon Keep & Gundrak), giving them actual story purpose for being run rather than “hey look at that spooky place that has loot”. And especially for players who remember the Gurubashi and Amani’s attempts to control/consume their loa, seeing that the Drakkari manage to do it and the impact that it has is downright bonechilling.

like it’s good that WoW has new cinematics and lots of voice acting (or “rp” as people call it) to tell the story and drive certain aspects home because back in the day i used to tell people that WoW was “reading: the game”, but it’s a shame because i feel like some of the stuff doesnt pack the same punch having it told to you like youre a baby at storytime rather than slowly inferring stuff on your own as you complete quests. all the new spectacle stuff is very good but i feel like it kinda spoonfeeds the audience the story sometimes, and it changes the tone a lot from the more subtle stuff in vanilla to wrath.

oh man i didnt hit up BC yet... yall already know to gut nagrand of quests but I feel like netherstorm and shadowmoon valley are vastly underrated too. if youre into the void or wondering about shadow magic, or what kael’thas was up to, a lot of netherstorm answers those questions via the ethereals. they also have like the ghosts of the alliance settlements from when they first came through the portal... man and the oshu’gun part of the main questline in bc nagrand (garrosh’s questline, incidentally, and requires you to go to auchenai crypts) also brings up an interesting question about the origin of naaru with the corruption of k’ure. k’uru was a naaru that turned to void after it was damaged/trapped in the genedar/oshu’gun and started drawing orc spirits toward it and corrupting them, but from the way it’s described it sounds almost like if the naaru can’t reach out to the light or its worshipers they can turn to void, much like the loa being reliant on their believers for their power. so especially with stuff like The Rejection of the Gift with Xe’ra in Legion, it has a lot of people wondering if void is the natural state of things and that the naaru are an augmentation of that, or the naaru possibly have their own agenda not unlike the void, so on and so forth...

I DUNNO MAN there is SO MUCH about current lore that has preexisting threads and connotations which is why i get so frustrated that people are like “OMG they introduced THIS in THIS xpac and then DIDNT ADDRESS IT!!!” like damn it’s the WORLD of warcraft, theyll get there in time! there’s a lot of shit to cover! not only that but you have NO IDEA what might get put back on the table after years of it lying dormant, much like the mechagnomes of Wrath reemerging in BFA or the ethereals’ ability to travel through the void in BC resurfacing again via the Locus Walker and the void elves... AAAAA IT’S SO GOOD