Shadowlands had a story whose best moments were few and far between, and the rest of the expansion was defined by a mix of awful bad moments that repurposed existing Warcraft lore in service of half-baked stories, with what remains after those two categories being in a category I call “aggressively mid.” It wasn’t all bad (or good), but it was kind of like eating plain oatmeal – no one really wanted it but if you’re a WoW fiend, a meal’s a meal.

You might have noticed that I haven’t talked about lore much in Dragonflight, and there’s a reason for that – most of the expansion, so far, has been in that aggressively mid category. There have been some good moments, some headscratchers, but generally the lows have been less pronounced, which is, I suppose, a decent thing. However, I think that Dragonflight represents a challenge to WoW’s storytelling that has cropped up repeatedly in expansions over the last decade in terms of pacing and formatting of the story delivery, and it also represents the continuation of the lowered quality of storytelling the game has had under its new creative leadership.

Expansion Launch as Timewaster

One thing that annoys me to no end with WoW expansion launches is that the actual, expansion-spanning story arc is mostly absent from the launch content. We get zone stories with varying levels of cohesion to each other, a first-tier raid story that connects some small percentage of the launch events, and then the content patches post-launch all pivot from the scant connections to the launch story into a wholly different story. Shadowlands was about us solving a problem for each of the Covenants to gain their trust…and then pivots into a story about Sylvanas and the Jailer. Sure, both of those villains are present in the launch story, but they aren’t really acting – we’re told they did some stuff, we’re shown a fraction of it via a starting experience, and off we go. It wasn’t until 9.1 in Shadowlands that the story began to pivot fully to the main arc of the Jailer, and because the expansion feels cut short (I don’t buy it when Blizzard says they always planned two major patches for Shadowlands), the ending of that story is abrupt and abandoned to move on. Shadowlands might feel like a unique case with how egregious that ending was, but it’s hardly an outlier – N’Zoth was a weird narrative arc at the end of BfA, Legion ended with the giant fucking sword that still pokes the planet, and Warlords ended with that lame “Draenor is free!” proclamation that fails to resolve any of the narrative tension between the disparate races of Draenor, and which we know, thanks to Allied Races, ended poorly, with the Draenei becoming thralls of the Light and enslaving the Orc tribes.

So Blizzard does a bad job of setting up our narrative onramp into the story and generally does a bad job of ending the arc to move to the next thing, leaving a messy trail of loose-ends and unsatisfying “conclusions” in their wake. That means that most of the storytelling of a WoW expansion is in the creamy middle – those patches between expansion launch and the last major patch of an expansion. The problem I have with this is simple – it makes launch story feel often quite pointless by overriding it with the actual focal-point characters and plot elements we will face. Shadowlands, again, serves as an ideal example – Sire Denathrius was an interesting villain who got time in the launch window to be fleshed out and explored a bit, and his story has a loose connection back to the main plot the expansion ends up being about. However, he is banished at the end of the launch raid and his story, short of the Dreadlord stuff that happens as the expansion goes on, is over. We don’t get a satisfying understanding of how his deal with the Jailer was brokered, how the Dreadlords are involved (short of the obvious De-nathrius = Nathrezim wordplay), or what their goal is in freeing him (sort of). His plot sets up the Maw as this dangerous place and the Jailer as being able to accomplish his goals with the resources he gets via this deal, but we don’t satisfyingly revisit Denathrius and the Jailer and how that parternship came to pass. It’s handwaved away as a deal for power – but the terms are still opaque.

Dragonflight spends the opening window of content showing us the glorious wonders of the Dragon Isles through the eyes of it’s native keepers – the Drakonid, the Centaur of Ohn’ahran Plains, the Iskaaran Tuskarr, and the Bronze Dragonflight’s shrine. We’re introduced to the Dracthyr through their starting zone if you play one, with them otherwise being held for lore in the future, and we end with the defeat of Raszageth, but her goal of freedom for her kin accomplished. We know the Incarnates have their Primalist armies, although on what terms they consent to wage this war we don’t know, and we know that the Incarnates represent a schism in Dragonkind – a break between the Aspects, servants of the Titans and followers of Order, and the Incarnates who believe in the strength of Azeroth and their own ability to self-determine. Why this makes the Incarnates evil, of course, is still an open question!

The problem here, again, is simple though – so much of the launch story of Dragonflight is utterly meaningless in the larger context of the expansion. The Raszageth story stands alone and sees Raszageth present in 3 of the 4 main leveling zones, which is genuinely good – but in terms of the overarching story, she has little signifance less than a year into Dragonflight. She’s a footnote, in much the same way Sire Denathrius was – she’s why the Incarnates are free, but we do little more than acknowledge that role and move forward with her death. She’s been our clearest communication of the different worldviews of the Incarnates versus the Aspects, but so far that has played out in a very hit-or-miss fashion with how spread the remaining Incarnates motivations seem to be.

The most continually iterated bits of launch content in the post-launch window have been the Tyr storyline, which has had steady rollouts patch to patch, and the Bronze Dragonflight story, which ended rather unsatisfyingly in the Dawn of the Infinite mega-dungeon with a simple time corrective that has, allegedly, stopped Murozond as a concern. That finale may be a fakeout, depending on how the Eternus story of 10.1.7 goes past this point, but for now, I can only say how I feel about the content on the table.

Dragonflight should be a story about the Dragons start to finish, and we should be getting a much-larger dose of storytelling about the Incarnates, their motivations, and the split between them and the Aspects, who seemingly coexisted for a fair bit of time. But at least now we’re in the Dragon part of Dragonflight, yeah? Surely now we’ll get those beats and they’ll be good?

It Hurt Itself In Its Confusion

The storytelling in Dragonflight around the titular Dragonflights has been…well, very hit or miss. Generally, the rule has been this for me so far – if it’s a side-story that exists outside of main patch, dungeon, or raid content, it’s been pretty good, and if it’s in any of those previously-named components, it isn’t.

The Blue Dragonflight quest chain was awesome, emotionally interesting, and had a clear idea of the story they were trying to tell, the thematic implications, and what it would mean for the game moving forward. Dragonflight serves as a unifying point to bring in the “evil” or villain-batted Dragonflights back into the fold and on our side, and this storyline acknowledged the past of blue dragons in WoW while also paving a new path forward. Great stuff!

In the middle, we have the Bronze Dragonflight story that played out in patch 10.1.5 and has continued into patch 10.1.7. There’s a bit of handwavy weirdness (we fix Murozond by meddling in the timelines and that’s it he’s cured?) but the overall story pays off the bond between Nozdormu and Chromie by showing the trust they have in each other and how Nozdormu is willing to reconsider his path if provided with a well-reasoned argument. We also get our first defection from the Infinites with Eternus coming to join the Bronze, explaining the motivations that led her to the Infinites and being shown, brutally, why the ideals of the Infinites can be a problem, watching her sister die over and over again trying to puzzle out how to solve the problem. This is a neat inversion of what we’ve traditionally seen with the Infinites and Bronze, but it also feels sort of hollow and maybe even predictable. Eternus is either key to Nozdormu not turning by showing a path to merge the interests of the wayward Infinites with the Bronze, or she is the key to turning him to Murozond through infiltrating and planting the seed more subtly than the overt actions of Deios in the megadungeon. It’s not an awful story, but it just feels a bit rote and predictable in that way – and if we go down a different path or the particulars of the path are interesting enough, I could see it being great!

Then we have the bad side – the Black Dragonflight’s handling in general and in patch 10.1 specifically.

There are people who are happy with Ebyssian as Aspect, and I think generally he’s fine in that role, taken in isolation. Where I find that decision problematic is in how Ebyssian has been portrayed as a character to this point – as someone wanting to shed his heritage and adopt his hidden role as Ebonhorn. Granted, the Dracthyr help him to turn that around a bit through their viewpoint, and it is a sufficiently interesting plotline there, but I also think that moving so quickly to a resolution on this story shortchanges the potential and also undercuts the storytelling of the launch story around the black dragons. For one thing, the 10.1 campaign was very haphazard and vascilated between weeks as though wholly different writers were working on each week of the campaign. In 10.0, we help either Sabellian or Wrathion through donating our time and effort to their cause. You can do both, and the rewards are largely cosmetic (especially now with gear creep), with the implication being that you are supporting one or the other in pursuit of the Aspect role. Through the process, you can see the two potential heirs coming to terms with each other and even entering a sort of begrudging respect era, which the opening segment of 10.1 questing sort of picks up with. Sabellian and Wrathion aren’t besties or aligned that closely, but there is a kinship, some banter, a sort of mix of respect and lighthearted ribbing coupled with genuine compassion and desire to lift each other up alongside disagreements with methods. Wrathion is brash, arrogant, and aggressive – charging into Zaralek recklessly. Sabellian is calm, collected, and scheming – much more stereotypical Black Dragonflight stuff, but through a lens that de-evils it in a way that evolves how they’ve been presented historically, and even sort of softens how he was initially presented way back in The Burning Crusade. Genuinely, that first week of questing set a good tone that I liked – there’s a rivalry but a kinship, and you can see how they’ll get along and partner up when one of them ascends to the throne of Aspect.

Then, in alternating weeks, that tone is undone by errant writing that seems to have amnesia about the events of the prior week. Sabellian and Wrathion are at odds for no good reason, with Sabellian calling out Wrathion as an experiment and leaning hard into the idea that experiments are fodder to die – much more in line with traditional Black Dragonflight stuff, but undoing all the good work done in portraying him in the prior chapters of the Dragonflight story. Surely the topic of Wrathion’s birth and nature came up in all that time they spent above Neltharus, so the way in which it gets shoehorned into the dialogue of the campaign is so bizarre and offputting that it killed the story dead for me. At that point, I didn’t care who got the seat of the Aspect, and lucky me, at that point it was all too obvious that Ebyssian would get it. There’s foreshadowing and then there’s unsubtle plot revelations ahead of plan, and Ebyssian’s ascent to Aspect is more of the latter – signposted heavily the second he becomes the mission-focused, forward-thinking dragon that Sabellian had been before he decided to start calling for the death of experiments and being a crude little shit. So we end up having to undo Sabellian’s negative development to get him back to his 10.1 starting state, which is done via the raid and having Sabellian be disgusted by how Neltharion treated his experiments and how he viewed them.

The biggest thing, as ever, that gets me in Dragonflight as it has for much of WoW storytelling in the past several years, is simple – there’s no consistent narrative arc worth paying attention to because only the last act matters. The particulars of how Ebyssian proves worthy of the seat of Aspect don’t matter, it’s just the finale scene that decides it where the characters regurgitate the moral of the story for you, which would be insulting if Blizzard had been following their own story to completion, but it zigged and zagged when it didn’t need to and so I kind of wanted them to just tell me the relevant plot for later. My reward for following the Black Dragonflight story was…watching it awkwardly stutter around and change directions in strange ways mid-flight. Not great! It’d be a great story to tell if Wrathion slowly became more strategic and restrained while Sabellian became more compassionate and kind through their journey together, but instead they entrench in their negative character traits until the image of their father teaches the lesson in the raid, scenes which are not given suitable context for those who don’t do Aberrus. Sabellian in particular suffers here because his arc goes all over the place and I came to loathe it for that lack of attention given week-to-week.

Now a lot of this isn’t out of line for bog-standard modern Blizzard WoW storytelling, but because of a controversy, we learned something interesting about how story gets implemented in WoW, and well…it’s a doozy.

The Role of Lore and Historians In WoW’s Development

Stop before I introduce this topic and think for a second – if you were making a game where storytelling and lore is a foundational part of the experience, how involved do you think the lore team should be?

Alright, so after a few minutes, you’ve probably got a vibe for it, right? Lore should be involved in making sure that new content is consistent with the lore and story being told, there should be a handoff process and review where the writers on the game are required to review new content and make sure it aligns with the story and lore development they’ve done and that the message of the gameplay and questing content is matched up perfectly. You’d expect this is about the minimum, yeah? Review the content, make sure it matches and fits tonally and in the particulars, approve or send it back for corrections.

Now what if I told you World of Warcraft just…doesn’t do that?

Oh boy.

When the controversy over the Alexstraza quest I wrote about previously broke during the 10.1.5 PTR cycle, a lot of players rightly asked, “how did the game team miss this foundational lore?” The answer, surprisingly, came from the wife of Blizzard’s lead historian, April Copeland, who took to Twitter and advised that the process at Blizzard on WoW is that the lore team is neither supervisory nor a mandatory part of the game design and development process. The development teams can choose to bring them in for support or to review the work they’ve done and make sure it passes muster within the setting and established lore, but they are not a default part of the process nor a required presence – it is at the mercy of the development team to decide to bring them in for help.

It’s presented in a flowery way here, that the developers are the authority and that lore should not stand in the way of making a good game – and to a point, sure. WoW has always, like it or not, prioritized the gameplay presented to players and so a lot of the work the developers do exists outside of lore or story, and that is acceptable. However, WoW presents itself as a game that puts emphasis and care into storytelling and lore, and has traditionally treated these as important elements of the game as a finished, well-rounded product. The revelation that the lore team is on an invitation-only basis to review content explains quite a lot of the dissonance in WoW between the story and gameplay and why the game is so often telling one story and offering a different ludonarrative, or why quest content can feel so detached from the overall story and lore – it’s because they likely are, divided into camps of what was lore-team approved and what the lore team never even saw. Now, obviously, we’re not privvy to the finer details – what percentage of the game has been reviewed, how that works for the main story content of a patch compared to the raid, dungeon, or side content, and if Blizzard treats the lore and story teams as separate (it seems not, but hard to say for sure). But in the context of historical lore, it makes sense through that lens how the game had, even if just on PTR, a quest that mangles and reuses the worst aspect of Alexstraza’s story for a cheap repeatable piece of content.

What’s more, this explains a big beef I’ve had with the work of the current story team.

Warcraft is a big, long-lived setting, nearing 30 years old with a mix of MMO storytelling and old RTS storytelling. It is to be expected at times that lore and storytelling will evolve over time – Warcraft I and II both had fairly threadbare stories in-game as it stands and it has largely been subsequent storytelling that has fleshed out the setting, from the novel series of the early 2000s to Warcraft III through to WoW. However, I think that to a point, new lore and storytelling has to honor what came before, instead of trying to change it or recontextualize it.

In Shadowlands, I hated the story of the Jailer. It was just weak on its own, which is fine enough – not a crime, certainly. However, what pushed me to hate it was how the Jailer was, retroactively, pushed in as the central figure behind much of the plot of Warcraft III. By presenting the stories of Arthas, Kel’Thuzad, and Sylvanas as pre-ordained “master plan” events instead of having allowed them to happen of their own accord as was originally the story, the story of Warcraft III and integrity of the setting as a whole is called into question. What was once settled lore is now anything but, and by starting down that path, Blizzard has now created a scenario in which the lore’s grounding is far less certain.

I hated this about the Jailer because the stories he was woven into from Warcraft III were the most interesting and good parts of that story. Arthas’ descent is interesting as the tale of a man who seeks justice and peace and goes too far for the power to enact his vision, to the point it costs him his family, his love, and his identity. But if it is the plan of the Jailer, then the emotional poignance of that journey is lost and tarnished. Kel’Thuzad and Sylvanas had their own stories that show downfalls in unique ways and through their actions – all of which is cheapened by the Shadowlands story.

Right now, the current WoW writer team is doing the same to Neltharion. Neltharion having been good, having been uncorrupted, was a part of his story – a fall from grace. However, Dragonflight and Aberrus now call that into question, making it seem as though Neltharion was always at least a little uncaring, experimental, and ruthless in pursuit of his goals. It takes a part of the established lore around Neltharion – that he was once a good, uncorrupted, honorable Aspect – and erodes it a little bit. Sure, there’s still room in this telling to suggest that he was good, that he was moved only slightly to madness before being made to seal Raszageth away at the Forbidden Reach pulled him into the thrall of the Old Gods – but the fact that his established, pre-Dracthyr lab, the place he worked to create the Dracthyr, also bore a shrine to the Old Gods and that the creation of the Dracthyr was less a noble aim to create life and more a plan to create and test super soldiers for his own, likely-corrupt aims, is kind of disappointing. Neltharion is an interesting fall from grace story, the idea that even a noble Aspect could fall to the corruption of the Old Gods, but it requires that he have a certain amount of grace beforehand. The story of the Dracthyr, the Forbidden Reach, and now Aberrus have all pointed to the idea that Neltharion kind of sucked even before the Old God corruption, that beneath the veneer of honorable Aspect he was always a slimy, calculating scientist doing horrific things in service of his own ends. That isn’t even a bad story beat to build on! – but it undercuts the lore that came before and isn’t meaningfully paid off. If we had more context from the Aspects, more surprise, more discussion of how they missed these things in their brother, it could be a really good plot and story! Instead, most of the Aberrus lore bombs and the various other reveals about Neltharion in the opening window of the expansion are treated as extensions of his character, that even in spite of these things being new information in many cases, no one is really shocked and we instead just tie them up as part of “he who would become Deathwing” and move on.

I dislike that modern WoW has little respect for the foundational lore and storytelling that defined the franchise. If a foundational lore element is changed in service of a new plot, that can be fine – but I want that new plot and the tweaks to understand the original story and honor it in retelling and redefinition. There’s a valid question to be asked about how much of WoW’s lore foundation really “matters” – how much we should endeavor to maintain as-is, and I think that gets tied up in another thought about WoW’s lore. If you’ve played WoW for a while, you might even ask yourself this – was Warcraft lore ever good?

The Impact and Return of the King

Warcraft lore was, by and large, shaped by the hand of one Chris Metzen. The foundational aspects of the story of Warcraft, the world of Azeroth, all of it spawned from the imagination of this guy. Even as Warcraft became WoW, he was instrumental in shaping the game – training up understudies who would eventually take his mantle as he left Blizzard for his own endeavors, like Alex Afrasiabi…oh. Right. That kinda sucks!

People generally liked Warcraft as a story under Metzen, but he is not above criticism. His writing is very trope-reliant, to the point that hero corruption and downfall arcs were kind of his specialty – Illidan, Arthas, even Grom in Warcraft III. He loves being an author-insert to the point that a lot of characters of early WoW origin have his voice acting behind them and a lot of stories in WoW reflect some personal experience at the time – hard not to notice how around the time Metzen was getting married there was a plot about Thrall learning to balance duty to Azeroth with family that defined a sort-of strange stretch of mid-Cataclysm. Over time, I’ve personally grappled with how I feel about Metzen’s writing and WoW under his creative leadership, and I think that where I’ve landed is this: Metzen is a decent-to-good writer.

Does he write sometimes-simplistic stories that lean on a common set of ideas and story beats? Sure. But I think the thing I genuinely liked about WoW under Metzen’s creative guidance is that it had an emotional center to it, that even if it was sometimes barely-veiled author-insert, it had a purpose and passion behind it. Metzen could be a repetitive writer, but I always felt like he left a little bit of himself in the work he put forward, that it mattered to him. The modern writing team behind WoW lacks that quite often, and it feels like a sort of sterile replacement for it. I rarely get the impression of what matters to the current team and current leadership, and what pokes through is often a status-quo adhering lack of passion – the lack of desire to meaningfully change anything. The big denouement to Shadowlands was the enshrining of a new Arbiter – no real system changes, just a return to the old ways with a friendlier veneer, and that same sort of fence-sitting is present throughout the Warcraft setting in modern writing – disruption and change are challenges to overcome in order to maintain stasis. Metzen, for his flaws as a writer, has fire and interest in things changing, and he reflects a lot of change in stories with his fingerprints on them. Warcraft III was a story about changing fortunes, about the Orcs finding home on Azeroth and the world changing for it, through conflict with other factions and the partnership of those factions to face the shared threat of the Burning Legion.

So the news that came out today, that Metzen is the Executive Creative Director on Warcraft, after returning to Blizzard as a creative consultant for Warcraft in 2022, is interesting to me.

A big part of my interest is that it feels more than a little cynical – the story of WoW is an oft-criticized point, so we bring back the person in charge when it was better-received and make a big public hoopla about it! And sure, I don’t doubt that this cynical take is at least partially accurate. Right now, one of the key ways in which WoW is soundly beaten by competitive products in the MMO space is through story – FFXIV gained a ton of ground by pushing story as a primary selling point, and while it has a less-impressive central lore to it, the overall story of FFXIV is leaps and bounds ahead of WoW in terms of overall quality and craft in presentation and storytelling, even if it’s having a less-exceptional patch cycle this expansion on that very front (a topic for another time). Yet at the same time, I do think this could be a good, highly-positive thing for WoW.

So we now circle back to the question I used to segue into this section – was WoW’s story ever good? And the answer I would give is this: yeah, kinda. Was it high art literary genius? No, but most stories aren’t – for as much as I love FFXIV’s overall storytelling, I wouldn’t put it in that category either. Under Metzen, WoW was trope-laden, sort-of predictable, and generally a “safe” story that didn’t push too many boundaries or shoot for the moon. What it was, however, was deeply character-focused, presenting some well-written characters with strong central identities and traits that defined WoW. I think it is little coincidence that much of the criticism of the game’s creative direction the last several years centers on the treatment of established characters from the Metzen era like Sylvanas and Tyrande, and that much of the criticism around those characters involves how they break from established characterization – much of which was written by or under the supervision of Chris Metzen.

That leaves us with a question – what does the future hold? Well, we’re not going to know much until 10.2 launches fully, likely in November, and that story campaign unfolds. We’re also supposed to be learning more about the future of Warcraft at Blizzcon, which is specifcally teased as Metzen-adjacent in the announcement today, and also the most predictable thing (it’s new expansion unveil time!). For 10.2 itself, the story on PTR is…fine enough. It’s still in that “aggressively-mid” categorization I talked about earlier – not bad, but also not exceptionally good or interesting. There are a few moments that could be more in their proper context, with obviously-missing cutscenes added, like a loopback to Legion to deal with the Storm Dragons and the involvement of the Netherdrakes coming to Azeroth as an expanded part of dragonkind, and these are more interesting to me pending how they get fleshed out with full context on live servers. Again, I think that what is there is fine enough, it just isn’t exciting either for the most part, and at least this patch circles back to more recent WoW events like Teldrassil and works towards finding a path forward in the lore that doesn’t just leave the Night Elves in limbo.

Am I excited to see what Metzen does? Yeah, kinda! I’m not holding my breath that the story of WoW is going to develop the nuance and multi-layered complexity I enjoy in FFXIV, but I think Metzen generally does a good job developing, telling, and concluding his stories, and I hope under his direct leadership the game starts to think more carefully about resolving current story arcs instead of leaving everything incredibly open-ended as they do now. There’s space between “every expansion is a standalone story arc that doesn’t leak into the next thing” and “the story is an evolving thing that constantly moves forward while leaving a lot of plots twisting in the wind.” For a lot of what I think ails the franchise, Metzen is the cure – he has respect for its past (he wrote most of it, after all), passion for it and the characters involved, and a storytelling style with the kind of bombast and intrigue that better suits a game, compared to the half-baked Game of Thrones thing the current writing team loves doing. Sure, I think it’s fair to say that sometimes Metzen’s writing is too direct and blunt, lacking in metaphor and audience interpretation, but I think that the game needs a stronger hand that is willing to put some force behind the story and make sure the key points are directly stated to the audience.

My biggest hope though is that hiring Metzen back as an executive role in this capacity means that the lore team is more involved and more engaged with gameplay and design, making sure that everything that is in gameplay is reflective of the direction of lore and vice-versa. Bringing back some synergy and harmony between the gameplay and narrative at all levels of gameplay is a net positive for the game that I hope they pursue, both with Metzen directing creative but also just in general at the game level since it would likely need signoff from the game director and other leadership staff. Genuinely, I think it would make WoW a lot better of a game if it got back to having lore and the setting be a foundational part of the game and not just the window dressing we stare at. It gives me the tiniest hope that Blizzard maybe finally gets that now that they are taking actions like bringing Metzen up to a full titled role, and while I’m not going to declare it as a win yet, it at least does bestow a little optimism.