New, compelling villains are a problem – even in World of Warcraft. The Game Director admits that they have struggled with this.
In MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, there are constantly new contents. Not just new loot and better abilities – but also enemies that need to be defeated. While you can quickly pull the tenth Gnoll or the fifth Necromancer out of thin air, it takes much more time to build up big, compelling villains. This has not always been achieved in World of Warcraft, as Blizzard also admits.
What was said? In an interview at gamescom, World of Warcraft’s Game Director, Ion Hazzikostas, spoke with GamesRadar magazine. It was about how they were able to rely early on strong characters from Warcraft III, but that was a very short-sighted approach.
We could just say: “You will fight against Illidan” and many players would respond: “That’s amazing! I can’t wait to fight against Illidan.”
You never interact with Illidan. You learn nothing about him in World of Warcraft. But that wasn’t important because he had already been built up beforehand.
Looking back, this seems to be true. Especially in “The Burning Crusade,” great, well-known characters were burned out in rapid succession. Just consider that Kael’thas Sunstrider, Lady Vashj, and Illidan Stormrage were all defeated in the same expansion. These were major, playable characters in Warcraft III. In World of Warcraft, they were simply raid bosses, with which, in most cases, you didn’t interact outside the respective raid.
Burning through the characters early in the lifespan of World of Warcraft seemed to backfire on the game.
In later expansions, I believe we had some incidents where we struggled to present a believable, compelling villain who would ultimately be defeated by the players 18 months later.
Which characters are considered failures? The most prominent example of this failure is the Jailer from the Shadowlands expansion. The idea behind the villain was that he is a major, central threat responsible for many events in the history of World of Warcraft. However, Blizzard clearly overdid it in the eyes of fans.
Because old, beloved stories were now recontextualized. This caused major characters like Arthas, Kel’Thuzad, and Sylvanas to lose significance, as they were all merely pawns in the Jailer’s plan.
Additionally, the Jailer himself was weakly developed in his own expansion. His true motivations were hardly comprehensible – also because he had so few lines of dialogue that players had no connection to him at all.
Previously, there were indeed enemies that were planned and developed much longer. A positive example of this is Garrosh. Even though he wasn’t the greatest strategist, his character was shaped over several expansions and he evolved understandably into the tyrant that significantly shaped the expansions “Mists of Pandaria” and “Warlords of Draenor.”
This is how Blizzard does it now: That Blizzard has learned from the major misstep with the Jailer is evident at the latest with The War Within, even though hints of this were already visible in Dragonflight. The new antagonist Xal’atath has been gradually built up over 8 years.
She first appeared in the “Legion” expansion, and the powers she serves were already mentioned in The Burning Crusade. Xal’atath has appeared here and there in the last expansions, until she finally implements her plan with the World Soul saga.
Whether Blizzard has finally hit the nail on the head again when it comes to creating villains remains to be seen. At least at present, they seem to have hit the right nerve with the community with Xal’atath. If you are not quite familiar with the mysterious elf yet, we have Xal’atath’s entire story explained here.
