Death was the end of a journey and a permanent danger. But in World of Warcraft, that is no longer the case. How does Blizzard plan to save this story?
It is now no secret that Shadowlands has not exactly excited many players. One must not only talk about the gameplay, but just the story alone elicits derisive snorts from many.
One of the biggest criticisms does not deal with the “story itself,” explicitly not with the details that take place in the Shadowlands. It concerns a completely different problem:
Death is completely demystified.
The problem with the story of Shadowlands likely lies mainly in its long-term significance. Giving death in World of Warcraft a face and clear rules is on one hand a very cool thing.
To know what happens after death is a wish that not only the characters in the game have, but also most people in the real world every now and then nurture. Showing a clear definition of the afterlife with all its rules is fundamentally a cool framework for a fantasy setting.
However, these revelations are also likely to lead to the peoples and cultures in World of Warcraft undergoing massive changes in the coming years. When a paladin now tells his dying comrade, “In the Light, we will be reunited,” that is no longer faith, conviction, and wishful thinking, but simply factually wrong.
When a mage kills a wayward colleague who has become a warlock and declares in anger that “Only hell awaits him” – that is simply not true. Because presumably the warlock will land in Revendreth, play a few decades as an Anima battery, and then ultimately find peace in the afterlife.
The various cultures, whether humans, taurens, orcs, or draenei – they will all inevitably get a very clear picture of death in the coming years. What does that do to cultures whose beliefs go back many centuries or millennia? Can something like that even be convincingly represented in an MMORPG, not just for a single people – but for a whole multitude of them?
Pelagos is too nice to be the Grim Reaper
The next big problem is Pelagos. He became the new Soul Judge, which is fundamentally an acceptable story, although it was a bit rushed and difficult for non-Kyrian to comprehend. However, it has become quite clear that Pelagos, in his rise to Soul Judge, has hardly lost any of his personality. He is still a person who evaluates each being individually, and whose actions are mainly driven by compassion.
Blizzard has put itself in a very difficult dramatic situation with this decision. Because death, in almost all forms of storytelling, is a simple yet extremely powerful tool. It is the ever-present threat in the background, a driving factor of tension. Stories about adventures and seemingly insurmountable obstacles are often thrilling because when heroes fail, death looms. Series like “Game of Thrones” or “Squid Game” have shown clearly how much tension the mere possibility of death can evoke and how shocking it is when main characters are not spared.
Some of the most emotional and powerful scenes in World of Warcraft are only so because death has such weight. Whether we take the slaying of the nightmare corrupted Ysera in Val’sharah, the brutal death of Garrosh in Nagrand, the last breaths of Vol’jin in Orgrimmar, or the heroic death of Saurfang.
All these moments had power because death was accompanied by uncertainty. Because death is a drastic cut that removes characters from the equation of the story. Sure, some characters reappear as souls or shades, are summoned by shamans, or similar. But those were always just brief moments or extreme exceptions that had a story-based reason for why their souls remained.
All of this is now destroyed – and probably irreversibly.
Just imagine how differently you would have experienced some cinematics in World of Warcraft. Would Ysera’s death have had the same impact? Would Varian’s heroic sacrifice have left you staring at the screen if you had known that after death they come to Pelagos, who judges their souls?
No, almost certainly not. The fact that Pelagos is not – like the previous Soul Judge – acting as a relatively objective “machine,” but as a being driven by compassion makes this situation even worse. Any character that is somewhat heroic or portrayed as “good” will end up as a soul before Pelagos and will most likely be sent to the “cuddle puddle paradise for good souls” due to his friendly and compassionate nature.
Of course, there are exceptions. Varian’s soul, for example, did not go to the Shadowlands, it was obliterated by fel magic, for fel magic destroys souls and has the ability to completely consume them.
But that death in the story of World of Warcraft is now only the end in exceptional cases and no longer the rule, could be a blow that will fall back on the storytellers’ feet in the coming years.
Blizzard will have to find a solution to this narrative problem. And the only obvious fix is to create an even greater threat that threatens both the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Because only when souls would also be in danger in their afterlife would death again become a real threat.
But no one wants such huge, cosmic threats right now – and rightly so.
Dismantling the myth of death was a rather radical decision. And I hope that the writing team knew very well where they wanted to go with this. Because otherwise, everything in the Warcraft cosmos loses relevance.
