Originally Posted by Sillia
It does seem rather dodgy that the only solution is to kill Malygos though. I mean... seriously, the only way to justify this is for him to jump off the slippery slope completely. We don't have the *time* to adequately flesh out what could possibly happen here, so they're going to speed it up by just saying he went nuts. That always leaves a bad taste in the mouth, because it's silly... he's been in charge of protecting magic for thousands of years and instead of working towards a real solution, he goes nuts and we have to put him down. |
You don't think there's enough room in Northrend to build up a story of why Malygos is doing what he's doing?
I imagine that his storyline will play out like Vashj's in TBC, only hopefully... better. Dragonblight is a 71-74 zone, so you'll go there relatively early in the expansion, and you'll probably get the first hints of what Malygos is up to around then if not earlier. It'll be like how the CE quests in Zangarmarsh focused around figuring out what the Naga were doing there, leading to the investigation of the pumping stations and eventually Coilfang Reservoir... only replace Naga with "blue dragons", pumping stations with "leylines" or some other blue-dragon related structure, and CFR with "the Nexus".
The problem with the Naga storyline in TBC, though, was that once you exited Zangarmarsh at ~63, it was done. Okay, there were a couple of hints towards it in Nagrand (the enemy Broken there actually serve one of the Underbog bosses, that's easy to miss..), but other than that it was just a matter of going back at 70 and taking out the leaders of CFR, Kalistrath (sp) and Vashj. If Blizzard has learned from their mistakes at all, they'll find a way to tie in the Malygos story to the other zones, or maybe make a high-level portion of Dragonblight that would reintroduce players to the story before sending them off to fight Malygos. It seems that Dalaran itself will be tied to this story, but it's hard to speculate how that'll fit in.
In short, though, I don't think there's any reason to doubt that Blizzard can make the arc interesting. In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if the impetus for the entire Northrend campaign is Malygos fucking around with things rather than another Scourge invasion... he just lost a blue dragon at the Sunwell, almost two, he's probably pretty pissed off. Well, then again, they've already got the template for a Scourge invasion ingame, I'm sure they'll reuse it..
The main question, ultimately, will be whether Blizzard learns from their shortcomings in the design of TBC's story. A lot of the parts of the story were great, they just didn't tie together that well largely because of the sharply-delineated zones. But I think Netherstorm is the quintessential example of how Blizzard can get these things right. With the exception of the Sunwell, they also didn't tie the raid encounters to the story very well, it was little more than "we've lead you through an epic story against faction X, but their powerful leader is still alive, I guess you can kill him/her if you feel like it." Mount Hyjal is definitely the low point of this, not even featuring the faction that had caused problems elsewhere..
Oh, and as something of an aside, is anyone else excited to hear that they're bringing back Arugal / the Worgen? I hate the unfinished plots in the old world, hopefully they'll do more here... finish the freakin' Scythe of Elune / Karazhan Riders story please. Oh, and the Ashbringer, for the love of all that's holy..