It's Time For 'World Of Warcraft' To End

I mean, if we're being honest, it's well past time for this game to finally die out, but the end of the current expansion really sealed the deal for me.

So I've been a Warcraft fan for...a long time now. My friends and I played 'Warcraft 3' heavily when it came out, and have been playing 'World of Warcraft' on and off since it's release in 2004. This means I've been there for the very high highs of WoW, such as 'Burning Crusade' and 'Lich King' ('Mists of Pandaria' was alright too), and the very low lows (pretty much everything after 'Mists'), and I've begun to notice a pattern that I think can be summed up pretty succinctly; the writers are out of ideas.

Maybe that's the wrong way to say that. They clearly have more ideas, they just...aren't...good.

Warcraft's overall story has always been relatively straightforward: A mad demon-god is rampaging through the stars, causing chaos and bringing more and more races under his dominion because he had visions in which the forces of the void annihilated all life, and his influence has been the cause of just about everything bad that happens, including the corruption of the Orc race, the spreading of the undead plague, and the destruction of whole continents on Azeroth (the planet where Warcraft's story is centered). It was all connected, it was easy to follow, and it set the stage for one of the most unique fantasy universes ever created.

This was the case, at least up through the most recent WoW expansions, but it's clear that the writers have run out of new things to do besides give us another universe-ending threat to deal with. See, our mad demon-god, Sargeras, was dealt with in an expansion from a few years ago called 'Legion', and I thought to myself "interesting, they basically just stopped the devil, I wonder where they'll take the story from here" and it turns out the answer to that question was very unsatisfying. Believe it or not, Sargeras wasn't the big bad after all, but it was the Old Gods! But it wasn't the Old Gods after all, it was The Jailor, one of the primeval forces of the universe, basically the god of death, who manipulated all of it! Oh but wait, it wasn't the Jailor, he was just preparing for some other cosmic threat!

Are you seeing the problem here?

Warcraft has always survived thanks to a strong story (and an addictive gameplay loop) that kept players invested, but over the past few years, Blizzard has been bending, twisting, and at times just outright breaking their established lore in order to keep the story going. You know how, when a sitcom runs on too long, the writers start to run out of ideas and everything starts to get really chaotic? Like, characters aren't acting like themselves anymore, old canon is retconned and some story arcs are just plain forgotten and replaced with new ones so the show can limp on? Yeah, that's kinda where Warcraft is now.

If you don't believe me, ask any active WoW player. I thought Star Wars fans were a miserable, unhappy bunch, but oh man, they have nothing on people who are still shelling out the $15 a month for 'World of Warcraft'. Old fan favorite characters are now reviled for overstaying their welcome or having their stories completely upended, new characters are one-note husks that typically don't make it through more than one expansion in any meaningful way, and somehow we're still supposed to care about all of these things when the next "Thanos" is revealed, even though we know they're going to be be very unceremoniously defeated (seriously, the "big bad" for the current expansion doesn't even get an "oh man you got me" moment, he just sees a flashback from his past and then dies on the spot).

Pair this with gameplay that has grown fairly stale over the past 17 years, as well as Blizzards toxic work culture, and you have a game that's dying a slow, agonizing death. WoW has come a long way from being the MMO with 12 million players. While I'm certain it won't end anytime soon, what with Blizzard making money hand over fist from this game through monthly subscriptions alone, I'm quite honestly at a point with this series where they could do a hard reset on all of the story post-'Mists of Pandaria', heck even post-'Lich King', and I really wouldn't complain.

WoW might still be the the MMO that somehow has the most players, and we owe the game a lot for essentially defining an entire genre of video games (and for giving us one of the best 'South Park' episodes), but its time has come and gone. Playing this game used to be such an incredible experience, but the magic just isn't there anymore. Let's move on to bigger and better things.

Like Destiny 2.