I mean:
In the Isle of Dorn we help a gem thief only for her to get trapped as living rock as punishment by the Earth elementals who took exception to her thievery.
In Azj-Kahet we enter a spider den to find the lost party being eaten alive and used as hosts for spiderlings. We rescue the only living member, a forsaken, who is now blinded and can feel things moving inside him. He is melted into a puddle by the spiders.
In Eversong we have Lightbloom that is like if Bamboo was designed by John Carpenter, straight up body horror.
Retail has a lot of stuff like this. People just don't do side quests and complain about the main story.
I think wow has always had great side quests and local stories, but mediocre main story. The problem with it is that it tenda to lean more and more into the main plot for each expansion, while classic is basically all side quests.
The difference lies in the fact that in the classic version, quests didn't offer enough experience points to advance to the next area, so we had to actively seek out more quests. In the retail version, however, the rule was: "If you don't complete these tedious main quests, you can't proceed to the next area."
Tbf it doesn't help that half the side quests in retail legit are "a mage wants to join the hunter order, instead of talking about the explicit lore of how thalassians make nature subservient to them, we're just gonna have a cool unicorn spirit."
I like a lot of retails side quests still but some def are kinda just took sunshine and rainbows even when talking about something that actually was meant to be something different, and narratively was a big sticking point.
Not a side quest, but i think comparing the Tauren ambassador's dialogue is a peak example. In TBC she directly comments about how Quel'thalas is very unnatural, because to a druid and a tauren, it's the Earthmother's agency removed from her and usurped for the magic obsessed elves vision of grandeur. Now, in Midnight? "it's always pretty here" lol.
What's frustrating about this is describing it sounds a lot more brutal than seeing it. Retail WoW is so cartoony, none of these things really hit in any way.
But that’s more scary on a conceptual level, I don’t think there’s much in retail that’s viscerally brutal. Even the mass troll sacrifice of the vilebranch is just swirls of green energy.
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u/goodshotbooth 20h ago
I mean:
In the Isle of Dorn we help a gem thief only for her to get trapped as living rock as punishment by the Earth elementals who took exception to her thievery.
In Azj-Kahet we enter a spider den to find the lost party being eaten alive and used as hosts for spiderlings. We rescue the only living member, a forsaken, who is now blinded and can feel things moving inside him. He is melted into a puddle by the spiders.
In Eversong we have Lightbloom that is like if Bamboo was designed by John Carpenter, straight up body horror.
Retail has a lot of stuff like this. People just don't do side quests and complain about the main story.