Legion's missed storytelling opportunities

by Matthew Rossi

One of my biggest loves when it comes to Legion is just how much story it has. Threads from earlier expansions and the original Warcraft games are picked up and run with, old friends and enemies make return appearances. It’s a fascinating example of using a new feature (the class Order Halls) to tell new stories that might not have been in the game otherwise, and, moreover, to tell targeted stories for specific classes — which means Legion has a lot of lore you’ll only get to see if you play one of those classes. That’s huge; a return several times over on the old ‘class quest’ idea.

There will be spoilers for Legion in this article, especially some of the Class Order Campaigns you may not have gotten to yet.

I’m a little disappointed that some classes really seem to have gotten a much better and more cohesive story than others.

I’ve played the Paladin, Death Knight, Hunter, and Warrior class hall campaigns. Of these, the Death Knight is the clearly superior one, with Paladin in second place. Both the Hunter and Warrior stories feel kitbashed together, but the Hunter one at least benefits from having Hunter lore figures to interact with at the Order Hall.

The Warrior class Order Hall isn’t bad — one could certainly argue it’s the most beautiful Order Hall and it continues a lot of the story from Ulduar — but it is fundamentally not a ‘Warrior’ story as such. For one thing, unlike other ‘class orders,’ the Warrior one is technically not a class order at all. Your Death Knights, Paladins, Hunters, Demon Hunters, and presumably other classes meet and interact with members of their classes from throughout Azeroth. But there are no famous Warriors in the Warrior Order Hall — neither living nor deceased — despite it being portrayed as the Halls of Valor, a Valhalla-expy.

The Halls of Valor/Skyhold — as opposed to the dungeon set in basically the same place — ends up feeling strange. You see other players there, of course, but canonically there’s just you, the Battlelord, and maybe either Eitrigg or Darius Crowley as your backup. The rest of Azeroth’s Warriors are apparently too busy to join you in this epic fight, and you have to rely on an army of Stormforged Vrykul and Val’kyr as your ‘Order.’

It’s not the only missed opportunity in the expansion, but I do wonder if it comes down to a lack of class identity. Warriors are basically anybody who can use weapons and strap on armor, from a Gnome to an Orc to a Blood Elf to a Night Elf — there’s no cohesive “we use the Light/Shadow/Arcane Magic/Nature Magic/The Power of Death” to Warriors to build an Order around.

Some Order Hall campaigns resolve around ‘find Illidan’s soul and invade a demon infested planet on a giant hijacked Legion ship’ while others get ‘make really good magic booze’ and it’s disconcerting. Monks have at least as strong a class identity as Warlocks or Demon Hunters do, but their story seemed to focus on the wrong elements.

Hunters got around this similar problem by establishing a secret Hunter Order that’s existed for hundreds of years, but it admittedly doesn’t really feel any more cohesive, just more well staffed. (The Hunter Order Hall has a lot of lore figures, the Warrior one has a bunch of guys you’ve never heard of before.) In comparison, the Paladin Order Hall is chockablock with old Paladin standbys and newer but important figures, from Maxwell Tyrosus to Aponi Brightmane to Arator the Redeemer.

Another problem the Hunter campaign has is that it’s constantly being hijacked by Mages asking for favors or derailed by going off into the woods to get Rexxar to do you a solid or otherwise not really devoting as much time as it could to the Hakkar the Houndmaster plot. I mean, the class mount quest is given to you by Odyn, ultimately. Why is Odyn telling me how to get a mount on my Hunter? Doesn’t he already have enough to do forcing everyone to prove their worth to him every few minutes? Why am I spending so much time in Dalaran saving Mages? Couldn’t I fight Hakkar in a natural setting? It’s a strange thing that doesn’t even dovetail into the Mage campaign, which would have made it more interesting.

This isn’t in any way meant to suggest that Legion is bad, just that some campaigns are more compelling than others. Obviously some of this is based on taste, and taste is always subjective. But I don’t even like Paladins, and I found the Paladin Order Hall more compelling as a story than the Warrior one when it comes to the class it was related to. The Warrior one didn’t need to be a Warrior — it felt more like a cinematic continuation of Ulduar than it did a Warrior-specific class journeyAnd it’s not like this couldn’t have been addressed — it’s the Halls of Valor. It would not have been hard to have a few lore-significant Warrior ghosts up there pulling an Obi-Wan for the duration of the Legion invasions, urging us all to work together because the demons will destroy the world and consume even our souls if we don’t.

One of my biggest problems with Legion is that it squanders character deaths to some extent. I’m not talking about Varian — his death was appropriate. But Vol’jin’s felt abrupt and like there was more story to tell, and worse, you could easily have told the exact same story without killing him. He gets viciously wounded, resigns as Warchief and appoints Sylvanas his successor in much the same fashion as Thrall named Garrosh, and then he goes off to heal up. And it’s not the most egregious — the Demon Hunter campaign throws famous Demon Hunters at you who are now tainted Legion servants, the Rogue class order campaign kills one of my favorite Rogues ever, and the Priest campaign actually manages to pull a reverse version of this by resurrecting (kind of) a famous, and famously dead Priest from the lore without so much as a minor explanation of where this person has been for years and years.

I’m seriously still upset that we lost Amber Kearnen this expansion. She’s been in the game since Vanilla. If you played an Alliance Rogue back then you’ve essentially watched her come up through the ranks while you did, and now she’s dead just to deliver a letter to the Uncrowned? That’s not a fitting death for someone who survived Pandaria and Draenor.

This is the expansion where Varian died — imagine seeing Anduin Lothar’s ghost up there, ordering you to unite Azeroth’s Warriors behind you in a cross-faction army that transcends our usual loyalties. Imagine Doomhammer’s ghost right next to him, nodding along, because the crisis is so big that those guys are working together. And we even had Danath Trollbane and Saurfang in the Warrior opening, so it would have been trivial to have the two of them up there helping us work all this out. A purely “we’re just working together until the crisis is over and then we’ll go back to killing each other” down-low pact kept from the politicians feels like a real Warrior campaign to me.

Another missed opportunity was the lack of faction-specific Artifacts. I get that some weapons are so cool and iconic that they transcend the faction divide — all Paladins want Ashbringer, and I’m fine with that. But seeing a Draenei use the Doomhammer or a Troll holding Strom’kar — the weapon that actually makes Trolls run away in terror of it — just seems off. I really would have liked to have seen certain weapons reserved for specific factions.

The Doomhammer could have easily been a Horde Shaman weapon for both Enhancement and Elemental, while the Fist of Ra-Den could have served for both Enhancement and Elemental on the Alliance side (it’s a fist weapon, just make it two fist weapons when you switch to Enhancement). This could have been done for several weapons. Varian’s Shalamayne, for example, could have served as both the Arms and Fury Artifacts for Alliance Warriors, while the Axe of Cenarius should have been the Horde one. (I respect Craig Amai greatly but I disagree with his tweet on this one. The axe belonged to Broxigar; it was a Warrior weapon.) Having Faction specific weapons that work for more than one spec mean you don’t even need to have more artifacts for certain classes.

I mean, I’m hardly representative but I haven’t leveled my Draenei Shaman in part because he’s straight up Enhance and I have zero desire to use the Doomhammer. It’s not ‘cool’ to him. It’s the weapon that helped slaughter his people. It just strikes me as odd.

In the end I think Legion is a marvelous expansion in terms of its lore. But it could have been even better, and I hope this informs the next expansion — there’s room to improve by thinking about how to best represent these ideas in the story.