World of Warcraft: Legion — Will the ‘kitchen sink’ expansion save Warcraft or kill it?

Yesterday’s livestream reveal of the new World of Warcraft expansion pack Legion contained a dozen stories and elements fans have been clamoring for over the years — which itself left some fans scratching their heads.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game has led paid-subscription MMOs, especially in the West, since its inception almost 11 years ago. In that time, like all good yarns, it’s built up a collection of loose ends, missing characters, and fan-favorite wishes.

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Legion appears to want to deliver on them all. It could be that this expansion is Blizzard’s way of pandering to its audience, letting them know that the company is listening to what they have to say. That’s potentially a smart move, given the aging game’s steady subscription losses.

Still … I’ve played the game for well over 11 years now, since first-push beta, and the announcement that this expansion would try to capture nearly every story element that fans had mentioned surprised me. What threads are left for future packs? This feels like a final expansion, not one more entry in a game the company has said they expect to sell for another decade.

Expansions that were outside of the traditional Warcraft universe lore (I’m looking at you, Mists of Pandaria) showed that, even when beautifully executed in nearly every way, they weren’t guaranteed to be a rousing success with the hardcore audience.

That expansion, which some mocked as “pandas and Pokémon” because of its playable Pandaren race and pet battles, nevertheless featured some of the most beautiful story, game design, and graphic work ever done on the series. It still failed to stem the steady loss of subscriptions WoW has seen since its high point during The Burning Crusade expansion years ago.

So it seems like an odd choice to squander so many of WoW’s beloved core stories on a single expansion, as is the case with Legion, especially if Blizzard’s stated interest in more-frequent expansion releases holds true. Legion includes:

• The Emerald Dream/Emerald Nightmare, a lush, green dream-version of Warcraft’s Azeroth continents, featuring key characters from throughout the series
• Titans, the nearly all-powerful creators and judges of the WoW universe who have played a role in the final boss events of several expansions
• Illidan, an end boss of The Burning Crusade, WoW’s popular expansion pack (and one of its most-popular characters)
• Demon Hunters, a new hero class that interact directly with Illidan, look vaguely like fan-favorite undead leader Sylvanas, and allow players to use demonic talents
• The Burning Legion as demonic villains (which some players had guessed might be the theme of an expansion by itself)
• An encounter with Queen Azshara, a transformed Night Elf leader who eventually became leader of the Naga serpent-like race;
• A revamp of the PvP honor system, which has remained the same for a couple of expansions now
• Order halls for each class, though it’s unclear exactly what players will do there besides pick up quests and interact with their new champions (themselves a modification to the game’s Garrison follower system)
• The ability for players to wield some of the most iconic weapons ever in game, including those previously wielded only by NPC leaders, such as Ashbringer and Doomhammer
• The ability for druids to significantly change the look of their animal forms (something those players have looked for since the game’s original release)
• The final fight with Gul’dan, the Orc Warlock that players have been chasing since almost the game’s beginning

And that’s just what Blizzard has announced so far. Every single item on this list is something that fans have requested for years.

An Azshara-based expansion was one of the rumors circulating before the broadcast, as was a demon-based expansion featuring Illidan’s backstory. The Emerald Dream has been a fan guess for expansion themes for as long as there have been WoW expansions — one of the zones of the original game had a spot that was rumored to be the place where that portal would go, and green dragons guarded it. But no one guessed that Blizzard would roll them all into a single expansion.

Toward the end of the livestream, the company announced that Alleria and Turalyon would be found — an almost comic cherry on top. Those two characters have been missing for so long that they’ve been immortalized in a tooltip on the game’s loading screen for a few years now. (“Tip: No one has seen Alleria and Turalyon for years. …”)

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It’s a stunning amount of wrapped-up stories, and while in some ways it feels like the ultimate response to those who complained about the thinner amount of content included in the recent Warlords of Draenor expansion, it doesn’t appear to leave Blizzard much to pick up with down the road.

The “kitchen sink” approach may pull in players for this next expansion. It remains to be seen whether Warcraft ultimately pays the price on the back end, when fans feel satisfied that all their favorite characters’ conflicts have been resolved, leaving the game in a good place for them to depart.