Why WoW Stopped Feeling Like Warcraft

Microsoft Gaming and Blizzard Entertainment Leadership

December 10, 2025 — Ruinnation.com

WoW’s previous Narrative Director quietly left Blizzard in 2023. Metzen’s back, Midnight’s on the horizon, and for the first time we can explain why WoW’s lore felt wrong for years—and why it might finally be turning around. – Bellular 

World of Warcraft, at its zenith, possessed a singular aesthetic and narrative identity that no competitor has ever successfully replicated. Imagine Tolkien’s high myth filtered through the lurid airbrush of a 1992 Death Angel album sleeve, rendered in the saturated palette of Simon Bisley’s Lobo covers, and then animated by a cinematic team that understood the erotic charge of plate armor, the grandeur of gothic decay, and the precise degree of camp required to keep cosmic horror from collapsing into self-parody. The result was never merely “epic fantasy.” It was mythic heavy metal: ridiculous, yes; sexually charged, unmistakably; but always coherent within its own internally consistent excesses. The orcs were barbaric, the elves decadent, the undead tragic and obscene, the humans simultaneously noble and venal. Every frame of the Warcraft III and original World of Warcraft cinematics announced the same covenant: this world is savage, beautiful, and slightly deranged, and it belongs to us.

That covenant has been systematically violated for the better part of a decade.

The erosion began as a stylistic drift (Mists of Pandaria’s softened silhouettes, Battle for Azeroth’s confectionery color grading, the progressive infantilization of character proportions), but it metastasized into something far more corrosive: the wholesale transplantation of another writer’s abandoned intellectual property into the living tissue of Azeroth. As Bellular’s exhaustive investigation has now documented beyond reasonable dispute, vast structural elements of Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and the original pre-production framework for Midnight and beyond were not conceived for Warcraft at all. They were salvaged, with minimal alteration, from Kingdoms of Amalor, a 2012 single-player RPG whose narrative architecture was overseen by Steve Danuser during his tenure at 38 Studios.

The consequences have been catastrophic. The cosmology of the First Ones and the Eternal Ones, the “machinery of death,” the sudden elevation of Elune to Summer Queen of a transplanted Winter/Summer Fae duality, the Primalist cult with no antecedent in twenty years of Azerothian history, the Arathi of Hallowfall, the Haranir of Quel’Thalas—these are not organic outgrowths of Warcraft. They are foreign bodies. They are, in the strictest sense, narrative vandalism: the imposition of an alien continuity upon a canon whose internal logic and emotional resonance had been meticulously maintained from 1994 through 2016.

To treat these elements as immutable lore going forward is to perpetuate a category error. They possess no more legitimacy within the Warcraft tradition than a piece of Star Wars fan fiction possesses within the Lucas canon. They were grafted onto the game under conditions of extreme creative duress, during a period when senior leadership was compromised by scandal, substance abuse, and abrupt departures, and in the absence of any unifying creative authority. The result was not merely poor storytelling; it was an act of desecration.

Chris Metzen’s return offers the only credible path to restoration. His reappointment must not be ceremonial. He must be granted unequivocal authority to excise the Amalor-derived continuity with the same decisiveness that a surgeon removes necrotic tissue. This is not a question of courtesy to departed colleagues; it is a question of brand integrity and fiduciary responsibility to a property that remains, even in its wounded state, Microsoft’s most valuable narrative asset in gaming.

Specific recommendations:

1. Publicly designate the period from late Battle for Azeroth through The War Within as an “interregnum” or “lost cycle” in which the narrative was compromised by external factors. This framing has precedent (the “War of the Ancients retcon” of 2004, the “alternate Draenor” of Warlords of Draenor) and allows the studio to preserve player achievements while discarding incompatible cosmology.
2. Explicitly decanonize the First Ones, the Eternal Ones as presently defined, the Zereth facilities, and the forced Fae duality imposed upon Ardenweald and Elune. These concepts have no purchase in the Warcraft imagination and serve only to dilute rather than enrich the mythos.
3. Re-center the Worldsoul Saga on threats and characters indigenous to the Warcraft tradition: the Old Gods, the Void Lords, the Titans as originally conceived, the lingering legacies of Sargeras, Azshara, and the Black Empire. Xal’atath, the Windrunner redemption, and the Sunwell are sufficient pillars for a trilogy that feels like Warcraft rather than a belated Amalor sequel.
4. Restore the original visual language. The cinematic direction of the Midnight reveal trailer already demonstrates a return to high-contrast lighting, desaturated metallic tones, and the angular, almost brutalist armor silhouettes of the classic era. This must become policy, not exception. The current house style (over-large eyes, rubbery facial animation, candy-colored environments) is incompatible with the tone required for cosmic warfare between Light and Void.
5. Vest Metzen with final creative veto over all narrative and cinematic output for the remainder of the Worldsoul Saga and any subsequent projects. The era of competing creative fiefdoms must end. Warcraft survived the departure of its original architects once because Metzen remained as steward. It has not survived his absence.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard was predicated, in significant part, on the enduring value of World of Warcraft. That value is not merely financial; it is cultural. A generation of players retains an emotional bond to Azeroth that no other virtual world has replicated. To squander that bond by continuing to legitimise a six-year detour into another writer’s cancelled MMO is not merely poor storytelling. It is corporate malpractice.

The patient is still breathing. The original heart—scarred, battered, but unmistakable—is still beating. Remove the foreign tissue. Let Metzen finish the operation he began when he walked back through the door.

The alternative is to allow Warcraft to remain a pastel mausoleum for someone else’s abandoned dream. That is not an outcome any stakeholder at Microsoft or Blizzard can rationally defend.