The next 3 extensions to World Of Warcraft are Blizzard's bold gambits. They are stories told in 3 parts and, judging by the trailer for The War Within, call you pathetic human while revealing the next steps in the master plan It's also definitely about to receive its first real in-game story movie and Blizzard gave us a preview in advance. It was.

For context, this isn't really a movie from the expansion itself — but it's from the expansion's pre-patch The Dark Heart, which arrives early next week. It's going to set a precedent for the storytelling of the upcoming game. Seeing it, I couldn't shake a thought from my heart: holy crap, they're actually talking like people. 

Full Disclosure — I've been playing WoW on and off since Vanilla, but I've never been a big lore buff. My understanding of that world-building is surface-level because most of that stuff is relegated to fiction, secondary media, and quest texts, but I've always been fascinated by the way WoW has been trying to tell stories in games for the past 20 years.

As I mentioned when Ion Hazzikostas announced the team's plans to tie the scattered stories, the Dragonflight story was neither blowing nor exceptional, but it was a step in the right direction, especially when compared to the Shadowlands nonsense. I didn't cry it like I have an epic multi-extended story of FF14, or anything, but there were some beats that really landed. For example, a conversation with Emberthal's Ebysian in the forgotten reach.

There was also always some stink. I enjoyed the epilogue after Amirdrassil's raid a lot, but the previous film (which is mostly what the player decided as "The end of Dragonflight") didn't really work.

This is an example of WoW's worst storytelling habit, writ large: an obsession with slow, dramatic, epic readings that try to imply weight and importance in the script — stilts, plodding, and as many fans have observed, setting YouTube's playback speed to 1.25x makes the scene scan considerably better.

A movie from Dragonflight that worked for me beat this trend. In fact, 1 of the most touching moments was when Tyrande hurtled towards Malfurion and just...Another post to kiss him comes from Amirdrassill Quest. I only know the broad strokes of their story, but I quickly understood better how important their relationship was. I thought it was cool that the leader of this hifalutin faction quickly dropped her stoic mask and became a high school sweetheart when her love returned — it was old

Back to The Dark Heart convo — and it clearly leans away from those bad habits and never declares out loud about the importance of family. It is not. Instead, it references the better character pieces of Dragonflight: Emberthal and Ebysian, a journey in the azure span of Kalecgos, Tyrande and Malfurion reuniting. The text trail, the dynamics of the characters through the story, the delivery of expressions not only directly to the exposition, but also to get a large plot of things directly for the viewer (hi-kink), but also to have a natural lip and tongue. It's not going to win an Emmy or anything, but it's looking promising even in all these early days.

That's not to say that all of these came out of nowhere. Blizzard is clearly trying to step up its story game for a while now — although Overwatch didn't always have the most convincing story, it was going to be really good between Anduin and Saurfang even though the battle for Azeroth also stumbled in many areas. It was.

What all this says — and God, I could be wrong here — the messy, complex, clunky and wayward story of World of Warcraft actually has a real shot at doing good again. At the very least, it could be a well—said nasty plot, and in-game is actually playing to launch - especially in recent previews