Watch Out For the Crazy Elf Lady

Here’s an interesting thought exercise: is a game world obligated to have everything solved?

That’s probably not the best way of putting it, but I’m thinking of scenarios in a game world where the development staff knows the answer, but isn’t obligated to provide an explanation to the player.*

I was thinking of this when I began running into the “Beloved of Elune?” questlines in WoW Classic Era (or pre-Wrath WoW, your choice.)

If you’re like me, I don’t often run into the conclusion of this particular questline, because it begins somewhere in the L40s and ends when your toon is close to the L60 level cap. To be honest, I have absolutely no clue whether this quest chain was ever modified/followed-up-on in the post-Cataclysm reworking of the Old World, and to be perfectly honest I don’t think I’d like to know. Like a lot of quests in the post-Cataclysm reworking of Azeroth, so little is left to the player’s imagination** that I don’t think it’d be worth it to find out.

The brief synopsis is this: there’s a curious Kaldorei in Rutheran Village who has heard a rumor that the Wildkin (aka the “owlbears” or “boomkin”) in Azeroth are actually Elune’s favored creatures, and he sends you to a few distant locales to collect Wildkin feathers looking for evidence of the same. NOTE: If you’re like me, you automatically think “Oh, kill them and take their feathers”, but no, you’re supposed to pick the feathers off the ground.*** Anyway, the end of the questline takes you to Winterspring, where you end up on an escort quest up into the mountains where you get some exposition as to the 'why' behind the Wildkin. (Of course, in traditional WoW fashion, you return to the person who started you on this questline, who says “Wow! This is so cool! Go tell the Archdruid!” who then tells you “We knew all this, now stop bothering me.” FWIW, Azshandra HATES that asshole Staghelm with a passion.)

In case you're wondering, this particular 
screenshot dates from when I leveled my
Draenei Shaman right when TBC Classic launched.
I pulled Card out of the garage to help one of the
leveling shamans complete the quest. And before you
ask, that person stopped playing shortly after
reaching Outland, another casualty of the meta.

It’s a nice questline, and it tells you a bit about the world, but are all the secrets of Azeroth expected to end with an exposition like this? And more importantly, should they end all tied up in a bow like that?

In my opinion, the answer is 'no'.

If everything were able to be 'solved' or 'explained away' as part of the game, what does that say about the game? That there is no mystery to anything? That the development staff expect you to find everything, and that all game mysteries are supposed to be solved?

I personally believe that mindset reflects the expectation that everything about a topic can be known, when in real life that is not the case.

Okay, let me back up here a moment. 

Not the greatest resolution, but this old

PBS Nova episode from 2000 will do.

I’m not talking about whether we can solve topics such as how to build a trebuchet, because there’s enough evidence and practical engineering involved from original sources that we can figure this sort of thing out, but whether we can solve topics such as why NPCs do what they do, or more existential questions such as “solving the afterlife” in a game. 

And yes, that last one is a direct poke in the eye at the WoW devs for their Shadowlands expansion.

Maybe it’s the hubris involved in real life that’s a factor here because enough people around the globe seem to absolutely know what happens after death. Frequently those beliefs can be contradictory, so not everybody can be correct about this. But hey, that never stopped people from believing what they want to believe, but in a game world that assuredness (or hubris) translates into certainty about how the afterlife must operate. 

Or why wildkin are the way they are. 

Or why the Old Gods do what they do.

I mean, the hard baseline of the existential horror behind HP Lovecraft’s vision of what Blizzard used as a template for the Old Gods was simple: Cthulhu and Company’s motivations were unknowable and that attempting to understand them would drive you insane. 

“Watch out for the crazy Elf lady” is a byline that anybody who remembers questing in OG Silithus in Vanilla WoW (or Classic WoW) should be all you need to know about the Old Gods. If anything, that particular questline still exposed more than necessary, but looking at it in hindsight the crazy elf lady questline struck a better cadence in terms of what was unknowable versus the exposition of the wildkin questline.

But still, people want to know everything about a game world, and for a subset of the same the concept of not figuring everything out can drive them nuts.

Well, welcome to the real world.

#Blaugust2023

*Or the Player Characters in a pencil and paper RPG.

**In a relative sense, of course. You might not have all the answers from a particular quest chain, but if you perform a similar quest chain on the other faction's side, you'll figure things out between the combination of the two. I'm looking at you, Worgen questlines in Silverpine Forest.

***Free hint: if you’re like me and have trouble seeing the feathers with your graphics, you may have to dial your graphics settings back to what they would have been in Vanilla WoW to see the feathers easily. Kind of sucks gaming the system like this, but if you don’t want to look like an idiot with your questing buddy trying to find feathers when they are jumping up and down on top of them –not that I’d know anything about this-- you’ll want to do this.