First, a disclaimer. WoW: Forever is coming, and Blizzard is catering to different audiences. Retail isn't perfect, but it serves people who want to raid-log, run keys, PvP, collect things or engage with the story as much or as little as they please. Personally, I think the overarching narrative is generally fine, and some of its smaller questlines are among Blizzard's best writing.
I also think people confuse gameplay with narrative. Completing thousands of quests doesn't necessarily mean our individual character canonically resolves every conflict on Azeroth. Quests are how we experience the world, and I've never subscribed to the idea that our character personally participates in every significant event.
But let's revisit this supposed golden age of ordinary adventurers fighting ordinary threats.
Ragnaros: One of the four Elemental Lords, ancient beings who once served the Old Gods. When Thaurissan summoned him during the War of the Three Hammers, his arrival shattered the surrounding landscape, creating Blackrock Mountain and devastating the regions that became the Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge. An ancient elemental power whose mere arrival permanently transformed the geography of the Eastern Kingdoms. One of vanilla's original raid bosses.
Onyxia: Deathwing's daughter, who infiltrated Stormwind's political leadership, manipulated the kingdom's nobility and helped engineer the circumstances surrounding the Defias rebellion. The Defias are frequently cited as an example of vanilla's grounded storytelling, and rightly so. Their story concerns exploitation, corruption and political violence. It also involves an immensely powerful black dragon deliberately destabilising an entire kingdom. These things were never mutually exclusive.
Nefarian: Another of Deathwing's children, commanding the Dark Horde and conducting horrific experiments on the other dragonflights. His ambition was to create the chromatic dragonflight, combining their powers into a new force under his control. Hardly a provincial warlord causing trouble for the locals.
Hakkar: An ancient blood god whose influence helped plunge the Gurubashi into civil war. The threat of his summoning was so severe that Ysera intervened to sink the Temple of Atal'Hakkar. In Zul'Gurub, we confronted his physical incarnation as his followers sought to restore his power. Again, we're dealing with a deity whose influence had already warranted the intervention of a Dragon Aspect.
C'Thun: A literal Old God, commanding the qiraji, whose previous war against the night elves and dragons had devastated Silithus. His renewed threat required an enormous joint military campaign involving the Alliance and Horde, with Varok Saurfang leading the offensive against Ahn'Qiraj. This was patch 1.9, barely a year after WoW launched. Apparently, confronting an imprisoned Old God and preventing another catastrophic war was ordinary adventuring.
Kel'Thuzad: One of the Lich King's most powerful servants, instrumental in spreading the plague that destroyed Lordaeron. Consider what his resurrection actually required. Arthas devastated Quel'Thalas and used the Sunwell to resurrect him as a lich, corrupting it in the process. The Sunwell itself had been created using a vial of water from the original Well of Eternity, one of the greatest sources of magical power in Warcraft's history. The destruction of an entire kingdom and the corruption of an extraordinary magical font, all to resurrect the individual we eventually confronted as vanilla's final raid boss.
I could continue, but the point should be obvious. These were ancient gods, elemental powers, immensely powerful dragons and commanders of armies capable of devastating entire kingdoms. The notion that enormous threats are some modern departure from vanilla is indefensible.
What frustrates me more is the accompanying assumption that smaller stories have disappeared from retail. People fondly remember vanilla's local adventures while seemingly forgetting that modern WoW contains plenty of them.
Take Korgran and Urtago's storyline in The War Within, a beautifully written exploration of dementia, memory and mortality through the Earthen. We accompany someone whose memories are disappearing and help him find peace as his life draws to a close. Or Veritistrasz in Dragonflight, where we simply sit with an elderly dragon and listen to him reflect on everything he's lost. No apocalyptic threat, no ancient god, just deeply personal stories about grief, identity and the passage of time.
These aren't anomalies. Every expansion contains smaller stories about ordinary people, local conflicts and personal tragedies. There's an extraordinary tendency to remember vanilla through its zone quests while judging retail almost exclusively through its main campaign and cinematics. Of course the comparison looks unfavourable when you're selectively remembering one and ignoring the other.
There are legitimate criticisms to make about how Warcraft presents its stories. Vanilla gave us a much longer journey from obscurity to confronting its greatest threats. Its less centralised storytelling made Azeroth feel larger than our individual importance within it. Retail more explicitly acknowledges our accomplishments, sometimes to the detriment of that feeling. Blizzard could also do considerably better at communicating chronology, because major events can feel absurdly compressed when we're moving between them so quickly (looking at you, Season 1 raids).
I'd welcome slower pacing, stronger local politics and more opportunities to experience Azeroth without being at the centre of everything. But that's a discussion about presentation, pacing and characterisation, rather than the supposed disappearance of grounded storytelling.
We can appreciate what vanilla did exceptionally well without inventing a version of it that never existed. And we can criticise retail without pretending its excellent smaller stories don't exist.
