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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9449644" data-attributes="member: 18">Chris Metzen is probably the answer here, he's on record as wanting Thrall (who he voices) to age, and is in charge of the overall story and story direction in this expansion and the next two expansions (which make it a kind of trilogy). In general the characters are aging up, even Anduin, who now has 30-ish vibes (he was technically 25 at the start of Dragonflight but it's unclear how much time has passed since then).2004's WoW was relatively grown-up compared to Cataclysm at least. 2010's Cataclysm was really the youngest, crassest, loudest, and dumbest WoW has ever been. Cataclysm is a WoW expansion that feels like it was cranked out on mountains of cocaine, which has absolutely no ideas, nothing to say (even by WoW standards!), just a ton of bad parodies, ill-conceived zone designs, visually lurid dungeons and raids, brings in some wholly unwanted casual misogyny (from characters we were supposed to think were cool), weird racism-adjacent content (the less said about the "pygmies" the better), and features a higher proportion of "joke quests" than anything that came before.It's wild to me because it's a post-9/11 WoW expansion about terrible disaster befalling people to their surprise but it is profoundly unable to not be crass and weird about disaster.It's no surprise given the guy in charge of the story/writing for that expansion was an unqualified 20-something with no writing experience (even of his own! not even fanfic!) who was in the role solely because he was leader of a successful EQ guild and friends with Rob Pardo (Blizzard's EVP at the time), in a fine example of corporate nepotism.But we are indeed a verrrrrry long way from that now. Even the occasional joke quests now, such that they are, are of a entirely more gentle and friendly type. The quest-flow is also extremely good, as is the average playability of the quests - I find myself doing quests at max level because they're fun to do, not because I have to, which is pretty rare in WoW!</blockquote>

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