WoW's released a short cinematic ahead of the War Within's pre-patch—and I'm just happy these characters are talking like actual people, now

World of Warcraft's next three expansions are a bold gambit from Blizzard. They'll be a story told in three parts, and—judging by the trailer for The War Within—they'll focus on character development and emotional storytelling over big dudes in armour calling you a pitiful mortal while revealing the next step of their master plan. It's also about to receive, arguably, its first actual in-game story cinematics, and Blizzard's given us a preview in advance.

For context, this isn't actually a cinematic from the expansion itself—but it is from the expansion's pre-patch The Dark Heart, which'll be arriving early next week. It's going to set a precedent for the game's storytelling going forward. Watching it, I couldn't shake the thought from my mind: 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 its worldbuilding has remained surface-level, due in part to most of that stuff being relegated to novels, secondary media, and quest text. I have, however, always been fascinated by the way WoW has tried to tell its story in-game for the past two decades.

As I mentioned back when Ion Hazzikostas announced the team's plans to tie together its scattered narrative, Dragonflight's story wasn't mind blowing or even exceptional, but it was a step in the right direction—especially when compared to the nonsense of Shadowlands. I wasn't weeping over it like I have FF14's epic multi-expansion narrative, or anything, but there were some beats that genuinely landed. Emberthal's conversation with Ebyssian in the Forgotten Reach, for example.

There were also, invariably, some stinkers. While I greatly enjoyed the epilogue after the raid on Amirdrassil, the preceding cinematic (which is mostly what players judged as «the ending of Dragonflight») didn't, uh, really work.

It's an example of WoW's worst storytelling habit writ large: An obsession with slow, dramatic,