I'm sitting here watching a KZfaq video about a guy watching a KZfaq video about a guy watching a KZfaq video about a video game. What a time to be alive

The Jailer was trying to stop the Super Jailer, which is just Deathwing from an alternate timeline.

how to make a wow expansion: "oh no, the biggest threat possible is coming to destroy everything!" "here take this magical item and power it up by grinding out bad guys for a while." "finally, your item is strong enough. go kill the biggest threat we ever faced!" "fools, how could you not know there was a bigger threat i was trying to stop! and now it is coming..." repeat over and over. optional, replace the last line with: "now that we killed the biggest threat, time to go kill the other faction. oh no, our war awakened a new bigger threat!"

It pisses me off that Asmon, while having only a very, very surface level knowledge of lore, can bust out a better story to Shadowlands on stream without thinking about it, THAN A TEAM OF WRITERS PAID TO DO THAT OVER 2 YEARS. Like, fuck, they really need to fire the entire story department at Blizzard.

You can forgive a bad company if the gameplay and story are good. You can forgive a bad story if the gameplay and company are good. You can forgive bad gameplay if the story and company are good. But no game can survive all three being bad.

Wow's "greatest" villain was a default unreal engine model all along. Why blizzard thought that making the jailer's true form a mannequin was a good idea? This is beyond me.

Can you guys imagine a room full of people at a meeting watching this cinematic and critiquing it and being like yep, thats it! That's the one! It's fucking mind boggling. How can you be so out of touch with reality to think this was good enough

Azeroth: Owie ouch, help me, there is this -sword- stuck like right by my heart Magni: Don't ya worry lass we got it! Azeroth: By the way there is this large turbine that is even more dangerous stuck in the equivalent of my anus that can suck off my energy to remake the universe Magni wasn't listening that well it seems.

If the Jailer's ultimate plan was for 'the greater good', why didn't he just explain it to The Eternal Ones so they could help instead of villainizing him? Oh, maybe they didn't agree with this 'altering reality' plan, that's why.. well, then why would he not tell us the players as we go into the Shadowlands to stop him? Why wait until he's beaten to just utter some cliffhanging cliché dying words? smh

I'm convinced now, more than ever, that there is something or someone in Blizzard that only exists to bottleneck the narrative- and the art team. Whether or not it's the directors of those teams, or someone else entirely, I don't know... but that thing needs to go immediately. Seriously. That's what the Jailer could've looked like? And you're telling me, they'd pick the existing model over that one? You are never going to convince me of that. Never.

Preach: my new video. Asmon: OUR new video

Asmongold, master of reacting a 14 min video and making it a 35 min video.

Hearing his idea for how Shadowlands should have ended makes me believe Blizzard should hire this guy right the fuck now. I would 100% come back to the retail game if this was the story.

Does anyone else think the first cinematic looks like a raid shadow legends champion reveal?

We could've known his motivations the whole time, and we could've known that he was trying to do the right thing, and we would've known his method was simply wrong and must be stopped, but no... they just.. don't say anything, and leave us empty all the way through. There's no room for us to love a story that we don't know.

Honestly, Blizzard sure know how to make a ending cinematic that makes all faith that still was left in me flow out fast. gods. The next expansion won't even last them half a year, considering how fast they are pumping them out, and worst, ppl will still buy it.

"It's so vague. You can twist it to make it fit." Exactly what the lore and story has become- easily to mold to whatever content rollout they need. Unfortunately, whatever the quality of expansions and games of the past, most of Warcraft for many years was about very iconic, recognizable, bombastic characters and events. You knew Thrall's want to help his people. Grom's lust for battle. Tyrande's faith. Varian's protectiveness. Now everyone has secret, half-formed schemes and secret thoughts - or are forgotten outright.

Still laughing at the weapon Jailor is carrying. Awful.

At this point, some 5 year old can just put a villain dude, do villain things, kill anything, wreck anything without any reason and when the villain is about to die just make him say "you dont understand! We need to prepare for what is to come!" And that 5 year old writers would be so proud of his godly mysterious writings.

"And then Bolvar kind of forgot about the Jailer and the forge of souls..."

And this is why I jumped to FFXIV. The MSQ maybe a chore at times but at least the story is cohesive and coherent.

Imagine being a multi billion dollars worth of company and some streamer can write better story while fixing issues in your game simultaneously than your writers. I also have game dev friends who thoughts players are ignorant and don't know a shit, i mean proper arrogant ones but they will be ashen comparison to blizzard ones.

They did say what the forge of souls was for, it was a soul grinder that would grind up souls to power the scourge machine. It was their fuel refinery. It wasnt a power siphon. Not to mention Sargeras was destroying world souls to stop the void and in trying to achieve that goal, he was stopping the jailers.

So sylvanas - controlled by the jailor, fights Bolvar that wears the helmet that controls anybody.... which is made by the jailor... which leads to the conclusion that what? the pawn of the jailor fought the pawn of the jailor to open the portal the jailor needs to be opened? That in itself already doesnt make any sense... And if anybody wants to tell me bolvar was himself in the fight against sylvanas... Why does his color change from red to blue. Why is it called helm of domination... You couldn't even call shadowlands lazy writing. None of this makes sense... Not even talkin about the "bigger thread". The first thing we saw about this expansion already contradicts itself xD Like wtf?

I'm angry and sad, no I'm not angry at Blizzard, I'm not angry at something who is sick, corrupted,dying. I'm angry at fans who are keeping this thing alive for their own sake. They are torturing sick instead of letting it go. Fans are imho like children of people who are in vegetable state, brain dead and kept for their sake to prevent feeling of losing one. Just let it die, maybe, maybe it can resurrect from its ashes just like the phoenix mount we all love. I left "hospital" couple of expansions ago but still kept watching from afar, from windows. And what they did to Arthas, finally did tear the connection with me and "hospital". Hospital and sick people in it no longer burden to me. I truly feel free now. "Thanks" Sylvanas.

Actually the forges were always working/animating when you went through the instance Forge of Souls. This animation of them...isn't new. They just repurposed it/retconned the lore/yadda yadda...

I don't care for the story when I play an MMO. BUT with WoW It HAD a story that I love so much. And it was during Warcraft 3 And what I can't forgive is them tainting it with BS

He just genuinely just solved the plot and gave it an insteresting twist and story

You fight the jailer, then he kill you and everyone else. have a monologue... "I will remake the reality, and you will understand the next time you see me." Server shut down. World of Warcraft 2... March 2024

Riddle me this, if the Azerite Beam came up through ICC and into Torghast, why is it coming up behind the Jailer in the Sepulcher?

We have been under ICC in Wotlk. There was a giant fucking hole underneath infected by faceless ones and tentacles. Falling down started a quest back then that made you find Arthas's carved out heart which makes everyone realize that there's no way of ever recovering him from ICC.

they actually turned the jailer into the NPC meme... that's epic lol

Asmon's alternative ending on SL is fucking awesome. Get him on the writing team. It even unmakes N'zoth's shitty death.

“Not everything has to be game of thrones.” True.

“How did she just walk in there?!” You mean the queen of the undead? How did she walk through a group of…undead?

Can we chat about, how the jailer can send the maw's interdimentional chains to pull land into the maw (Korthia, Zereth Mortis), - And that, the Jailer could have literally done this at anytime to get to the Selpher without us knowing and succeeded in remaking reality, had Sylvannas not cracked the sky open so we could go in and stop him. Its literally like, a redundant plot with bigger plot holes than the plot itself.

I actually think the ICC and Forge of Souls bit from the intro cutscene was well done. It’s the first instance of a retcon that didn’t make me slap my forehead and ask who thought that would possibly work. Like yeah it’s a retcon, but it fits with both the old lore and new lore. Actually decent retcon. I wonder if this was written by the new guy lol The ending was absolutely shit though. We still don’t know anything about what this guy wanted to do. At least Sargeras had a specific threat. Cleaving swords through worlds and shit, but we don’t even know what “unmake reality” even means. He never actually did anything.

When recruiting new writers , they should ask them what they thought of GOT season8. If they thought it was good, straight up end the interview. Who hires these people!??

What you mention about using the jailer as a reset button for a more modern azeroth - that would have been amazing. To see us finally lose for a reason, hell yeah. What a cool curve ball.

"Bonestorm. You remember that?" How could I ever forget?

If Zack was finished with the FF 14 storyline, through Endwalker, I think he would be even more pissed off about how things turned out. Especially seeing what another mmo can achieve compared to this garbage.

Ay yo, Blizzard said this would be the conclusion to a series of events dating back to Warcraft 3 in the 90s, and then ended on a cliff hanger. 😂😂😂😭😭😭

so, 'a cosmos divided will not survive' but he's literally the one that was dividing the cosmos???

Man Asmongold's idea would be fucking awesome and makes a lot of sense, it would explain why sylvanas did the things she did and give a decent reason for her now being accepted as "one of the good guys" and why the jailer wanted to "remake reality" while also making something new on a villain with the whole "we lost this time" thing

Imagine that, let's say that in 9.1 we had an actual character building around the jailor, and we have an explanation for all of his motives and it was actually well developed, now in 9.2 we got a "war effort" kind of event, where we had 2 sides, one agreeing with the jailor and helping him, one against him, so get 2 raids, one for the jailor side and one against him (both sides can do both raids but, let's say you're on jailors side, you can't get "points" or whatever by doing the other raid, just gear) and we have a few other things to do in order to help or prevent jailor's plans, in the end of 9.2 we get the conclusion and 9.3 or even 10.0 is the consequences of that, I mean, the opening of the gates in vanilla is till this day considered a fucking awesome event, I don't really know any other event like that and blizzard could have saved, or at least made shadowlands a bit more interesting and they just threw all to the trash

i don't usually comment but damn those were some amazing ideas you had for the expansion ending. Genuine would have been interesting!

Wasn't that Arthas' motivation in WotLK? Wasn't that Sargeras' motivation since/before the Burning Crusade? I think they said that the Jailor was pulling the strings behind both of them so it makes sense that they had the same motivation, but it just feels so bad. The Jailor came out of nowhere to the point that I just can't connect him to those past storylines.

As I understand it, the jailer concept art was always Zovaal as the arbiter, not Zovaal the Jailer

@8:00 I joked when all we saw was his shadowed outline that he was just gonna be "The Lich-ier King" and, I mean, he's The Lichier King. "Hey here's our newest barely changed Death Knight tier set." He loses all presence by becoming so generic. Sad Robot > Mr Snow Miser > Nipple Man >>>>> Lichier King

Wait. So first he or another "partner" of his, sends agents into every part of the cosmos to destabilize them. Then he wants to "unmake reality", but just while dying he wants to unify them all under him to defend against what is to come? ?????

"Missed the opportunity to do that" this should be on Blizzard's Tombstone.

"First two months were ok" damn this really was WoD 2.0

I appreciate that Asmon feels that N'Zoth was done dirty by how easily he was defeated. They've really butchered making the Old Gods feel like a legitimate threat with both Cata AND BfA.

I always thought the FORGE of Souls were to like weave souls into armor/constructs/abominations/spells etc. But were there any indications at all ever that is was some sort of azerite siphoning machine?

Just wanna say i finally subscribed to your channel thanks for excellent content def. kept my spirits high as ive battled depression these past couple of years i dont really care if people make jokes youre a great dude ty for living your dreams when others cant.

It's just that in this ending cinematic. All those scenes of the Eternal Ones punishing the Jailer seems more fit to have been shown before 9.1. You don't even see the Primus in this cut scene, only his shadow and voice. It really makes me think Blizzard wanted to put it in earlier but decided not to and then shoehorn it in the ending. If they did it earlier, maybe they could transition that into the whole plot of the jailer's intentions and the cosmos divided stuff in 9.1 and 9.2.

13:38 THAT is excatly the reason why I stopped playing retail. I loved the lore so badly, that, when it came to the point it became ridiculous, it wasnt fun anymore. Makes me sad to this day.. Such a great potential destroyed

Did WoW copy Marvel? Thanos's snap was Jailer. End Game = Jailer death. Cosmos = Eternals. So we are going to a multiverse war next?

FFXIV: Endwalker did a similar thing with the plot but they at least had the spine to resolve that particular conflict within the expansion and in a far more thoughtful way.

You know, they just took that from Star Wars. That was what Papa Palpatine was trying to do. Fucking blizz at it again.

How did Zovaal as an arbiter get the knowledge of a greater evil coming for us... God this ending cinematic is probably the worst cinematic ever. Even Garrosh yelling "Draenor is free" is actually better than this. We get no resolution, no explanation, nothing. We just ended the guy who orchestrated the most important plan in all universe and reality and we don't get anything... This is so bad.

I still dont understand why did sylvanas destroy the crown if domination to open portal to shadowlands, isnt the lich king controlled by the jailor lol ? So he could have just told him to break it/open it himself. Lol what shit writing full of holes

The machine in ICC tells me that the jailer knows a much faster and efficient way to the soul of Azeroth, i think northrend in general is that point in the planet most closer to the Titan soul rather than silithus and the wound.

I couldn't stand chat thinking that he meant Egon, when he was talking about Dana's building in Ghostbusters being built by Ivo Shandor.

I saw ICC being a conduit when I realized how the entire northrend continent is a circuit board. The entire continent is a massive gaming PC motherboard. I saw this coming back in Wrath. It's got a RAM area, a hard drive, a GPU, cooling systems, nanotechnology ports run by robots. Sound outputs, etc. The entire Wrath expansion was us cleaning corrosion and dust and a virus plaguing the system and then giving it a good reboot.

Wasn't killing everyone and enslaving them to save them from a bigger bad the same thing The Lich king wanted to do with the burning legion?

It says a lot about Wrath's design that over a decade after the content has been relevant and few have seen it recently (the ICC 5 mans generally don't pop in leveling queues, or they didn't use to) outside of maybe farming the battered hilt, that it is recognizable in less than five seconds on screen.

Denathrius was basically hinting his allignment with the jailers plans in the flashback and willingness to help him

I’m gonna miss you, jailer. It’s almost sad to see you go. Born during the saddest time in Warcraft, you had the potential to be a great villain, yet you were disgracefully reduced to this husk.

Terran Gregory is an absolute genius in cinematic designing, his team carries this pile of shit storyline. How can he and others who are there from the beginning accept this lore? Is it possible that anyone says "This is great"? AND! I dont really get how can you not make a CGI cinematic about the very end of Warcraft lore? Arthas? Jailer? Pretty important characters...

I imagine the Forge of Souls is the mechanism that actively helps to ferry the souls into the Shadowlands from beneath the Icecrown Citadel. But here, I also thought that was the job of the denizens of Bastion. I guess if we go with my argument, it would make sense that they use the Forge, as opposed to attacking the wound, because they still need to get the soul over to the Shadowlands. Considering the Forge is beneath the citadel, and when you finally go to confront Arthas on the throne, you notice he starts pulling all the souls from the Forge up to the throne. Either he does it, or we do it, to help release them from Arthas's captivity and into what we thought was a safe place in the Shadowlands.

To somewhat even the playing field for the fight between Sylvanas and Bolvar, I think it could've been interesting to have a plot line of Sylvanas acquiring a new mourneblade that was made for her, which would also foreshadow the existence of the Jailer, because we wouldn't know who had it made yet.

All Star Thumbnail

Not only is the Jailer a boring character in terms of storytelling, he just *looks* boring. Like....so forgettable in every way.

Its clear to see the old Jailor concept became a scuffed Maldraxus guy but with horns

So this is where Queen's News of The World album artist got his idea from, such deeply layered IRL lore

No Asmon, you are not the only person, I stopped playing because the story and narrative of the game burned me, I couldn't connect with the content because of how bad it was story. You can have a game with no story and be successful, but you can't have a game with a bad story (especially on an IP as old and successful as Warcraft) and be successful because if it has a story inevitably people connect with it in some way. , the story and narrative of a game has to have a minimum of quality, something that WoW no longer has, mainly due to the inconsistencies and all the changes they have been making in the latest expansions. What is happening with WoW is similar to what happened with Star Wars when it was acquired by Disney. The direction took a swerve and they began to change things that made everything that was already established be in doubt or change and that hit the fan base, the thing was so drastic and so poorly done that even those who were not very interested in the story began to notice the inconsistencies and/or feel that there were things that did not make sense, feeling confused, and rejecting the change. It could be said that they were unable to develop the story as they wanted due to the problems caused by COVID and internal scandals, leading to an overall lack of content. However, that is not a true justification, ultimately the failure of the expansion continues to weigh on them and their failures, being a company with a poor or inflexible organization to deal with covid, and at the same time being rotten from within for years, causing scandals. FFXIV had delays due to covid but they adapt well and despite everything they released one of the best expansions, if not the best, of all up to that moment (Shadowbringers). Blizzard is simply a company that is sick and broken from within.

The intro cinematic is actually pretty good in my opinion, Shame about the ending one being hot trash.

11:42 he was talking about the 6 forces (shadow, light, life, death, order and disorder)

The Jailer's face that Preach's video freezes on from the 11:00 mark to like 20:50 reminds me so much of that "Must not fap" meme.

I hope asmon is right, that the people who made shadowlands are no longer with the company, and the new crew is just trying to start fresh with the new expansion. I’ve been playing since I was a kid, since Wrath, and to see the game like this sucks. That being said, I won’t ever give up on WoW. I hope it arises to the former glory it once had. FOR THE ALLIANCE!!

Also lost ark is a shit game my boys. Don't get the hype.

Serious waste of not having Preach and Asmongolds facepalm face for the thumbnail

At 29:40 They couldn't introduce the expac with Sylvannas dying because they already did that with Varian Wyrnn in Legion.

17:37 wait, that actually sounds so cool

brooo if blizz did what asmon said regarding the nzoth fight and we as the players succumbed to the madness and we died and got sent to the shadowlands and they did a big reset. do you fucking understand how cool would that shit be?!?! it would reignite my passion for the game.

Bell, Nobbel, and Asmon need to be writing WoW

That ending you propose is way too smart for Blizzard

2:17 What sword bro? There never was a sword. What are you talking about [GASLIGHTING INTENSIFIES]

I just noticed something.... in the cutscene where you approch the jailor and he activates the forges under icetown... which then makes a huge stream of aserith stream thru the tower and up into Torghast.... but then that stream appears next to the Jailor... and we are in the "zeret mortis" zone now, where the raid we are in, is..... which is far away from torghast.. ! ...I cant even... :)

That original concept looks so much more interesting from both a visual and narrative perspective than just "big man in armor". The final design looks more like the big bad guys strongest henchman.

The Jailor at the end of the expansion...It's just a prank Bro 😂

There are SO many ways they could have set all of this up. From Sylvanas having some new kind of power we've never seen before, to what Bolvar learned when he put on the helm, the seeds of this could have been planted years ago, like every other big villain we've had. This expansion could have been answering questions players would have been speculating about since Cataclysm. People would have been expecting something else, and there would have been more hype around it. Now, that doesn't fix anything about this expansion and how it was handled, but at the very least this would have been a foundation upon which to build a compelling story.

Imagine how it could have been.. like the image with the two citadels from diffrent realities. Imagine the new raid, as a mirror ICC. The Layout (of the citadel, not the bosses) is exactly the same.. but mirrored. And then the Jailer at his throne with an enslaved Arthas as the second to last boss in the instance. Got damn that would have been epic.

the energy is connecting to torgast how did it reach zerith mortis ..., that was a fine note from nobel xD

Imagine if the expansion was a dreadlord focused expansion, and the jailer was just a pawn of sire denathrius. I thought the direction they were taking the lore of the dread lords was actually cool, and makes more sense narratively and to the average players than the jailer did it all, because the dread lords were there in wc3. They’re known for playing both sides and it fits their character to help the legion only as a means to further the goals of sire denathrius. If his plan was more fleshed out, it would be amazing to see, especially as dreadlords are just such a good villain because we actually want to go out and kill them like you were saying, the villain we need is one we hate.

This Denathrius-cut is completely understandable. Because we learned at the end of the Revendreth-questline that Denathrius betrayed everyone. That he told Zovaal the things he said it's completely understandable because he had to play a role for the other Eternal Ones. Just Lying for the bigger purpose and to keep the others unsuspicious. Thats what I would've done too in Denathrius' position

*Asmon NEEDS to watch Nobbel's reaction to this cinematic!*

not only yoggsaron but also the kingdom of the spider which was planned as an additional zone also they cut the majority of the yoggsaron and lichking connection content.

7:42 If you shrink it a little it looks like a human with armor from icc... or a mob from icc... some kind of death knight commander or something... if we had 0 information and only saw that image we would easily think that It's EITHER A NEW ARMOR or an icc mob... (what's more, even the giant mob that Tyrando killed when he faced Sylvanas looked more like a King or something intimidating than this thing)