The sad inevitability of Deathwing's defeat

Warning: This post contains spoilers about the death of the Lich King. If you have yet to defeat him and you wish to go into the fight unspoiled, please do not read any farther.

As I was admiring Deathwing's Cataclysm model on WoWWiki, I was hit by a sudden realization that changed my admiration to sadness. Here is this great villain, with a detailed model to represent him as he decimates our world. Here is this terrifying creature, destruction incarnate, who can change the face of Azeroth forever simply by returning to it. Steeped in lore, immensely powerful, Deathwing is a very intimidating villain. And by the end of the expansion pack, he'll probably be dead. Simple as that; he's been cast as the main villain, so he's probably going to die.

Something about that just doesn't sit right with me. If Cataclysm will follow the precedents set by the previous three games, then it's only a matter of time before we can kill Deathwing, and this once great antagonist will be just another trophy on the wall for players. But maybe it's just me. Maybe, because I haven't experienced the thrill of killing the final boss of an expansion after many tries and failures, I think too little of the experience, but something about a team of faceless adventurers being able to take down some of the greatest villains in the Warcraft universe just doesn't seem to do justice to these figures.

But I don't think the problem lies in these bosses being killable by players; I think the problem lies in how the killing of these bosses is treated by the game itself. The killing of a lore figure like the Lich King or Illadan or Kil'Jaeden should be a big deal, but something about it just... isn't. Some of the reasons for that are unavoidable in the MMO genre. When we can kill a villain, then hear others claim responsibility for the kill a week later, it takes away from the larger significance of our accomplishment. When we can kill that villain, then go into the raid the next week and see him again, as if we had never laid our blade on him, it makes the whole thing feel meaningless. The killing of major villains on a weekly basis just feels... bland.

There is hope, however, and we can see that hope in the way that the death of the Lich King was handled. Two things were unique about Arthas's death: the fact that his death rewards players with a cutscene, and the fact that his defeat was not a complete win for us "good guys". The cutscene may seem a minor issue, but few events in-game have cutscenes, so the presence of one clearly indicates that something important has happened. More important, however, was the fact that we, the players, were not able to defeat the Lich King; we were only able to defeat Arthas, and Bolvar Fordragon had to take his place as the new King of the Damned. Thus, we really weren't able to defeat the Lich King, though we were able to defeat his avatar, so our victory was believable in its scope.

What does this mean for the future and for Deathwing? Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the lore behind Deathwing to ponder how something similar could be done to make our defeating him reasonable, but I do have one idea. Perhaps, rather than trying to defeat Deathwing, we would merely try to stop him. I don't know what we'd be trying to stop him from doing, but perhaps at some point in Cataclysm's story, it would be revealed that he was doing something that would threaten to shatter Azeroth completely, and rather than trying to kill him, we would only be trying to prevent him from doing whatever it was he was doing. With that under our belt, Deathwing could then be set free upon the world to be a recurring antagonist, continually hindering the efforts the good guys in whatever way the writers find convenient. Then, perhaps after some event has weakened him sufficiently (another foe, perhaps), or he has simply been weakened by time, we could kill him.

Aside from the benefit of this approach making the idea of us players fighting and "defeating" Deathwing more realistic, it would also allow the writers to keep him around as a character and weave him into the lore of expansions yet to come. It would really be a shame to bring him back for a one-shot deal when it would be much more convenient (and believable) for him to stay around longer. And besides, if we keep killing off Warcraft's major villains, who will be left to play the roll of antagonist in Warcraft's continually evolving story?