In World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Illidan Stormrage gets killed. This isn’t actually a surprising end for the character. Illidan as a person was someone who was driven in no small part by a sense of inadequacy, continually trying and failing to live up to other people and getting enormously pissy whenever that didn’t happen. He made a lot of selfish and short-sighted decisions, and when he failed at his one unambiguously good end goal, he retreated to Outland to become a petty tyrant whom you ultimately depose violently.
But some fans did not get the memo, arguing that despite all the evidence to the contrary, Illidan was actually a good person who deserved to be treated well. So thanks to handwave-based story contrivances, it turned out he was actually around and was revamped to be one hundred percent justified in Legion’s story, in which Illidan kills someone attempting to make him at least slightly better and is lauded by the narrative as a hero for it. It is, in short, an attempt at a mulligan for an existing plot outcome.
It does not work.
The term “mulligan” actually has an unclear origin, but it first got used for golf when you let someone just re-do a shot without counting it as an additional stroke. The idea is that there are times when conditions conspire against you and the result of a shot isn’t really your fault, so everyone just agrees that you can try again. If you putt and your shot might have gone in, but at the last moment a hawk dives down, grabs your ball, and goes flapping off into the air… well, that isn’t really a referendum on your skill.
Subsequently, the term has been applied to a lot of game concepts where everyone decides to just sort of disregard what happened and “reset” the game. In some cases it’s even a very formalized rule. Magic: the Gathering has an official rule about mulligans if your starting hand is just terrible. Lots of games have structures in place to let you say, “well, that try doesn’t count, so let’s move on.”
And this is a good thing. You should, in fact, be allowed to observe a point where failings in the game are just the result of bad luck or weird randomness, just like how fudging a roll in the players’ favor in a tabletop RPG is a good thing. But the problem is that the mulligan still exists.
If I’m playing golf with a friend (not a thing that happens, but bear with me for the purpose of analogy) and she completely flubs a swing, we’re playing a friendly game and there’s no reason to not say, “Hey, that doesn’t count, let’s just reset.” We can laugh about it. But we both still remember it happened. And it becomes a lot harder when, say, we have actual recordings and evidence of everything that happened.
Blizzard has a bad habit of trying to pull mulligans on previous ideas that did not work.
The Illidan issue is not the only time that the game has taken some kind of mulligan with concepts that seemed to otherwise be missing. Shadowlands had a lot of character mulligans, but it wouldn’t be unfair to say that Battle for Azeroth as a whole was trying to pull a mulligan on faction warfare which really had no place in the story post-Mists of Pandaria. That expansion ended with a moment that should have really put an end to factional bickering in the macro sense. Legion tried to contrive a reason to perpetuate it, and it still didn’t work.
But then, that echoed through to Shadowlands, which attempted to sell what Sylvanas did as a bigger plan in the wake of Wrath of the Lich King, and it didn’t work because there hadn’t really been any build-up or justification. The entire story was trying to pull a mulligan on story beats, to have another go at something. Sure, the last time we had melee hunters it was more of an emergent property of talent trees than a designed thing, but can we try it again? Yes, it was a big plot point that the aspects got de-powered, but what if we get to write the story where they are super important again?
Good storytelling and game design is almost always full of callbacks and references to the past, but in this case, it’s attempts to rewrite and recast the past. In many ways the whole fixation on time-limited server rules in WoW Classic caters directly to that. Oh, you remember the original game being harder and can’t conceive that maybe some of that was its having been two decades ago? Well, let’s make it actually harder. Let’s pull a mulligan on actual history – you’re all willing to do that, right?
Except the answer to that is actually negative. A lot of times people are not, in fact, willing to just let you call a mulligan. That’s why these things are technically against the rules.
Let’s go back to that hypothetical friendly golf game: If your friend has now done two dozen “test swings” and still promises that this time is the one that will count for real – oh, no, never mind, another test swing – you are probably not going to sit for it any longer. “Look, I’m marking it six and we’re moving on,” is a valid response.
Taking a mulligan in games is at a fundamental level an expression of trust and faith. You are allowing someone an undisclosed number of second chances to ensure that the game remains fun for everyone. But abuse of that system results in it being taken away, and all of it is predicated on the idea of this being friendly. If I am playing someone in a game where there are actual stakes, you do not get to just retry forever.
Because a mulligan doesn’t just take away the bad outcome but lessens the positive outcome in both directions. Illidan’s story had the right ending in The Burning Crusade, and his story in Legion was really bad. But I don’t think that either story is actually the final word any more; it’s just the final word until Blizzard decides to ask for another do-over. And whether or not the next do-over is the final word will, again, last exactly as long as it takes to decide “maybe we should do this differently,” at which point we’ll get a fourth try, a fifth try, and so on forever.
And I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry: No, you do not get infinite tries. You need to accept that you can make some callbacks and nods, but you have not earned mulligan privileges and may never have them; it’s very rare to get them. You get one shot at these stories and ideas, and if you screw them up then you cannot just get them back forever because the first try didn’t count.
And if that makes you think, “Well, now I don’t want to take this big swing because I don’t know if I’m ready to hit it,” good! That is the point! Maybe take some smaller swings for a while and actually hit the ball.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
