This is going to be a little World of Warcraft-centric, only because it's the only game I have extensive history with. Hopefully my points apply to most if not all MMOs in general.

This was a little inspired by WoW's patch 4.3 content, in which Deathwing is finally brought to an end as well as the powers of the four Dragon Aspects. You don't really need to know much of the backstory to keep up with me, by the way. Anyhow. This storyline...well it was rushed. There's really no other way to say it. Deathwing (being the current main antagonist) was really hyped as being nearly unstoppable, he spend a good part of the game randomly flying about the world and scorching entire areas and for a long time all our major characters lamented how they were going to stop him before he destroyed the world. There really wasn't a very large gap between that and his end. I have a feeling part of it probably had to do with the upcoming expansion, but I digress. My problem was I really liked this storyline! All throughout the game, the Dragon Aspects are hinted to or referred to in some shape or form, and it didn't really start picking up until the Lich King expansion when they began appearing ingame. Still though, their roles and true nature was never really talked about in any detail and you basically had to look up the game history to know who they are and how they came about. From a story perspective, they just weren't touched on enough for how this story eventually ended. Nozdormu didn't even get a unique model until the 4.3 patch! With Deathwing's re-emergence into the world, I think a lot of us players (especially us veterans) expected to see and experience a lot more of the Dragon Aspects before Deathwing was finally brought down. Needless to say, I think we really got the short end of the stick. And it seems a lot of players feel that way too.

But in a way, I can kind of understand how something like this could happen. Writing a story for an MMO really appears and is probably similar to a long, unending first draft. And you seldom get it right on the first go. Trying to create interesting storylines in a confining format like an MMO is probably even more of a challenge than a novel or short story. You can't go back and change lore unless you get super creative. In a way, I can kind of let the bad setup slide. Stories often take time and planning, and really how many times have you sat down to write a story and find things change along the way? New ideas, characters, and settings, ideas shift and change. And that's with a tale that has an ENDING! Unless the writers at Blizz and every other MMO company are planning the entire lifetime of their games, it's very difficult to see where your game story is going to be a year, two years, etc. down the road. Sometimes it's not until you get to that pivotal moment in a story when you realize the role a character has to play. Sometimes old heros fade away, new ones take their place, sometimes the gods take a bigger or smaller role than anticipated. So really, as much as the end to Deathwing felt incredibly anti-climatic to the players who were looking forward to more Aspect fun, I don't think we can really 100% blame it all on the writers for the ending. The format makes it difficult, especially for lore that seemed to often be in progress as the overall game story developed. They would have had to have set that up LONG before Cata, and that probably wasn't realistic by any means. Still, I think they could have inched it out a bit more, maybe give us a bit of history somehow and fully define what their ancient powers were for and what role they were to play before taking it away from them.