Metzen: "Okay I'm going to leave but before I do I'm going to make a comprehensive canon guide."Afrasaibi: "I'm going to rewrite this one character because I $%^&ing hate her."Danuser: "I'm going to make a fifth Old God."Golden: "I'm going to make this Youth Pastor the most importantest bean in the entire universe!"Metzen: "I hate you all."
Which Old God was under Twilight Highlands?
My money is on a secret Old God under the Darkmoon Faire. Between the secret ghosts, the animal guardians, the seemingly immortal carnival ringmaster (Silas), and the giant old-god style eyes literally everywhere, yeah I think the clues are there.
It's important to remember that Warcraft (and Starcraft, for that matter) heavily rips off draws a lot of creative influence from Warhammer lore.Four old gods that corrupt mortals into serving them, each vying to tip the balance of power in their favor and becoming the ultimate force amongst their faction.Nzoth ruled an empire, killed millions, and drove Deathwing to create massive destruction. His closest parallel would be Khorne, blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne etc.Yogg'Saron was very slow with his corruption, and shows us visions of the past. He is closest to Tzeentch, the Chaos god of change. The puzzle box, interest in human politics, Slaanesh is the chaos god of pleasure and hedonism - this goes for sex, drugs, eating, noise, all taken to unholy extremes. However, Bizzard really doesn't put much sexuality into the game so Slaanesh doesn't have a great comparison - C'thun could be argued to be the closest though. as Cthun is associated with a specific race who worship him. (Aqir) However Cthun is more similar to Tzeentch than Slaanesh, even though Yogg is a better fit.Y'shaarj is Nurgle, the chaos god of pestilence and decay. However he's not gross - the bodily fluids have been removed. Instead of spewing out vomit, Sha spew out white smoke. Instead of walking through streams of acidic pus and bile, you walk through the weird cracked black and white ground. He, like Nurgle, empowers his chosen champions (Garrosh, Malkorok, etc) with immense strength, but makes their bodies twisted and grotesque. Ghuun fits better here, but Ghuun has very little influence so...All the old gods overlap a little though, and are adjusted for a less grimdark setting. So if WoW is copying 40k lore, who is the 5th old god, if they're equivalent to the Chaos God from 40k?Malal, later reintroduced as Malice, was the renegade god of Chaos who opposed the other Chaos gods and would work against them constantly, rather than vying for power. Malice was never on the same level the other four. Malice was retconned and is no longer canon, while the other four gods remain as the ruinous powers. Malice was said to have grown in power proportional to the combined powers of the other four. This fits pretty well with parallels to Xal'atath - a minor old god character that was once very powerful, but is now very weak, who also seeks to oppose them.Also each Chaos God has their own favourite sacred number and color and Malice's was black and white which is pretty shadow priesty.So yeah. A lotta words to say "I think its more likely that we just didn't fully kill all the old gods properly, and that we'll be seeing them work together to try and regenerate themselves".
My imagination is one of the writers trying to come up with some story for this expac had gone through old flavor texts and went "Guys! I know how we can have a boss that might piss off more people than Jailer and start internet debates all over!"
Wild theory. Considering other Old God's connections to Lovecraftian ones...Going to throw a wild guess that 5th is based on Hastur.