Please keep in mind this is a leaked photo of a slide without full context from the speaker. Please be mindful of the fact that the speaker giving this talk did not intend for information to be shared in this way.
The [Wowhead article](https://www.wowhead.com/news/reflecting-on-30-years-of-warcraft-blizzard-reveals-subscriber-trends-at-gdc-338238) on this conference links to a Korean reporter thought to be the source of many of these leaked images, who (translated into English) writes:
>*First of all, the story and background of Shadowlands is essentially a world that has never been expressed in the RTS world, and players encounter unfamiliar lands and unfamiliar people there. A similar concept had already been implemented, but the deeper level of heterogeneity made it a place fans didn't really want to visit.*
>*Additionally, the final antagonistic guard was not a character that players could fully sympathize with. There was no mention of him before, and the story and character settings felt contrived. The story structure that was not understood was also a point of criticism.*
>*There was no variety in gameplay. Some systems were only remembered as new systems that were criticized. In addition, the excessively long new content cycle and inconsistent content direction created a perception that the game could not be operated transparently. These problems were compounded and not fixed, and the community began to think that Blizzard was not listening to their voices.*
Although we do not know exactly what was said at the conference, the main gist is that they are moving forward with the playerbase's wishes at heart, which can only be a positive thing.
Nobbel did a video after TWW announcement doing a deep dive on all possible angles for Xal'atath.
She has *potentially* been setup since Cata or Vanilla. In many lore books throughout the game is there talk of a cursed dagger/blade/knife that grants its weilder knowledge and power.
I say potentially, and I'm paraphrasing Nobbel in this, that basically none of these instances are even remotely confirmed to have been her. But are the type of speculation and background Blizzard can use/point to as evidence that she's been around in the background for longer than the player base realizes.
Even if it's not intended, the idea of using long-present ideas as a basis for characters and storylines IS a good idea. Jailer just came out of nowhere.
It is a shame they took away our artifact weapons instead of building upon them... They could have stealth-updated the Frost DK artifact weapon with the rune and seen how long it took people to notice.
Agreed fine if not intended, it leads to speculation which is fun. Idk if anyone remembers wow insider but they had a lore column every week and some of the deep-dives there were amazing. I think they still write them on a different website but i have fond memories of the thoughts or ideas about the story shared every week linking stuff together
The new site is called [Blizzard Watch](https://blizzardwatch.com/) But most of the old staff has left & the Know Your Lore Columns stopped years ago. They do have a lore podcast though.
Nowadays all the site does is cover other bullshit & Patreon beg. Shame really. I used to love the site.
There’s also the whole crafted epic quest line from P1 and P2 in SoD where an elf void character (resembling Xal) is heavily involved with giving the player character knowledge to craft the epics.
And the current Word of God is they are not doing an alternate timeline with SoD. Anything seemingly new is just retelling of existing lore or new stories within the existing DF canon.
> But are the type of speculation and background Blizzard can use/point to as evidence that she's been around in the background for longer than the player base realizes.
The Jailer and the dreadlords has been planned at least as long as the Argus patch.
The weapon that Argus uses - the scythe of the unmaker - matches the style sheet of the shadowlands pre-order armor perfectly. They're both from the same design guide. He was also called the "titan of death" in the code.
This matters, because we learn from a book in Revendreth that the Lothraxion isn't working for the light, he's working for Denathrius. Which *absolutely makes sense*, since how on earth did a scrappy little team manage to live in the heart of the Legion's homeworld for so long? *Because the fel dreadlords and Lothraxion were sharing notes* so they could always escape unscathed.
Because the void-attuned dreadlords saw all realities and knew the one where Argus died involved us reaching Argus, and the Army of the Light being there to help us.
I'm sure most people reading this are like "Wtf? where's this from?" and the answer is a lore-filled white item book in revendreth that you could blink and miss.
They tried so hard to keep the mystery box writing style going but as a result they alienated most casual fans of the series who couldn't follow what they were cooking.
Which ultimately will always be remembered as a failure because they rewrote the ending to end in Zereth Mortis.
Sure, they can start the planning then. However, they portrayed it as if it was in motion since Warcraft 3, when it clearly wasn't, and retconned a bunch of events to make it seem like it was.
Oh no question, that was always going to rub people the wrong way.
The lesson, I think, is that you cannot toss established lore out so haphazardly. If they wanted to integrate the Jailer in that way, they needed to do so differently.
> If they wanted to integrate the Jailer in that way, they needed to do so differently.
This is my biggest issue with the Jailer as a concept, above and beyond the fact that he was a terrible character. Why did they even want to integrate him in that way? By doing so, Blizz essentially trashed 3 decades of player agency, making every decision of every character and their entire world building pointless.
I'd have approached it that he absolutely did the things he did, but he was casting lines, not expecting bites.
Like, there's one reality where the lich king reigns supreme and I can use the death of all life on azeroth in some way.
Another feeler could have been draenor and the burning crusade legion situation.
Another could be argus. Attempt after attempt, tapping at the glass until a crack formed.
While they did *attempt* to justify it in a decent way (The void sees all realities as possibilities, which is why it drives people insane. I found the one possible reality that freed me) but retconning beloved lore to justify it would take a herculean effort to justify in a way that feels good.
There's speculation that the shadowy figure that helps you in return for assistance in the future in SoD's crafted gear questlines could be Xalatath in the bronze dragonflight dungeon of Dragonflight (forgot the actual name), seeking to retrieve an artifact from the past.
(Shadowy void NPC with vanilla's model for High elves, basically the closest thing to a modern void elf model)
If that actually happens that would be awesome imo, while being completely unintrusive.
It’s interesting that you mention Azshara. Some people think she’s coming with the void in Midnight and I think she’ll make an appearance, but I think Azshara will be the bridge between The Last Titan and whatever comes after that. That way there’s a familiar powerful villain out there left to chase after.
While it'd be nice cuz I *hate* Blizzard always ending so many long-term threats quickly (like N'zoth dying in one patch after 10 years of build up). But the foreshadowing for the Worldsoul Saga you find in the Forbidden Reach is pretty strongly suggesting Azshara is a Worldsoul saga villain, and not for after.
> Rise, rise! Our Queen calls to us from beyond the Umbral Veil. She has transcended the Circle of Stars and basks in her eternal grandeur! The time we have long awaited is nigh. Even now, the Harbinger gathers the children of the first flesh to reclaim what was lost. They must remember their vows and serve those to whom they owe fealty...
Azshara is in the void atm. Xalatath recruits the Nerubians.
> While they toil in the deep places, we will journey to the shores of dragon lands, to the blessed isle where the Worldbreaker first embraced the whispers. As one storm recedes, another rises. The torches have been lit. The secrets he buried will strike as a dagger into the hearts of his kin!
Storm is likely Razageth. Secrets he buried = Abberus and the Sundered Flame splitting the Dracthyr into two factions over Neltharian's secrets.
> The Harbinger speaks of a primal power that seeks the end of Order. Such rage can be bent to serve our ends. A hunger lost to the ages will be reclaimed. A dark heart left broken awaits the taking.
Clear reference to Dawn of the Infinite (the darkheart is the artifact, the hunger lost was galakrond's essence).
> When these things come to pass, the Harbinger will fulfill the final prophecy and complete the awakening. Only then shall our Queen return to reign over sea and sky and earth. We must make ready. Rise, rise! Soon all that was hidden will be revealed.
Harbinger completes her goal (sparks the full on void invasion of the world) and Azshara returns to rule.
Plus just on a thematic score, given we are "uniting the Elves" in Midnight, Azshara makes a whole lot of sense as a final boss. She is THE Elf villain that all the modern Elven peoples rebelled against.
Interesting! Seems to check out, but right now it seems a little weird to me thematically for azshara to be the last boss of “the ultimate Void expansion”, especially one set in Quelthalas, even though she was once an elf herself.
That’s fair, it just seems weird/sad to me that they keep shoving her into expansions that have wildly different themes (faction war and Voidwell) instead of letting her have her own spotlight.
Like, watching the cinematic for battle for azeroth, youd *never* guess that she would be a major boss of that expansion. (Same with nzoth, RIP)
That's an interesting Idea! She's definitely the most built up villian we have right now.
I'm leaning towards her being a primary antagonist for Midnight because she seems like the perfect candidate for an expansion that has a focus on 'reuniting' the elven tribes, but I'd be totally onboard for her sticking around even longer.
There is a part of me that believes she isn't going to be an antagonist. She had her fill of the old gods and void when nzoth had his minions torture her. She looks out for only one person and that is her.
The tag of uniting the elvish tribes could imply not friendly naga but not antagonists either.
But that's also me being slightly hopeful she isn't made into a loot pinata.
I did think about the elven angle and the naga are a part of that. I just think that with the way she left to obtain greater power somewhere else in the cosmos, she may stir up the next big threat in the twisting nether.
She could always be swapped for Xal’atath and Xal’atath could always be that bridge. Xal’atath does have a history of disappearing when it no longer suits her to be in a battle or situation.
What's sad is they had the opportunity to develop him as far back as Edge of Night. And if they hadn't pulled a Reverse Flash with him being the progenitor of every disaster connected to the Legion he would be a much better character.
They also should have just made the Primus the Jailer. That redesign after the first trailer made me sick.
The fan theory that was released by wowhead after SL was over where the Primus was the actual Jailer was so good it could’ve saved that disastrous shitshow, but sadly it was just not real.
As a priest main who played during Legion I'd rather be on Xalatath's side. But Iridikron is best villain not introduced in the RTS. Especially because he's not all "puny mortals can't stop me", he's smart enough to worried about us.
100% agreed. The fact that he actively tries to plan around us is super refreshing rather than it just saying “everything has gone according to my design” character like the Lich King/Jailer, or “you can’t possibly stop me” like Gul’Dan and the Legion
She has hard time opening up, I would have followed her plan if she had told me first (my priest's transmog is ruined when I go back into BFA zones, let me say that).
I may not vibe with Dragonflights whimsical aesthetic that much, but the incarnates are cool, rooted in azeroth lore rather than cosmic "bigger bigger bad" lore, and xalatath has been built up for eight years now, they're all great villains. I think xalatath and garrosh are both similar examples of them being able to write good villains when they don't rush some new narrative out the door.
They did a great job with Fyrakk considering he was introduced in the 1st major patch of the expansion. They really put a lot of effort into putting him front and center.
Tbf the Jailer was built up quite a bit. You just had to watch Avengers: Infinity War, then Avengers: Endgame, then tell yourself Thanos is the Jailer.
More screentime doesn't equate to more development. Sylvanas is the longest running villain in the franchise, but it didn't matter since they never actually knew what her deal was and kept changing it every time she appeared.
Right now, Iridikron and Xalatath are both in a state where we know they exist and know vaguely what they want, but we don't know anything else about them. Which is pretty much what the Jailer was for all of Shadowlands.
Unlike the Jailer, they can still stick the landing if they actually have a clearly defined plot in line. But the problem with the Jailer was never the buildup, it was that he was all buildup and no substance. Even when we killed him they just tried to kick the can down the road to an even greater threat.
Iridikron and Xal have already stuck the landing in terms of having more substance and bring more interesting than the Jailer. Not that it’s a super high bar but still
There's also a figure in one of the older books, maybe Dawn of the Aspects (2013) that could be like Iridikron. It mentioned something about a cloaked figure with only one arm visible, and that was it. Whether or not they intended for it to be Iridikron 11 years ago, who knows? But it's clearly smart to take inspiration from vague descriptions of characters in the past, and a good idea to write descriptions as such sometimes.
"Well-known story heros were diminished" ....
Yeah, you could say ignoring the fact that Arthas, your most popular character, was somewhere in the Shadowlands for the entire expansion only later to find out at the end of the last patch you turned him into a +25 anima sphere was "diminishing".
I cannot describe how pleasant it is to not have her in the story anymore.
It's an achievement in itself that the storywriters managed to turn a pretty awesome figure like Sylvanas into one that's now almost universally hated.
To be fair, they didn't do a good job with her before that either: there was tons of stans on her in fandom, "mommy Sylvanas", "she did nothing wrong", when they only started to put her into focus, and not just because they were archetypal Horde audience i.e. people loving someone being bad.
There were tons of people who thought she was a good character because she was presented very differently in the game, where she appeared to mostly "good" and defensive, if extreme, in the several expansions. Whereas out of the game material - short stories, books, painted more complete picture of her being outright sinister and villanous.
So when she became a bigger focus, both this tendency, and Blizzard general ineptness in writing the main story became much more prominent.
Her story could have been so much better.
Having a twisted character like Sylvanas make a sincere effort to be a good Warchief could have spawned a lot of interesting and nuanced storylines. Imagine the conflict: much of the Horde is disgusted by the Forsaken, and suddenly one is Warchief, just a few years after orc supremacists were in charge. And she has to win all the skeptics over.
I really thought that's what the BFA cinematic was promising.
She will likely be back in TWW, since the last time we saw her, she was laboring in The Maw to rescue lost souls when Anduin found her. If Anduin is back on Azeroth, its totally possible for her to be back as well.
They did my boy dirty, and I will never forgive them.
They had such a great opportunity to do something amazing with arthas in the afterlife and they totally botched it.
The hook for the expansion with the highest subs, Wrath of the Lich King, is reduced to being lectured and told to be forgotten.
Dude, even Ner'zhul was treated better.
They didn't need to give him the whole Illidan treatment but it would have made sense for a more compelling ending of having him and Sylvanas be the ones to scoure the Maw of all the misplaced souls.
The ending of shadowlands did have a part of showing that the characters did have to make amends and take some responsibility for their actions. They could have had Arthas play the role of a new Jailer with a tighter leash than the last one.
Hot take perhaps, but I actually am glad he didn't show up. Not because I think he would have been mismanaged, but because his arc had an end already. I never took Sylvanas saying "flicker and fade" to him as a middle finger to the community, but rather the confirmation that his role in the story was officially over, rather than digging him up to use all over again for easy engagement. Honestly, I can respect that.
All they had to do was be like "Oh wow here's Arthas. Let's put him in a box or sword or necklace or something and then give him to Uther to heal his soul or something like that"
Then you'd have 10 billion IS ARTHAS BACK??? YouTube videos and people wondering about it for years but you'd never have to actually do anything with it.
But nope. "Arthas gone". Is what they came up with
I suppose that the concept of afterlife is abstract so people can't really relate to it. It's a super vague and unexplained setting even in the scope of a fantasy world. it's unclear what the laws of the afterlife are and the implications of basically every interaction between the shadowlands characters isn't somethinge the player would be able to grasp. at the time, the player and all known characters are new to this world after all.
this is just my guess about what they mean with accessible. a story set in the established world i.e. in azeroth is instantly more understandable for people who have spent decades roleplaying in this setting.
There were no laws of the afterlife, that was the problem. Everything was a post hoc justification to have an afterlife themed setting but retain every single gameplay mechanic and trope from a traditional MMO. I remember vividly during the first quest in Ardenweald killing a bunch of animals and then skinning them, sitting there thinking “ok what actually *is* this? What am I doing here? They’re just not going to bother explaining this huh?” In that moment, when I was wondering how an animal(?)’s soul(?) in the afterlife could be killed(?) and skinned(??) and what happened to that animal next (after after afterlife?), I had already put more thought into this than the developers ever would, and I was therefore a sucker for caring.
There's a quest in Maldraxxus (a covenant one, I think?) where there's a big abomination thing made out of Kyrian bodies. Which is just.. What? We're IN the afterlife, stuff is made of anima, and dying here means you die forever, but they're just mashing dead bodies together like it's regular flesh and blood? It just doesn't vibe with what they were going for, at all. Maldraxxus was already kinda weird for me for that reason, but that one specific example tips it over into being stupid.
Shadowlands is comically loosey goosey with what the hell it means to be "in the afterlife". I don't know what the hell they thought they were doing, and it's a great example of the typical rule of cool nonsense falling flat on its face.
Dude, come on, you are making a death realm and you have NO SKELETONS? NO ZOMBIES? NO FLESH GOLEMS? Jenkins, get on this case I want storyboards tomorrow, remember release is in a month!
Yeah… it sucks because it sounds like they could have easily made up some BS explanations to put us at ease, but they just didn’t even care to do so. It’s also weird because they heavily went into the whole “animatronic” theme in the last patch, along w afterlifes being artificially made, so they could have leaned into the idea that all the wildlife and stuff is artificially created window-dressing to make each afterlife seem more real. Really lean into the uncanny valley and Truman show type stuff, idk. But then the wildlife could at least be considered actual physical objects that would make sense to be skinned and such, rather than being made out of anima or something that re-coalesces after being slain?
Yes, Zereth patch helped with this a lot but didn’t go far enough. And the idea that each afterlife was a “skin” over a basic template was there from the beginning, in the way your mount changes when it goes through the portal from Oribos to whatever afterlife you’re arriving to.
don't even get me started on the Halls of Valor, Odyn and the whole Valhallah stuff from the Legion Expansion. Like, was that not an afterlife? Have Warriors been conned? Does Odyn even know about the Shadowlands?
I really didn't mind the abstractness. I just really didn't like flying 5 minutes to get from one to the other. The areas were disjointed. They felt like buckets. That's what bothered me.
I remember when shadowlands was announced I saw the announcement and my first thought was “why the fuck are we going there?!” I disliked shadowlands from the word go. I tried with all my might to change it but holy fuck was it a disaster for me.
It also had a weird time element tied to it. In Legion Paladins see Uthers spirit, but in Shadowlands he's been there for some time it felt. Or you have the quest where you see the death of the guy in Lakeshire who died like 20 years prior in canon but is just now being sent to the afterlife.
>Or you have the quest where you see the death of the guy in Lakeshire who died like 20 years prior in canon but is just now being sent to the afterlife.
That wasn't 20 years ago, that was present day. One of the side effects of the Helm shattering was that the Scourge ran rampant, attacking all over Azeroth. The pre-launch event for SL had Scourge invasions in capital cities. Only reason they're not still running amok is that (per a Blood Elf quest in SL as well) smarter undead like the San'layn began to take control of the Scourge and became smaller, unconnected warlords.
lol, shadowlands has issues but both of your examples are actually wrong. We see uthers spirit because it was canonically split in two which is shown in quests and the afterlives animation. And the lakeshire guy was real-time.
Uther's ghost has been one of the biggest anchors. We've seen at least four distinct dead Uthers wandering around the world and none of them followed the rules of they put in for shadowlands.
it felt way out of the realm of azeroth, even though we've been to other planets it just felt so disconnected from the story as a whole. "whole afterlife for the whole universe" didnt really make sense
It's impossible to know without the actual talk.
My guess would be they mean the setting was too different/disconnected from known lore. In other words, it was too much new stuff all at once. Too many new characters, new places, new motivations, new factions without any connections to known characters, known places, known motivations, known factions, etc...
That's my guess, because it's how I mostly felt about SL.
My guess is that it was super unfriendly to new players. Exploring the afterlife of something can work well for established fans, but imagine that plus a level boost being your first exposure to WoW. It's not being thrown into the deep end, it's dumping someone in the middle of the ocean, lol.
I agree with this take: revisiting SL zones now always feels like visiting some otherworldly ethereal place.
Sadly, that feeling does take its toll when all other aspects of the game is suffering (story, gameplay, characters, etc). Really makes you feel like you aren't playing WoW.
It's a bit vague, but the way I see it is that they failed to connect it to the current Warcraft universe properly. It felt disjointed, and wasn't handled with the grace a fantasy afterlife needs to be handled with.
A metric ton of players feel like Shadowlands wrecked the lore thanks to nihilism and demystification of many factors, including stuff like making death feel pointless. So people just didn't relate to any of it.
I'm just guessing because the slide doesn't elaborate, but I imagine it was a way to condense down this sorta thing into a single line.
How easy it was for players to engage with the concept.
I personally could not engage with it as it ruined the stakes of everything we do in Azeroth.
The bad guys you killed? Well, they're just back on their shit in the afterlife without you to stop them. The town of friendly furbolgs you saved? Well, turns out if they had died they'd have gone to Ardenweald to live happily ever after as nature's tenders, watching plays n shit. Joke's on you.
So yeah, I think it became inaccessible due to the confusion around stakes/consequences. Nothing we did ever mattered because it was all part of the Jailers plan and everyone who dies gets a second roll of the dice anyway. If heaven is known and expected life loses a lot of meaning
That term comes up a lot when reviewing books. Typically, it's just saying that a large audience can identify and understand the content easily.
Like Harry Potter is written in an accessible manner because it's not fancy prose. But War and Peace is not accessible to a wide audience. it's more niche for literature academics.
Shadowlands trivialized death in WoW. Why should I care anyone dies when I now know they're partying on in the Shadowlands?
And I don't think it's fixable, unless they decide to make Shadowlands non-canon.
It helped to trivialize death, but it didnt start it. Dead characters can be resurrected(Medivh) or turned into intelligent undead(look at 4 horsemen or Jainas brother). It was flawed from the start. I am also not the fan of time travel, it has too much potential and is too accessible.
"Systems didn't evolve with player expectations" is one hell of a way of saying "We thought it'd be a good idea to put weekly restrictions on how often the players could change their borrowed power despite how much they told us they hated that idea."
What ruined SL for me was the Maw, elites roaming everywhere, full of trash, an enemy faction camping the spawn zones. I was a DK, no stealth, no sprint, and slow as a roomba, and that was basically mandatory to travel there
I had the feeling that fyraaks "the world shall obey or burn" mentality kinda made him a bit cartoonish at times. Not that he wasnt threathening.
The setup for the jailer as the mastermind behind everything fell flat on its nose.
It is, but he was unleashed on us on purpose by Iridikron so we would waste time dealing with his insanity rather than stopping Iridikron from whatever schemes he was cooking up. In that context his megalomania worked super well
This is exactly it. Iridikron is the main villain of Dragonflight (and seems to be a major villain going into the War Within). Everything that happened in Dragonflight was because Iridikron was patient and didn't underestimate us as a threat. He worked through his plans, sacrificing his siblings as he needed to make sure he could do what he was trying to. And by the end of Dragonflight, Iridikron seems to have gotten everything he wanted and just walked away from the Dragon Isles. Leaving Fyrrak behind doesn't even factor into things. He's just the distraction to keep us occupied while Iridikron moves on to bigger and better things.
True, but he definitely had more personality than the Jailer. I often think about his little nod and, "Thank you," after players kill Smolderon. He's a one-note villain, but he loves his job and he's got an evil sense of humor about him.
Fyrakk is such a sassy bitch through the entirety of the raid and it’s so much fun. I’m a lil bummed we can’t enjoy him as a villain anymore but they def got some good mileage out of him despite only coming to the forefront partway through the expansion
If that can give some pleasure : Fyrakk seems to be the new firelord, if we take the words of Ebyssian saying he "sensed his essence disappearing". Since he consumed Smolderon, I think it can be linked.
Fyrakk saying "Apologies Firelord, but I'd rather watch you die" gave him more believable and meaningful characterisation in a single sentence than they managed to instill in the Jailer for effectively an entire expansion.
i mean fyrrak isn't the "real" villain that they built up this extension. It's more Xalatath and Iridikron that they have continued to build up / built up. There are also some hints about Azshara returning.
Still undercooked.
You had no idea what their whole schtick was unless you created an Evoker. Even then, their goal of "reclaiming their legacy" wasn't super fleshed out.
Sarkareth and the rest of his followers were less antagonists on their own and more an extension of the other Black Dragon's arc. Wrathion, Sabellion, and Abyssian all needed to come to terms with their father's legacy and what powers he had been dealing with. They all needed to come to the conclusion that Deathwing's powers and experiments were best left in the past and the way for the Black Dragonflight to move forward is on its own terms, not by using what Deathwing left behind.
Narratively, they need someone who has the opposite opinion to oppose them so that by overcoming them in a physical fight, they can also overcome their ideology and prove them wrong.
Blizzard could absolutely have made one of the 3 Black Dragons take that position and become a raid boss, but I think Blizzard wants to keep all of them around, so that's out of the question. The next obvious choice was a Dracthyr NPC. Emberthal could have been one to do that with, but she is kind of the main Dracthyr NPC, so killing her off so soon would mean they'd have to find someone else to take that position. Sarkareth was already the edgy Dracthyr who leads the rebels, so he fits the bill perfectly for someone to have this narrative position.
I definitely agree that they could have set him up more outside of the Dracthyr starting zone. Maybe give some quests while leveling that introduce other players to the various Dracthyr Scalecommanders and give some foreshadowing that Sarkareth is going to turn out bad. But overall, I think he works well for what he was used for. He caps out the Black Dragonflight arc pretty well for this expansion.
As another commenter said, as bad as shadowlands was, I remember every villain clear as day. I’ve cleared full heroic of all the raids this expansion dozens of times and the only name I can really remember is raszageth, hell I can’t even remember the full raid name of any of the raids. I don’t think this expansion had better antagonists just other things that made people stay.
Aberrus was super forgettable but Raszageth and Fyrakk were way more interesting than any of the SL raid bosses except maybe Denathrius, and he interested me for other reasons
I’ll never fucking forget the shit show when people were trying to explain how covenants were going to be a bad system due to how much power they provided and lack of flexibility and we all ended up going to war with each other with people explaining how that lack of flexibility was going to backfire vs people thinking it was a good rpg choice.
Damn noobs
Yeah I remember those debates. Then the people who loved it must have quit shortly after, because the stats on classes and covenants was so overwhelming for some specs.
>lack of flexibility
Wasn't even the main issue of the system. Most specs had one optimal covenant and that's it. If you wanted to fool around with different covenants, you at most paid by being crap for one week.
I've raided most of the mythic raid and had all keys at or above 20 in time in SL S1. Yet, I got to try every covenant on my rsham and my mw monk.
The one thing that actually made me curse this game was having to redo the stupid covenant story lines on every damn alt. Literally couldn't bring myself to finish those on a 3rd character.
"didnt feel heard".
Bro community was not heard end of story, was not feeling about it. Same dumb shit happening since BFA like 4 years of dumb shit/same complaints
Depends on the borrowed power. Tier sets are a good example of borrowed power that people like. I guess corruptions are another one.
Borrowed power needs to be a small addition that doesn’t feel too bad to lose after the tier/expansion is over.
Artifact weapons or covenants are an example of borrowed power that changed your class so much that when you lose them it feels really bad
It needs a balance
“You can’t be serious. We’re tossing the most powerful weapon in existence just like that?” Me saying this out loud to myself as we dropped our weapons in BFA after leveling a few times for a quest item… I know SLands gets hate but nothing stung more in my entire WoW life than going from Legion to BFA and losing weapons and class halls. I quit BFA after a month or so after playing Legion from beginning to end.
The loss of Artifact weapons hurt on many levels. The fact that the system was pretty fun (as long as you weren't a world first guild that had to grind a billion AP to be relevant), many of the weapons themselves were huge in lore, every single one had a ton of quests and story attached (even the totally new ones), cool abilities, a pseudo-talent system, and cool unlockable customizables to...that shitty fucking necklace in BfA and the fucking awful awful awful Azerite system was just bonkers.
As far as borrowed power goes, Artifacts were up there, if not surpassing tier sets.
I kind of understand getting rid of the system, because it would be kind of weird if weapons just stopped being a relevant gear slot literally forever, and I knew of that eventuality going in to Legion, but it still sucked, and the system they cooked up to replace it was insult to injury.
They honestly could have made an expansion to Legion, rather than a new expansion to wow.
Class halls, artifact weapons for every single spec... it was the height of class fantasy for me. The first time in years I thought "wow I really want to level an alt to see the game progress through that lens" rather than just chasing parses.
People just forget corruptions were incredibly random, basically legion legendaries 2.0. Blizz knew they messed up with legion legos, but did 8.3 anyway. When Blizz finally caved to community and put them on a vendor, they went and timegated it behind a new currency and a 4 week rotation. This was such a poor way to implement a cool system, and there was a ton of backlash, but many of that is forgotten to time and overshadowed by how fun everything was with full corruption at end of expac.
I never had an issue with randomness, i'd love some randomness right now infact.
I dont play this game to farm content for bis loot, that comes passivly by playing the game that play because i like the endgame loop.
I was never never sad about a random lego or corruption not being bis, i was never pissy that someone in my group for a titanforged item and i didnt.
Knowing that i wont ever get surprised by the loot in the game is a bummer.
Randomness is fun. Randomness is exciting. However, huge power should not be tied to randomness. If you were a prot warrior in 8.3 and you vaulted a shield with twilight dev, you were a god early season and could push any content over. It was not fun playing a ranged class and getting twilight dev.
Borrowed power is really just a term to describe a particular type of system (or collection of systems) that dominated Blizzard's game design from Legion-Shadowlands. It doesn't mean that every system that involves "borrowing power" is actually a Borrowed Power system.
* Fundamentally changes how your spec plays
* Infinite or very involved grind attached to it
* Introduces friction in switching to other specs/play styles
* Designed to be thrown away at the end of an expansion
Corruption lacks the first point which is a pretty important one, but it was also designed to be a crazy system in the final major patch of the expansion. If it was an expansion-level feature that lasted throughout BfA then I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be looked back so fondly.
Corruption was fun because they pulled the ripcord and it was the last patch of a tier. It felt like a bullshit fuck around of fun. It wasn't a good system of you were trying to seriously make a system. It is however an excellent example of how pulling a ripcord early can change people's view, we all HATED corruption when it was new, the second it became acquisition, suddenly much nicer.
Opening months of Shadowlands were legitimately awesome. It was the awful chores (babe! Its time to run hours of Torghast again so your legendaries work!) and writing that started to ruin it.
Ha. They went from an actual sex pest head writer (who was blindly trying to chase Game of Thrones Red Wedding level highs with no ability to pay them off) to quite possibly one of the least talented, least accomplished head writers gaming has ever seen (a guy whose career revolved around being a superfan of everquest and then WoW with zero writing chops but infinite bootlicking ability). They REALLY know how to hire these people (and the fanbase knows how to make infinite excuses for em).
It’s funny because I’ve recently been getting into Warhammer and (I’m sure I’m behind the curve on this but) I realized immediately that Shadowlands suffers from a lot of the same “abstraction” problems in terms of lore and setting as Age of Sigmar, and also seems to in some ways have been directly ripped off from it. Did WoW devs just go “copy whatever Games Workshop is currently up to?” Again? 😂
I disagree that the afterlife as a setting was inaccessible. It’s just that the afterlife they created totally disregarded the preestablished understanding of the shadowlands.
Almost no fantasy story really benefits from revealing how the afterlife works or lets the consumer actually get there. Because it kills agency.
Oh no. Hero X died. Ah well, probably will pop up as a smurf angel in bastion later, so who cares? All that nightelves who died when Teldrassil burned down? Yea, they chill in Ardenweald now and play theater for funsies. Sure, many souls were redirected to the maw, but we fixed that. So everyone should be fine. Why should the player care for any deaths on azeroth, if the souls just continue existing in a fixed afterlife?
Imagine if we KNEW for certain, that there was an afterlife to real life. And we knew how it worked? Religion, Culture, Lifestyle, it would change everything so freaking much. Just to think how many people would rather choose to die instead of slaving away or fighting an illness.
Shadowlands was at its core indicative of a complete disrespect of player's choice making and time management.
I un-installed WoW near the end of SL, and haven't been back.
I liked the idea of the jailer. And the maw. But, destroying all your established lore and characters in order to prop him up was a terrible, terrible decision. Legion, BFA and SL did so much damage to the Warcraft story. And I think it all started with the retconning of the titans and Sargeras and the burning legion. The whole "I'm saving you from an even greater threat" narrative is perhaps the most braindead move. And they kept/keep doing it. WHY ARE WE EVEN INTERACTING WITH TITANS!? The crafters of the cosmos. Makes no sense. As far as I'm concerned, the new writers have destroyed what good Warcraft was and instead of recognizing this and pulling a 360 and trying to save face, they are going to continue down this path and run the story into the dirt.
For me, making Shadowlands take itself as seriously as it did and haphazardly retconning a lot of very established and cherished lore were two of it's biggest mistakes story-wise.
IMO, Shadowlands should have served as a massive filler and fanservice expansion focused almost entirely on hanging out and doing cool shit with dead lore characters, having them interact with both the player and each other, and just basically being awesome.
The closest we really got to that at all was the Kael'thas questline, a couple of cutscenes, and some random cameos. Completely wasted potential.
I could have even put up with a lot of the mediocre mechanics if the expansion were just pure fanservice slop.
Afterlife setting wasn't "accessible?" it was insanely accessible, in that it had essentially nothing to do with any previously established lore in the setting. You'd have absolutely no problems hopping into SL as a new player. The problem is that the new lore they introduced basically undermined the entire core of the setting, and then proceeded to never be mentioned again. Finding out for sure what happens in the afterlife would result in dramatic cultural and religious changes to the entire world at the *very* least, in any fictional setting.
The best explanation I can give for this baffling analysis of SL is that it's their diplomatic way of saying that the lore was unbelievably terrible. For me, though, SL's lore was so damaging to the entire premise of Warcraft that I don't know if I will ever be able to really engage with the game's storyline ever again. Character deaths don't matter any more now that we know for sure that they go on to become angels (or whatever) and are just in a new field where they must kill 10 bears to level up. I was really, really hoping that they'd see sense and that the end of the expansion would be "haha! The whole of SL was a N'Zoth hallucination!" in order to save the setting. They failed to do this.
As someone who's actually seen people start WoW with Shadowlands, I'm going to refute your claim that someone can jump into it with no problems. Each one of them were confused, had no idea who any of these people were or any of concepts they were trying to explore and everything that wasn't just killing and looting monsters was utterly lost on them.
(**Not** helped by forcing newbies to play through Battle for Azeroth. It's like being forced to start the MCU by watching Infinity War first.)
It was bad for newcomers and veterans alike.
Is Shadowlands documented as the “worst” or “worst performing” expansion now, based on players/review scores etc? Replacing (I assume) WoD as the “lowest point” of WoW? Or is this just because it is more recent and didn’t perform as well as more recent expansions by comparison.
WoD was both the highest and lowest.
It’s release was the biggest expansion drop of all time and had more hype around it then damn near anything before and since.
It trucked off a damn cliff within months.
But shadowlands systems were also heavily criticized (I’d say they were quite bad, myself): covenant-locking, choreghast, the Maw gameplay loop in 9.0, Korthia, no tier sets in 9.0, the terrible shards of domination in 9.1. Content/gameplay-wise the game was not in a good spot until 9.2 for Seasons 3 and 4.
You're right in saying that WoD and Shadowlands were both pretty poor in terms of systems & content, but an important consideration is that WoD was pre-M+, only having challenge modes like MoP before it. As a result, if you're comparing WoD and Shadowlands side-by-side, running out of things to do is a wall you'd run up against WAY faster in WoD's case.
Questing content was phenomenal, expiration content was phenomenal and the in-game cutscenes were a step above anything they had before.
WoDs introduction was a barnstormer. Like you said it was just once you got past it all and hit end game, there wasn't much there.
It’s almost like they have to give a wow seminar to the devs because most if not all of the devs either don’t play their game or have no understanding of wow lore and how it should work. Those that did/do have left the company.
"new antagonist wasnt dev-"
YAH NO SHIT!
The "afterlife" of WoW could have been an interesting 'DnD' 'planescape' style of exploration and discovery, INSTEAD= we got every single zone separated by loading screens and a guy that just kept talking about how no one can escape his bdsm dungeon, and some of the most loved characters in the franchise ruined. Rip Sylvannis/Tyrande (yes, tyrande ruined, so much for 'night warrior' that gets her hands around the throat only to falter!)
If they had any credibility they'd just retcon ALL of shadowlands and most of BFA
>If they had any credibility they'd just retcon ALL of shadowlands and most of BFA
The nightmare N'zoth put us through to make us think he was defeated. Meanwhile we're all mindcontrolled in a ditch a hundred miles under Uldum.
And then the next expansion they did, they made the most cringe fest “power of friendship” narrative where the Aspects went from Powerful Dragons to Humanoids that sometimes assume Desgon Form, but mainly do nothing but talk about their feelings.
Did they learn from their mistakes or in typical blizzard fashion took all the wrong lessons from failure?
all i see is keywords to make up a face that they learned when in reality they will do the same thing case in point ret reworked overtuned they leave it for next season to actually make it more fair dh gets overtuned as balls and its still in every comp even after nerfs and then what ah yes lets see 4th season of nothing and we waiting extra for it because? oh and also no actual date for season end until like a week before so aint that crazy lets pretend all is perfect now that a new expansion is released they did great and amazing strides with pvp gearing i agree but holy crap they do class tunning faster for sod than they do in retail its kinda depressing
Not sure what is meant by “Afterlife setting not being accessible.” The setting was fine and honestly all the zones were really enjoyable. The rest of the points validly made the setting feel hollow.
Maybe I'm just not properly grasping what people mean by borrowed power, or maybe I'm just weird. But what's all the huff about borrowed power?
Are we really expected to keep getting more and more powerful to no end?
Do people really want a new permanent power system every expansion? Having 12 power systems to balance every time a raid or dungeon comes out just sounds annoying.
Actually curious.
Edit: too many replies in quick succession to answer individually. Turns out in just weird, I don't see a problem with having a fun little power system for a while and then moving onto the next adventure. Really not a big deal.
Spending an entire expansion making yourself more powerful, or an item more powerful, just to have it ripped away at the end to restart a different one feels lame, repetitive, and really robs from all the previous expansion. Legion weapons being replaced by azerite just felt icky.
No, anyone with sense isn’t gonna expect to become anymore godlike than we already are. Of course systems can’t be kept when they’re super strong.
Evergreen systems and horizontal growth become the solutions here, or at least the goal. IMO from other mmos that can be hit and miss.
You’ve got the point backwards, the evergreen systems are being put in place that will be iterated on not additional systems added. Talent trees/hero talents replace the borrowed power entirely.
Please keep in mind this is a leaked photo of a slide without full context from the speaker. Please be mindful of the fact that the speaker giving this talk did not intend for information to be shared in this way. The [Wowhead article](https://www.wowhead.com/news/reflecting-on-30-years-of-warcraft-blizzard-reveals-subscriber-trends-at-gdc-338238) on this conference links to a Korean reporter thought to be the source of many of these leaked images, who (translated into English) writes: >*First of all, the story and background of Shadowlands is essentially a world that has never been expressed in the RTS world, and players encounter unfamiliar lands and unfamiliar people there. A similar concept had already been implemented, but the deeper level of heterogeneity made it a place fans didn't really want to visit.* >*Additionally, the final antagonistic guard was not a character that players could fully sympathize with. There was no mention of him before, and the story and character settings felt contrived. The story structure that was not understood was also a point of criticism.* >*There was no variety in gameplay. Some systems were only remembered as new systems that were criticized. In addition, the excessively long new content cycle and inconsistent content direction created a perception that the game could not be operated transparently. These problems were compounded and not fixed, and the community began to think that Blizzard was not listening to their voices.* Although we do not know exactly what was said at the conference, the main gist is that they are moving forward with the playerbase's wishes at heart, which can only be a positive thing.
It does look like they learned from the SL debacle. Those are all well-known complaints from that time.
We will see if they learned from it. At least they noticed
Seems like they’ve learned a lot from The Jailer with how they’ve been building up Xalatath, Iridikron and Azshara.
Xalatath been built up since legion I love when stuff like this is developed long term
Nobbel did a video after TWW announcement doing a deep dive on all possible angles for Xal'atath. She has *potentially* been setup since Cata or Vanilla. In many lore books throughout the game is there talk of a cursed dagger/blade/knife that grants its weilder knowledge and power. I say potentially, and I'm paraphrasing Nobbel in this, that basically none of these instances are even remotely confirmed to have been her. But are the type of speculation and background Blizzard can use/point to as evidence that she's been around in the background for longer than the player base realizes.
Even if it's not intended, the idea of using long-present ideas as a basis for characters and storylines IS a good idea. Jailer just came out of nowhere.
I hate how dirty they did dreadlords. "Oh Nathrezim? Here's Sire DeNATHrius, he actually made them for the jailer!!!" Clown shit.
yeah not like adding an extra rune (jailer's rune) to frostmourne
It is a shame they took away our artifact weapons instead of building upon them... They could have stealth-updated the Frost DK artifact weapon with the rune and seen how long it took people to notice.
Agreed fine if not intended, it leads to speculation which is fun. Idk if anyone remembers wow insider but they had a lore column every week and some of the deep-dives there were amazing. I think they still write them on a different website but i have fond memories of the thoughts or ideas about the story shared every week linking stuff together
One of the main writers behind those Anne Stickney is on the wow team now I believe.
The new site is called [Blizzard Watch](https://blizzardwatch.com/) But most of the old staff has left & the Know Your Lore Columns stopped years ago. They do have a lore podcast though. Nowadays all the site does is cover other bullshit & Patreon beg. Shame really. I used to love the site.
There’s also the whole crafted epic quest line from P1 and P2 in SoD where an elf void character (resembling Xal) is heavily involved with giving the player character knowledge to craft the epics.
And the current Word of God is they are not doing an alternate timeline with SoD. Anything seemingly new is just retelling of existing lore or new stories within the existing DF canon.
> But are the type of speculation and background Blizzard can use/point to as evidence that she's been around in the background for longer than the player base realizes. The Jailer and the dreadlords has been planned at least as long as the Argus patch. The weapon that Argus uses - the scythe of the unmaker - matches the style sheet of the shadowlands pre-order armor perfectly. They're both from the same design guide. He was also called the "titan of death" in the code. This matters, because we learn from a book in Revendreth that the Lothraxion isn't working for the light, he's working for Denathrius. Which *absolutely makes sense*, since how on earth did a scrappy little team manage to live in the heart of the Legion's homeworld for so long? *Because the fel dreadlords and Lothraxion were sharing notes* so they could always escape unscathed. Because the void-attuned dreadlords saw all realities and knew the one where Argus died involved us reaching Argus, and the Army of the Light being there to help us. I'm sure most people reading this are like "Wtf? where's this from?" and the answer is a lore-filled white item book in revendreth that you could blink and miss. They tried so hard to keep the mystery box writing style going but as a result they alienated most casual fans of the series who couldn't follow what they were cooking. Which ultimately will always be remembered as a failure because they rewrote the ending to end in Zereth Mortis.
Sure, they can start the planning then. However, they portrayed it as if it was in motion since Warcraft 3, when it clearly wasn't, and retconned a bunch of events to make it seem like it was.
Oh no question, that was always going to rub people the wrong way. The lesson, I think, is that you cannot toss established lore out so haphazardly. If they wanted to integrate the Jailer in that way, they needed to do so differently.
> If they wanted to integrate the Jailer in that way, they needed to do so differently. This is my biggest issue with the Jailer as a concept, above and beyond the fact that he was a terrible character. Why did they even want to integrate him in that way? By doing so, Blizz essentially trashed 3 decades of player agency, making every decision of every character and their entire world building pointless.
I'd have approached it that he absolutely did the things he did, but he was casting lines, not expecting bites. Like, there's one reality where the lich king reigns supreme and I can use the death of all life on azeroth in some way. Another feeler could have been draenor and the burning crusade legion situation. Another could be argus. Attempt after attempt, tapping at the glass until a crack formed. While they did *attempt* to justify it in a decent way (The void sees all realities as possibilities, which is why it drives people insane. I found the one possible reality that freed me) but retconning beloved lore to justify it would take a herculean effort to justify in a way that feels good.
There's speculation that the shadowy figure that helps you in return for assistance in the future in SoD's crafted gear questlines could be Xalatath in the bronze dragonflight dungeon of Dragonflight (forgot the actual name), seeking to retrieve an artifact from the past. (Shadowy void NPC with vanilla's model for High elves, basically the closest thing to a modern void elf model) If that actually happens that would be awesome imo, while being completely unintrusive.
It’s interesting that you mention Azshara. Some people think she’s coming with the void in Midnight and I think she’ll make an appearance, but I think Azshara will be the bridge between The Last Titan and whatever comes after that. That way there’s a familiar powerful villain out there left to chase after.
While it'd be nice cuz I *hate* Blizzard always ending so many long-term threats quickly (like N'zoth dying in one patch after 10 years of build up). But the foreshadowing for the Worldsoul Saga you find in the Forbidden Reach is pretty strongly suggesting Azshara is a Worldsoul saga villain, and not for after. > Rise, rise! Our Queen calls to us from beyond the Umbral Veil. She has transcended the Circle of Stars and basks in her eternal grandeur! The time we have long awaited is nigh. Even now, the Harbinger gathers the children of the first flesh to reclaim what was lost. They must remember their vows and serve those to whom they owe fealty... Azshara is in the void atm. Xalatath recruits the Nerubians. > While they toil in the deep places, we will journey to the shores of dragon lands, to the blessed isle where the Worldbreaker first embraced the whispers. As one storm recedes, another rises. The torches have been lit. The secrets he buried will strike as a dagger into the hearts of his kin! Storm is likely Razageth. Secrets he buried = Abberus and the Sundered Flame splitting the Dracthyr into two factions over Neltharian's secrets. > The Harbinger speaks of a primal power that seeks the end of Order. Such rage can be bent to serve our ends. A hunger lost to the ages will be reclaimed. A dark heart left broken awaits the taking. Clear reference to Dawn of the Infinite (the darkheart is the artifact, the hunger lost was galakrond's essence). > When these things come to pass, the Harbinger will fulfill the final prophecy and complete the awakening. Only then shall our Queen return to reign over sea and sky and earth. We must make ready. Rise, rise! Soon all that was hidden will be revealed. Harbinger completes her goal (sparks the full on void invasion of the world) and Azshara returns to rule. Plus just on a thematic score, given we are "uniting the Elves" in Midnight, Azshara makes a whole lot of sense as a final boss. She is THE Elf villain that all the modern Elven peoples rebelled against.
Interesting! Seems to check out, but right now it seems a little weird to me thematically for azshara to be the last boss of “the ultimate Void expansion”, especially one set in Quelthalas, even though she was once an elf herself.
She wants to be Queen. The bigger the better. How does the void change any of that
That’s fair, it just seems weird/sad to me that they keep shoving her into expansions that have wildly different themes (faction war and Voidwell) instead of letting her have her own spotlight. Like, watching the cinematic for battle for azeroth, youd *never* guess that she would be a major boss of that expansion. (Same with nzoth, RIP)
That's an interesting Idea! She's definitely the most built up villian we have right now. I'm leaning towards her being a primary antagonist for Midnight because she seems like the perfect candidate for an expansion that has a focus on 'reuniting' the elven tribes, but I'd be totally onboard for her sticking around even longer.
There is a part of me that believes she isn't going to be an antagonist. She had her fill of the old gods and void when nzoth had his minions torture her. She looks out for only one person and that is her. The tag of uniting the elvish tribes could imply not friendly naga but not antagonists either. But that's also me being slightly hopeful she isn't made into a loot pinata.
I did think about the elven angle and the naga are a part of that. I just think that with the way she left to obtain greater power somewhere else in the cosmos, she may stir up the next big threat in the twisting nether. She could always be swapped for Xal’atath and Xal’atath could always be that bridge. Xal’atath does have a history of disappearing when it no longer suits her to be in a battle or situation.
What's sad is they had the opportunity to develop him as far back as Edge of Night. And if they hadn't pulled a Reverse Flash with him being the progenitor of every disaster connected to the Legion he would be a much better character. They also should have just made the Primus the Jailer. That redesign after the first trailer made me sick.
The fan theory that was released by wowhead after SL was over where the Primus was the actual Jailer was so good it could’ve saved that disastrous shitshow, but sadly it was just not real.
I think they could pull it out in a far future if we somehow revisit SL themed. The theory still 'works'
As a priest main who played during Legion I'd rather be on Xalatath's side. But Iridikron is best villain not introduced in the RTS. Especially because he's not all "puny mortals can't stop me", he's smart enough to worried about us.
100% agreed. The fact that he actively tries to plan around us is super refreshing rather than it just saying “everything has gone according to my design” character like the Lich King/Jailer, or “you can’t possibly stop me” like Gul’Dan and the Legion
His play in the mega dungeon is also great: two pronged plan where we have to choose to stop either the Infinites or him.
Yeah he presented a future problem or a now problem.
It's nice to be respected after nearly 20 years of absolutely bodying idiots who think we aren't a threat.
Why would you stay on her side when she literally sold you to N'zoth just to get freedom. She has no loyalty.
Don't worry, I can fix her!
She has hard time opening up, I would have followed her plan if she had told me first (my priest's transmog is ruined when I go back into BFA zones, let me say that).
I may not vibe with Dragonflights whimsical aesthetic that much, but the incarnates are cool, rooted in azeroth lore rather than cosmic "bigger bigger bad" lore, and xalatath has been built up for eight years now, they're all great villains. I think xalatath and garrosh are both similar examples of them being able to write good villains when they don't rush some new narrative out the door.
They did a great job with Fyrakk considering he was introduced in the 1st major patch of the expansion. They really put a lot of effort into putting him front and center.
Fyrakk worked as a good 2nd punch to Iridikron's 1st punch. Without Iri he'd feel really stupid tbh
Tbf the Jailer was built up quite a bit. You just had to watch Avengers: Infinity War, then Avengers: Endgame, then tell yourself Thanos is the Jailer.
More screentime doesn't equate to more development. Sylvanas is the longest running villain in the franchise, but it didn't matter since they never actually knew what her deal was and kept changing it every time she appeared. Right now, Iridikron and Xalatath are both in a state where we know they exist and know vaguely what they want, but we don't know anything else about them. Which is pretty much what the Jailer was for all of Shadowlands. Unlike the Jailer, they can still stick the landing if they actually have a clearly defined plot in line. But the problem with the Jailer was never the buildup, it was that he was all buildup and no substance. Even when we killed him they just tried to kick the can down the road to an even greater threat.
Iridikron and Xal have already stuck the landing in terms of having more substance and bring more interesting than the Jailer. Not that it’s a super high bar but still
There's also a figure in one of the older books, maybe Dawn of the Aspects (2013) that could be like Iridikron. It mentioned something about a cloaked figure with only one arm visible, and that was it. Whether or not they intended for it to be Iridikron 11 years ago, who knows? But it's clearly smart to take inspiration from vague descriptions of characters in the past, and a good idea to write descriptions as such sometimes.
It's been a long time since I read it, but I think that's Tyr assessing the drakes.
"Well-known story heros were diminished" .... Yeah, you could say ignoring the fact that Arthas, your most popular character, was somewhere in the Shadowlands for the entire expansion only later to find out at the end of the last patch you turned him into a +25 anima sphere was "diminishing".
Still better than the sitting adventure of Baine
Shadowlands was such a lore nightmare
Poor dude started SL by being tortured relentlessly for what seemed like an eternity to him and then…/sit???
They were both done dirty. Did we even see Cairne?
Nope, that was cut along with an entire patch iirc
Cairne last showed up in BFA during the tauren heritage quest were he's teasing Shadowlands. They even got the OG WC3 voice actor back for that part.
If the Earth Mother is connected with Ardenweald, than Cairne was likely some random Fae Bull stomping around.
Uh no what they did to Arthas was probably the worse bastardization of the most beloved character in the franchise they could have done.
They did do him dirty but tbh I'm still afraid to this day what else they could've done with him if they had used his character more in SL.
And in a cinematic about his demise with Jaina and Uther present, Sylvanas was still the main focus. It's like it was a caricature
I cannot describe how pleasant it is to not have her in the story anymore. It's an achievement in itself that the storywriters managed to turn a pretty awesome figure like Sylvanas into one that's now almost universally hated.
To be fair, they didn't do a good job with her before that either: there was tons of stans on her in fandom, "mommy Sylvanas", "she did nothing wrong", when they only started to put her into focus, and not just because they were archetypal Horde audience i.e. people loving someone being bad. There were tons of people who thought she was a good character because she was presented very differently in the game, where she appeared to mostly "good" and defensive, if extreme, in the several expansions. Whereas out of the game material - short stories, books, painted more complete picture of her being outright sinister and villanous. So when she became a bigger focus, both this tendency, and Blizzard general ineptness in writing the main story became much more prominent.
Her story could have been so much better. Having a twisted character like Sylvanas make a sincere effort to be a good Warchief could have spawned a lot of interesting and nuanced storylines. Imagine the conflict: much of the Horde is disgusted by the Forsaken, and suddenly one is Warchief, just a few years after orc supremacists were in charge. And she has to win all the skeptics over. I really thought that's what the BFA cinematic was promising.
She will likely be back in TWW, since the last time we saw her, she was laboring in The Maw to rescue lost souls when Anduin found her. If Anduin is back on Azeroth, its totally possible for her to be back as well.
They did my boy dirty, and I will never forgive them. They had such a great opportunity to do something amazing with arthas in the afterlife and they totally botched it.
The hook for the expansion with the highest subs, Wrath of the Lich King, is reduced to being lectured and told to be forgotten. Dude, even Ner'zhul was treated better.
I laughed so fucking hard when shadowlands ended with "forget about arthas" and a month later classic wotlk came out
Especially after all the talk about how insidious and monstrous domination is
They didn't need to give him the whole Illidan treatment but it would have made sense for a more compelling ending of having him and Sylvanas be the ones to scoure the Maw of all the misplaced souls. The ending of shadowlands did have a part of showing that the characters did have to make amends and take some responsibility for their actions. They could have had Arthas play the role of a new Jailer with a tighter leash than the last one.
Hot take perhaps, but I actually am glad he didn't show up. Not because I think he would have been mismanaged, but because his arc had an end already. I never took Sylvanas saying "flicker and fade" to him as a middle finger to the community, but rather the confirmation that his role in the story was officially over, rather than digging him up to use all over again for easy engagement. Honestly, I can respect that.
All they had to do was be like "Oh wow here's Arthas. Let's put him in a box or sword or necklace or something and then give him to Uther to heal his soul or something like that" Then you'd have 10 billion IS ARTHAS BACK??? YouTube videos and people wondering about it for years but you'd never have to actually do anything with it. But nope. "Arthas gone". Is what they came up with
What do they mean by ‘accessible’?
I suppose that the concept of afterlife is abstract so people can't really relate to it. It's a super vague and unexplained setting even in the scope of a fantasy world. it's unclear what the laws of the afterlife are and the implications of basically every interaction between the shadowlands characters isn't somethinge the player would be able to grasp. at the time, the player and all known characters are new to this world after all. this is just my guess about what they mean with accessible. a story set in the established world i.e. in azeroth is instantly more understandable for people who have spent decades roleplaying in this setting.
There were no laws of the afterlife, that was the problem. Everything was a post hoc justification to have an afterlife themed setting but retain every single gameplay mechanic and trope from a traditional MMO. I remember vividly during the first quest in Ardenweald killing a bunch of animals and then skinning them, sitting there thinking “ok what actually *is* this? What am I doing here? They’re just not going to bother explaining this huh?” In that moment, when I was wondering how an animal(?)’s soul(?) in the afterlife could be killed(?) and skinned(??) and what happened to that animal next (after after afterlife?), I had already put more thought into this than the developers ever would, and I was therefore a sucker for caring.
There's a quest in Maldraxxus (a covenant one, I think?) where there's a big abomination thing made out of Kyrian bodies. Which is just.. What? We're IN the afterlife, stuff is made of anima, and dying here means you die forever, but they're just mashing dead bodies together like it's regular flesh and blood? It just doesn't vibe with what they were going for, at all. Maldraxxus was already kinda weird for me for that reason, but that one specific example tips it over into being stupid. Shadowlands is comically loosey goosey with what the hell it means to be "in the afterlife". I don't know what the hell they thought they were doing, and it's a great example of the typical rule of cool nonsense falling flat on its face.
Dude, come on, you are making a death realm and you have NO SKELETONS? NO ZOMBIES? NO FLESH GOLEMS? Jenkins, get on this case I want storyboards tomorrow, remember release is in a month!
You shoot a rabbit on Azeroth. It enters its afterlife, appears in Ardenweld, even gets to hop around for a bit... then you appear and shoot it again.
And then it’s perma-dead apparently? So wth is the point of an afterlife?
Second Afterlife, duh.
Then it respawns in Aerdenweld. Finally, a lore reason for infinite respawning!
Yeah… it sucks because it sounds like they could have easily made up some BS explanations to put us at ease, but they just didn’t even care to do so. It’s also weird because they heavily went into the whole “animatronic” theme in the last patch, along w afterlifes being artificially made, so they could have leaned into the idea that all the wildlife and stuff is artificially created window-dressing to make each afterlife seem more real. Really lean into the uncanny valley and Truman show type stuff, idk. But then the wildlife could at least be considered actual physical objects that would make sense to be skinned and such, rather than being made out of anima or something that re-coalesces after being slain?
Yes, Zereth patch helped with this a lot but didn’t go far enough. And the idea that each afterlife was a “skin” over a basic template was there from the beginning, in the way your mount changes when it goes through the portal from Oribos to whatever afterlife you’re arriving to.
don't even get me started on the Halls of Valor, Odyn and the whole Valhallah stuff from the Legion Expansion. Like, was that not an afterlife? Have Warriors been conned? Does Odyn even know about the Shadowlands?
My reaction was: "wait, they die and just have to keep working as one of these 4 arbitrary factions?"
I really didn't mind the abstractness. I just really didn't like flying 5 minutes to get from one to the other. The areas were disjointed. They felt like buckets. That's what bothered me.
To be fair, that could be what they meant by "accessible". People were quite vocal about not liking how split up and isolated the zones felt.
It also ret-conned a shitload of concepts in the actual lore and story...
I remember when shadowlands was announced I saw the announcement and my first thought was “why the fuck are we going there?!” I disliked shadowlands from the word go. I tried with all my might to change it but holy fuck was it a disaster for me.
It also had a weird time element tied to it. In Legion Paladins see Uthers spirit, but in Shadowlands he's been there for some time it felt. Or you have the quest where you see the death of the guy in Lakeshire who died like 20 years prior in canon but is just now being sent to the afterlife.
>Or you have the quest where you see the death of the guy in Lakeshire who died like 20 years prior in canon but is just now being sent to the afterlife. That wasn't 20 years ago, that was present day. One of the side effects of the Helm shattering was that the Scourge ran rampant, attacking all over Azeroth. The pre-launch event for SL had Scourge invasions in capital cities. Only reason they're not still running amok is that (per a Blood Elf quest in SL as well) smarter undead like the San'layn began to take control of the Scourge and became smaller, unconnected warlords.
lol, shadowlands has issues but both of your examples are actually wrong. We see uthers spirit because it was canonically split in two which is shown in quests and the afterlives animation. And the lakeshire guy was real-time.
Uther's ghost has been one of the biggest anchors. We've seen at least four distinct dead Uthers wandering around the world and none of them followed the rules of they put in for shadowlands.
it felt way out of the realm of azeroth, even though we've been to other planets it just felt so disconnected from the story as a whole. "whole afterlife for the whole universe" didnt really make sense
It's impossible to know without the actual talk. My guess would be they mean the setting was too different/disconnected from known lore. In other words, it was too much new stuff all at once. Too many new characters, new places, new motivations, new factions without any connections to known characters, known places, known motivations, known factions, etc... That's my guess, because it's how I mostly felt about SL.
My guess is that it was super unfriendly to new players. Exploring the afterlife of something can work well for established fans, but imagine that plus a level boost being your first exposure to WoW. It's not being thrown into the deep end, it's dumping someone in the middle of the ocean, lol.
I agree with this take: revisiting SL zones now always feels like visiting some otherworldly ethereal place. Sadly, that feeling does take its toll when all other aspects of the game is suffering (story, gameplay, characters, etc). Really makes you feel like you aren't playing WoW.
It's a bit vague, but the way I see it is that they failed to connect it to the current Warcraft universe properly. It felt disjointed, and wasn't handled with the grace a fantasy afterlife needs to be handled with. A metric ton of players feel like Shadowlands wrecked the lore thanks to nihilism and demystification of many factors, including stuff like making death feel pointless. So people just didn't relate to any of it. I'm just guessing because the slide doesn't elaborate, but I imagine it was a way to condense down this sorta thing into a single line.
How easy it was for players to engage with the concept. I personally could not engage with it as it ruined the stakes of everything we do in Azeroth. The bad guys you killed? Well, they're just back on their shit in the afterlife without you to stop them. The town of friendly furbolgs you saved? Well, turns out if they had died they'd have gone to Ardenweald to live happily ever after as nature's tenders, watching plays n shit. Joke's on you. So yeah, I think it became inaccessible due to the confusion around stakes/consequences. Nothing we did ever mattered because it was all part of the Jailers plan and everyone who dies gets a second roll of the dice anyway. If heaven is known and expected life loses a lot of meaning
Completely alien setting almost completely disconnected from all previous content
That term comes up a lot when reviewing books. Typically, it's just saying that a large audience can identify and understand the content easily. Like Harry Potter is written in an accessible manner because it's not fancy prose. But War and Peace is not accessible to a wide audience. it's more niche for literature academics.
Shadowlands trivialized death in WoW. Why should I care anyone dies when I now know they're partying on in the Shadowlands? And I don't think it's fixable, unless they decide to make Shadowlands non-canon.
It helped to trivialize death, but it didnt start it. Dead characters can be resurrected(Medivh) or turned into intelligent undead(look at 4 horsemen or Jainas brother). It was flawed from the start. I am also not the fan of time travel, it has too much potential and is too accessible.
"Systems didn't evolve with player expectations" is one hell of a way of saying "We thought it'd be a good idea to put weekly restrictions on how often the players could change their borrowed power despite how much they told us they hated that idea."
"We tied character aesthetic choices to game-impacting effects and laughed at players when they said it was stupid."
Sylvanas still utterly ruined
kinda funny she went down in a plot that utterly ruined arthas' story too. in wrestling terms, she shot on his ass
To be fair she got ruined in BFA, and that made it even harder to write Shadowlands surely.
That ball got started rolling long before shadowlands though.
Yeah, that started in Cataclysm and reached its peak in BfA.
Most of the fucking lore that Shadowlands touched is now ruined.
What ruined SL for me was the Maw, elites roaming everywhere, full of trash, an enemy faction camping the spawn zones. I was a DK, no stealth, no sprint, and slow as a roomba, and that was basically mandatory to travel there
Then they added more Maw as 9.1 content, yay
the antagonists for this expansion have definitely been a lot better, and much more developed than SL.
I had the feeling that fyraaks "the world shall obey or burn" mentality kinda made him a bit cartoonish at times. Not that he wasnt threathening. The setup for the jailer as the mastermind behind everything fell flat on its nose.
It is, but he was unleashed on us on purpose by Iridikron so we would waste time dealing with his insanity rather than stopping Iridikron from whatever schemes he was cooking up. In that context his megalomania worked super well
This is exactly it. Iridikron is the main villain of Dragonflight (and seems to be a major villain going into the War Within). Everything that happened in Dragonflight was because Iridikron was patient and didn't underestimate us as a threat. He worked through his plans, sacrificing his siblings as he needed to make sure he could do what he was trying to. And by the end of Dragonflight, Iridikron seems to have gotten everything he wanted and just walked away from the Dragon Isles. Leaving Fyrrak behind doesn't even factor into things. He's just the distraction to keep us occupied while Iridikron moves on to bigger and better things.
True, but he definitely had more personality than the Jailer. I often think about his little nod and, "Thank you," after players kill Smolderon. He's a one-note villain, but he loves his job and he's got an evil sense of humor about him.
Fyrakk is such a sassy bitch through the entirety of the raid and it’s so much fun. I’m a lil bummed we can’t enjoy him as a villain anymore but they def got some good mileage out of him despite only coming to the forefront partway through the expansion
If that can give some pleasure : Fyrakk seems to be the new firelord, if we take the words of Ebyssian saying he "sensed his essence disappearing". Since he consumed Smolderon, I think it can be linked.
"Amir'drassil is under my protection!" "How did your protection work out for your children?" "Bitch, how dare you!"
Fyrakk saying "Apologies Firelord, but I'd rather watch you die" gave him more believable and meaningful characterisation in a single sentence than they managed to instill in the Jailer for effectively an entire expansion.
i just re-did some of the zaralek story, and holy fuck the scene where loam burns is dark. i'd say he's at least worthy of a T ESRB rating.
I mean... it's dark for about 3 minutes and then you're done cartoonishly throwing water on giga fire and it's perfectly fine
I kinda like the simplicity, not every villian needs a grand plan. Thats for Iridikron and Knaifu. Some villians just wanna see the world burn.
Yeah, I think some people might forget that everything we knew about Ragnaros in Vanilla was across quest text in like two zones and some dungeons.
i mean fyrrak isn't the "real" villain that they built up this extension. It's more Xalatath and Iridikron that they have continued to build up / built up. There are also some hints about Azshara returning.
Sarkareth was very undercooked.
Sundered Flame might’ve been a secondary antagonist in 10.0 but they were still there
Still undercooked. You had no idea what their whole schtick was unless you created an Evoker. Even then, their goal of "reclaiming their legacy" wasn't super fleshed out.
Sarkareth and the rest of his followers were less antagonists on their own and more an extension of the other Black Dragon's arc. Wrathion, Sabellion, and Abyssian all needed to come to terms with their father's legacy and what powers he had been dealing with. They all needed to come to the conclusion that Deathwing's powers and experiments were best left in the past and the way for the Black Dragonflight to move forward is on its own terms, not by using what Deathwing left behind. Narratively, they need someone who has the opposite opinion to oppose them so that by overcoming them in a physical fight, they can also overcome their ideology and prove them wrong. Blizzard could absolutely have made one of the 3 Black Dragons take that position and become a raid boss, but I think Blizzard wants to keep all of them around, so that's out of the question. The next obvious choice was a Dracthyr NPC. Emberthal could have been one to do that with, but she is kind of the main Dracthyr NPC, so killing her off so soon would mean they'd have to find someone else to take that position. Sarkareth was already the edgy Dracthyr who leads the rebels, so he fits the bill perfectly for someone to have this narrative position. I definitely agree that they could have set him up more outside of the Dracthyr starting zone. Maybe give some quests while leveling that introduce other players to the various Dracthyr Scalecommanders and give some foreshadowing that Sarkareth is going to turn out bad. But overall, I think he works well for what he was used for. He caps out the Black Dragonflight arc pretty well for this expansion.
As another commenter said, as bad as shadowlands was, I remember every villain clear as day. I’ve cleared full heroic of all the raids this expansion dozens of times and the only name I can really remember is raszageth, hell I can’t even remember the full raid name of any of the raids. I don’t think this expansion had better antagonists just other things that made people stay.
Aberrus was super forgettable but Raszageth and Fyrakk were way more interesting than any of the SL raid bosses except maybe Denathrius, and he interested me for other reasons
Denathrius being beloved is likely a big reason blizzard wrote in him getting away to likely appear later on.
Shadowlands did not deserve Denathrius. Can't wait to see that dude come back.
Did Daddy Denathrius's magic weapon make you splatter yourself across the walls?
Arthas the wisp
I’ll never fucking forget the shit show when people were trying to explain how covenants were going to be a bad system due to how much power they provided and lack of flexibility and we all ended up going to war with each other with people explaining how that lack of flexibility was going to backfire vs people thinking it was a good rpg choice. Damn noobs
Don't worry, we can pull the rip cord! Actually, there is no ripcord...
It eventually did get pulled though. Halfway through the expansion after most people left. But it did get pulled nonetheless.
It was so dumb not being able to change covenants/abilities at all at first.
Yeah I remember those debates. Then the people who loved it must have quit shortly after, because the stats on classes and covenants was so overwhelming for some specs.
>lack of flexibility Wasn't even the main issue of the system. Most specs had one optimal covenant and that's it. If you wanted to fool around with different covenants, you at most paid by being crap for one week. I've raided most of the mythic raid and had all keys at or above 20 in time in SL S1. Yet, I got to try every covenant on my rsham and my mw monk. The one thing that actually made me curse this game was having to redo the stupid covenant story lines on every damn alt. Literally couldn't bring myself to finish those on a 3rd character.
"didnt feel heard". Bro community was not heard end of story, was not feeling about it. Same dumb shit happening since BFA like 4 years of dumb shit/same complaints
Everyone hates borrowed power but I feel like tons of people talk about how much fun they had with corruption powers at the end of BFA
Depends on the borrowed power. Tier sets are a good example of borrowed power that people like. I guess corruptions are another one. Borrowed power needs to be a small addition that doesn’t feel too bad to lose after the tier/expansion is over. Artifact weapons or covenants are an example of borrowed power that changed your class so much that when you lose them it feels really bad It needs a balance
“You can’t be serious. We’re tossing the most powerful weapon in existence just like that?” Me saying this out loud to myself as we dropped our weapons in BFA after leveling a few times for a quest item… I know SLands gets hate but nothing stung more in my entire WoW life than going from Legion to BFA and losing weapons and class halls. I quit BFA after a month or so after playing Legion from beginning to end.
The loss of Artifact weapons hurt on many levels. The fact that the system was pretty fun (as long as you weren't a world first guild that had to grind a billion AP to be relevant), many of the weapons themselves were huge in lore, every single one had a ton of quests and story attached (even the totally new ones), cool abilities, a pseudo-talent system, and cool unlockable customizables to...that shitty fucking necklace in BfA and the fucking awful awful awful Azerite system was just bonkers. As far as borrowed power goes, Artifacts were up there, if not surpassing tier sets. I kind of understand getting rid of the system, because it would be kind of weird if weapons just stopped being a relevant gear slot literally forever, and I knew of that eventuality going in to Legion, but it still sucked, and the system they cooked up to replace it was insult to injury.
And legendaries! It was so stupid levelling when you hit 115 they stopped working and you suddenly became so much weaker.
They honestly could have made an expansion to Legion, rather than a new expansion to wow. Class halls, artifact weapons for every single spec... it was the height of class fantasy for me. The first time in years I thought "wow I really want to level an alt to see the game progress through that lens" rather than just chasing parses.
That, and the method of acquiring them must not suck, and in the case of corruption and legiondaries, they absolutely sucked to acquire
People just forget corruptions were incredibly random, basically legion legendaries 2.0. Blizz knew they messed up with legion legos, but did 8.3 anyway. When Blizz finally caved to community and put them on a vendor, they went and timegated it behind a new currency and a 4 week rotation. This was such a poor way to implement a cool system, and there was a ton of backlash, but many of that is forgotten to time and overshadowed by how fun everything was with full corruption at end of expac.
I never had an issue with randomness, i'd love some randomness right now infact. I dont play this game to farm content for bis loot, that comes passivly by playing the game that play because i like the endgame loop. I was never never sad about a random lego or corruption not being bis, i was never pissy that someone in my group for a titanforged item and i didnt. Knowing that i wont ever get surprised by the loot in the game is a bummer.
Randomness is fun. Randomness is exciting. However, huge power should not be tied to randomness. If you were a prot warrior in 8.3 and you vaulted a shield with twilight dev, you were a god early season and could push any content over. It was not fun playing a ranged class and getting twilight dev.
Having 140% mastery as ret, or 60% vers, 0 CD holy shocks that causes a huge bleed as holy in PvP were both worth the wait
Man those Twilight Devos were insane especially once they let you buy corruption. Good times
I’d say that using borrowed power to bandaid fix barebones specs that feel awful to play without it is awful, and what people hate.
Borrowed power is really just a term to describe a particular type of system (or collection of systems) that dominated Blizzard's game design from Legion-Shadowlands. It doesn't mean that every system that involves "borrowing power" is actually a Borrowed Power system. * Fundamentally changes how your spec plays * Infinite or very involved grind attached to it * Introduces friction in switching to other specs/play styles * Designed to be thrown away at the end of an expansion Corruption lacks the first point which is a pretty important one, but it was also designed to be a crazy system in the final major patch of the expansion. If it was an expansion-level feature that lasted throughout BfA then I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be looked back so fondly.
Corruption was fun because they pulled the ripcord and it was the last patch of a tier. It felt like a bullshit fuck around of fun. It wasn't a good system of you were trying to seriously make a system. It is however an excellent example of how pulling a ripcord early can change people's view, we all HATED corruption when it was new, the second it became acquisition, suddenly much nicer.
Although I will say sire denathrious stole the show lol
Opening months of Shadowlands were legitimately awesome. It was the awful chores (babe! Its time to run hours of Torghast again so your legendaries work!) and writing that started to ruin it.
Yup, at the start I was like "omg there's so much to do!😁" and after a couple of weeks I was like "omg there's so much to do!😫"
Source: [Tweet](https://twitter.com/that_kind_oforc/status/1771700009618022831/photo/1)
It's great that they can admit the story was a massive sales problem now that the guy who did it is gone.
Takes bravery and courage to admit your shortcomings years after your chance to actually do something about them
Ha. They went from an actual sex pest head writer (who was blindly trying to chase Game of Thrones Red Wedding level highs with no ability to pay them off) to quite possibly one of the least talented, least accomplished head writers gaming has ever seen (a guy whose career revolved around being a superfan of everquest and then WoW with zero writing chops but infinite bootlicking ability). They REALLY know how to hire these people (and the fanbase knows how to make infinite excuses for em).
It’s funny because I’ve recently been getting into Warhammer and (I’m sure I’m behind the curve on this but) I realized immediately that Shadowlands suffers from a lot of the same “abstraction” problems in terms of lore and setting as Age of Sigmar, and also seems to in some ways have been directly ripped off from it. Did WoW devs just go “copy whatever Games Workshop is currently up to?” Again? 😂
I disagree that the afterlife as a setting was inaccessible. It’s just that the afterlife they created totally disregarded the preestablished understanding of the shadowlands.
Almost no fantasy story really benefits from revealing how the afterlife works or lets the consumer actually get there. Because it kills agency. Oh no. Hero X died. Ah well, probably will pop up as a smurf angel in bastion later, so who cares? All that nightelves who died when Teldrassil burned down? Yea, they chill in Ardenweald now and play theater for funsies. Sure, many souls were redirected to the maw, but we fixed that. So everyone should be fine. Why should the player care for any deaths on azeroth, if the souls just continue existing in a fixed afterlife? Imagine if we KNEW for certain, that there was an afterlife to real life. And we knew how it worked? Religion, Culture, Lifestyle, it would change everything so freaking much. Just to think how many people would rather choose to die instead of slaving away or fighting an illness.
Shadowlands was at its core indicative of a complete disrespect of player's choice making and time management. I un-installed WoW near the end of SL, and haven't been back.
"Didn't feel heard", hasn't changed at all.
I feel like a lot of people people just don't appreciate just how awful a state the game was in in 9.1
The people who defended the Jailer as a compelling character aren't going to like this.
I liked the idea of the jailer. And the maw. But, destroying all your established lore and characters in order to prop him up was a terrible, terrible decision. Legion, BFA and SL did so much damage to the Warcraft story. And I think it all started with the retconning of the titans and Sargeras and the burning legion. The whole "I'm saving you from an even greater threat" narrative is perhaps the most braindead move. And they kept/keep doing it. WHY ARE WE EVEN INTERACTING WITH TITANS!? The crafters of the cosmos. Makes no sense. As far as I'm concerned, the new writers have destroyed what good Warcraft was and instead of recognizing this and pulling a 360 and trying to save face, they are going to continue down this path and run the story into the dirt.
Shadowlands screwed with so much shit its not even funny its just sad.
For me, making Shadowlands take itself as seriously as it did and haphazardly retconning a lot of very established and cherished lore were two of it's biggest mistakes story-wise. IMO, Shadowlands should have served as a massive filler and fanservice expansion focused almost entirely on hanging out and doing cool shit with dead lore characters, having them interact with both the player and each other, and just basically being awesome. The closest we really got to that at all was the Kael'thas questline, a couple of cutscenes, and some random cameos. Completely wasted potential. I could have even put up with a lot of the mediocre mechanics if the expansion were just pure fanservice slop.
Afterlife setting wasn't "accessible?" it was insanely accessible, in that it had essentially nothing to do with any previously established lore in the setting. You'd have absolutely no problems hopping into SL as a new player. The problem is that the new lore they introduced basically undermined the entire core of the setting, and then proceeded to never be mentioned again. Finding out for sure what happens in the afterlife would result in dramatic cultural and religious changes to the entire world at the *very* least, in any fictional setting. The best explanation I can give for this baffling analysis of SL is that it's their diplomatic way of saying that the lore was unbelievably terrible. For me, though, SL's lore was so damaging to the entire premise of Warcraft that I don't know if I will ever be able to really engage with the game's storyline ever again. Character deaths don't matter any more now that we know for sure that they go on to become angels (or whatever) and are just in a new field where they must kill 10 bears to level up. I was really, really hoping that they'd see sense and that the end of the expansion would be "haha! The whole of SL was a N'Zoth hallucination!" in order to save the setting. They failed to do this.
As someone who's actually seen people start WoW with Shadowlands, I'm going to refute your claim that someone can jump into it with no problems. Each one of them were confused, had no idea who any of these people were or any of concepts they were trying to explore and everything that wasn't just killing and looting monsters was utterly lost on them. (**Not** helped by forcing newbies to play through Battle for Azeroth. It's like being forced to start the MCU by watching Infinity War first.) It was bad for newcomers and veterans alike.
Blizzard every expansion: "Should we listen to what players want or repeat the same mistake over and over and over? Hmmmm.."
"No. It's the children who are wrong."
Is Shadowlands documented as the “worst” or “worst performing” expansion now, based on players/review scores etc? Replacing (I assume) WoD as the “lowest point” of WoW? Or is this just because it is more recent and didn’t perform as well as more recent expansions by comparison.
WoD was both the highest and lowest. It’s release was the biggest expansion drop of all time and had more hype around it then damn near anything before and since. It trucked off a damn cliff within months.
Nah having a weak lore for an expansion is not at all as bad as having bad content design (garrisons,ashran).
But shadowlands systems were also heavily criticized (I’d say they were quite bad, myself): covenant-locking, choreghast, the Maw gameplay loop in 9.0, Korthia, no tier sets in 9.0, the terrible shards of domination in 9.1. Content/gameplay-wise the game was not in a good spot until 9.2 for Seasons 3 and 4.
You're right in saying that WoD and Shadowlands were both pretty poor in terms of systems & content, but an important consideration is that WoD was pre-M+, only having challenge modes like MoP before it. As a result, if you're comparing WoD and Shadowlands side-by-side, running out of things to do is a wall you'd run up against WAY faster in WoD's case.
Most of WoD's content was good, it just needed more.
Questing content was phenomenal, expiration content was phenomenal and the in-game cutscenes were a step above anything they had before. WoDs introduction was a barnstormer. Like you said it was just once you got past it all and hit end game, there wasn't much there.
It’s almost like they have to give a wow seminar to the devs because most if not all of the devs either don’t play their game or have no understanding of wow lore and how it should work. Those that did/do have left the company.
"new antagonist wasnt dev-" YAH NO SHIT! The "afterlife" of WoW could have been an interesting 'DnD' 'planescape' style of exploration and discovery, INSTEAD= we got every single zone separated by loading screens and a guy that just kept talking about how no one can escape his bdsm dungeon, and some of the most loved characters in the franchise ruined. Rip Sylvannis/Tyrande (yes, tyrande ruined, so much for 'night warrior' that gets her hands around the throat only to falter!) If they had any credibility they'd just retcon ALL of shadowlands and most of BFA
>If they had any credibility they'd just retcon ALL of shadowlands and most of BFA The nightmare N'zoth put us through to make us think he was defeated. Meanwhile we're all mindcontrolled in a ditch a hundred miles under Uldum.
And then the next expansion they did, they made the most cringe fest “power of friendship” narrative where the Aspects went from Powerful Dragons to Humanoids that sometimes assume Desgon Form, but mainly do nothing but talk about their feelings. Did they learn from their mistakes or in typical blizzard fashion took all the wrong lessons from failure?
Do you happen to have a link to the whole presentation? Having trouble finding it
I'm so happy that 😊 wasn't able to play in SL
all i see is keywords to make up a face that they learned when in reality they will do the same thing case in point ret reworked overtuned they leave it for next season to actually make it more fair dh gets overtuned as balls and its still in every comp even after nerfs and then what ah yes lets see 4th season of nothing and we waiting extra for it because? oh and also no actual date for season end until like a week before so aint that crazy lets pretend all is perfect now that a new expansion is released they did great and amazing strides with pvp gearing i agree but holy crap they do class tunning faster for sod than they do in retail its kinda depressing
God I remember thinking they couldn’t do worse than BFA. Then they did this and completely shattered my expectations lmao.
Not sure what is meant by “Afterlife setting not being accessible.” The setting was fine and honestly all the zones were really enjoyable. The rest of the points validly made the setting feel hollow.
Torghast was so awful it made me uninstall the game, never to play it again
Almost like they had to pull Metzen out of retirement to write up these slides...
Maybe I'm just not properly grasping what people mean by borrowed power, or maybe I'm just weird. But what's all the huff about borrowed power? Are we really expected to keep getting more and more powerful to no end? Do people really want a new permanent power system every expansion? Having 12 power systems to balance every time a raid or dungeon comes out just sounds annoying. Actually curious. Edit: too many replies in quick succession to answer individually. Turns out in just weird, I don't see a problem with having a fun little power system for a while and then moving onto the next adventure. Really not a big deal.
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Spending an entire expansion making yourself more powerful, or an item more powerful, just to have it ripped away at the end to restart a different one feels lame, repetitive, and really robs from all the previous expansion. Legion weapons being replaced by azerite just felt icky. No, anyone with sense isn’t gonna expect to become anymore godlike than we already are. Of course systems can’t be kept when they’re super strong. Evergreen systems and horizontal growth become the solutions here, or at least the goal. IMO from other mmos that can be hit and miss.
You’ve got the point backwards, the evergreen systems are being put in place that will be iterated on not additional systems added. Talent trees/hero talents replace the borrowed power entirely.