Shadowlands could have been great. One of the best in fact, where it not for a few things:
Not a lot of effort was put into it. We all learned a few years back what kind of shenanigans were going on at Blizzard HQ at the time it was being developed. What we got was an expansion great in concept, that was built greatly by interns.
It relied on one main story, with little to no side stories that told us anything about how denizens of the Shadowlands got to be who they were.
Stubbornness and inflexibility by senior staff that prevented needed changes from happening until it was too late, something later admitted by the game director.
I personally love playing in the Shadowlands universe. I love the creatures that inhabit it, especially stewards, and the dredgers. Someone put a lot of work into creating and designing stewards, but we never got a lot of story explaining their culture. Korthia’s scholars were another really interesting group whose story just stopped and went nowhere.
In a normal expansion we’d have several detailed novels at least to fill in the gaps, but no luck here.
The most fun I had was writing my own stories about some of these characters that went along with my own head canon version of the expansion. However, if you’re not the same sort of nerd that I am, I can see how you’d be disappointed with the expansion.
I love that argument. “There were big changes but I won’t mention them, I’ll just say they were there and insult you because you don’t know what they are”.
Just about everyone trying to argue against me puts far more effort into personal insults than they do into defending their own position. The reason, their position is difficult to defend.
But OK, let’s hear it. What were the big design changes brought on by Shadowlands? Or are you going to stick with the “If you don’t know my argument then something is wrong with you”?
You’re the one saying “Dragonflight” as a change. Obviously more changed within it than just the name of the expansion, but if all you’re going to point out is the name of an expansion and a couple of casual-friendly features (confused as to why you are acting like they’re negative or small/irrelevant?), are you actually trying to have a discussion?
Let’s see…
-Class and Spec abilities and passives rolled into a talent system akin to the talents of old to permit for more player choice
-Reduced by-design friction in zones and content in general, both on the casual end and the mid/hardcore end
-Introduction and continuation of casual-friendly systems such as Follower Dungeons
-Beginnings of the path to account-wide features, reputations and currencies, which we got with TWW
-Overhaul to the crafting and gathering professions across the board
-Increased accessibility to content in general without the requirement of consistently maintaining your subscription and meeting weekly thresholds, which has held true across most content forms excluding the absolute high end (which has always been exclusive anyways)
-More focus on evaluating given endgame pillars equally rather than treating some as secondary or as “stepping stones” to others (some of this started in Shadowlands, but it became more prevalent after Shadowlands)
-Anti-flying stance adjusted with a new mode of transport (and later resolving accessibility of the original flight mode), minus a few locations
I have not offered you any personal insults yet, merely factual statements regarding your relatively ridiculous stance.
Friction, friction, friction. That was the name of the game in Shadowlands.
Huh? I feel like we learned plenty about each of the different groups in Shadowlands. In fact, a criticism I think that can be levied at the expansion is that the Night Fae basically had nothing to do with the plot and their stories were completely isolated from the rest. You go to Ardenweald because… reasons, and then by the end of it you decide to go to where you should have gone after Maldraxxus, which is Revendreth. And then the Night Fae don’t really contribute anything worthwhile to the narrative, whereas other characters from the other three Covenants have roles in the unfolding story.
Yeah these changes were terrible. No one was asking for the timegated professions we"ve had since Dragonflight, which I guess started in Legion. They basically just moved the timegating of legendaries via soul ash etc. to the professions systems, and made them a convoluted mess.
They folded "borrowed power’ into hero talent trees, because I guess that was a big complaint with the covenants. It never bothered me, but everyone happy now? No. Players who want more power are never satisfied. So they’ve moved on to eliminating pets in neverending quest to remove any variety in playstyle in the game to squeeze a few more dps out of every build. It will never end.
Gear also drops like candy in WW and started with Dragonflight, so I guess that’s an improved system. Which is something that will happen every expansion–making changes to the gearing system.
What they probably saw was a big uptick in solo players, so Torghast is back remodeled as Delves, with gear drops. And follower dungeons that cater to the same crowd.
The change to dynamic flying was probably coming anyway. From what I gather the no-flying problem was way, way worse in BFA. Honestly that seems like the xpac wirh more pain points, but I wasn’t there live, so can’t speak to it.
I actually liked Dragonflight though a little light for my tastes, so I don’t think it compares badly to SL at all. What I see though, is an everincreasing blandness in the game that if it is the direct result of players hating Shadowlands, really, really sucks.
Really? I didn’t play during shadowlands, but I have been going back and doing the quests and raids and stuff and I like Revendreth and Castle Nathria but don’t like anything else really. I guess the Night Fae zone is kind of cool, but I wouldn’t but it as high tier.
Honestly, the new system is divisive, and I can accept that it’s not liked by everybody. It’s different, and while I like it I know some don’t.
I’ll still take the current crafting system over BFA → Shadowlands crafting.
I don’t think Blizzard realized where the Hunter base stood with pets, hence the option being brought back for MM. It was a stupid thing for them to try to force and they apparently got enough backlash on it to walk it back.
The hero talents are in my eyes probably the better way they’ve handled borrowed power because it’s not really borrowed power, just another layer of character progression integrated into the talent system.
Gear, eh. Half and half for me, but speaking objectively playing alts and goofing around in low to moderate content is easier than it ever was to my recollection, and I only view that as positive.
Torghast, I loved. I think it would’ve been a more generally accepted endgame pillar or optional endgame if it had been independent of endgame gear progression, both in terms of Torghast depending on the endgame content and endgame content somewhat requiring Torghast. I hope they bring this back or expand it eventually.
Shadowlands suffered less from it, if only because of how segmented the zones were from each other. I’ve never liked Pathfinder timegating flight.
I think they’re trying some new things and some of them are just not going to be hits. I’m willing to accept working through growing pains for interesting or different stuff, and thus far I’m happy with how they’ve iterated on the game with DF and TWW. I’ll have to see how TWW goes before I pass further judgement on it, though.
Thank you for at least reasonably discussing this, though. Nice to actually converse with somebody, lol.
Yeah I’m really not trying to be combative, just saying there are good and bad to a lot of these expansions, and I think SL has been dunked on a little too harshly, and I hope some people who didnt like it for whatever reason give it a chance even after the fact, because it had a lot of interesting elements.
I absolutely loathe Shadowlands, it’s by far the worst expansion ever released. It was the one expansion I sincerely couldn’t bring myself to play through.
That said, there are a lot of things about it I like in isolation, that I would have enjoyed if they were separated from the overall theme of a poorly handled afterlife.
To me, it all felt disconnected and uncomfortable to navigate, both from a story and gameplay perspective. Otherwise, as a casual player who really leans into the aesthetics and roleplay elements of the game, I enjoyed the concept of Covenant powers and I especially still adore Soulshape and how you could unlock so many different forms from content around the world.
My general critiques of SL notwithstanding, it had a lot of the classic WoW charm I adore so much, to the point where in a different, more accessible setting with more refined systems I would probably put it above Dragonflight.
I really wish we got that Faun running animation for Draenei in the barbershop, or something. It was so cute. And honestly, I still really wish we came out of that expansion with a few allied races.
I didn’t mention “systems” in any of my posts. Go back and quote me where I said anything about “systems”. Seems like these “systems” were enough of a problem you have to mention them on their own.
It factually had terrible retention.
It was. Until SL.
A tedious slog is better than nothing, I don’t believe that at all. I’d rather have nothing to do because I can FIND something to do as long as there’s not a tedious slog ahead of me.
Not just my tedious slog. The majority of player’s tedious slog. Enough quit to send a message. Now wow isn’t a tedious slog. It’s fun.
I didn’t do it. I quit a couple of months into SL and didn’t come back until mid season 1 in DF. I was one of the majority of players driven away by SL.
Yea no. You don’t represent a majority nor can you claim it was for the majority. I can however do that exact same trick.
Now WoW is boring and empty of any reason to log in. Now I ask myself why continue to subscribe? Just like WoD the WORST and most boring expansion ever…
The game directors statement does not back what you are saying and even if it did it should be taken with a grain of salt. After the catastrophe that was WoD, the developers learned that alternate max level contact was necessary to keep people entertained and subscribed. Do you think they forgot this lesson? DF offered nothing and TWW offers delves which are a step up but sadly shallow compared to Legion and Torghast.
How is anything you mentioned a change that only happened because of Shadowlands? With those changes they changed not only how we played in Shadowlands but in all the expansions before Shadowlands.
How does that back up your argument that Shadowlands was a terrible expansion that caused changes in the game.
And here’s another point. They are always running one expansion and working on the next one which means those changes were being worked on as Shadowlands was being released. That’s proof that Shadowlands could not possibly have caused those design changes.
If you don’t understand how me asserting that Shadowlands was overflowing with friction and that Blizzard was pivoting to avoid needless friction in gameplay after that flop of an expansion are both related, you never had any interest in an honest discussion.
Not that I figured you would judging by your replies, but I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt. Saying holds true, don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed.
Can’t convince everybody to take the goggles off and see things as they are. Toodles.
Yeah, needing to run four characters or switch repeatedly on one character to see all of the underlying mesh that made some parts of the story work was an awful experience made only worse by the covenant lock.
At least I was bored enough to level alts and see the other faction stories before I quit, lol.
