First it was a horde v.s alliance war, which makes almost no sense because we were pretty much united in fending off a legion invasion which would have clearly cost a great deal.
Then we’re at war with each other because azerite.
A material that… explodes better? empowers things? I guess?
BUT WAIT! ACKTUAHALLLEE it’s about magni and you being a defender of azeroth and getting a special necklace that uses that very planet itself to gain power.
BUT ACKTUAHALLY WAIT, it’s not REALLY about that too!
This patch now has something about the horde vs alliance fight BUT THEN here’s a new zone that has, well, none of that.
Oh wait, we’re actually fighting queen Ashara in an underwater zone again.
Oh wait but actually n’zoth contained to an end of a patch because wrathion showed up and actually n’zoth is sending corrupted visions. never mind about the war, it uh, ended.
Like, i get you can have two stories at the same time, an A plot and B plot. But they never complemented each other in any way, shape or form. Because the player experienced the narration no progress was made to the A and B plot unless the player was there experiencing it.
So suddenly you’re fighting in dark shore then you’re fighting queen Ashara.
Then you’re fighting off invasions of the factions in your home areas, but then you’re also learning n’zoth is a thing. Too much nothing that went no where.
some early questlines were good but it felt like two expansions happening at once.
Then the shadowlands which is by far up there with the likes of WoD when it comes to story/gameplay.
I could get into a rant about that but i’ll save it. But i’ll just say that around the time of maldraxxus it took the idea of the sourge and made it a whimsical joke, and a lich teaches you life lessons made my eyes roll into the back of my head so hard i saw my brain.
I tend to think of BfA as the Eurydice to WoW’s Orpheus, because if the setting ever looks back and acknowledges the damage that expansion did it’ll be mired in the shadowlands forever.
Yeah BfA been living rent free in my head for the past six years as well.
I 100% buy into the theory that Afrasiabi somehow rewrote the plot at the last minute to sabotage it because knew he was going to get nailed by the sexual harassment investigation and wanted to take WoW down with him.
I am being completely genuine when I say that is easier for me to believe than the idea that anyone with a functioning brain thought BfA’s plotline wouldn’t be universally hated.
Like usually even with the worst of trainwrecks you can usually decipher how it might have looked good on paper. But BfA seems almost surgical in its awfulness like they were going out of their way to piss people off. At every single turn they seem to take whichever option that people would hate the most.
But what hurts the most is the lasting damage it’s done. So much of the lore is irreversibly broken now. It is impossible for WoW to escape the shadow of BfA without a full reset.
I was so hyped for BfA too. After all that Argus nonsense I was so excited to go back to basics with Orcs vs. Humans
EDIT:
People don’t forget grievances just because something else was holding their immediate attention for a bit. Which is why I think the current peace the Alliance and Horde are enjoying shouldn’t exist. There’s so many unresolved disputes it’s not even funny.
I think it’s particularly hilarious that the Alliance let the Forsaken take Lordaeron back without demanding any concessions in return and vice versa for the Horde and Gilneas. In any sane story those events would have been geopolitical landmines.
This is probably why I like MoP the most from a story telling pov. Everything that happens in MoP is linked to the factions arriving on Pandaria, causing a mess and unleashing the sha on the continent.
The Zandalari and Mogu reignite their ancient alliance to resurrect Lei Shen? Probably never would’ve happened if the Shado-pan were not spread too thin due to the Yaungol and Mantid attacks.
The Yaungol attacking Kai-Lai? They are only doing that because the Mantid are attacking them
The Mantid swarming ahead of the usual schedule? Sha of Fear corrupted Shek’zeer.
What’s this, the Shado-pan Monastery has fallen to the Sha? Well the Celestials allowing the Alliance and Horde into the vale was the final straw and Taran Zhu snapped. To be fair, wouldn’t you if people broke into your home, smashed the place then demanded to stay? While the heads of the local government said it was okay?
MoP had a cause and effect. Other expansions had this to, to a degree. For example, WoD with Gul’dan and co causing problems. Well that is on us being short on options and low on time.
It feels that BFA did not really have any of that. It was so obvious that it tried to be a remake of MoP but it did fall flat. The best parts of BFA’s story was the leveling and the launch non-war campaign, max level quest lines.
I have a soft spot for the Kul Tiras setting and storyline, which redeems the expansion for me.
It just goes to show you that Sylvanas and her “storyline” quite evidently ruined what could have been a very nice Old God and South Seas-centric expansion.
I’d say three: the HvA war story, the South Seas/Azshara story, and the Old Gods story. Maybe four if you count the Azeroth/Azerite story.
I have wondered whether BfA is literally two expansions in one. I could easily believe that in the wake of Afrasiabi’s departure, the remaining writing staff had to cannibalize the intended plot for the expansion that was meant to come after BfA, just to try to mitigate the damage done by 8.0-8.1.
Yeah, and I don’t get the recent (slight) rehabilitation of BfA’s reputation either. All I can think is that some players are looking at it through rose-colored nostalgia glasses and only remembering the parts they liked.
Agreed, but BfA even fumbled that. The war was started in the most contrived and inorganic way possible. The discovery of Azerite alone could easily have led to an arms race fueled by past grievances (and I actually suspect that was the original intention).
My theory is that Legion (up to and including the tomb of sargeras), Argus, BFA (up to and including Eternal Palace) and Ny’alotha were all meant to be their own mini expansions. This is due to Blizzard (or maybe Activision) wanting WoD to be a ‘year long’ expansion. However that did not happen and as such, Blizzard had to combine Legion & Argus into one expansion, then BFA & Ny’alotha into another. We know Blizzard tends to at least have an idea for future expansions before they develop them.
I mean Tomb of Sargeras was referred to as the ‘ICC of Legion’ by Ion before he revealed Argus. We also know that Blizzard cut out an entire zone from Legions development because ‘they had enough NE ruins’.
I have always felt that the Black Empire invasions in Uldum and the Vale felt more like a prepatch event. Like we hold off the Black Empire invasions then go through the portal itno Ny’alotha itself. It is also disappointing that the grand city of the Black Empire ended up being three buildings, Il’gynoths butt and then N’zoth.
Not to mention that the ending of ToS and Eternal Palace feel more like end of expansion stingers to lead into the next. Which was something they were doing at the time. Garrosh going on Trial → WoD. AU Gul’dan getting thrown through the Black Gate → Legion.
I honestly think the BFA expansion was clearly rewritten midway through development when Danuser took over, so I don’t blame afrasibi for it. Clearly the expansion was supposed to be all about the faction war and was supposed to be the cornerstone of the whole expac but that clearly changed.
All the marketing and buildup at Blizzcon had if focused on building up the faction rivalry but all that was done away with at release and they instead pivoted to trying to bring the factions together. Which Afrasibi had already been gone from the game at that point for about 6 months.
Now we are left with the game as it is where danusers vision is realised. The factions are basically dead, and we are left with have happy love, family time expansion. Now the narrative is a mess and nothing in the setting make any sense anymore as he has butchered the story to insert his.
I have to agree. BfA ruined most things beyond repair and what little was left was ruined by SL and DF.
BfA ruined the factions, a core supporting pillar of the setting.
SL ruined the cosmology and what little consistency this universe had.
DF ruined the tone making current lore and characters completely incompatible with what came before.
I actually wonder if the last one is what got Metzen to come back. BfA and SL may have been destructive to what he created but DF was a direct attack on his legacy.
Danuser wasn’t in charge at any point during BfA. Afrasiabi didn’t leave Blizzard until after all of the narrative content for BfA had been released and Shadowlands was reaching alpha stage.
Afrasiabi was moved off working on WoW some time before he formally left the company. According to the best guess we can make, the last content patch he worked on was likely 8.2. (I admit that I don’t remember exactly how we worked that out, though.)
That’s the first I’ve heard of him having been moved off the WoW team before he was fired. Every article I’ve seen just says that he was fired around June 2020 after an internal investigation, and I haven’t seen any indication that Danuser took over being in charge of the story prior to 2020. 8.3 came out in January 2020 and was announced in October 2019, so Afrasiabi had would have had to have been off the team for a long time to have not worked on it.
I’m not making any excuses for Danuser’s story choices, but don’t blame him for the dumpster fire that was the beginning of BfA. Also, even if the expansion had been great, Afrasiabi needed to go. No amount of good game story would have outweighed him being a creep.
