I will give BfA a pass on this front, because ultimately some degree of this was always going to baked into “High Seas” expansion. Though I will say, I did not care for Vol’dun & given that Kul’Tiras and Zandalar were already split, a third Jungle Zone with some twist would’ve been fine in its place imo.
I don’t want realistic. Wrath was cool because you had epic fantasy like the Oculus looming over Borean Tundra, the ten story Viking keep, giant mythic dragon bones, the Wrathgate, Icecrown Citadel, massive machine cities… the scale of Wrath was epic and it was all immersed in this frozen north aesthetic. MoP doesn’t have that sense of scale. It’s just residentsleeper.
I’m not talking about the people or entities within, simply the geography. Everyone likes different things, that’s what I enjoy, flying over it and feeling immersed.
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Wanting boring but realistic in your fantasy game… that ain’t it. Human Male Warrior vibes.
Riding through it too, of course. Not just flying. But I mean the landscapes and stuff. TBC was always tough for me in this regard. The color schemes being so aggressive.
The point he & I are making are less about scale (though some scale can be too much imo, see Argus), but about continental coherence.
Take the scale away from Wrath and it still works. All of the zones feel like they organically flow into one another. The enemies you fight are pretty evenly spread across the continent (Nerubians? You’ll fight them across Northrend. Vrykul? They’re all over the place, etc.)
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Comparing Wrath and MoP is just cooked. Panda land simply is not epic. It doesn’t matter if it’s coherent if it’s boring.
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And that’s your opinion. Cool. Go for it. But others see it quite differently. If you can’t accept that, that’s a you problem.
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MoP performed poorly compared to Wrath so it’s not just my opinion.
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I’m not singing the praises of MOP on story beats, that’s more or less beside the point, I am just saying Pandaria was an organic-feeling continent, with enemy coherence.
I like it when zones feel like they flow naturally together. I like it when we don’t fight a totally different set of enemies from zone to zone.
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I prefer Wrath to MOP by a mile and for a host of reasons, but by this metric, Legion performed poorly compared to both MOP & Wrath.
WoD was the last Warcraft expansion we had. The only problem I had with it is we didn’t fight Grommash Hellscream and instead fought Blackhand to death.
I don’t think fighting Alternate Universe Time Travelling Orcs, after coming off from two patches of “Orcs are le bad” felt very good, or Warcraft-like honestly.
And yet people prefer Legion because it doesn’t matter how coherent the zones are if there is no “Wow!” Moment like what you get with Suramar.
I’ll never forget the iconic “This wolf…This wolf… still HAS TEETH!” line in the cinematic. It really made Grommash a perfect villain. It’s a shame they turned him into a good guy.
Grommash honestly should have led the Horde. It was wrong of Blizzard to just ignore him all out considering his face was the staple in the Trailer cinematic.
Now what we got is this sad dialogue with Sindragosa and Malygos and all this peace talking hoo hah that’s bland and uninteresting.
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Since you wanted to bring up sub numbers earlier, people did not prefer Legion to MOP.
You won’t regret it. It is so tasty
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My recollection is that MoP hemorrhaged subs all expansions whereas Legion launch brought folks back.
All i’ve seen is your saying aesthetics and lore (Which this isn’t Vanilla) is what makes class fantasy.
Legion for me, was just all set dressing with nothing meaningful or just giving us something we already have 11 times, 12 if you want to count WoD.
Just giving us a different ice cream flavor, instead of promising us different iced snacks. I want a Blue Vanilla Slushy, not a Blue Vanilla Ice Cream.
What do you do that is functionally (i’m not talking about lore or aesthetics here) different from say… Rogue to DK? Or Shaman to Pally? Monk to DH? Or Druid to Mage?
For my rogue, it’s just a hub where you collect quests, look at your artifacts and apply traits to them, do missions, get followers.
That would be fine if one of them is like that, but for all potentially 12 (at the time) to be like that, makes me question the whole “Class fantasy” thing if their not doing anything unique or meaningful with it. And i don’t mean just the minor details like pickpocketing genies.
BC & Wrath were the only expansions to see perpetual growth and end with more subscibers than they started with. MoP saw a small bump and then gradual decline. Legion followed a similar pattern, but the launch peak still had fewer people and the decline went even lower.