The lack of content is felt harder because the devs locked out players from joining other covenants and doing their stories just so they can lock them out of abilities and building upgrades. The game incentivizes you to double down on a covenant like Blizzard doubles down on covenant restrictions.
The end result is a fragmented game narrative where we only really understand whats going on in our covenant and 3/4 of the rest of the story is locked behind
-2 week coolddown clock
-Alts and their grind if you do not want to change your covenant
-Loss of building upgrades and covenant abilities
I always wanted the Covenants to invite you to grind them after you reach max renown on one. I thought that system would make more sense and allow players to continue progressing in the game all year round and give us a reason to log in.
For example once you get to renown 40 as night fae you would then get an invite to choose another covenant and start helping them with their buildings and battles while getting access to their power trees and abilities. This would allow the game to have 160 levels of renown for players that wanted to grind it on a single character (360 after patch 9.1).
I thought that was the best compromise because it would allow players to get all the covenants on one character if they wanted to grind it but did not force others to do so if they wanted to hold onto one covenant. It would work well for alts and mains.
The story in this game is just getting more compartmentalized each day and its reducing the value of the sub. I refuse to grind 4 alts of each class or roll 4 alts in general to get the story and experience all the abilities for a single class.
There is value in progressing with a main and only needing to have one character to experience the full game. In the past the game divided the story to alliance vs horde campaigns. Now its alliance/horde campaigns with a subset of 4 covenants. So we effectively get 25% of the story at best unless we want to throw everything away that we had.
The Blizz Dev team says this is a meaningful choice. I dont feel like this is meaningful. I feel like this is unjust and untimely punishment. During a pandemic when they cannot get a patch out consistently they need more content in game to be released yet they have decided now is the time to lock the story down and force players to either reroll alts, suffer the pain of swapping covenants or just play a different game.
Many of us decided to walk away and just let the game go and just experience a full story in other games.
Its interesting how Nier Replicant by Yoko Taro has a similar situation but very different results. That game has multiple endings so the player has to play through certain parts of the story again but the perspective changes and the end results to the story also changes giving new purpose to the players actions. The reason why we fight changes and motivates us further.
Blizzard used to ask why do we fight. In the past that question was meant to encourage players to keep on fighting because azeroth and the universe needed us. In Shadowlands it feels like this question is taken to the other extreme. Why bother fighting if you will lose all your buildings, progress, and get penalized for swapping? Just dont fight and understand this is a meaningful choice that you made on your own.
I call that a bad bargain and instead of enjoying everything Shadowlands Story & abilities has to give I am only enjoying 1/4 of it.
I dont expect Blizzard or its white knights to change their minds. They really wont. So I dont know why I even bothered posting this as the white knights will still come here and eat me alive to defend all of this. But maybe I just want them to understand that where the other most popular mmo in the world is giving players what they want and letting them have all the things under one character (the class being a subset of the actual player) instead of wow where the player is now a subset of a class and a subset of a covenant with no real player identity. In the same time wow is pushing players away from having their specs and covenants under one class and telling us to be happy. I am not happy. If you are happy good for you I like that you are having fun. I just wish we all felt like that.
