3.5/10.
-Story is very lack luster.
-NPC & story choices were clearly made based on virtue signaling, which should have no place in games or with gaming companies.
-The flying is an interesting introduction, but feels like it belongs in a minigame, not the core function.
-The art is extremely all over the place. They clearly had very different artists for separate zones, and the lack of tying them together is just really prevalent this time around.
-The dungeons are okay, but again feel more like a mini game outside of the real experience than they do an actual part of the story, much like they did for Mists of Pandaria. No cohesion.
-No memorable repeatable content presented
-Still too many currencies
-PVP is extraordinarily imbalanced and absurdly bursty
-No threat to the world - I feel like we as players were tired of being the central focus, “demi-god” maw walker, chosen one B.S, but this is even worse because now I feel like we have no actual reason to be here. Our presence in this land is pointless, and no dragon that can come from this expansion will ever carry as much weight of threat as Deathwing did, and I that’s coming from someone who didn’t like Cataclysm.
Blizzard, you have just lost your touch. You guys needed to simply stay the course and end the WoW story and moved towards the old gods. This expansion is so fluffy it’s painful. And then not to mention you clearly didn’t think of the repercussions releasing this much of a fluff expansion would have. How are you going to go from something this non-threatening, back to expansions that are supposed to actually carry weight related to the bigger existing threats to Azeroth?
-I feel like vanilla brought together all the existing MMO’s under 1 roof, with 1 great, phenomenal story, and it actually made you feel like a hero. Not like you were revered like one by NPC’s, but like an actual character, with meaningful effect in the world around them through simplicity and story.
-I felt more engaged with burning crusade. The dungeons repeat value was great because it tied to the story well.
-I felt more in love with the story in wrath. The pure culmination of a story line that’s been being told for a decade finally came together in a single clash.
-I felt bad for cataclysm.
-I felt more love with a total art style revamp in mists, and like the team truly wanted to just go all out with something new. You committed. It wasn’t the greatest, but you really showed us what the engine could do here.
-I felt more like the PVP was balanced in WOD and we were still trying new things both to the world, and items. Oh, the myriad of different cool tools/items this expansion introduced…
-I felt WAY more like the story of Legion created a bad guy you hated SO much, you wanted to play JUST because you needed to bash his face. Never have I hated a villain in a video game as much as Gul’Dan. The story telling and the cut scenes here were just no bars hold.
-I feel like BFA gave us some phenomenal mythic+ experiences, some nice classic-esque experience raids, and an art style that very much returned to the old wow. I feel like the story line here was phenomenal and reimagining that pure horde vs alliance hatred was great.
-I feel like Shadowlands gave us endless dailies, infinite currencies, a very imbalanced m+ system, zones that were questionably unfinished almost as bad as Silithus (the maw was stupid), a story that just took pieces from everything you ever had that was good and tried to tie them together to create something else good, but it never did. I feel like the helm of dominance served no real purpose to this story and was used for cut scene drama, and that not even your developers understood its actual importance. I feel a total disconnect was made from your developers, to the actual story of your franchise for Shadowlands.
-And now for this, I feel like there’s no direction at all. I feel like Shadowlands lost the direction, and Shadowlands was the biproduct of failing to bring it together, and now this is just some weird side quest because you guys don’t know what to do. I feel strongly about almost no feature in a positive way, other than “okay, we can do this now”.
And before anybody says my love for the game’s gone. It’s not. I’m still very much enjoying classic.
You need to take an honest inventory of what you’re doing Blizzard. You should have got that feeling just by watching your own expansion trailer and realizing this expansion had no explanation to what the hell it was about. The game is proving that more true now. Now we’re IN IT, and have even LESS clue why.
