I’d like to say that some of the smaller storylines in WoD were actually really good. A lot of the little stuff, like the Rangari, and some of the individual zone questlines were all better than a lot of the more recent WoW writing
I’m with you.
It’s an MMO, more effort should be put into worldbuilding than overarching narratives. Blizzard does way better with their zone-level quests and writing than they do with making giant narratives that shape the entire world.
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Same as it always was, people felt pressured to keep up with the artifact weapon grind for raiding, even if they were just casually raiding. I think hopefully that attitude is starting to die off though.
I liked them though! There were some that were boring, sure. But some like the warlock class hall were fantastic. I enjoyed the warrior and priest ones too, and the mage one. The hunter one was pretty boring tho.
Yrel was great, aside from Maraad having to be sacrificed to make her the new Exarch, which also cost Velen his life in this alternate timeline. But for the life of me, other than seeing Captain Taylor as a ghost, watching Thrall meet his dad, and Yrel ascending in power 2 days after we save her from a cave… Nothing about WoD was memorable for me except the garrison boredom and the horrible choice to exclude flight for 18 months.
Older people are the biggest consumers by far. This is just 100% wrong. They have more disposable income and account for the overwhelming majority of consumer purchases.
And a random case in point: young people are not buying these weird shirts being advertised on Facebook:
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It had some major hits, and some major misses.
-The zone stories stick out to me. Yrel, the Rangari, etc.
-I personally liked the Alliance garrison, it was beautiful, even if it made the game antisocial. Seeing my battle pets run around and collecting characters was fun.
-Zones were huge and fun to explore.
-Bodyguards were a really cool feature and they were really fun for me. Like… I’d throw so much money to get them back.
I can’t get over the dog one😹
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Legion, full stop. I was super into the story, was enjoying Demon Hunter; was raiding, I was back in the swing of things.
Then… RNG struck. Legendary not dropping after Legendary not dropping; I fell further and further behind. Until I was not having fun anymore, being kneecapped by this most absurd of systems. Didn’t return to the game until Shadowlands.
THEN THEY DID IT AGAIN WITH DRAGONFLIGHT!!! No Frak axe? No invitety. 
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Story/lore pretty much took a significant back seat after Wrath of the Lich King. Cata on the story just kept getting worse, but was at least tolerable. Then BFA, Shadowlands and Dragonflight happened and omg, just terrible. TWW is taking garbage story telling and cringe to the next level though, because of course you need to double down on everything people hate, while ignoring original lore, thematics, and tone. The franchise is unrecognizable from the original story that the RTS games established. All great stories are doomed to become trash though, just look at Lord of the Rings, Dragon Age, Witcher, etc… untalented people w/ nothing to offer can’t help but screw up great things because they think they know better.
IMO WoW survives strictly because of gameplay. The fluid movements and gameplay (not including the trash balancing and weaker content) is why WoW has stood the test of time. It’s pretty hard for the new age devs to screw up something that is the core mechanics of WoW, but we’ll see!
I feel like WoD was a lot more playable than other expansions.
- Garrisons were easily ignorable.
- Restricting flying allowed them to make an engaging leveling experience.
- Pruning abilities made classes better.
- A free boost combined with the pruning and flying restriction made this a great expansion for “returning players.”
- Rares were fun little mini-bosses that dropped useful rewards.
- It had a cool PvP hub.
- The aesthetic felt very World of Warcraft (unlike it’s predecessor MoP).
It’s far from a perfect expansion. But I would put it somewhere in the middle.
Yes old people buy stuff for their kids.
Old people are not buying those weird Facebook shirts for their kids lol.
Come on.
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It has never been Shakespeare but for a video game fantasy setting its not bad at times. Vanilla/TBC actually had very little in the way of story telling.
It wasn’t until Wrath they really tried to start telling a cohesive narrative from beginning to end and it was great. Cata, meh I understood why they redid the old world and some of that was great some not so much. MoP I thought had some great story telling, Legion was fantastic.
BFA was utter 
to the point I quit the game for over 6 years and missed the last 3/4 of BFA and all of SL/DF. TWW is great if you like girl bosses and checking boxes.
You lost me at “good expansion story”
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BFA had a potentially good story ruined by its gameplay.
WoD had the best introduction and the best leveling of any expansion, and it isn’t even close. But then you hit max level and farted around in your garrison for two years sending followers out to have all the adventure.
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lol this is the most accurate description of what playing WoD was like
While you are certainly entitled to that opinion:
- You could not ignore garrisons if you wanted to make money
- The zones were poorly designed often making ground travel feel like the juice was not worth the squeeze
- Pruning I was fine with, but having access to every profession almost nullified needing alts or other players to craft
- Every expac has a free boost, even the lackluster ones, and they LOST subs on this expac which is why they eventually caved and added flying back in. Sold us a CE with a flying mount and could not even use it in current content.
- They should have renamed them Commons, cause there are about 260 of them throughout Draenor
- PvP was a blast in Pandaria and got wrecked in WoD. That spot between the “capital cities” was little more than a Horde lovers farm fest
- It felt “warlike” cause everything looked like Outlands with updated skins.
As far as Expansions go, it is near the bottom, if not completely at the bottom for me. At least BFA gave us allied races, and Shadowlands felt like there was some sort of story happening.
Ick.
Nearly everything wrong with this expansion was messed up to validate borrowed power systems. The world zones were focused on validating covenants and that borrowed power. Torghast was validating legendaries. All of it was contrived for this expansion.
Everything is robots is probably the worst premise they could have used for an expansion capstone theme. My conspiracy theory is after Blizzard decided to stop updates on SCII, they moved the team over and that team forgot they weren’t doing Starcraft anymore.
You’ve got it upside down. They made a bunch of systems and then molded the story and game to fit those.
They were required for the Legendary questline too.
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