I wonder if we would have liked Shadowlands if:

Wyrmrest Accord
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A conversation in another thread made me start thinking. What would have made us actually like Shadowlands?

I feel like it would have been vastly improved in a few steps:

  • If the Maw had been designed so that we were able to have mounts from the start. Didn’t have to be our regular mount. Didn’t have to be flying. A quest to obtain a Maw mount after the starter quests were finished would have been enough.
  • If players were immediately given the ability to complete the zones in any order they wished. Everyone I know was excited for Revendreth, so thanks Blizz for putting it at the end where we’re not going to finish because we want to jump into other content when we hit level cap.
  • If we saw more lore characters who should have been there. Imagine finding Vol’Jin and having him help us through part of the plot. Or Tirion. Or Cairne. Maybe Baine wouldn’t have been sitting on a floor if we got to take him through a plotline to see his father one more time.
  • Some kind of actual plot with Ve’nari. Have you seen how many lines of dialogue this character has? More than 60. That’s a lot of chat for a glorified merchant. And she had different rep levels than normal factions. Imagine if she had been some horcrux of Xal’atath who was having us gather something so she could use it and escape.
  • Giving us a better reason to do Torghast right from the start. I actually liked the overall premise. But if I’m going to waste time going through level after level, I wanted more from it.
  • The Jailer should have been someone we knew. Someone we recognized. He didn’t have to be any ‘older than time’ being. He could have been any baddie character we recognized, carrying out an agenda to get his enemies into the Maw. It would have made more sense to tie the expac into existing lore than to create one that we absolutely didn’t care about. Let’s just say it was Ner’zhul. When he died, instead of him being trapped and tormented, maybe he found a way to trick or defeat the existing Jailer when he got to the Maw. Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to be in charge and kidnapping the heroes than some random character?
  • The writing team should have looked at the existing religions and made sure their plot didn’t conflict. Were they trying to say that religions IRL don’t reflect actuality? Or were they just lazy and didn’t want to reach back for the existing lore to fact check? If the afterlife was going to be anything, it should have been connected to the religious beliefs our characters hold. Instead, this gave us an entire expac we had to handwave the plot for in order to RP.
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For me, if it hadn’t just spit in the face of all the lore and religion that already existed, then I think it would have been received a bit better. I don’t want to hear that apologist bs that “the realms we saw were only a few of those that exist…” blah blah blah. They could have had their new stuff work with the existing stuff.

I’m most familiar with tauren lore. Lore has always said that the tauren ancestors live deep within the Emerald Dream. The ancestors come back to visit and send messages. I won’t even go into the lore classes that exist. For a Tauren perspective, be could have had ancestors reaching out saying something is wrong, no one has crossed over to us in a long time. What’s up? The Shadowlands could have be stealing souls before they could get to the Dream. I would have been so cool with that. That would have been compelling to me. Baine would have have had a mission to find his Daddy.

Again, I really only know tauren lore. But I am inclined to believe that there are ways to link most of the other races to some of what they did for Shadowlands. The problem is that the writers and developers would have to know their own lore. That’s were everything fell apart. They either don’t know enough lore or don’t actually care enough to work with what they’ve got.

It’s a fantasy game, I’m fine with wild ideas. If they had just put them in the frame work they had already built, I think things would have gone better.

This. It could have been a mystery that we unraveled through the beginning of it… Who is this? That would have been fun.

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I would have loved this. It would have tied all of it back to the very beginning and Ner’zhul–JUST Ner’zhul, pure, ascendant, not tied to Arthas–ending up the last and most dangerous enemy of that arc would have been amazing.

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For me, Shadowlands should never have been about the afterlife. It should have been a post-Legion follow up. Sylvanas is still working with Zovaal, but he’s not some Decepticon exile any longer. He’s a corrupted Titan Watcher who has promised Sylvanas if she helps him consolidate his power base in the wake of the shattering of the Burning Crusade, he’ll restore all of Azeroth’s undead to life. After all, he was the one who guided the creation of the Lich King for the Legion.

Sylvanas’ motivations for Battle for Azeroth wasn’t about sending souls to Super Hell, it was honing the Horde into a galactic fighting force. She was mustering an army for Zovaal, and her attack on the Lich King and destruction of the Crown of Domination was specifically to distract the forces of Azeroth. If she couldn’t give Zovaal an army, at the very least she could ensure he wouldn’t be disturbed while consolidating power.

The realms of Shadowlands aren’t realms. They’re planets dealing with the Legion invasion in their own way. Bastion seems to have weathered the experience well enough, but the dark undercurrent of their society which saw them repel the Legion gets exposed, and the Forsworn still pop up in service to Zovaal, who like with Sylvanas struck a bargain with them. Maldraxxus is a world that is suffering from the Cult of Damned, who secured a Legion space craft during the events of Legion and have set up shop. Kel’Thuzad can even still be there, since we never found his phylactery in Northrend. The various Transformers we find on each world are just those worlds’ Watchers established by the Titans, whom Zovaal is trying to displace.

Zenith Mortis isn’t the crucible of death - it’s where the Titans came from. Their homeworld.

Oboris isn’t some halfway house of lost souls - it’s a Naaru void ship. Since Sargeras’ imprisonment, the Legion have fragmented and fractured. They’re trying to sort things out. That’s why the Vindicaar was absent during the Battle for Azeroth - it had already been conscripted for containment duty. We kinda had a hand in destabilizing things, so its only right we help out. The abduction to the Maw was Zovaal trying to ransom racial leaders to get the forces of Azeroth on side. What is the Maw? It’s his destroyed homeworld. The one he was Prime of. Then Sargeras came, corrupted his programming, and shattered his world irrevocably. Zovaal’s initial goals are consolidation and conquest of the other worlds we visit, and then moving back to Azeroth to dethrone Odyn and claim Azeroth as his own. Once he discovers the fact the Titans themselves have a homeworld, the end game proceeds as normal with him learning about the First Ones and using what he finds to try to recreate reality - to use Azeroth as a template to re-create his shattered homeworld.

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I didn’t know I needed to think and talk about Shadowlands at the end of 2024 but I’m so into it :0

I would have dug what they did, exactly as they did it, if it wound up shifting into something like Gentarn’s idea of it all being exposed as a titan construct and not the REAL afterlife.

I would have dug it as the ‘real’ afterlife if instead of simplifying it to the zones they included, they were more up front about these being a handful of innumerable afterlives, and we entered others in small slices like scenarios and the off-world ‘invasions’ in Legion.

I would have REALLY dug it if they broke BfA up into 3 expansions and built up the Jailer, and made Shadowlands the 20th anniversary expac as part of the World Soul Saga, and they:

  • spent a lot of time making it true to their own lore
  • went hard on proc-gen and the zones we spent most of our time in had a central, static ‘core’ but were ‘infinite’ if we explored
  • made the maw smaller and focused on Torghast as the ‘hell’ and it had a larger circumference and way more proc gen
  • maybe made it where only a few zones were accessible and other stuff we had to enter as spirits or astral project to
  • GAVE US A NECROMANCER CLASS FFS

I’m sure there’s more.

edit: ah yes, and perhaps if they didn’t ruin Sylvanas – a totally different BfA thing is required for this.

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I’ve said this before and I’m only half-convinced it’s a good idea, but I think all of Shadowlands should have been Torghast.

Not Torghast as it was, but if Torghast was a sprawling machine that the Titans used to access other realms of energy (such as the afterlife) to fuel their experiments and now it was malfunctioning due to the influence of a former Titan and running amok and we had to figure out how to shut it down, that’d be fun.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a tower so much as a non-euclidean area that did not necessarily follow the laws of time and space. “Doors” to various afterlives could be active and spilling over into Torghast, the threat being that the afterlives could come into contact with each other and you’d start having Orc souls sent to Elf hells or something like that.

You could even keep the various factions who were responsible for maintaining the relative “neutrality” of Torghast that had now begun battling each other for control.

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I’m one of the few that actually enjoyed the expansion sans for it being revealed that Zovaal was the one twisting his mustache responsible for everything we had seen to that point.

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I checked out of the story in BFA so nothing story-wise would have made me like Shadowlands, I think. But I didn’t go into Shadowlands expecting to like the story. I went into Shadowlands to enjoy dungeons and raids.

If Shadowlands hadn’t had ANOTHER artifact power grind on top of 60 other million daily chores on top of a low drop rate for loot, I would not have stopped playing Shadowlands. Before anyone says “well they fixed that later:” why didn’t they fix that day one. Why wasn’t it fun from Day One.

I don’t CARE that the final season of Shadowlands was fun. The first one was so miserable that I honestly did not want to play it at all.

Having read actually good fantasy recently, WoW is not and has not ever been “good.” It’s been enjoyable, but at its best it’s maybe just capable of basic story beats. Even its best-told story (Arthas) is bogged down by how incredibly silly it is, and is largely carried by it being yet another retelling of the oldest stories in our cultural canon. I don’t care that Shadowlands is an affront to lore or whatever because WoW lore isn’t sacred. I might have even been fine with Shadowlands as a story if the gameplay had been fun. But the most I can say about Shadowlands as a story is “man, the blue man group really doesn’t like fun.”

If Shadowlands had an amazing story but still had that awful gameplay, meanwhile, I would have not played it. I don’t play XIV because good story isn’t enough for me to play a game I don’t find fun.

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^ This. It should have been this.

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I posted this elsewhere, so this is where I’m at with Shadowlans:

Shadowlands could have been our trip back in time to the beginning. It should have taken us back to the beginning and we should have spent two years there playing through from Day 1 of WoW until the present. A storyline that basically had us fighting through everything we’ve experienced, to come back to the land of the living. A fight for soul survival.

It could have been such a memory-filled treasure chest that we could have been sitting and staring at our screens thinking of all the wonderful times we’ve had, all the quests, all the moments, people we played with that maybe are no longer with us, SO MANY MEMORIES.

That’s what I wanted my WoW death to be - a trip through everything that was, so that Norman would come out the other side, appreciating the trip through Shadowlands and thanking Blizz for all the good times over the years.

Could have been…

OMG REMEMBER THAT TIME?
OMG REMEMBER THAT QUEST?
OMG REMEMBER THAT NPC?

We went to the afterlife. It should have been filled with such memories of everything we’ve done and seen, everywhere we’ve been. A fight for our soul.

Instead we got the Jailer who apparently was aKsHuALLy the guy responsible for everything, you know until the next person Blizz wants to make responsible for everything comes along.

The idea that I could have crossed into the sky in Northrend and my screen go hazy for a few minutes only to hear faint voices of NPC’s coming through…for Norman to wake up and see himself (like an out of body experience?) running through the Gnomer starting area…flashes of quests, sounds and memories…and then an entire expac spent fighting to get back to his body in Northrend.

idk.

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And then he turned out to be a stick figure LOL

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When WarCraft became a super elaborate Transformers fan fic.

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The thing that worries me is that, in the Zerith Mortis raid, there’s over forty robots just like Zovaal’s ‘death’ form just before we fight the proto-versions of the Pantheon of Death.

Is the whole reason there’s a shortage of World Soul because the First Ones snatched them all up to serve as the cores of the various Pantheons of the setting?

:dracthyr_uwahh_animated:

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So what happened was the war with the Quintessons was going badly, so Sentinel, who was an aid to the First Ones, gave a false report that stated all the Quintession leadership was going to be gathered…

Proceeds on an elaborate essay on how The First Ones are connected to the movie Transformers One

…and that’s why there’s no more World Souls. Sentinel Prime’s been ripping them out of planets as they’re being made so he can mine for Azerite.

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I submit that Shadowlands will be looked at far more favourably by the general community as we gain more and more distance from it over time. Now, will it ever be anyones contender for best expansion ever? Let’s not go crazy… but I wager that it’ll be respected FAR more for its wins over hated for its loses in due course; just as WoD, Mists, BFA, etc… are now.

Shadowlands hate appears to largely be history repeating itself mixed with understandable emotional disdain for the external context the expansion lived through. There are some missteps in Shadowlands that are unique, sure; but, overall, its faults are faults that it shares conceptually with expansions that have come before it. WoD, for example, was ripe with AWESOME lore potential, but they dropped the ball; same thing basically happened with SL, imo.

I personally don’t like the idea of pretending it didn’t happen, because, one, it did, two, it’s confusing for everyone (especially role-play communities that don’t need further fracturing), and three, you lose the actual good the expansion held when you do that. For example, Ardenweald, the Brokers, Maldraxxus, etc…

I believe that Blizzard should actually invest time and effort into fixing the lore problems the expansion poses. These are creative people; I know it isn’t beyond them to do so. NPC dialogue, item text, novels, in-game books, etc… are simple and easy ways to clarify and correct lore so we can start to understand things better and actually work towards faster appreciation for that expansion’s story. Abandoning it wholesale does far more harm than good.

Threads like these are good, because, if Blizzard read through them, they’d see some really great ideas.

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I don’t disagree, but I think it will ultimately end up one of those things that they just never speak of again.

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All I will say is unlike other expansions, Shadowlands doesn’t endear any sort of fond memories for me the further away I get from it. About the only thing I enjoyed about it was running Torghast and seeing how massive I could make my pet by the end of the run. There’s a juvenile humor in dragging around a Vanilla sized Raid Boss to help clear procedurally generated content.

Maldraxxus was my Covenant less because I enjoyed it or the story surrounding it and more because it was the least offensive narrative available. Ardenweld especially continues to be a sore spot for me because we get a whole cut scene about Ursoc being allowed to die to conserve Anima, but the whole of the zone move metaphorical mountains for Ysera’s soul who causes nothing but problems from the onset and with whom only we player characters have any connection to.

I did all that nonsense constantly going “Why are they not sucking out the Anima and throwing her in a ditch already?”

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I mean, you cannot create something out of nothing, and even the most advanced transferal will lose energy, mass or cohesion during the transferal process.

The First Ones might just be a mortal race that came into contact with a healthy World Soul’s Azerite-like substance and hyper-accelerated into a cosmic force as a result, but rather than forming a symbiotic connection, became parasitic instead.

The ‘First Ones’ we encounter might be rebels who saw this dependance upon World Souls, and the crippling lack of World Souls in general, would mean all of creation would inevitably collapse when the last few World Souls were drained dry. And that’s why the Titanic Pantheon and the Eternal Ones of the Shadowlands are robotic, they’re the last, lingering remnants of this former age, colossal war-machines, terra-forming platforms, super-AI archives and planet-sized construction engines in humanoid form all designed to create, maintain and defend a colossal cosmic-scale ‘terraforming’ by the First Ones who rebelled, who re-wrote their AI, separated the hostile entities into prison demi-planes and then hid away the remaining World Souls.

We see the whole Demi-Plane can have whatever rules the caster wants, so long as they can pay the energy costs, with Kel’thuzad’s Demi-Plane in leaked content, and we know that the AI going rogue and pursuing their own designs is a common trope in most settings.

The Titans break their ‘new’ programming and go around trying to make more of themselves to reshape and renew the cosmos according to their original programming. The First Ones literally could no do anything until we broke their recursive loop and forced them to accept new parameters, and the only two who were not trapped in that loop were looking at the cycle and realised it was hopelessly broken and doomed to fail, so it had to be completely torn apart and taken down before it could be remade, and even they were corrupted and failing their functions.

The setting being revealed as part of the First Ones’ experiments to try and make a perfect reality and it being abandoned as a failure while they moved on to other, more successful projects, only to come back and see we were turning it around regardless, would be a hell of a story-beat to process.

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I don’t think the First Ones matter. It’s Robot Pantheons all the way up. Azeroth itself is functionally Primus and we’ve already fought Unicron (Argus).

The player races are all abnormalities or transplants from other places. Outside the Beast Races (of which Trolls appear to be part given what we see in TWW), all the other races of Azeroth originated from pulleys and gears that were mutated by corrupting magics.

Glances at the symbols for the Horde and the Alliance

Hell, we already have factions with stylized logos. May as well be Autobots and Decepticons at this point. WarCraft is Transformers, and Shadowlands established WarCraft has always been Transformers.

EDIT: Crap. That makes Draenor Gobotron. Congratulations Orc lovers. You’re Go-Bots.

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I think it depends on why people hated it.

For instance, I loved Legion at the time. I would never go back and play Legion ever again. Legion classic? Miss me entirely. Realizing that the systems started in Legion led to the misery that was raiding in BFA and playing 20 hours of SL has kinda soured me on that expac. I can’t see myself ever saying I enjoyed Shadowlands just because of why I didn’t enjoy Shadowlands-- going back and leveling thru it isn’t delivering the same experience I had that made me hate it.

In terms of story… Yeah, I can see people softening on it in the sense that eventually we won’t complain about it much. But it took SL for people to stop dunking on WoD, so… (Granted, I didn’t hate WoD’s story! so i’m sure there are ppl that like SL’s story.)

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