Except in Morrowind the different guilds aren’t proclaiming your the savoir of their respective guilds before you’re even a member. OP has been over it a million times how the initial narrative when levelling is how you’re this all important character, The Maw Walker who’s able to traverse the Maw and return from it which no member of the covenants can do. You’re being sent from one covenant(guild) to the next to help solve each of their problems figuring out what’s going on with the different groups within each faction causing trouble. Once you get halfway through this big story arc you pick a covenant to join and get locked out from the other 3 even though you’ve been working with all 4 throughout the first half of the story.
No narrative reason why the other covenants decided not to ask for your help(even though no one else can), they just won’t talk to you anymore.
What are you talking about? They absolutely have until this expansion.
They actually don’t have to do that. The next quest that starts for the Night Fae doesn’t start off with “Now that you’re one of us…” It just… continues the next story. When I was able to do the first 4 quests after getting to level 60 in Bastion, I was able to experience the story like it was no big deal. Again, never once did they acknowledge you even joined a covenant. It literally just continues the story.
What kept me from finishing the story was that the questline I was on is on the main Bastion hub, and apparently, when you pick a different covenant, you are banned from being there and you get removed after 5 minutes. (You get a debuff that ticks down 5 seconds and an alert pops up that says “You are not welcomed here.” After the debuff ticks to 0, you are teleported to the nearest graveyard. Enjoy the run back to the nearest flight point.) I was able to “speed along” the quest to reach the 5th in the second half of the chain, but then it required me to fight bad guys in the main Bastion hub, so it kicked me before I could continue.
That’s when I went to the forums to report it as a bug, but that’s when I was told that it was a feature. I’ve been trying to tell everyone since then because I find this unacceptable. So far Blizzard hasn’t given a single word on why they made this decision.
I call it them meaningfully choosing ways for us to have to keep playing by making alts so that they can keep their numbers up for their investors that mean more then the people that actually by their product.
Isn’t wow always like that?!
In BFA, horde and alliance initial main story was faction locked.
In legion, class halls MSQ were locked.
In WoD, Alliance / horde story was locked
In Most, same thing…
So on…
If it were equivalent, to go by what you listed it would be like in Legion they allow you start the all class halls on a single character regardless of class, but only give you half the story for all of them and everything after is class locked.
Or in BFA you are able to do half the quests in Kul Tiras and half the quests in Zandalar, regardless of faction, but then the rest is faction-locked.
If it’s supposed to be locked like that why give half the story to everyone? Especially before they make their choice.
Everyday I’m finding more and more reasons to think Shadowlands is going to be much worse than BFA and it’s not even past beta…
People in the forums are slow in terms of intelligence. They lack critical thinking skills and logic. Don’t even bother trying to explain anything to them.
This is not new. In BFA itself, you had alliance doing their own thing and horde their own. Alliance players had no clue why they were raiding G’Huun’s lair or whatnot.
Other expansions suffered from same problem. That’s why you have alts and characters from both factions. For lore.
As some of us have pointed out throughout this thread this is a false equivalency comparing the story structure and implementation from BFA or any previous expansion to Shadowlands.
In BFA we can say to get the full story you need to play both factions as each faction had seperate detailed narratives for their respective zones on KT or Zandalar. 1/2 The story is on KT and half is on Zandalar locked to each faction.
In Shadowlands no matter what class or faction you are the narrative is presented that you are the Maw Walker. You start in Bastion and proceed to get sent to each covenant by the previous one you are helping. It’s a very linear structure. This expansion doesn’t let you choose where to start or go next. You go where the story tells you. You get about 1/2 of the way though each covenant story before being sent to help the next.
Abruptly once you hit 60 you’re given the choice of picking which covenant skills/soulbinds you like. Once this is done you’re just locked out from completing any of the other stories.
As the Maw Walker helping everyone, suddenly you’re abandoning 3 covenants that still need help. So 3/4 of the remaining story is just unavailable because Blizzard in their wisdom decided the covenants that have been helping each other won’t accept the Maw Walker because they preferred the cool blues of Bastion over the Blood reds of Venthyr?
It’s terrible implementation of a branching story.
In reality the story doesn’t branch, you finish one and the rest just end for no reason. Nothing in the narrative explains why you can’t go finish the other stories.
It’s all there, but to help further the “meaningful choice” crap they are deciding to prevent you from playing other stories. It’s an oversight that rubs people like me and OP the wrong way.
Choosing a covenant should be a reward not a punishment.
It’s not entitlement. We’re not asking for special treatment. We’re asking for them to give us the full coherent story.
Class hall stories were minor and had no impact on the different zone and overarching narrative of Legion.
BFA never really had a coherent story and the narrative changed with each successive patch. After the initial levelling experience the Alliance and Horde stories were the same.
Shadowlands has an overarching narrative of us as the Maw Walker helping all 4 covenants and then abruptly changes once we are forced to pick abilities and a skill/soulbind tree.
You’re a troll posting on an alt to hide your main.
It seems like the Blizzard MO on grinds and regrinds is an individualized price point for the amount of grind some one is willing to do.
Starts off extreme to get as much out of the people willing to put that much works in. When they get far enough ahead, get sick of the grind and other people start to complain about their advantage, the sale price or “Catch up” price is applied.
So what we have at launch won’t be the way it ends. It’s the worst version that in micro transaction game is used to encourage people to pay to get around. In this game it’s a temporary time gate used to try equalize everyone.
