“Why did Shadowlands fail?”
Me: “Yes”
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You’ll just argue literally anything someone says to you. You’re a known contrarian on this board.
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Blizzard gave me the game a couple months ago. The obvious design flaw to me coming in late was the covenant campaign should have been the leveling experience so you had some decent gear to start with at 60. The other really bad choice was the way fates was implemented. You had to interact with half a dozen different NPCs to get the full benefit. Also the Maw having 2 different ‘flight’ paths was annoying as hell.
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Where to start…
There are many reasons Shadowlands failed and they aren’t limited to M+ etc. Here are the reasons I feel Shadowlands failed
- Poor writing and storytelling.
Especially when you get into the realm of "Oh it was this bad Thanos like rip off that was pulling the strings as far back as WCIII. Recontextualizing WCIII wasn’t necessary. Maybe it could have been done well. But they botched it. Marvel had what 10 years to build up Thanos. The Jailer had none of that buildup and you could say they even tried to rip off the idea of the infinity stones via. the sigils and poorly at that.
- Conduit Energy
You could probably make a whole thread on this alone. But Conduit Energy was controversial as far back as the alpha. Players and testers told Blizzard it sucked and Blizz shipped it anyway. It then took them a year to later remove it anyway. The reason Conduit energy sucked is it actively restricted you from playing the game how you wanted too. (We will come back to this). Let’s say you want to change specs…you have to change conduit energy. Let’s say someone then wants to PVP? They then would have to change conduits yet again. So if someone in the course of playing the game changes their spec a few times? They may then have had to change conduits 4 times. And since Conduit energy refilled at a rate of 1 per 24 hours? It actively discouraged you from engaging in various content.
- The time gating/wasting of player’s time.
Shadowlands went overboard with systems designed expressly to waste your time. Anima was this expansion’s artifact power basically. It was another arbitrary resource grind. The tedium in acquiring this anima was compounded by how miniscule the return of anima was for doing just about anything. Add to that the “Mission” Table which is what I consider non-content. It felt more like having to log in every day and do chores. It felt like WoW was being designed more like a mobile game. It’s systems felt based around metrics designed to keep you playing longer, regardless of whether you were actually having fun or not.
That isn’t even taking into account things like world quests and the general inelegance or lack of ease of getting around. Everything in Shadowlands just took longer. World Quests were fine in legion as you could knock them out in fairly short order and doing 4 of them would net you a reward and substantial experience with a given faction. That wasn’t the case in Shadowlands. With it’s hub being Oribos you would have considerable time in just getting from zone to zone. The quests themselves actually took longer too. You could extend this criticism to things like Choregast/Boreghast and the Maw tbh.
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The Champions are always the protagonist. In this case the Maw Walker. As for motivation, clearly Zovaal wanted to be the number one lord and ruler of everything which went against what the other Eternals felt they needed to do.
Then there were lots of medium level stories. Each Covenant had an issue we had to deal with and there were individual stories of the various NPCs we encountered.
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HA !!! Good one !!! Endless whining about Shadowlands that’s been going on for two years solid and I’m the contrarian?
Classic example of a million kettles calling one pot black.
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If you honestly don’t believe SL pushed away a lot of players, I have a bridge to sell you.
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Adding to the list of things you didnt like I would say retconning Elune, who had been heavily referred to as WoWs only true to life “Goddess” by previous devs as a animated robot was just so freaking stupid. I feel like they were trying to phone in an “Eternals” situation to the SL and that should be the last movie ever copied!
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Ah yes, the complete fulcrum of the entirety of existence whom has zero agency in the actual plot. We view the story. We don’t participate in the storytelling. We are MacGuffins, not characters.
I will say that there were a few small stories that were enjoyable (and coherent). But the main narrative was an incoherent mess, unrecognizable as a story in even the most generous definitions.
I am willing to bet that there’s a design document out there with a decent story. But it wasn’t delivered to us as such. They tried to use the exposition of world-building in lieu of a narrative, simultaneously revealing the sophomoric cosmology at in play that should stay unknown to the reader. They tried to use character developments their “Big Reveals” and “Big Moments” rather than giving us character development as we progress so those Big Reveals mattered and Big Moments actually landed.
It was like watching a YouTube video posted by a 16 year old of their favourite Game of Thrones moments without ever having watched Game of Thrones.
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Covenants
Mission Tables
Poor zone design
Too much Sylvanas
Anima
Covenants
Mission Tables
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“You know, I’m not really feeling my monk today, I think I’ll raid on my hunter.”
RL: “okay cool just make sure you maxed out your renown, crafted your legendaries after farming torghast for 9 hours straight, at a minimum ilvl of x, have all your soulbinds for your covenant unlocked, you look up which covenant you should be playing, have x zone unlocked so you can be there to summon the group, and you bring a fun and exciting attitude! (:”
“I think I’ll do some PvP on my druid today.”
Enemy Demon Hunter xGigachadx the Duelist, fully upgraded:
“be an awful shame if you just got one shot through all your defensives over and over and never know what you did wrong”
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Trash main story featuring Sylvannas, frustrations from BFA story featuring Sylvannas and too grindy for anima.
The reasons will be different for everyone.
You will hear:
Unbalanced PVE
Unbalanced PVP
No mounts in maw
and the list goes on
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Wait, they had a massive surge of WoW players coming in that they literally stopped selling the game? How did I not know about this?
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Well that’s new. Never heard such situation like that that could happen to any MMORPG games.
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I thought I had remembered it better than it was at first. I really disliked pandaria so I thought I had … I dunno. I was not playing for a long time. I went back and I’m getting reacquainted with my toons. I was doing the content from lich king or before. There is a WORLD of difference between then and now. The storyline, the smoothness and glitches, clever references, grind factor, all of it. So many areas were just stunningly beautiful. I feel like the current version is a rinse and repeat. Actually more like cut and paste codes.
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Hey I’ve been asking for proof all along. So far the best people have given me are opinions, not facts. Also I’d like to know why the following are not the reason for any decline instead of SL content. Again facts not opinions.
- When WOW was first created it was one of the only D&D like MMOs around. Now there are hundreds of new ones each year.
- In an industry where 5 years is middle aged and 10 years is an antique, WOW is an 18 year old game competing with tons of new technology.
- The trend these days is toward social media and mobile where WOW doesn’t play well.
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And how exactly is anyone supposed to get proof? The only entity that actually knows for sure is Blizzard and they don’t release that kind of stuff.
I’m going by what I’ve seen over the course of SL. Believe it or don’t I don’t care. It’s what happened. SL did push many many people away including me.
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Yes thank you !! Exactly my point !!! Fact is we have no idea what caused a decline in subscriptions. That means people claiming it was SL content are giving their opinion, not fact.
Also we don’t have any idea how much of a decline there was. If you do a search on “Top MMOs 2022” all the top entries are split as to whether WOW is still the number one MMO or one of the top three.
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M+ was probably the only good thing about Shadowlands with everything else being a complete failure.
What is your problem with M+
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