Now that the dust has settled, why did shadowlands fail?

Community General Discussion
83

It started with sylvanas in another expansion mucking up the lore that was already mucked up, she didn’t need to be in another, and we didn’t need to see the Wow after life explained and we didn’t need to see a character already dead used as a McGuffin, arthas. We didn’t need lore changes on this level and beloved characters used in horrible story arcs they didn’t need.

this set the stage for what already seemed like horrible design decisions in beta and an extremely rigid philosophy on game systems added all ushered in another expansion where what we begged them not to do in beta went through anyways. it was many things all adding up. I could go on but many reasons maybe too many to list.

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84

It various to person to person, depending on what the like to do. Thus for me it was the story, with how they shoved Zovaal into War3 and kept acting like it was grand plan, the constant wait and sees in regards to Zovaal and Sylvanas, that Sylvanas literally had to have Zovaal outright “serve” for her to have that “Wait, I’m the bad guy?!” moment, and my disgust over a second Horde civil war and N’Zoth being wasted to promote The Jailer.

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85

Worst first patch content drought ever is probably the most legitimate reason. 8 months for the first patch of an expansion is super bad for retention and people’s out look on the game. First impressions matter most, content droughts are expected at the end of an expansion not the beginning.

To put things into perspective BFA first patch-> next was 4 and a half months

Legion was one and a half

MoP was 2 and a half.

8 months is too long.

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86

Covenants and conduits were a terrible idea from the start.

The story is bad but I doubt many people play wow for the story .

Legendaries we’re a huge gold sink.

This is the first expansion where I stopped playing shadow as an alternate spec . There where too many wheels to turn including legendaries , covenants , soulbinds.

Also when they pulled the ripcord, having to go to a forge every time to change your conduits or go to oribos when you wanted to change your specialization felt ridiculous. They could have added a forge right in the enclave since it made sense you would probably change your soulbinds after switching specs .
It’s not unlike having the stovetop not being in the kitchen .

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87

I’ve touched on it in other threads, but the biggest thing is that the lackluster execution of the premise (going to the afterlife) left me unenthused and without much of a desire to play. When leveling I was often thinking, “well that’s cool but why should I care”. It’s all too disconnected/tangential. This meant that after having to step away from the game for a while to deal with real life stuff the main thought I had when considering playing again was, “but why”.

The systems and endgame progression and all that jazz are moot to me if the story hook is weak. It’s part of why I ended up sitting out most of MoP, despite it being a decent xpac in other respects - I just found it hard to care about anything happening on Pandaria. It could’ve been a random rock out in the Twisting Nether for how untied it was to Warcraft prior, just way too much disconnected newly invented junk with no narrative weight.

Shadowlands’ ultra rigid campaign questing didn’t help either, because it has practically zero replay value and Threads of Fate isn’t really an improvement, so I didn’t even feel like leveling alts.

Regarding M+ popularity… well, of course it’s popular, it’s the only accessible relatively uncapped form of gear progression that’s available for a lot of players, leaving them feeling like they have no choice if they want progression that doesn’t fizzle in an instant. If you want to see how popular M+ actually is, remove gear rewards from it and make it basically MoP challenge modes on steroids and watch as participation immediately drops through the floor.

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88

Ok now why did Microsoft and Exxon fail? Oh gosh, they didn’t fail. Still waiting for proof that Shadowlands failed. So far none given.

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89

for me the having to Grind everything on every Alt, (before they added all the Skips) was just terrible. the Renowned system was only fun the first time through. Domination sockets were COOL but… the upgrading and trying to farm all the ones you needed was BLAH like should have only been “base level” and Upgraded 1 time" and that’s it .

and the Story just felt So disconnected from WoW and Azeroth.

Honestly it was WoD all over again i think, so much stuff just Abruptly Ended or doesn’t mesh will Likely because of Cut Content/ Late in development changes.

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90

Honestly it “felt” like 10 months lol, it was absolutely brutal

Waiting 8-9 months for new content, only to be met with the tiny “bite-sized” zone of Korthia was the last straw for a lot of folks

Just wondering, are you trying to “audition” for MVP/green-text or something? Almost all your posts are white-knight posts or somehow taking the side of Blizzard

And, using words like “gosh” :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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91

IMO even WoD was better than Shadowlands since it had constant callbacks to the RTS games and TBC, even if the Garrosh/Iron Horde stuff was kinda stupid. Shadowlands is nearly entirely newly fabricated crap with a few big celebrity names (Uther, Arthas, etc) tossed in to try to drum up appeal.

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92

I think it would have been fine without Torghast and The Maw/Korthia. Covenants themselves were fine, but they needed to either make it so you could freely switch between them from the beginning, or set a date when we would have finished our Covenant campaigns to then allow that to happen and make that date public.

Everything about Torghast/The Maw was awful though. Whoever designed those shouldn’t be allowed near any WoW content design ever again.

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93

shadowlands is the culmination of 3 xpacs made in service of grind metrics instead of player value

if gold had never been added to the cash shop, the game never would have gone in this horrible player manipulating design direction

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94
  1. Class design - I hated, HATED how awful warlock was as a choice for M+ in 9.0 when absolutely nobody wanted you in their groups. You couldn’t even manage a group.
  2. Covenants were told a bad idea in dev and nobody listened. Bad idea from the beginning. You want to believe as devs that adding new abilities is good for the game but covenants are proof it was a bad idea. It’s best to leave such things to the standard loot table.
  3. Dailies / WQ system heavily outdated. I know some people like this stuff but I loathe it.
  4. The story was abysmal.
  5. The cutscenes were worse. This was the first time they used them and my first thought was the experience would be improved by just taking them out.

Disclaimer: I know they were going through a lot of turmoil with Shadowlands but I think if they just delayed another year and gave the BFA crowd some small patch it would have been better. The whole end to N’Zoth was absurdly minor as well.

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95

Stopped playing Shadowlands after the first month and only just recently came back so can’t say much about the last 2 patches.

Biggest problem with Shadowlands was the so-called “story/lore”. The afterlife. The Jailer that popped out of nowhere and had zero backstory to him. The only thing I understood with the Jailer was how Sylvanas was buddies with him. That was literally it and it all made absolutely zero sense. Whoever thought that was a good idea… I truly hope they aren’t a part of Dragonflight.

The zones were way too overcrowded and on top of that, I really couldn’t connect with any of the characters or environment like I could in other expansions. Revendreth and Maldraxxus are just plain ugly, Ardenweald… lol idk wtf Ardenweald is. Bastion was actually kind of decent though.

Of course the covenants and conduits. Didn’t mess with the legendaries so I can’t say much on that. If I remember right, covenants were advertised as something you could choose and not have to worry about power. Something you chose because you liked the aesthetics or whatever and not extra numbers on your character sheet. Mostly cosmetic. That was obviously wrong. The conduits are just borrowed power, automatically terrible.

Torghast and the Maw were just boring to me. One thing about Torghast that I remember for sure was how Blizzard advertised it as an endless amount of floors and each one of them would be different. The only difference in Torghast was the powerups, at least in the beginning of the xpac I don’t know about now. Definitely not as advertised.

The Maw. I don’t know what Blizzard was thinking with the Maw to be honest. I get that the whole place is supposed to be threatening, that I appreciate. But if you’re going to put people in the highest tier of that Jailer bar thing whatever it was called for just killing a couple of mobs, have it reset faster than a day. Maybe a couple hours or something. The no mount thing was a big issue for people but I didn’t really care too much about it.

I thought it was kind of funny when I looked in the adventure journal recently and saw that there were only 3 raids and 1 other dungeon added. Whole time this expansion has been out, that’s the best they can do. Lol wtf, Blizzard?

Has to be a pretty awful expansion if whenever I step into the Shadowlands zones, I start missing BFA. Man, that expansion was a freaking blast compared to this pile of trash. I couldn’t even stand going back to do the rest of my covenant campaign for renown just so I can upgrade my PvP gear. Yes, just what I needed when all I wanted to do was completely avoid Shadowlands. Shadowlands is just completely soul draining, physically cannot stand it. Hate it.

That was just a rant but you get the point. There’s probably much more.

Jesus, this post is long. TLDR: Maw/Torghast, Covenants/Conduits, Story, Zones, Lack of raids

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96

World quests were mostly fine right up until Shadowlands, I think where they went wrong is switching over to all these annoying “multi-step” or “complicated” world quests… versus the simple “kill 1 mob” quests we had before

Their decision to switch them over to the annoying, complicated/multi-step BS just left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and ruined the “outdoor world” content experience (by turning it into a slog with all the “complicated”/unfun WQs), especially for the solo-casuals/outdoor world content casuals

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97

I forgot this one. Holy smokes. What a snooze Snoreghast was. One of the poorest attempts I’ve seen of a scaling solo dungeon.

This the team that made the mage tower. Let that one sink in. How could the same team make something so antifun. It’s literally the opposite of the MT. Takes forever. Everything is slow. The floors are excessively full of irrelevant mobs. Sure you could plow through at 300 ilvl most of the content but it all seems pretty pointless to me.

It was actually fun for a hot minute the first two weeks when the bosses were one or two tapping people. Then that got nerfed too. Big, lame and boring.

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98

Hyper-restricted content and progression in the beginning. Loot droughts. Necessary power locked behind long grinds that were severely time-gated, with no catch-up mechanisms.

Seasonal affix, and M+ rewards were boring. The only content–besides old world stuff–was basically PvP and raiding. If you didn’t like one, the other was all you had. I happened to dislike PvP, so all I had was raiding, and I maxed out my GV every week to try and get better gear for progressing in Mythic CN. There was no progressing after a certain point, and you relied exclusively on your Great Vault–even moreso than later on. Class balance was pretty bad, with some classes being fully useless in raids, and severely disadvantaged in PvP.

It was extremely terrible overall, and I would’ve quit if I wasn’t into Timewalking and running old content. The reduced loot drops were, hands down, what alienated players on mains, and lack of catch-ups alienated people that liked alts.

Some mythic guilds demanded you had two mains maintained for CE raiding, and I cannot fathom who would punish themselves in 9.0 to actually do that and wasn’t being paid for it.

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99
  • Didn’t feel like Warcraft
  • Disjointed zones
  • Anima grind
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100

They need to go back to the old rep grinds. Meaning you can do those annoying WQ/ dailies if you want. Or you can just kill mobs over and over again. Making people do WQ/ dailies doesn’t make them better or worth investing time in. Pathfinder was proof of that.

The best time for dailies that I remember were when I never had to do a single one of them to get anywhere. They were utterly optional.

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101

Bingo.

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102

I feel like nobody from Blizzard EVER data mined the popular “what’s your favorite xpac” threads and pulled ideas out of it, instead, they took ideas from the complaint threads and problem solved thru it? seems to me not the best way to deliver a successful new product.

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