spend alot of time in the maw, that was just bland on the color of everything being black with the rare blue/red colors.
not to mention many questions unanswered, forced alterations of lore just to make handsome squidward robot in chains powerful bad guy that has been “Trying” to prepare life or somethin for a greater threat.
oh and sylvanas.
not much to like there. the story was all over the place, but mostly focused on sylvanas, and the jailer. while good that its a main focus on the boss, its also not good to focus and alter things for his and sylvanas’s sake.
as well as arthas being turned into anima… that one still stings, specially how they did it
i dont think it failed. it was not near as good as some other xpacs but as a whole it was ok.
my biggest problem with SL was that it was very alt unfriendly compared to xpacs past. before you level an alt. get a crafted item here or there, run a few dungeons, get in a raid and boom geared and having fun. move on to next alt.
in SL you had to jump through infinite boring time sink hoops. covenants with soulbinds and then having to farm conduits for each class AND SPEC, farm renowned endlessly, farm torghast over and over on each alt for the soul ash and soul cinders to create your legendary. then god forbid you wanted to change specs that fell under a different covenant. then on your alt you had to do that again. smh.
any xpac that is alt unfriendly better be perfect in every other aspect otherwise its bad.
There’s a lot of reasons. Strap in, we’re gonna here for a minute.
First and foremost, Shadowlands was very combative to the player base. Things like conduit energy ruined the idea of experimentation because you had to be afraid you were going to be unable to go back to your build. Covenants locked people out of cosmetic choices they might like more. And outright, most of the systems in Shadowlands just made for a terrible interacting experience, legendary items included. When you have systems on top of systems which combat the player and are naturally confusing? It’s a bad time. And when the game is built upon these systems for the next couple of years, it is awful.
Shadowlands was also terrible involving alt friendliness, which was outright stated to be one of the benefits of the expansion. This was borderline false advertising and made playing alts a total nightmare.
The story was disconnected from Azeroth on a greater scale, and the Jailer was a mediocre villain at best, who will go down in infamy for his nipples and nothing else.
So on. The list goes further and further. Shadowlands overall was just bad.
I think the biggest issue it had, more than even the gameplay problems…was a severe lack of investment in the story from the average player. Most people simply did not care two licks about the Shadowlands or any of its lore. It didn’t feel like WoW, it didn’t feel like it mattered in the grand scheme of things (because of course the Jailer isn’t going to rewrite all of reality, obviously he’ll be stopped), it just…
Had nothing to keep people invested when the gameplay faltered. A good story and setting are crucial to keeping people’s interest.
Because it was also the first expansion with ZERO Horde/Alliance dynamic.
Even something like Legion had the different Horde/Alliance areas in Dalaran (left over from Wrath) and the Warden Towers conflict.
Shadowlands had nothing.
Removing the Horde/Alliance interaction is a colossal mistake. I know that poo-pooing the factions is all the rage on this forum, these days, but it’s strangling the golden goose without people even realizing it.
The biggest reason that most people have said as to why SL failed was because of the covenants and how more specifically Blizzard didn’t listen to them for half the expansion’s life with swapping them.
However, I know the biggest reason was their patch cadence cycle. It was absolutely abysmal, yes covid was a thing, but almost all other game companies did even better during it because they were set up to work from a computer. Blizzard that had the most resources maybe out of any of the companies just seemed at least to sit by and produce nothing?
I think it was honestly rushed. Blizz saw a slot with the pandemic happening, and the initial hype was good, but the game just did’t retain subs because of lack of content. Hyper gating and padding to extend the limited content, and I think the limited content was because it was rushed.
Was over the top, silly, made no sense, had a lot of time wasting and disregard for peoples time, zones and themes were weak, story was dumb.
Starting off it seemed to have tons of potential that was basically wasted at every turn. It’s like Revendreth story going into Nathria was great. Everything else and from that point on was laughable.
Ion has said in interviews many, many times, and this is supported by common sense - most people don’t change their build regularly. Conduit Energy was dumb, but was in no way a major component of the downfall of an expansion. World First Andys make it out to be a much bigger deal than it was because it impacted them directly.
Not really. They can help, but if the gameplay is good people will play even if the story is bad. The problem is 9.1 was a perfect storm of slow to deliver content, not enough content, bad content, AND the story elements of 9.1 were bad.
Season 4 had no story and it has retained a fair amount of players who played to the end of Season 3. People care mostly about gameplay and having stuff to do that feels rewarding and fun and getting fresh content at a regular rate.
Shadowlands was devoid of a lot of Warcraft flavor. Not just the faction conflict, but this was an expansion about Death and the Ebon Blade were barely present in the story? WUT? Ebon Blade showed up during the intro sequence, got Worf’d, and then we’ve basically never seen them again? I understand that they want a big focus to be on rallying the Covenants, but the Ebon Blade should have been the connective tissue that linked all of them together.
You’re telling me that Zereth Mortis was a story about the Dreadlords and Zovaal, the creator of their former master, and the Ebon Blade were barely present? Just a big story-telling fail.
Perhaps prior to Sepulcher being merged into one raid tier we would have seen the Ebon Blade and Bolvar get their epic final battle, but with SL being cut short as it was, this may have simply been yet another casualty.
The go go go mentality that M+ haters like to blame on M+ has existed since vanilla (more than a decade before M+ was introduced) and it was widespread then too. You either didn’t play at the time, didn’t run dungeons or lived under a rock.
The gearing was goofed up. Everyone ran m+ and no one raided. People that don’t like M+ just ghosted the game a month or two after each patch. It wasn’t until they did the Fated thing that I was able to finish content on alts because people actually were showing up for raids again. Also Torghast could have been more engaging somehow. No one wanted to do that, so people only ran it to get dust for a new legendary and avoided it mostly.
Otherwise, Shadowlands was pretty great. I liked it a lot better than BfA.
This was the big one for me. It’s the only expansion I didn’t have more than one character at max level (until pre-patch 50% bonus to xp). SL is by far my least favorite leveling experience.
On a side note, I leveled two characters this week, one in MoP the other in WoD…remember when we had more than 4 leveling zones per expansion? Why is the price of an expansion going up while the amount of content is going down?
I liked all the zones, except Korthia. The Maw was one of the coolest things they ever put in the game but they didn’t put enough stuff to do in it. So it was just wandering around under threat all the time with little gain.
