Why is it a thing… the expansion feels so alien and non warcraft… why was this the next stepping stone after the criticisms of BFA.
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It isn’t. It never happened. 
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The answer to that question is probably why BFA is still the default expansion for new players and SL isn’t.
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Kinda the point. Its supposed to feel weird.
The problem was they kinda failed to deliver
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My opinion only but I think they did an afterlife expac to tie up the story so they could carry the story forward in the way they wanted to go.
That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It was kind of goofy.
Can’t please everyone, I bet there are some people who think Shadowlands was the best xpac ever, and have a Shadowlands T-shirt, lunchbox, mousepad, hoodie, wallpaper for all devices and a Shadowlands Limited Edition 10’ statue of The Jailer on their PC desk, and who wished all future xpacs were Shadowlands Part 2, Part 3 etc…
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The people who designed Shadowlands had no connection with what went before. Some were new and hired for their talents in things like developing success metrics. Others had been with the game for a long time, but never cared for the world or story.
When Alex dreamed up the image of the burning of the tree which became the start of BfA, there was no one there to say, “maybe this isn’t such a good idea” after he left. They decided to go with it and do what they could to make it work. Shadowlands was just the continuation of trying to cope with decisions and work that had been started and left incomplete.
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Yeah they were basically trying to staple the story together by that point
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IMO the biggest reason Shadowlands sucked is because instead of using it to fill in lore gaps and add something new to the story while also tying it in with the old lore, it felt more like completely disjointed from the established lore and they came up with the concept for Shadowlands and thought it would be neat and then tried to make up lore to tie old characters into it. It just felt weird.
FFXIV has an expansion where you travel to a different dimension (Shadowbringers), similar to like WoD/Shadowlands, but instead the new dimension answers questions about the established lore and fills in gaps and it makes the exploration of a new dimension interesting and compelling. You want to learn more about this place to learn more about where you started out/came from. I didn’t feel like that at all going through Shadowlands, I just felt like I wanted to hurry up and get back to Azeroth. It felt like they were trying to do what Square Enix did with Shadowbringers but with Shadowlands, but they made the concept of the after world waaaaay too far encroaching and just left us with even more unanswered questions instead.
People want to continue the story in a game, not start a new one, and then eventually leave it behind and move onto something else. It just doesn’t feel great.
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I’m still surprised no one got fired for Shadowlands…
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Because you had a CDev team in a rush to end the “old” chapter of WoW so they can tell THEIR story.
Its like all of Blizzards designs, we kinda get inklings on why they do things, but i think the only way we’ll get a complete answer would be an old dev writting a tell all book or something.
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I mean in enjoyed the concept and it was great cosmetics for some classes but it also feels so alien
Pretty much explains when we die why we come back from the dead,which is part of the game. This just extends why sylvannas story.
Ehh it doesn’t though cause when we die we should be trapped in a covenant… when you go to Bastion the intro quest you tell them you’re not dead and they ignore you
I don’t know. Shadowlands felt like a missed opportunity to me. It could have been a cool undead themed sequel to WoTLK, but instead it was bleh.
That said, the zone aesthetics were very well done. I particularly liked Maldraxxus and Revendreath. Probably spelled both of those names wrong, but I am too tired to look them up.
Depending on who you ask, it was either Blizzard’s attempt to ride on Shadowbringer’s coattails or Blizzard was going through it’s Emo phase.
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I still think they did a good job with Covid being a thing at the time. It had to be hard to make a game while on lockdown basically. And you know, that ended up being a part of why I disliked the expansion too. It was so dark and gloomy… during a really dark and gloomy time irl. Not exactly the ideal escape.
It was mountains of missed potential… how do they go from making Demon Hunters absolutely bad ash in Legion then for Shadowlands they made death knights canon fodder.
I think the fault of Shadowlands comes back to why Ion said they didn’t make a old God expansion cause they didn’t want to be tied down to one setting.
Which is ironic cause the majority of shadow was basically the same setting until we got to Zerith mortis.
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Technically ,we are dead especially when first died on Azeroth , so that there they would look over, it is only because of Azeroth herself we live. In a way we are trapped with no will of our own not in game, but we can delete ourself even though we live in rl.