Shadowlands Feels Unfulfilling

Wyrmrest Accord
1

Yes this is one of ‘those’ threads. TLDR: I’m not liking Shadowlands and it feels like a step down from previous content, on par with Warlords in terms of frustratingly boring.

But is anyone else just not feeling Shadowlands? I’ve done the campaigns on another toon and I just…didn’t care for the any of the storylines in the zones or the zones themselves. Bastion was pretty but it’s Diablo heaven and I’m not really a fan of Diablo, Maldraxxus had the lol characters but was just ugly, Ardenweald is ANOTHER glowy magical elf forest and Revendreth had the best aesthetics but so gloomy. And the Maw is just your generic blasted doomscape we’ve all seen before. And Oribos is just visually boring for me.

Not to mention the zones are just so small, or at least feel really small. They’re just ‘move from generic utilitarian quest hub and then go to the next hub’. There’s no flavor locations where you can just hang out and FEEL like you’re in the world and get immersed.

I generally try to read all the quest text because I want to know the expansion’s story, but it feels like there’s just nothing really happening that has managed to hook me. I don’t care about anything that is happening in the game’s story right now. I don’t feel invested in the story or about stopping the Jailer. How many enormous unstoppable armies have we fought at this point and won against? Like the only main reasoning I can come up for caring about is ‘Well, if you don’t fix the plumbing of the Shadowlands, you’ll just end up this moron’s tool when you actually DO die and can’t come back’.

And honestly I’m just not looking forward to leveling through the content again with this character. Honestly I miss Battle For Azeroth content, even if the gameplay was bad and Azerite was such a mistake, but Kul Tiras was an amazing place and I enjoyed most of Zandalar (even though I just don’t like Troll content in general and that pyramid city was a pain in the butt). And the story up until “whoops we’re out of time and ideas better cram an Old God in there for filler”. At this point I’m just flipping through the quest text so I can just get on with things so I can get to 60 and then just get OUT of the Shadowlands and do old content.

I’m just…I dunno. I’m bored of what little has been offered, and since I’m not a raider and my connection is too slow to PVP…there’s just nothing really feeling compelling for me. Like it took me two months to reach this feeling with Warlords of Draenor, but I’ve only been back playing Shadowlands for a week.

I was hoping that RP would be a good distraction but I’m just not even feeling that because the zones have nothing going for them. I can’t justify spending time and money on a game I can’t otherwise enjoy just for RP.

Does anyone else feel like this?

35 Likes
2

Sir, this is a Shipley’s.
























Am I doing it right?
3 Likes
3

For the record, I unironically enjoyed what content was available in WoD. On the other hand, SL is so actively unfun that I haven’t been subbed for months now.

16 Likes
4

150% and without question, this is the fastest I have fallen out of favor with the shiny of a new expac.

I am thoroughly disconnected from the story and all the systems, barring staying up to date so I can keep up with any cosmetic items I want. I am phoning it in. My enjoyable time in game, is spent in previous expacs exploring, farming things, RP, etc.

I’m still here because I immensely enjoy parts of the universe that is all of WoW and those parts are enough to justify paying the nominal sub fees. I will be playing this game until they either pull the plug on the game or they pull the plug on me.

The only thing I’m looking forward to at this point, is when the inevitable Sylvanas Scooby Doo Mystery redemption arc happens and the player base goes completely bananas and loses its collective sh…

8 Likes
5

I’m not sure how I feel about WoD anymore. I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination that it was a good expac… and yet I didn’t grow quite as bored with it quite as quickly as I have with BfA and now SL.

The fact that it was, in a way, WrA Alliance’s “golden age” of RP probably helped with that, though. Meanwhile, BfA + SL seem to be bleeding Stormwind dry in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. But I digress.

I talked about this before, but I think one of the most upsetting things about Shadowlands, for me, is that it’s not terrible. At least, not in the same way BfA was. I think SL has good bones! It really, genuinely feels like Blizzard could do something really cool with SL, but they just… haven’t. And looking at 9.1? I’m starting to think they won’t.

It doesn’t help that it feels like this is the first expac that the art team has phoned in. For a timeless, otherworldly realm governed by mysterious, hitherto unseen gods, Shadowlands sure is boring to look at.

14 Likes
6

WoD was terrible as current content. You were done with it so quickly and there’s little to actually DO once you hit cap.

WoD as legacy content, however…it’s actually very pleasant. It doesn’t seek to waste the player’s time. The zone storylines save Talador are all well done (Talador has that “Hey look, it’s Ogrim Doomhammer! Oh no, he’s dead!” weird hiccup. Like, way to do a major, MAJOR Lore character dirty there.), two of the three raids are joys to farm now (Highmaul remains Loading Screen Hell with a “final” (non-Mythic) boss with bullspit unskippable phases regardless of how much damage you pump into him), and even the dungeons are fun to do for the little cinematic touches they played with.

Coincidentally, WoD was the last expansion until Shadowlands (I think) that featured every single equippable item as a potential drop. After WoD, you either aren’t getting any weapons or neckpieces (Or as I call them in Farming “Free Gold”).

As for Shadowlands, it failed to grab me to such a degree that it’s the first expansion I’m straight up NOT participating in. Pandaria took the Siege of Ogrimmar cinematic to get me to come back from Cataclysm, but unless Shadowlands gets some absolutely wild story beat to pique my interest again, I’m perfectly content to just do already existing content.

3 Likes
7

rubs jaw

i think you know an expac’s story is bad or disconnected when a good solid chunk of the rp community is outright ignoring it or not participating in it.

for me, that “disconnected” word is the main problem. like, bastion and revendreth are perfectly fine. maldraxxus is a waste of time. ardenweald is another pretty hefty blow to nelf lore. the maw is the worst zone theyve ever made. but honestly? they dont have anything to do with azeroth. i know, i know. whatever sylvanas is scheming has dire consequences because the jailer’s after the soul of our world. but… who cares? they didn’t make us care. the plot out there might as well be an entirely different world, different game, because its so far removed from the ideas of an afterlife we’ve been given as well as the world we’re used to… that its just completely separate. how is it that we’ve had TWO expansions that take place on an actual alien world, yet both felt way more connected to the world we care about than a place filled with all our favorite lore characters?

well. they didn’t make us care about the characters. the characters that’re back have been gone for so long, and have had their characters so thoroughly changed over the years, that they arent the characters we know and love. so we’ve been given a cosmic threat that’s hard to connect to, with characters that we cant connect to because theyre written differently every other patch, and with a world that resembles nothing like the world we have.

at least it gave the RP community the threat of a global scourge invasion, to give us something to chew on. it has a leg up on wod, in at least that one aspect.

hi everyone im sint and i make long rambling posts

19 Likes
8

I was pushing a few alts to 50 threw WoD recently and I only just now realized that was Ogrim after someone in my guild pointed that out.

Wait that’s not Ogrim that’s just low rez Thrall oh wait IT IS!

I was thinking recently that usually this is the time in the expansion I start doing some fishing quests/achievements for random items or gadgets and the distinct lack of them in Shadowlands is pretty disappointing. BfA had at least a few things you could do but BfA should have been a warning sign since we didn’t get the most exciting stuff until Mechagon came out.

I guess I can get my fifth artifact fishing pole again? :upside_down_face:

9

Mechagon was such a breath of fresh air after the Anti-Fun Equation that was Nazjatar.

Seriously, I don’t wish violence on any game developer, but I’d love to sit down with whomever thought that zone layout pre-flying was a exciting, fun experience and give them a piece of my mind. And then a piece of this baseball bat I happen to be holding.

Nazjatar dang near broke me. I got the required rep for Pathfinder and never went back on any toon. Honestly I feel like Nazjatar is what soured me on the game in general because I’ve never even touched the N’Zoth stuff because I’m absolutely terrified it’d be another Nazjatar and not Mechagon and I am literally not strong enough to do that again.

EDIT: I know that comes off as extremely melodramatic in writing but I’m being absolutely dead serious. If I experience anything like Nazjatar again…I’m out for good. I was fundamentally THAT dissatisfied with the content.

3 Likes
10

I quit BfA when Nazjatar game out I hated it so much hahahaha. I had friends that offered to help me threw it but I was so gamer mad I unsubbed haha.

I was planning on never getting flying in BfA until they pushed the 100% rep gain bonus and I was able to overgear Nazjatar by doing N’zoth content which where in zones I could fly in and then going back and steam rolling naga in superior gear. Otherwise BfA would have been the first expansion I never got flying in I was so fed up with it.

I’m also not playing Shadowlands at the moment or at least very casually until they push flying out. I edited my post before but I’m getting all my alts to 50 and leaving them there because I don’t plan to level anyone else to 60 until I have flying. I can’t do Legion dungeons at 60 anyway but I can still do other old raids for mog gear at 50 so no point getting to 60 until that’s addressed or we get flying lol.

1 Like
11

You know you’ve messed up the design of a zone when you complain about it in General chat and the responses back are “It gets better with Flying.”

When the Devs are on the record as saying Flying is a Mistake and they only begrudgingly continue to support it. (And yet 95% of the offerings in the Virtual Store are FLYING MOUNTS)

1 Like
12

Guys the expansion after Shadowlands is gonna be dope its gonna be awesome we’re gonna zug and we’re gonna krona kai kristor and we’re gonna ishunu the HECK out of some dal’diebs I’m looking forward to it but until then I think Shadowlands is pretty dumb

18 Likes
13

Expanding on my previous post, re WoD was fun:
WoD had incredibly solid class design with fun abilities. It had extremely solid questing zones with NPCs that were not obnoxiously omnipresent, a line that they could have crossed with Y’riel but didn’t. It was also the last “increase player power by doing stuff to get gear” expansion, before they decided that we needed some kind of infinitely grindable bar we needed to fill. It was just you and the gear, like every expansion before. This all meant that even if they should have had more stuff to do, and even if the overall frame story was phoned in, I could constantly level alts for funsies. It had replay value.

SL has a whole list of things that are wrong with it. I would never expect exclusive appearances like covenant sets to be quick and easy to get, but the entire process for getting them is excruciating. The plot, even in the individual zones, does nothing to make me want to care. Class balance is wonky, and is exasperated by covenant abilities. Zone scaling is strange as well. The world quests are the grindiest and worst they’ve been since being introduced. There’s the maw and torghast, I’m not even going to start with that.

Then the straw that broke the camel’s back was the drip feed of the plot. My normal modis operandi in the game is that when leveling a character I don’t stop doing quests when I ding level cap, I keep going until I run out of quests and only start endgame stuff once I’ve done that. But you can’t do that here. Before you can finish the zone storyline you have to have a bazillion renown, which they stressed prerelease was not rep! It’s worse than rep, it’s rep with a bar they extend out every patch. Oh, also I guess on the questing front they made it so that the dungeons don’t scale for some reason so if you do all the bastion quests you can no longer queue for the dungeon in bastion anymore because you outleveled it.

Anyways I got rambly there but tldr, SL is bad.

6 Likes
14

I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than Alliance BfA experience which involved us having to go back into dungeons after canonically clearing them once before but nothing mechanically or NPC wise changes about them.

15

I think Shadowlands is actually worse than expansions like WoD or BfA because there’s just nothing there to talk about, good or bad.

Even the terrible aspects of the other two xpacs actually got people talking–and even if in some cases they resulted in exhausting arguments, at least they kicked up enough energy and care for people to notice them and discuss them. SL has given us pretty much nothing of note but more Sylvanas x Anduin to roll our eyes about.

And I hate it. Not even my love of my own characters is able to sustain my interest because there’s not even at least an interesting, accessible location to make use of. Do you want Blue Twizzler Druid Heaven, Creepy Brainwashy Spirit Healer heaven, Vampire Hell, or Victory Metal Undead Hell?

3 Likes
16

I loved WoD from the start but mainly because of what it was. The setting, story, and content were all fun and engaging for me. I completely get why others don’t like it though. With SL I just feel bored. I liked it at first, I really did. I was interested in the story, the setting, the characters, but I feel like I’ve done a 180 at this point. I still like the zones but I’ve completely soured on the story and just SL as a whole. The Shadowlands have always been part of Warcraft but the execution has really screwed up so much of the universe for me. I almost don’t like acknowledging it on my characters anymore.

6 Likes
17

I like the Shadowlands as being part of the universe of Warcraft. I don’t like how the expansion plays when it comes to endgame though. I haven’t become borde with it (yet), and plan to have an Ardenweald and Bastion alt set up soon. HOWEVER.

I’ve found myself more and more just either RPing, or playing other games lately.

Hell I recently beat The Ancient Gods Part 2 on Doom Eternal. Getting back into Dawn of WAr II with my cousin… little breaks like that away from Wow are helping me stick with it. But the fact we’re not getting more customization options, PvP being really off-balanced, among some other issues, has made it hard for me to feel particularly keen to do much else on WoW.

1 Like
18

Yeah, I bounced out of this after the first week of Castle. I don’t think I’ve ever left an expack this fast. I was warning people about Torghast early on, and nothing Blizzard has done indicates that they are going to change a lot of fundamental problems with SL.

It’s not like any individual thing can be pointed at as being outright terrible, but the way everything meshes together is just pointless. Not necessarily unfun or badly designed, but outright pointless. It’s like Blizzard just stopped asking players WHY they do certain parts of content and just started going down a checklist of things they felt needed to be included.

So, without a feeling of any kind of reward for anything, I just felt like I was doing chores for no gain. No gold, loot, mogs, or anything of note in the short-term. Everything needed to be this grand long-term plan instead, which isn’t particularly fun for an MMO. I don’t care about Blizzard’s epic vision or whatever; I want things that will make my character look cool to me.

WoD didn’t have a lot of content, but the content that was there was pretty good. HFC was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in Mythic raiding. Stepping into Castle and seeing the lack of reward for anything, let alone the time you needed just to get into realistic gear to handle it, just killed my desire. It’s sad when the best loot for raiding is gained through… PVP? What? I mean, it’s good people that enjoy different types of content can have multiple avenues for loot, but shouldn’t PVE also be giving you PVE gear?

I think the expansion was summed up about two weeks after I unsubbed and my guild’s discord had people getting three of the same belt they already had in their weekly vault.

12 Likes
19

I was excited for it, and I enjoyed a lot of what I played on beta and some concepts I was seeing were definitely something I was looking forward to.

There’s plenty to do that feels meaningful. I enjoy Torghast still, but having to do it on multiple characters to progress them as much feels weird. PvP is a lost cause for me cuz the character I wanted to dedicate to PvP this season is nowhere near as well geared as other folks and the catchup for it is daunting when I have so much other stuff to do on other characters.

The lore was set to be interesting, but they’re not DOING enough with the new concepts, and they’ve left a story back home in limbo which feels wrong for many reasons. That and the portal stuff was the WORST bullcrap they’ve pulled with an expansion ever IMO, causing a major aspect of the lore to be ruined to me.

The content is better than BfA, imo, even early BfA which was arguably pretty decent. There’s no REQUIREMENT to log on anymore to power up my character, not as much anyway, and all pursuits are cosmetic and vanity/gold. By all means I should be ENJOYING this expansion more than BfA, heck, it doesn’t constantly try to make me feel like a poopy buttface for playing Horde every 5 minutes.

The toys are neat, there’s a lot of cool stuff to collect…but WHY does it feel unfulfilling to me? I’m legitimately in the same boat, but I really can’t figure out what about this expansion is pushing me away. There’s no compulsion to grind everything out, the amount of stuff to do is a little overwhelming but no more than concepts in previous expansions, and being pretty much in a PvP slump doesn’t really bother me that much.

I don’t get it. Something about Shadowlands is lacking big time, and I don’t think I’ve seen the reason I think so listed on anyone’s lists of grievances. A lot of this stuff works for me, and yet, I can’t… enjoy much of it? Ugh. I’m confusing myself, I can’t figure any of this out but TL;DR, I agree, but probably for different reasons that I’m not sure of. Something is wrong with this expansion, and it shouldn’t be.

20

The weird thing is… I totally predicted Shadowlands long before it was announced.

The BfA pre-patch very clearly said:
“We haven’t touched the Horde story since the end of MoP, and now we plan to retell MoP, and then we won’t touch the Horde for the next expansion or two after that.”

I didn’t expect the Alliance to get left behind in Shadowlands too though.

5 Likes