Well that would be impossible as Cairne actually isn’t in the Shadowlands.
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Yeah, but we now know it’s “robots all the way down.” That really demystifies it for me.
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I really think we needed to see at least a few glimpses of the other, ‘infinite’ afterlives. They could still have told us that those afterlives were not relevant to the adventure we were currently on, aside from pointing out ‘They too will fall if the Jailer is freed’. Shadowlands suffered from too much ‘Tell, don’t Show’, and then what they did tell was also boring and confusing.
What was ever up with the Brokers? I’ve always thought that they (and their dungeon) were supposed to represent a mercantile afterlife of souls who loved nothing more than exchanging material goods in life and merely switched to spiritual goods in death… or, well, the material goods that exist in the afterlives… cause ‘things’.
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Yeah I didn’t like the whole ‘The Pantheon of Death are all robots’ thing. I mean, part of me kind of knew that if the First Ones ‘created’ them, that it would have to be something less magical, but I didn’t have ‘they’re all machines’ on my Shadowlands bingo card.
That said, the actual races of the Shadowlands? Those aren’t robots, and the fact that there’s an infinite number of afterlives means that any possible afterlife you thought your character could end up in is still valid.
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The Brokers are … fine … but why on earth didn’t they use the Ethereals?
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I will say that, in small doses, the afterlife can add to fantasy stories. Lets be fair here, classes like Shamans always kind of had afterlife stuff tied innately to them. I don’t think they needed to be delved deeply into though, not as full zones or something crazy like that. But, if we HAD to do Afterlives, there was set up for things to actually be more spiritual and more culturally tailored.
Ideally, imo, it should be something more like visiting Sovngarde in Skyrim. A brief visit to the Underworld on a epic quest and such. It’s not a bad trope on it’s own.
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Trolls were confirmed right
Tauren, orcs, all light based religion worshipper, pandaren and nightelves were proven wrong
Only trolls had the privilege to be 100% true.
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Call it redundant. But, I just feel the need to say it.
Those races were proven measurably right in the lore pre-Shadowlands. It is not as if it was all vague nothings that could go anywhere or be discarded. They were right, until the universe was fundamentally rewritten to say they weren’t.
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They definitely should’ve gone the DC universe “all faiths are equally real” route, and for all intents and purposes that’s what we had been shown prior to SL, especially before Chronicle’s Bakugan chart, but the modern devs/writers don’t have that kind of respect for the lore on any level
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Reminder that this is only because they liked the VA for Bwonsamdi—otherwise, the main Darkspear loa was due for a villain-batting.
And I for one think that was a very bad decision, as I’ve said above.
Exactly! That’s the truly annoying part.
They’d have no idea how to handle it in the confines of 1 xpac. Not that they had any idea how to even pull off what they tried either lol. I’m not gonna defend them but i’ll say that, with the inconsistency some races get, a lot of their playerbase whose not used to their OG stuff might feel confused.
Like, if we went to an Elunite afterlife like Sovngarde in Skyrim, with that OG lore from 2004 about how Elune’s aspect, the Night Warrior, would raise the valorous into the heavens to ride across the night sky. I think people who genuinely only are exposed to them via years upon years of hippy jokes would be confused by the older warrior culture style civilization they had.
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I’d rather risk people who don’t know the race’s roots being confused by a return to form than everyone be confused by the vapid caricature they’ve become
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I didn’t oppose the concept of Shadowlands from the beginning, but if what we got was their big idea for it, they should’ve just scrapped it. We absolutely should’ve gotten to see more afterlives. Originally, I thought that would occur in later patches. Maybe instead of Korthia, the Jailer tries to evelop another afterlife into the Maw. Or in 9.2 we go to different afterlives to stop the Jailer’s armies similar to the Legion invasions in 7.3.
Overall, I think SL would’ve benefitted from being more grounded in the actual Shadowlands and not trying to tie the Jailer into everything before it. So no Zereth Mortis and putting all of reality at stake. Make SoD the final raid where we kill the Jailer and make the issue that he wants to rule over the Shadowlands. And maybe Denathrius isn’t trying to feed anima into the Maw. Maybe he just wants to keep it all for himself in Revendreth, and we raid Castle Nathria to get the anima out. I liked the Covenant stuff for what it was, but the story didn’t need to get more cosmic from there.
Shadowlands was just a bunch of borrowed concepts from more popular expansions that were better thought out.
Jailer- Sargeras
First ones- titans
Brokers - ethereals
Bastion - Vyrkul
Maldraxus - scourge
Revendreth - vampire scourge
Ardenweald - old school nightelf faction.
Sylvanas - Garrosh from WOD
Nothing about this expansion is unique of terribly different from what has come before. It lacks vision and direction and is just a hodge podge of regurgitated content.
They are some gems buried in there but most of it(especially the main plot) was horrendus and full of preachy over incoherent garbage as they tried to dig themselves out of a hole they made for themselves.
I also doubt this is all Afrasbi’s fault either. Likely they just tried to change the direction of the story after it was already into development which is what had caused this mess. I am kind of curious to see what his original vision was for shadowlands not that I condone his actions while employed by blizzard.
To fix the story Blizzard needs to do the following.
- Firstly just resolve the damn Night elf story already, Give them they’re god dam victory over the horde. Take back their lands, plant their new tree and just move the hell on so we can focus on something else.
- Spend some damn time developing some decent horde characters whether that be in game, books or comics and for heaven sakes don’t make them go evil.
- Remove Anduin from the game for good. Nothing good can come of a mary sue like him and he is just sucking the life out of the alliance and making alot of people resent the humans in the game because of how much screen time he hogs.
- Allow the Alliance to have some grey to it without villan batting it with stupidiy, Some of the best and most discussed events like the Purge, Stormheim and barrens are when the alliace is allowed to get its hands dirty.
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I’m not sure he had one, beyond (maybe) “We go there.” From what people have worked out about the behind-the-scenes timeline, the last patch he would have worked on would most likely be 8.2.
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SL was a story clusterbomb in a lot of respects, but one I haven’t seen brought up so far:
the realms of death are unfamiliar with dying. Having to save the afterlife from extinction is something I’ve never seen before, and not in a good way.
There have been other stories (many based in D&D, from which SL definitely took inspiration) in the afterlife, but I can’t think of one where the premise is that you need to go into cosmic heaven/hell in order to keep them and everyone in them from uh, dying.
Im sure his plan wasn’t the stupidly pointless night elf arc and sylvanas arc. That feels like it had a plan initially and the writers reversed the direction after War of thorns. The entire arc is pointless and is ending up at the exact same place it started.
To me it felt like they had no intention of following up on the night elves after the War of Thorns and scrambled the Night Warrior stuff together when they realized, hey, night elf fans are kind of pissed off.
Throughout BfA I really never got the impression that they expected the outrage that Teldrassil caused. And the hastily-made nature of the Night Warrior is why it amounted to absolutely nothing. If Tyrande’s entire arc from BfA-SL had been removed the story wouldn’t change at all.
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Well, there’s a wonderfully terrible old movie called Bruce Lee in Hell or The Dragon Lives Again where Bruce Lee teams up with Popeye to save the dead people from the evil king of hell who has this earthquake pillar that keeps killing(?) the dead people … no, I’m not making this up …
That’s been more or less confirmed, although some people think Afrasiabi was just making it up as he went along—he apparently didn’t tell anyone what his long-term plan was, if he had one. The way we’ve heard it, Afrasiabi got the idea that Sylvanas should burn Teldrassil and insisted on pushing it through even though a large portion of the writing staff didn’t like it. So when he left, the ones who remained were stuck trying to continue the story from there. (See threads linked at the bottom of this post for more details.)
It makes a lot more sense when you know what was going on behind the scenes. I did a quick summary above in my response to Badmaa, but see these threads for the full story as far as we know it: 
I disagree that it was completely Afrasiabi’s fault because the story didnt improve at all once he was gone. Shsdowlands was even worse than BFA.
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