Shadowlands isn't just an expansion, it's an overhaul!

Community General Discussion
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After the recent flurry of information regarding the upcoming Shadowlands expansion yesterday, I’ve come to a realization of sorts:

Shadowlands isn’t just an expansion.
It’s a complete overhaul of how the game works.

And yes, I know full well that ActiBlizz has a penchant for changing the game quite significantly with each expansion… but this looks and feels different, and possibly more significant.

To just rattle off some of the more signficant changes:

  • The level squish is an obvious change, which involves a complete rework of how leveling is done and altering how several aspects work in response.
  • The Covenant system seems to be set-up as an “extension” of classes, almost as if it were a sub-specialization or something to that effect. The Soulbind system, which has choices tied to the Covenants, only seems to reinforce this. These all seem to be set-up to give players a significant choice in terms of gameplay… and borderline un-balance-able as a result. They also come off as a semi-rigid choice (and were initially shown as a “hard” choice you couldn’t change), and you’ll be encouraged to stick with it.
  • While I can’t recall when & where this was stated… but it actually looks like ActiBlizz has outright said they want to start discouraging the “need to optimize” mindset which has dominated the game. I think the actual line was along the lines of “a certain group will have to get over it”. Taking the nature of the Covenant system into account, this actually seems to be true.
  • Torghast is new and arcade-y type of system which is being played up as critical to core gameplay loop in Shadowlands’ endgame.
  • There’s a large amount of resources going into offering significantly more player customization options. New skin tones, eye colour, the addition of Legendary weapon transmog during late BfA after years of denial, the recent announcement that Artifact appearances will no longer be tied to specs… they’re really pulling out all the stops here on this front.
  • Taking into account some of the changes attempted in BfA (and even a few from Legion) that will be carried over into Shadowlands: the GCD change, the stripped down classes to better facilitate these external systems (sometimes referred to as “borrowed power”), World Quest and Assaults (referred to as “Callings” this time around), Mythic+, the extreme & rampant stat-inflation from all of these systems a la Diablo… the net result has been a significant and MAJOR change to the game over a relatively short span of time. Shadowlands will just be the capstone on all of these cumulative changes.
  • A general trend I’ve noticed is that they’re strongly redirecting the focus of the game to try and attract NEW players. Lots of upfront flashiness & features, lots of new ideas & systems… and they’re only doubling down on them more and more.

Or to sum it all up:

It’s like the expansion will be an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GAME.

More than any expansion that came before, Shadowlands won’t be the WoW you knew… and for better or for worse, you should be looking at it as if it were an entirely new game you’re picking up rather than just an extension of WoW. Or at least it looks that way to me.

You could almost say, for all intents and purposes – the old WoW is dead.
The old saying of “Only WoW can kill WoW” rings true… and is surprisingly literal.

That being said… it doesn’t really change my opinion about the current state of the game and where it’s headed. If anything, it just reinforces it. Shadowlands doesn’t look like a game I’d be interested in; with my established dislike of the gameplay and boredom at the premise, it just looks like a waste of time.

All I can recommend is you step back and look at the expansion in this context, and decide if it still looks like something you’d be interested in.

And just before I leave this be, here’s an interesting little question to add onto all of this:

Why?

To me, the immediate answer is obvious – ActiBlizz is trying to reinvigorate the game by bringing new blood in and draw back many of the older ones who have already left.

That also has the implication that the game isn’t doing so well at the moment, things are faltering and have been for some time (all of these changes aren’t things that happen overnight). Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few planned features were pushed out early to try and shore up the numbers a bit; legendary weapon transmog being a pretty obvious example.

The root cause of said decline isn’t quite so obvious… though one can look at the fact WoW now has some legitimate competition that are doing a far better job of attracting new players, leaving WoW with only a slowly but steadily declining playerbase of die-hard fanatics. But an MMORPG can not live off dedicated fans alone, and they’re now getting more desperate for new blood.

How successful Shadowlands will be at bringing in new players, I cannot say with any certainty… but it is plain to see that they’re trying to do so, more than ever before.

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I feel you are right, though I feel in some regards the expansion is more of a “finally giving the players what they’ve been asking for since forever” (more customization options, etc.) and less of a radical overhaul. Even in this regard, the expansion is still kind of lacking, because a full overhaul would look something more like:

  1. All classes available to all races

  2. Many more customization options available to all races, at the least the options that already exist in the game for variants of those races (some examples: red-skinned former Man’ari for Draenei, red eyes/skin for orcs, customizable tails for worgen, etc.)

  3. Full re-customization (name change, race change, etc.) at the barbershop to replace paying directly for those options (just set the price in gold to equal the same Blizzard balance price of the old services, so it will be exactly the same thing with fewer steps and more ease of access)

  4. The ability to transmog any piece of any gear type onto any class (so priests could transmog plate, etc.) and really open up the options for appearance there with minimal effort from Blizzard’s part

  5. Removing pointless transmog restrictions, like hiding pants (pants show through some of the robe models, even!)

  6. More allied races that people have been requesting for ages (naga, kalu’ak, sethrak, the list goes on indefinitely really), since each allied race barely takes any effort to add (just a basic intro quest to unlock once reputation with a particular faction has been achieved, then some additional player models, and like, that’s about all to make people happy)

  7. The ability to play with and group with members of the opposite faction with War Mode OFF

I really love some of the updates in Shadowlands but the customization options could go a lot further, I feel.

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But yet no new race class combinations. Seems lazy to not add a new class, not do extreme reworks, not add new races, and then call it a customization xpac. Adding new race class combinations with the new customizations of the core races would be the perfect time. Since we are getting a level squish and a new leveling experience new combinations would entice players to level alts of those races.

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Unless you’re a Shadow Priest…

#removevoidform

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I disagree. Its going to have alot of recycled BFA systems with a different name. The new systems are just going to get thrown away at the end of the expansion and reset player progress (again). Torghast is just going to be a modified visions run.

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That’s not a full overhaul, that’s removing everything the lore and warcraft stands for.

  1. Many lore reasons to keep things diverse. Do you want to see only blood elves on horde side?
  2. They are already adding a lot, I DO consider this a big overhaul of the customisation system, just alone for adding ear options, jewelery, eye seperate from face ect.
  3. Name change is something serverbound, it’s not something someone should be allowed to change on a whim.
  4. This would ruin the little bit of things we can recognize of our fellow players. Heritage already makes it tough, we don’t need any more of this.
  5. Ok, that one I agree with.
  6. This would be added bonus but not ‘required’ to be a overhaul.
  7. They have stated this would never be a thing in WoW.
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I think that Shadowlands is laying the foundations for 10.0 / WoW 2. I think Blizzard has a grand vision for restoring WoW to glory after seeing that WoW Classic $$$.

I think that Shadowlands itself will largely be a evolution of existing systems however. The biggest new feature are the sub-classes, which may be a precursor to a more involved sub-class system in WoW 2.

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Unian, thank you for your reply; your opinions are just as valid as mine are.

On name changes, we already can change them on a whim, though. We can just buy a name change. We can either spend real money or spend gold to buy Blizzard Balance to then buy the name change. Like, it is the same thing; all I mean is to put the name change option directly into the barbershop. Blizzard could set the gold price to be equivalent to like buying a token and converting it to Blizzard Balance; it’s all easily convertible anyway. But doing this directly from the barbershop would be a smoother user interface experience, I feel, and would make sense given that we will be able to change our characters’ sexes and the like in Shadowlands anyway; a name change seems fitting if we are doing that, right?

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I understand and agree, but from a server point of view, our data is linked to our name-server.
If I remember correctly, a name change takes some time to take effect, same as server transfers. having it in-game and ‘infinite’ could cause much lag. That’s more the point I’m trying to make.

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I am not sure what the technical limitations (if any) would be there. I suppose at worst we could just choose the option and be resent to the character renaming screen, and then reload back into the game as with buying a name change already. But I definitely lack the brains to be a programmer or a server architect, so I am just saying what I would like to see, not necessarily knowing whether it can be done with their current technology. :slight_smile:

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I’m pretty hyped for Shadowlands. But adding everything you mentioned would make me absolutely bouncing-off-the-walls ecstatic. Yes, please.

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One critical difference, OP. Its all unfortunately still based on the ancient engine it has always relied on.

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It’s still a tab target MMORPG. For all the changes WoW has gone through over the years it still feels like the exact same game, and will continue to unless Blizzard goes off the deep end and creates an entirely new combat interface.

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This one is actually quite easy to explain:
They know they can’t recapture the success of WoW with a new game.

So they’re going for the next-best thing, which is reworking the existing game to fit their new vision; they can’t overcome the inertia of WoW (though I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d word it as “use the existing momentum” to make it sound better to the higher-ups), so they’re trying to steer it as much as possible in another direction.

It could be a case of “have your cake and eat it too”.

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I like voidform don’t @ me

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Yes and no.

Devs don’t want to have to integrate changes into previous expansions. They want to create a brand new game every time, and then completely sweep it out the door come next expansion.

It was clear to me when they implemented level scaling that they had a long-term plan to turn the game into something that didn’t resemble or even incorporate the old wow.

It doesn’t seem to me there will be any changes that will benefit or attract new players. Seriously. Ion told us they had to implement level scaling because the reason there were very few new players was because leveling had nerfed itself when they borked lower level spells, and new players were demanding 110 levels of really hard content AND those borked spell progressions. Which haven’t been fixed, actually, except to nerf some spells even more for no reason.

So where is the wave of new players level scaling was supposed to bring in? There is none, because that never was a consideration. The changes are intended to make it easier to gut early story and bring the game into maintenance mode.

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Ok sure. Thats kinda been fairly obvious since Blizzcon?

What im speaking about is the inherent limitations of the engine limiting the potential of any changes.

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I’m pretty sure once we come back from shadowlands Azeroth will have a time skip and vamped/polished world.

It’s pretty much seems like bliz attempt at Wow 2.0

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And the new vision is layers of borrowed power that players will obediently grind for, grind after grind after grind. Spreadsheets and infinite sims. And lots of paid carries, as gradual progression that used to serve as a learning curve is being stripped away to push token sales for content with such a steep learning curve most players can’t do it. Also, removal of casual content and requirements to do hard content in order to access anything will mean your paid carry business will be absolutely booming.

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Agree 100%.

#removevoidform