Shadowlands Still Doesn't Feel Like Warcraft

Lore Story Forum
1

In fact, I think it feels like an entirely different franchise that was bolted onto the Warcraft setting.

I don’t just mean it’s a different vibe, it feels to me like the Shadowlands was someone’s idea as a concept long before it became the backdrop for this expansion.

Take away Sylvanas, take away Anduin, take away all the Azerothian souls that ended up on the other side like Kel’thuzad, Kael’thas, Draka, Garrosh, and the rest, and the Shadowlands as a realm has enough fleshed out mythos and world building that it feels like it was conceived as something separate to and apart from Warcraft. It feels increasingly to me like someone else’s brain child implanted into WoW.

The entirety of the Shadowlands, as a concept, is entirely from left field. It doesn’t matter if the name “shadowlands” was vaguely mentioned by Ner’zhul in WoD, a loot from Gul’dan in Legion. It could be a realm by any other name. It feels like an entire setting dreamed up by ambitious writers, perhaps with a vision to base its own game on, but have found themselves in a position to bolt it onto the Warcraft setting as if to give the concepts some kind of legitimacy.

if you Thanos-snapped all the Warcraft callbacks out of this narrative, you’re not taking much away in the end. How would you explain the role of Ardenweald and the Wild Gods? It’s not like nature spirits are unique to WoW. What about the Night Warrior and the souls of Night Elves in Torghast? It’s not as if those concepts are new. What about the Pantheon of Death as a counterpart to the Pantheon of the Titans? A council of ancient, eternally powerful beings is also not unique to WoW. All of these things could stand on their own and still have nothing to do with Warcraft since none of that in Warcraft is exactly original, either.

That’s just wild speculation, obviously, but the more I play Shadowlands the more it feels like an MMO that isn’t well meshed with the DNA of Warcraft and if it had been made into it’s own IP would have already been forgotten.

To clarify: I like Shadowlands. I like the realms, I like the characters, I like the Maw, I like Zovaal. I just don’t think it’s meshing well with Warcraft and for the first time since Vanilla it just doesn’t feel like the same setting. It really does feel to me like Shadowlands was someone’s vision before they were ever in a place to affect the narrative of Warcraft.

22 Likes
3

You might as well says that about nearly anything in Warcraft. Look, people back in Warcraft 2 complained about gnomes/goblins of all things! And how bring steampunk elements into a medieval game was not part of the “spirit of warcraft”.

Heck, we have the draenei. I am sure if I I could go back to the past and tell myself Warcraft will have space aliens with their own vessels and that crystal like things will represent one of the pinnacle creatures of the light my past self would roll his eyes.

2 Likes
4

The defining trait of Warcraft has always been the seamless and silly fusion of fantasy, steam-punk, sci-fi, and really any other seemingly-incompatible genre, in a way works against all odds. Shadowlands may have some semi-new aesthetics, but to reject their admission into the overall aesthetic would be anathema to everything that Warcraft stands for. And it makes me sad that people don’t understand that. Shadowlands may not be good content-wise, but to object to it’s artistic style for being “too out there”—for Warcraft, of all things—is borderline blasphemous.

Besides, Shadowlands is far more established than Pandaria ever was: it only existed as the vague homeland of one character in WC3, and was only a name. But MoP isn’t viewed as impure, despite its aesthetic being unlike anything ever seen before. So is MoP not Warcraft?

WoD? The Shadowlands has been in the game since 2005, as the place you corpse-run in. It’s role in the cosmos just got retconned a bit. But introduced in WoD? Come on…

4 Likes
5

Does Helya count as an Azerothian soul?

With that question in mind… to quote Palpatine and Zul:

“Good.”

I do not see why expansive lore is bad.

Call me an Old Fashioned “Captain Save a Broad”… but I like that Odyn is explicitly described as vain by the Meta Narrative in the descriptions. I hope he gets his due.

I see footsteps towards justice against Odyn. May it lead to his downfall.

2 Likes
6

You only need to read those interviews where the writers gushed over how freeing it was to write a totally new setting unconstrained by the old to understand how little they are interested in the existing lore.

It feels like a disconnected bolt-on because it is. It’s a waste of time non-entity of a story with all of WCs worst characters thrown in. They somehow topped themselves and wrote something worse than WoD.

10 Likes
7

That is true enough. We seem to have to stretch our minds to make sense out of the lore they churn out.

Bowel movements have more consistency.

7 Likes
8

It’s definitely much more loose with what gets put into the lore now. As Gandred said, its really evident that the story creators are given the freedom to do whatever they want, within reason(like Thrall isn’t going to suddenly be a crab person).

You just have to look at that fairy tale book, it seems the authors had stories they wanted to tell and threw some Warcraft glitter over it, and well, if those stories didn’t make too much sense, then they are ‘perspective.’

As for the Shadowlands itself, it’s my opinion they went a little too far with new stuff, so much so that it feels very disconnected from the actual universe if you take out Sylvanas and Anduin. Otherwise you are just helping aliens with their problem that will bleed over to your planet because that’s the only way the writers seemed to justify being there. It’s just like WoD, after killing Garrosh, first thing Khadgar said was, “Well, those Ogres might cause trouble one day, lets take them out too.”

Instead of everything about Zovaal being a macguffin, they should have had something the players could relate or care about be at sake. I guess the writer’s thought Anduin would fill that role, and now they are calling in the Dreadlords.

11 Likes
9

Edit: Why am I pretending to have any insight; all I did was regurgitate the plot so far.

1 Like
10

This.

I don’t dislike Shadowlands but one of my biggest complaints is what the writers did you get us here.

AZshara and Nzoth had years of build up that they would be these big threats. You could have easily used both of them to create an entire expansion, especially the Black Empire.

Having them both be patch content in an xpac that was entirely red herring to throw you off felt like a slap in the face to all that build up and was a complete letdown.

Furthermore, the power scales feel absolutely ridiculous. We went from interdimensional spaceships killing KilJaeden and a Titan back to…oh no, trolls and fat sailors are the biggest threat. It’s just like…what?

By unlocking the veil of what happens after death, everything that came before has proven to be less impactful. We see that characters that should be suffering didn’t, and this no-name jobber (Zovaal) gets built up with an “Actually it was me all along!” which cheapens the previous lore.

There are also still places unexplored by Azeroth that we should go to: Dragon Isles, Tell A’bim, Kezan and Undermine, Ogrezonia, retaking Gilneas But now when we go there, will it be meaningful? Will anything be meaningful now that we know that when we die we actually just go an adventure somewhere else?

You can just look at Sylvannas’s loot list to get a sense of how the writers of SL feel about the previous expansions. Saurfang had a great narrative arc, finally exposing Sylvannas and earning his warrior death to go be with his son…and in the end he’s a f@#$ing trinket worth 25g…lol.

14 Likes
11

Pandaria was still woven into the the Azerothian universe in a sensible manner. It didn’t retcon or change or major lore in order to exist, or invalidate other major parts of the universe. It was an area that “vanished” during the time of the Sundering, and has been largely removed from the world’s events until it’s reveal.

It was the same as any other continent/zone that’s been revealed on Azeroth (Northrend, for instance, Vashj’ir, Uldum, Twilight Highlands, etc. These places have been near seamlessly blended.

The Shadowlands was introduced by changing everything about the afterlife (basically invalidating or changing all the lore around death/the Emerald Dream). It also stole away the agency of many characters/pivotal moments, and cheapened major events.

Pulling away the curtain and going “SURPRISE, it was X all along. None of the characters were acting of their own influence and everything has been string pulling by people we decided to make masterminds just 5 weeks ago!”

Warcraft is best, IMO, when they stick to the mortal conflicts on Azeroth. Going to punch space gods and defeat death itself is just stupid. Honest to god garbage.

Edit:

This. Yup.

14 Likes
12

I say that’s not true. The pre established Shadowlands were very different. Heck SL destroyed a lot of afterlives and pretty much ignored any interaction with the Shadowrealm we had before.

Shadowlands feels very off putting to me. Destroying lore and it seems like nothing matters and nothing will have consequences. That’s the exact opposite of MoP btw.

Let’t just disagree on that…

12 Likes
13

You can disagree all you want — still doesn’t change that it was a great arc. No other character was given a full set of rendered cinematics. Whether you liked it or not doesn’t change that it was great.

great /ɡrāt/
adjective

  1. of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average.
    “the article was of great interest”

  2. of ability, quality, or eminence considerably above the normal or average.
    “the great Italian conductor”

14

In your view. For me it completely destroyed Saurfang and his legacy.

That’s true. Anduin comes close though.

That’s not how this works. That’s obviously subjective and for me those cinematics were aside from the first all terrible.

Addressing your semantics: Something terrible and character destroying is story wise way under average in my book.

5 Likes
15

So basically a fanfiction written by supposedly professionals.

What if Harry and Ron went to the Pokemon universe!

2 Likes
16

Conceptually, Shadowlands looked fine. It could’ve been a new chapter, but instead, the whole BfA-Shadowlands stuff so far is founded on twisting by the current dev team of what the players liked.

It’s deceiving with promoting one thing and going in another direction. It’s not true to the characters or themes that were there.

That could’ve been a new step for the devs to show their best. And their best is taking what was there and twisting it into a half baked mess. With the best representation of how the story feels to me, being Baine. He’s there. He is called “ze best”. And that’s it, just being “on hold” till a convenient moment. Just like in BfA.

I think the moment it clearly defined the transition was with the Chronicles being moved from an incomplete source that needed clarifications and comments to fill the gaps, into “titan PoV”. Not that it’s inherently bad, but the way it is used is to justify being irresponsible and messy with the story, all while try to be free of criticims, be it “it’s their story to tell”, "it was a PoV’, and so on. That tool is used not to enhance the story so far, but to avoid responcibility.

What the Chronicles were advertised as, and what was abandoned with the “PoV” reveal:

gl hf

3 Likes
17

I literally posted the definitions and bolded the one being referred to.

Your opinion factors into the 2nd definition, not the first which I am referring to.

Use :brain: pls. I’ll repost it here.

No other character has received several rendered cinematics to tell their story, meaning the extent, amount and intensity of his arc was considerably above the normal or average.

The subjective part of great is it’s second definition, which is not being referred to, as previously stated.

Another example:

The great plains

  • referring to the plains being much larger than a normal plains

With great effort, he lifted the weight

  • referring to the amount of energy put into lifting

That food tasted great

  • referring to the subjective nature of your taste buds in regards to the flavor of the food
18

The definition of a word indeed, with no meaning here at all. To you it was great. To me this was way below average and terrible in every way of story telling. You liking something doesn’t make it objectively great. :slight_smile:
I would even argue it has a lot of problems in it’s writing.

Anduin comes close, but yes that’s true.

Oh I see, you’re playing the nonsensical argument game. No that’s not what great means. It doesn’t mean simply more quantity and you know that. This feels extremely dishonest. Please don’t insult people like that.

4 Likes
19

Where did I say I liked it? Your fundamental misunderstanding of a word having multiple definitions is astounding.

20

Lol /10char

21

You called it great, so you like it, of course. Or at the very least you think the graphics are well done.

There.

I feel stupid for doing so, but it seems I have to explain the use of the word “great” to you. What a waste of time, for something that seems so dishonest.

See, you understand this word has multiple meanings.

You were referring to Saurfancs story arc. Great in this context simply means, hi’s story was pleasant and well written / or told in your view. That’s it. It seems like the typical anti Sylvansas take.
If you wanted to say, he had the most attention to his story arc, because of those cinematics, you would have worded it differently.
However because you like it so much you claim this to be objectively great. To argue this point you change to the second meaning of a word, which you can replace with large, or tall, or even a large amount etc. That’s not the same thing. Those are fundamental different and you know it. You are simply butthurt someone thinks this story is actually bad.

An example:
There are more transformer movies than movies of the LoTR trilogy. This fact alone doesn’t mean the transformer moves are “greater”, as in having a better story. It’s hard to believe such a dishonest take is real.

2 Likes