Gallywix was worse. At least with Garrosh you could argue that Thrall had no way of knowing just how miserably he would fail. At that time, Garrosh was, per The Shattering, extremely popular with the Horde populace and had an established pedigree. Thrall still f-ed up and absolutely should have listened to Cairne and everyone else.
But Gallywix is another story. Gallywix had just attempted to kill Thrall himself, as well as killing or enslaving the PC. He had previously enslaved the rest of the Bilgewater Cartel. That chain concluding with Thrall suddenly appointing Gallywix is one of the most gobsmackingly bizarre plot moments in this history of this franchise. Itâs like the story was written with the intent that Sassy Hardwrench would take over, at the last minute Blizzard execs were like, âNope, keep Gallywix,â and the story team was so ticked off they didnât even bother trying to have it make sense.
Seeing as how this is Blizzardâs first foray into the truly unknown- using a completely new, Metzen-free setting and location⌠Iâm interested in seeing how it turns out. For better or for worse, weâre going to see if Warcraftâs writing team truly has the ability to stand on their legs. So far, their track record hasnât been very promising. But they have been tied down to old lore this entire time, so I suppose they deserve a fair shot at utilizing something of their own making.
You would think that itâd be impossible to do worse than BfA. But thatâs also what people said when they claimed that itâd be impossible to make an expansion worse than Warlords of Draenor.
In any case, unless the expansion brings forth untold amounts of improvement to the quality of the game, Iâll be watching this one from the sidelines.
It saddens me to think about this but⌠bfa left a lot of baggage and lots to answer for so SL has lots of stuff to fix since the beggining, specially for the nelf and forsaken fans, this is not a good way to start an expansion i think it will be too much and they will just decide to ignore everything and push forward.
This is my concern as well. It just doesnât feel ârightâ to leave for Shadowlands and offer our services to some folks we never heard of before, when thereâs still so much unfinished business at home.
I know itâs all part of the story about the Jailer and Sylvanas and their mysterious plans, but personally, I couldnât care less about any of the covenants and whatever their problems are.
Iâm more interested to see how people move on after the disastrous mess that was the faction war and help rebuilding our world, instead of just leaving and hoping everything will be alright when we return.
Yeah Im really just not feeling any of the zones. Itâs just so distant from what I care about in WoW.
Sure, yeah, the vampires are spooky and I might be able to simp for Lady Vashj in Maldraxxus, but my first loves have always been Azeroth and Outland.
So some sparkly Satyrs donât have enough magic soul juice to fuel their minivans and volkswagons or whatever. I really canât be bothered to care. Oh, Sylvanas is being mean to the Blue Man Group? Thatâs Tobias Funkeâs concern, not mine.
I wanna go back to Feralas and see how the deep jungles and the mystical ruins of Eldreâthalas are doing so many years after we left them in Cata. I wanna go see a Gadgetzan that looks more like the version from Hearthstoneâs Mean Streets expansion with rival gangs and an actual city out in the desert while the Sand Trolls ride around on giant Hydras across the zone. Take me back to Darkshire and see how itâs rebuilt after the fiasco of the Rogue Order Hall story and help them fight back opportunistic undead and feral Worgen.
Take me home on some country roads back to Westfall to see how the povertyâs going, maybe some Night Elves have moved in and helped make it a more vibrant and fertile land. Letâs go on a treasure hunt in Stranglethorn with Belloc and Harrison Jones or something.
Honestly itâs needed because weâre still stuck with all the ridiculous natural disasters in the classic world that happened in Cataclysm, and these zones could use some big tune ups instead of just going off to generic vampire land or bonyard 5000.
Iâm also especially uninterested because the one covenant Iâd like to join (The Maw) isnât an option. I really couldnât care about the plightâs or interests of any of the others.
Iâm conflicted. On one end, Iâve always wanted to explore more of the afterlife in Warcraft. And I think learning more about certain aspects, like the Jailerâs plan, will be nice. But I agree that I dislike the removal from stuff.
It reminds me of Warlords of Draenor in some respects where a lot of our stuff feels really removed. Whereas stuff on Argus clearly felt relevant and engaged, despite being another planet.
You can have your own opinion on the OPs post but this is just straight false. The Shadowfell in D&D and the Shadowlands are very very different.
The Shadowfell is a single plane of existence that is a plane of shadow made up of positive and negative energy. Itâs meant to be the polar opposite of the Feywild. And the largest of the demi-planes. The most defining feature of the plane being the lack of color and light; no sun, moon, or stars, all things looked as if the color had leeched out. Gravity and time worked the same there as it did on the material plane, unlike other realms, and itâs landscape was a twisted version of the material plane as well.
Aside from comparing the Feywild to the Dream, and the Shadowfell to Ardenweald there arenât many comparisons you can make. And even that doesnât work because the Shadowfell is not a vast forest or connected with nature at all. And itâs not the realm of death, souls do not go there when they die, in fact those who live there find their souls going to other planes(the outer planes) when they die.
I get that they sound similar so we want to make the comparison, but they really are not. The Shadowfell seems to be seriously misunderstood if the general conception of it compares it to something like the Shadowlands.
I absolutely agree. Itâs WoD all over again. Major political shakeups happen at the end of a world war, and instead of dealing with the resulting fallout, we leave not only the planet but the dimension altogether. I have zero interest in the Jailer, the Arbiter or any of the Shadowlands covenants. I have boatloads of interest in the lands and peoples weâve known for years and whatâs happened to them. Or even other places like the Dragon Isles. Or the oft-hypothesized other side of Azeroth has an undiscovered continent and we find out thatâs where Azshara fled to. At least those would have some relation and bearing to Azeroth and its people.
âoh no that character diedâ
âno problem letâs just vacation in the shadowlands and say hi, maybe they even turned into a blue humanâ
So far, to me as well, everything seems really uninteresting, I was just thinking that was because they havenât really implemented much of the story because they are trying to hide it. If anything it makes the story worse because it seems like they are making death more and more meaningless. Visually itâs probably going to be nice, but the story seems dull so far.
Thatâs what people said about the beta content for BFA. If the expansion is coming out this year â and theyâve repeatedly, recently, stated that it is â the difference in alpha/beta is essentially meaningless.
I feel like WoD could have felt less disconnected than Shadowlands. In my eyes at the time, we now had access to an unspoiled Draenor. It wasnât until BFA that we find out âOh yeah, the tether was cutâ. I was essentially like, âBish what?â
Shadowlands promises to be something we canât really go back to becauseâŚWell, itâs the Afterlife.
I like the idea in theory a lot, and think that any chance to expand the cosmology and bring back the sense of mystery is great.
However, so far, execution seems - in typical Blizz fashion - very hamfisted, one dimensional, overly conventional comic book fare. If they pushed the more speculative, âshadowlands are infiniteâ angle, I think it would be better. They always suck at this though. For instance, in WoD, they could have done so much more to convey a sense of mystery about the rest of Draenor, but unfortunately the world feels oddly small. In contrast, a zone like the Tengu Wall in GW2 is utterly mysterious.
But I cannot wait to get away from BFA. It has been made amply clear that the things I consider successes in BFA (Zandalar, KT world building) blizzard doesnât given a flying fig about.
Dude, just quit wow already if youâre going to be this salty by default. Itâs clearly not an enjoyable experience for you, and all youâre doing here is dragging others down. Stop.
Replying to my own thread to say that now after a bunch more information has come out I feel exactly the same way I did when I wrote this. Nothing about Shadowlands interests me. Literally the only thing to pay attention to of even the slightest bit of interest is seeing how a handful of story beats from BfA will be wrapped up, which isnât really enough for me to want to level all my characters through zones that do not catch my interest in the slightest. I do not care about 4 ridiculously tiny realms of the WoW afterlife. I donât care about anima. I donât care about The Jailer or Arbiter. None of it has really anything to do with Azeroths world, which is the original thing that immersed me in this game. I donât care about Uther or Arthas. Their stories ended years ago. I donât care about what goofy covenant Draka belongs to. I donât care.
The only things I care about is seeing how the Night Elf story develops and the new info about how the Dreadlords could be the real big bads instead of the Void Lords.
After playing some of the beta myself, I think my issue sort of comes in a few different spots. They tried to ignore a lot of pre-existing afterlife lore that the universe had, because they were based around different beliefs and cultures. What they wanted in Shadowlands was a âmass appealâ that I feel has actually completely missed the purpose of going to the Afterlife. Also, because some of it seems to almost imply that SO MUCH in the main universe is actually just an idea from the Shadowlands. Itâs a dumb, ham fisted way to make the death dimension sound cool, because they otherwise made it sound boring until now.
Also as a Druid player, Ardenweald is very unsatisfying as a nature afterlife. For a zone based around âwinterâ and itâs themes, it is the softest and least fit to survive out of any others. The ideas of Maldraxxus arguably apply better to nature spirits, than Ardenweald itself. Itâs too focused on pixies and blatantly ripping off Celtic myth that it forgets to make it feel like an afterlife for nature spirits. Plus, the Emerald Dream already was the afterlife for all Azerothian Nature spirits and Dragons. Ardenweald just parts of the Dreams lore lmao.
This is my problem with Ardenweald too. As a RL ecologist, Ardenweald feels super bland to me and very superficial when it comes to nature themes. I think the Fae thing is absolute nonsense and has nothing to do with nature, aside from having moth/butterfly-wings. There is very little diversity in Ardenweald, in terms of creatures or habitats, something I generally have a problem with in WoW when it comes to nature portrayal. Considering they have landscape artists in Blizzard, youâd think theyâd take care of this stuff.
It doesnât satisfy me as a night elf player either being that it lacks a lot of the creatures night elves are associated with, like owls, sabers or hippogryphs. Sure it has these huge trees, but the trees themselves are monoplantations and not thematically diverse (not a real forest). It just is a copy of fae myth with nothing thematically to really satisfy anyone. I find it conceptually weak too, considering the Emerald Dreamâs existence and the imbalance of anima in favor of wild God abominations.
I definitely am going for Maldraxxus or Bastion first because the story and originality is much better, but Iâll play Ardenweald for the NW storyline and maybe Bwonâs part
I mean, its Blizzard associating âNatureâ with heavy Night Elf Fey-Wild-esk giant forests as always. Hell, it doesnât even portray the âFallâ and âWinterâ of nature as it apparently is trying. I mean, look at that place, it is lush and vibrant as hell. Placing the region in a permanent state of evening and night doesnât make it more associated with the end of lifeâs journey by default.
Honestly, I think Bwon probably is the most bluntly death-oriented thing in that zone from what Iâve seen, and heâs apparently not wanted there.
