SL had so much potential. All the main covenant zones were great.
There’s clearly some missing content. I think they rushed it out to distance from BfA (even though I think a little courage could have made both expansions better by just telling the story and letting marketing sweat). Maybe someday we’ll get a remix with added Muehzala content and a Thros zone.
Venthyr were the best covenant/zone.
maldraxxus were the second best covenant, but probably third worst zone.
if we ever get player homes, i hope that revendreth style buildings are accessible.
god knows it’s only going to be nelf / human / orc / maybe alliance high elf though.
I’ve never stepped foot in Zereth Mortis.
I probably should, at some point, if only to be a completionist, but… Man, I went back to Oroboros to get a quest done and I was immediately depressed.
I really didn’t like Shadowlands. Like, at all. The mounts and mogs were the best part and I’m not that enticed by the glowy clay look.
Looking back on SL, there’s things I can appreciate about it NOW than I did when it was relevant. But than again, back than SL was right off the back of BfA, so emotions were running kind of high back than.
Like I said before, my MAIN complaint is how Zooval just came out of nowhere. The rest is hit or miss, I do wanna do a deep lore dive into Zerith Mortis though someday, just for the heck of it
I really, really can’t agree. Down to the core idea, the very concept of the expansion was horrible. The afterlife should never be explored in detail, especially not the type of afterlife they decided on with it all managerial. And that’s even without getting into the first ones crap, or the Jailer being behind everything bad ever but lacking anything in the form of personality. The only thing it has going for it is some of the art looks nice.
Zereth Mortis according to the Patch Introduction was originally the Desert with the Foliage resulting from the First Ones moving in to claim the place.
The Automa Animals have actual meat in them and hatch from Metallic Eggs coming from the Forcefield-protected Water you can walk on. They are not Robots despite their appearance!
Some of the Realms of Death hatch from those same Eggs by the way explaining why Maldraxxus seems to be made of Meat while Revendreth seems to have Veins in the Endmire.
Yes this means they did not simply shove the Souls of the Eternal Ones into mere Robots but instead into Genetically-altered Zereth Mortis Eggs made to look like Robots!
Why the First Ones genetically engineered a creature like Zereth Mortis to spawn Creatures that resemble Robots is beyond me! Afterlives is understandable as Souls shouldn’t be just left to fend for themselves in a place as dangerous as the Veil is but why Animals and other Automa that resemble Robots?
Like, I know I’ve kvetched about it before, but the idea of upending what lore we did have on every race’s unique afterlives and spirituality just so that we could meander through the gosh-danged afterlife committing sidequests is, on the face of it, so blitheringly stupid that I don’t even feel a need to throw in turbohell or casual annihilation of souls.
I dislike Shadowlands.
Said Unique Afterlives being the Light(for the Church of the Holy Light), the Night Sky(for Night Elves), the Great Hunting Ground(for Orcs according to BC), to An’she(for Sunwalkers who use the Light of the Sun), to the Spirit Realm/Veil(for Tauren and Orc Ancestors) according to Lore Sources.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t think visiting 4 afterlives necessarily upended the old lore when we know that the afterlives are infinite. But that does seem to upend what was originally intended for the Shadowlands.
The original plan was to have the Shadowlands be a part of vanilla. That the spooky ghost world we travel through during a corpse run was supposed to also be a high level area. Huge lovecraftian horrors were imagined to be writhing in the distance and we could see high level players fighting them as we ghost back to our corpse.
We were always meant to go to the Shadowlands. The way they conceptualized the realms we visited in those Shadowlands was meh. They should have made all those to be various Dante-esque versions of hell or something. So people can still go on believing their various restful afterlife myths.
Honestly, starting by upending the tauren heritage quest right then and there left a sour taste that I never really recovered from.
Indeed as Danuser himself mentioned the idea of Durotan going to the Orc Hunting Ground mentioned in BC(while also mentioning Draka retiring from Maldraxxus and going there) while also stating the Light can bring Souls to it’s personal Afterlife(the Naaru just has to get to the Paladin before the Kyrian).
Since An’she’s power is tied to the Light the Sunwalker Afterlife being with An’she heralding the Dawn is still possible.
The Night Sky is the Afterlife in question that has never been verified as Elune’s usual treatment of her followers is unknown despite Teldrassil’s Souls being sent to the Shadowlands to help the Winter Queen and later being carried through a seed into the Emerald Dream and being released into the Dream by the World Tree when it finished growing.
What part was upended by the Shadowlands Expansion itself?
The Grimoire written by the Brokers I know of but the Shadowlands Expansion itself?! Where does the Shadowlands Expansion itself deny the Tauren Ancestors staying in the Spirit Realm/Veil?
It rubbed people the wrong way when there was a Tauren in Bastion freaking out and getting memory wiped.
People don’t want to think that it’s possible that afterlife myths can just be myths.
I mean, less so when the tauren religion is based on communicating with the ancestors and the ancestors just showed up for a wee chat.
But apparently the ancestors kind of get sprinkled over the afterlives like paprika and you wind up with things like Huln Highmountain not being in a mysterious tauren afterlife we never see but instead bopping around another, not ancestoral afterlife.
Not showing any of that but just going, “Trust us, it’s totally there probably and completely fine despite all the souls falling to bits and starving all around you” was not particularly reassuring.
That being said, I’m a Grade A Shadowlands Hater and you’re certainly free to enjoy it and even think it makes sense. I’ll just be over here, salty that most of what we got out of it by my estimation is a serious case of depression for Anduin and the least convincing redemption moment of all time for Sylvanas.
Shadowlands was definitely a mixed bag.
I thought it suffered from being too one note.
I sort of felt like it was a dull grey dream until we got to Zerith Mortis, and there was water and greenery.
There was a lot of bad, some good, but mostly it was dull. Not to mention all the time spent with Bolvar, Jaina, and Baine sitting around wondering how Anduin is doing… guh
But I liked how Sylvanas jumped into the maw with a new little owl friend, and all was made right in the world.
Not a single thing i liked about the bfa-shlands arc, really just took a dump on all the more fantastical elements to replace it with 4 colour coded office spaces
I will maintain that Shadowlands’ crowning glory was that it somehow made BFA even stupider.
But I’m right there with you, and part of the reason that I give Dragonflight more love than it might deserve was that it wasn’t a continuation of that pile of angst. Mostly.
That being said, opinions and so on. Everyone is entitled to their own.
I think WoW should just abruptly go back to this level of cinematic for an expansion without explanation;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6zRXh8YVXc
The parts where Shadowlands shined for me were in it’s environments, minor characters and music.
All of the main zones (minus the Maw) I thought were really well-done, I thought each one had it’s plusses, even Bastion (my least favourite) made up for it’s bad story by having Stewards and cool armor. Every zone was really thematically different and interesting in it’s own unique way.
Despite the horrendous overarching story plot, there were some really loveable characters in the sub-stories and all of the various races of each zone were really interesting and well designed. I also liked the opportunity to see some old favourites from the past (Lady Vashj!)
I loved the CONCEPT of the covenants, with the individual story threads, armor etc. but grinding anima was so incredibly tedious and time consuming and having to repeat things on several characters was a massive slog. It lost me about halfway through Korthia. That place was a nightmare to grind everything and I was so burnt out that I didn’t even get past the introduction of Zereth Mortis.
Sprinkle that with probably the lamest villain that has ever been spun up, the ruination of some of WoW’s most iconic characters, the continuation of the neverending Night Elf sob story and being forced to care about Anduin being the lamest Death Knight ever conceived… no amount of cool zones or characters could turn that around.