He should have known better than keeping covenants locked after the massive amount of negative feedback on beta lol. People asked for covenants restrictions gone, aka pull the ripcord, bur he insisted on it and it went live like that. The fact he didn’t loose(not even remove, loosen) the requisites till expac was over a year released was a textbook example of too little too late. He also should have veto’d the ridiculous travel time between shadowlands zones or world quests being designed with hidden steps that added faje longetivity and the gratuitous need to wowhead a quest to see if it was worth your time or not.
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The sheer amount of incompetence displayed in both BFA and SL by both the writers and devs, especially the lead and head ones(even if they didn’t design or write X, they should have veto’d it since they could do it but didn’t do it in the end) cannot be overstated. DF flopping is the ultimate results of their own hubris, as I said above. They brought this on themselves.
WQs and daily quests in SL were dreadful. Many of them took too long to complete with hidden extra steps that only wasted your time or were so badly designed you were better off not doing them. Most korthia dailies comes to mind or the infamous WQ “The spider in the wall”. And it didn’t end just there. Working on a new mount was a chore with the covenant restrictions being beyond ridiculous or the mount being idiotic in how locked it was. Tahonta was a 2% drop that was denied to your toon if you didn’t have a construct that demanded tons of anima and time waiting to find and to craft. The kyrian trials of ascension were godawful with how buggy and poorly designed they were.
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Dragonflight narrative to me is a soft reboot from my own experience.
Sadly, some questlines like the green dragonflight one indicates SL is still canon and it’s events are referenced. Personally, I think SL deserves to be purged from canon. It does dirty to many characters and it’s nigh impossible to comprehend since it doesn’t just retcons and contradicts past lore, but it’s t also contradicts itself repeatedly and nothing was accomplished in the end other than dumping the wow equivalent(in terms of reception and intellect) of scrappy Doo and Jar Jar Binks into the maw.
Even Christie Golden couldn’t salvage this trainwreck in the Sylvanas book.
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The green dragon stuff only references one of the good parts and others not so much. Soft reboot is not the same as a hard reboot where everything that came before it is not canon.
Shadowlands redeemed sylvanas, ended arthas, undoing the death of Ysera, and many more. To me these are good decisions narratively.
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There is no indication it’s a soft reboot however. And if so, what is and what isn’t canon? It’s canon they tossed Sylvie to the maw? It is canon wow has a poor man’s Darkseid and Thanos that isn’t even portrayed consistently across patches and media? It is canon they reduced Arthas’ soul to 35 anima?
I haven’t found any evidence of a soft reboot.
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Soft reboot in dragonflight not shadowlands. Dragonflight is when the soft reboot happens.
The person that committed genocide and took horrible choices that made her look like her brain was barely working during BFA and SL being redeemed is bad writing lol.
It’s messed up when Arthas’ only real evil act (before having his soul stolen by frostmourne and his mind dominated by Ner’zhul) was burning his men’s ship and blaming the mercenaries for it, and is reduced to 35 anima and gone for good while Sylvanas, who burned Teldrassil and did many atrocities willingly gets a slap in the wrist. It’s the equivalent in real life of having someone misguided who did bad things purely trying to do good things executed and have a serial and remorseless killer give a slap in the wrist and be released back in society eventually. It’s every bit of messed up as it sounds. And Arthas’ sendoff is the single most insulting and terribly written garbage I had the displeasure to see, easily in the same level of trash as game of thrones S8 and the final season of Voltron: Legendary defender.
The only unironically decent bit is the Denathrius thing, but even then this came with nonsensical retcons related to dreadlords, with even further contradictions later on, even.
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No matter how bad you think something was for the lore, I think openly purging established events will only make it worse.
There is a natural fuzzification and re-interpretation of the world as a fantasy narrative moves on. Some things will be built upon, other other things will be quietly ignored and forgotten. Just step back and let time do its thing.
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Well, X-Men did with Days of the future past in a satisfying and logic way. They removed X-Men Origins and Last Stand from canon in a well written and received storyline that brought others to closure as well. It can be done in the hands of a good writer.
Events of the past sadly remain canon until it’s events are explicitly contradicted. Time does not fix it at all. Unless it’s a show or video game with negative continuity, then serialization means it’s canon until contradicted. Shadowlands did so much damage in terms of canon that I’m even willing to say it’s on same tier of storytelling as Star Trek V and several of the Halloween movie sequels( the damage was not undone till 2018 movie came around and explicitly regarded only the first film as canon and ignored the rest. WOW would need a similar move with future canon contradicting or ignoring shadowlands entirely. They can even pull a Days of future past and do a cosmic retcon. I’m all in for the idea).
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I’ll give you that it was was a nice scene (assuming we’re talking about the movie version of the story)
But I’d also argue the franchise never actually found its footing again after that story. There was never a coherent world after that, just a few standalone stories that may or may not have actually shared a timeline (and didn’t involve the characters returned unless I missed something).
So I’m not convinced it’s a good counter-example.
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That’s due to bad writing. The franchise was in good footing with lot of story opportunities and health till apocalypse happened then Dark Phoenix ended in a rock bottom note. Had the writers actually done a better job, then it wouldn’t have had issues.
Mortal Kombat also did something similar with the whole bit about Ra-den sending info to his past self, and it worked too.
Story resources like this one can be used in a positive manner, and I’m convinced it’s the only real way to purge SL(and maybe BFA) out of existence and make a interesting story that opens the door for more.
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The thing is, Shadowlands could easily be fixed if they revisited the setting later but retconned out Zovaal, whom is the cause of most of what was wrong with SL alongside Sylvanas as an extension. Just replace Zovaal with Denathrius, it just makes sense when you consider that Denathrius did most of the work and the scheming and Zovaal didn’t really do anything…
The problem comes in that the writers for WoW don’t actually seem to understand even the basics, they have zero clue what to actually do with the characters, and frankly…if they do revisit the Shadowlands, or write any expansion going forward for that matter… I hope it’s under Microsoft with different narrators.
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buys everything
Hahaha I know that feeling! I bought the $10 transmog just to have it checked off of the list. I didn’t like how it looked so there was no way I was going to pay full price for it. Now to wait for the next items put on the Shop.
Nothing in the Dragonflight story makes you go “oooooooh! aaaaaah!” or has any “oooooooh! aaaaaah!” factor
Meanwhile in Legion you had this “epic” story that was super immersive, and it had long-time/popular characters like Illidan featured front and center. Even BFA had memorable/likeable characters such as Bwonsamdi, Vulpera faction, Tortollans, etc
None of these Dragonflight characters are likeable or have anything memorable about them. When you’re walking around and talk to an NPC from the storyline it’s like “who is this nobody?”, the only exception is maybe Chromie (who’s been around for a long time). And the story is vague too, it’s unclear who “the world-ending threat” is or who “the main bad guy” is
Also, the new “hero” class of Evoker looks goofy/Disneyfied/kiddie-fied as hell… but on the other hand Demon Hunters looked “cool and edgy” when they were rolled out. It’s just not the same coolness appeal
Overall both the story and narrative are pretty “meh” this time around
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Partially I blame trying to farm nostalgia from an already dead and finished story… even the Aspects themselves stated they were handing us the keys in Cata when they lost their powers and ability to reproduce, the Dragonkin are doing just fine without the Aspects and their flights and this is even a plot point the Aspects are just kinda fam-fisted into as the sort of “saviors”… etc. It’s just trying to complicate loose ends and further what didn’t need furthering, the Aspects and most dragon plots have been wrapped up since Cata/Legion/SL.
It doesn’t help that the main threat this expansion could easily be dealt with since Old gods>Elemental lords and Incarnates, and we’ve already dealt with Elemental lords AND Old gods, among other entities exponentially more threatening in powerscale than the current foe.
give me more transmog shoes for trolls and then we’ll talk!
Blizzard has a long history of disdain for their paying customers, which goes all the way back to Alex Afrasiabi’s hiring.
For many years they have designed the game around wishful thinking, ideas like making casuals do harder content will turn them into hardcore elites, that if they make such changes that make people want to quit the game, they will “adapt”, git gud, and come back after quitting. That if they push players too far and too many people quit, all they have to do is make a few minor bandaid fixes later in the expansion and they’ll all come running back, credit cards in hand.
They really like to experiment on their playerbase to see what happens, rather than attempting to do real research. That’s why covenants happened. They were trashed in the alpha and beta, and if they had been researched before that, they would never have happened. That’s why they brought back rank locked PvP gear and doubled down as casual PvPers quit.
They had such a disdain for casuals that twice during Shadowlands they implemented content and marketed it to casuals as a hook to subscribe, then made changes that made that marketing claim a lie. Season 4 had zero new content for casuals, which turned out to be a negative number if you count the effect of the removal of the slime kitty from LFR.
That and the fact it was clear there would be less casual/world content, and world content would be less soloable gave a lot of people reason to wait and see rather than buy. I don’t think they should have been surprised fewer people bought the game. I don’t think they should have been surprised players who never did mythic+ before didn’t come back and start spamming keys. But then, I don’t think they should have been surprised that the people they intended to push to git gud at dragonriding and get over normal flying were at such a disadvantage that apparently so many of them quit that there apparently is no point in implementing flight in DF, which seems to have ground to a halt.
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I don’t even know what all this doomposting is about, lmao. 