I’m not sure what happened when creating this expansion but it has been a train wreck from every angle.
-The Alliance gets pushed around yet again and is the victim of a genocide. The Alliance is held back because it isn’t the story they want to tell.
-The Horde needs to be taught some lesson that’s a worse version of the lesson we learned in MoP. The cost of learning this lesson is to decimate the Horde’s already decimated roster.
-Characters that have been in the lore for years such as Rastakhan, Azshara, and N’zoth are completely squandered and thrown away.
In my opinion this expansion has been “unhealthy” for the players. I’ve seen so many people angry and stressed out. BfA shows us all that Blizzard cannot build something up, they only really destroy things.
I don’t think I have it in me anymore to care about this story. The worse it gets the more missed opportunities I see ranging from BC to today. They really need to step it up and spend the next decade fixing this mess.
Still find BC’s pinata loot boss system worse than this. At least that keeps me cheery personally, the whole “been through worse” sort of thing. Though BC had great gameplay, BfA’s was just down right terrible. If it wasn’t for Classic I’d be unsubbed, but eh, enjoying Classic.
TBC at least wasn’t done maliciously, it was mostly done by the guys working at the time wanting to deliver cool bosses for the audience which largely appreciated fighting named WC3 figures.
In retrospect it was a massive waste of cool lore figures but at the time, people were super pumped they weren’t fighting made-for-MMO figures.
The only part I agree with you on is that BFA was destructive to the story.
I don’t think the Alliance was handicapped. They were about as handicapped as the Horde was, in that they didn’t get to use all their cool doo-dads and special forces.
The Horde also doesn’t need to be taught jack diddly, to be frank with you.
There’s also some need for explanations as to why X isn’t used in the war, or Y.
To add to the destruction, both the Zandalari and Kul Tiran fleets got destroyed in the most lame/lackluster ways. The Zandalari fleet gets blown up by remote explosives and the Kul Tiran fleet gets sucked down a giant bathtub drain.
No epic cinematic of a naval confrontation between the 2 naval powers.
Real simple. They royally screwed it up. So they did the same thing as they did in WOD, because they are feeling a lot of pressure from all directions to fix their mess. Shadowlands is going to be interesting to watch, from a reaction standpoint. If it flops, then the question becomes, do they shut it down or not.
What happened is that the soulless corporate megaminds at Activision-Blizzard are trying to squeeze out every bit of money they can out of this cash cow, not realizing that if they keep squeezing the cow is gonna fall over dead.
Bad metaphor, maybe, but it’s really just down to tyrannical upper management dictating increasingly bad decisions that alienate and push away the majority of developers and their creativity. It’s clear there’s a lot of love and soul trying to be put into the game, but it’s getting choked out by stockholders looking to buy their fourth yacht.
Darkshire, that village in Thousand Needles(whose name escapes me) Peak of Serenity, not to mentioned having Sargeras level all of Silithus with his sword.