Usually in WoW you care about your faction, what is your faction (read: multiracial coalition) doing about the Current Apocalypse?
Legion was amazing because for the first time we centered our CLASSES. For the first time in the entire history of the game warlocks had lore characters being developed that weren’t villains, and even got a Mists-era Warlock “back” from magical eternal banishment.
Shadowlands as an expansion, in lieu of Factions, and in lieu of Classes, could’ve had as a foundational base exploring how each race relates to Death to shape the world, what is the role of the endless cultures and peoples in the metaphysics of the universe?
Instead we got this crap that just swerved almost all existing lore and is centered on an unclear melodrama (what is in the Sepulcher, where is it?), caused by reasons that are still unclear (WHAT WAS THE RED THING BLIZZARD THAT SHUT DOWN THE ARBITER), and retconing various characters (Sylvanas, Kel’Thuzad, etc).
That has always been the case? Like the moment BfA came out most people fully agreed that the zone stories were actually pretty decent up to well written with Stormsong being universally agreed upon to be the weakest of them all while Zuldazar and Drustvar were pretty strong. The zone stories were never a problem.
But, if we usually talk about the expansion lore we usually talk about the main plot, which was a complete and utter sh**-show in BfA and without a doubt the worst thing Blizzard has ever written topping even time-traveling-orcs or Burning Crusade and it’s slandering of characters.
Edit: The Shadowland-zones are also fine…even though 3 out of 4 of them follow the same basic formula. Oh, no Devos betrayed us! Oh, no that one guy from the House of the Chosen, who constantly acted suspicious because of his absolut incompetence, betrayed us (he’s so irrelevant that I forgot his name)! Oh, no Denathrius is evil! Totally didn’t see it coming. It’s not like he’s the endboss of a raid or something like this.
IMO in the beginning, when I just did the quests in the leveling zones, WoD, the idea of learning more about the orc and draenei from a little earlier than the current time, alongside the planet, seemed interesting.
Now, after the 1st content part (6.0) it went to a failure mode, but it’s not like it was full of retcons / contradictions, etc. And the scope of reimagining orcs from “they were manipulated” to “they’re always the same if there is an excuse to act that way (except that one clan, because of course it is)” was not fully clear since the follow up was not avalable.
Shadowlands is more damaging to the pre-existing lore and characters, and shows that the current devs are more concerned about themselves rather than what the players know and like. Or so it seems to me.
It was the Orcs who destroyed Draenor - now Outland - when Ner’zhul made the Dark Portal.
The Burning Legion wanted to destroy the universe and kill everyone. They would have gone to those worlds even if the Draenei never saw or visited them. I don’t hate the Horde but you hate the Alliance, even though it took the Horde THREE Warcheifs (indecisive pickle Thrall, racist roid-monkey Garrosh and corpse-lover cover girl Sylvanas) to find a stable path forwards compared to the Alliance’s two war dogs (figurative with Varian, literal with Genn).
Yes WoD had a way better story, even if time travel to an alternative timeline in my view is stupid and the disrespect they killed Archimonde with was terrible.
Shadowlands is bad in every way. The story is not engaging, the plot is stupid, we know nothing, we have no reason to care about anything, Zoval is a sad joke, major lore retcons and a lot of them, nothing happening in Shadowlands will matter, retcons to the death lore and the destruction of most afterlives with a rather terrible new version of afterlives. Also major disrespect to Mueh’zala and putting Gnomes in to the Other Side (dungeon), making it in to a joke.
Devs seem to go against the players.
It fixes nothing from BfA and makes everything only way worse.
There is really nothing positive this time around.
Unlike both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands WoD did not damage existing lore but merely added to it. We were able to fully experience Draenor, and while it was not a perfect carbon copy of the real timeline it still offered us some insight about e.g. draenei and orcish internal politics, culture etc.
It never outright retconned anything (well only the whole “Legion exists across all timelines” but that was stupid and was dropped silently anyway).
The Horde council will be executed for treason then we attack the alliance again and destroy them for good. No peace. No mercy. No compromise. Lok’tar!
How did the Draenei civilization look like?
How did the Orcs try and wipe them out? Who were these iconic orc clans?
It was an interesting premise that was executed poorly.
Shadowlands is uninteresting and executed poorly premise that not only sabotages future lore but also grinds any previous lore to a bloody mess to prop itself up.
SL is bad due to the sheer amount of retcons they had to add to Wotlk alone just to make the expansion work. Never mind the fact we STILL don’t know anything about the Jailer or his motives.
You’re right, it’s garbage writing all the around. Though convenant storylines like Ardenweald and Maldraxxus are pretty cool, it’s just that the meta story is horrible.
I don’t even mind that there was a bigger bad in the Shadowlands who ultimately controlled Arthas and co.
It’s just that the lead-in to this expansion was awful, the Jailer and co were never built up to be Legion/Scourge/Deathwing level threats until you were already in the expansion. The Villainbatting of Sylvanas was all they were willing to do to build this expansion up outside of the Helya stuff in Legion (and look how much she’s actually mattered).
Kel’Thuzad, Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing, Garrosh, Archimonde, Kil’Jaden, and N’zoth were all built up to be legitimate threats long before we got involved with taking them down. I Still don’t definitively know the Jailer’s deal.
I do. In my view, it cheapens the old lore. Or let’s say it’s a weak attempt to show us what a “mastermind” the jailer was, but all they are archiving is to make me care even less.
I’d argue a big part of the issue is that the leveling experience of the game feels like getting the prologue of a story when one was hoping for something resembling a full narrative arc. Clearly I wasn’t hoping for the entire story, but more and more with Blizzard expansions of late the story feels less and less satisfying through the leveling experiences. Leveling through each zone was less a story arc as it was a mini-prologue for a different subplot that would actually go nowhere until you did the covenant campaign which was locked to one per character and was time gated itself.
Like I can not express how deep my frustration goes with what feels like a wasted opportunity of a leveling experience. We solve nothing, resolve nothing, and just go through hours of set up after set up… and unlike other narrative games that also have hours upon hours of setup all of it culminates in … nothing. Because the resolution to the main plot does not exist, and where it leaves off in the story doesn’t feel like we’ve really done anything.
When I play games like FF XIV, by the end of the 5.0 storyline I felt like I had gone through an actual narrative plot, and had gotten a full story told to me. Sure, there were more chapters left to tell, but what I was given felt like a book in a series. WoW meanwhile in Shadowlands feels like I got the first fifth of a book handed to me.
Which is frustrating in large part because Blizzard has done better previously. As much as I hate BFA, I can at least say Zandalar leveling felt like I had a full narrative arc at the end of questing. Prior expansions focused way more on individual zone wide stories, and unlike the Covenants those felt like we actually got to an ending by the end of questing in that zone.
And no matter what grand intent the writers may have had for the Shadowlands, it is hard to get invested in a story that feels so incomplete. Missing cause, rising action, climax, or resolution we are left with nothing to hook us but the prologue of a novel that spent most of its time trying to get people on board with all of their setting’s ideas.
I mean, did it really? WoD just explained why living on a hostile world the orcs were aggressive towards anything not an orc. It didn’t describe it as a genetic defect.
They lived on a world where literally everything tried to kill them daily. Draenor was Australia on steroids
Was the afterlife ever an important part of the Light Faith? I don’t remember too much along those lines, and I feel like the faith doesn’t require some Christian-esque afterlife to be successful considering it can pull off supernatural miracles.
I think another thing to consider is that Garrosh painted himself as a prophet, by “predicting” future events before pointing the finger at the Draenei as existential threats.
Still not even remotely a good thing, but the story does point out that some tribes were basically given no choice but the join the Iron Horde, and others outright refused to join them even on pain of being massacred.
Which is kind of my point. If the orcs were Monsters from the get go as Baal suggests, than what’s up with clans like the Frostwolves still having moral compass and doing the right thing? Not to mention orcs like Rulkan going against her husband Ner’zhul and such. Evil bloodthirsty monsters don’t do those sort of things, you know?
Certain people just like to see what isn’t there and than try to make a mountain out of it.
On the topic of orcs and WoD, I think that ‘the orcs were nothing but monsters all along’ is a bit reductive, the actual lore was presented as more complicated than that if you look at all the information, and even at worst the Iron Horde wasn’t any worse than certain real life humans and nations (that don’t even have the excuse of being an inhuman fantasy race with fantasy flaws). Yet at the same time, it made for incoherent and contradictory storytelling because we’ve always been told one thing about the orcs and we only see the orcs when they’re doing the opposite.
