So I beat the jailer for the first time the other day in LFR. I’m not a big raider, never really have been, but I like to go through the content to enjoy the story and get gear for the fashion aspect. I’ve followed along with the story throughout Shadowlands and I haven’t terribly enjoyed it, but I was willing to see it through to the end and see what Blizzard cooked up for the end-xpac raid boss.
And uh… wow. For one, the visual design of the final fight was just so lacking and “minimalist” like Oribos and the rest of the “first ones” stuff. The boss room doesn’t feel special or epic, it feels like the secondary boss you fight before getting to the big guy. And the different phases had absolutely nothing to them? I was shocked at how little difference (visually) the phases had. The room didn’t change, the floor didn’t really change, he didn’t change his appearance… I couldn’t believe it when he hit 0hp and just went down. And while the final cinematic was cool and kind of sad, it just didn’t sit right with me.
To me, the Sylvanas fight felt like the end-of-xpac final raid boss fight. After all that drama with the Jailer we got… that?
I’m hoping that the reason Blizzard didn’t try hard with this last raid is because they’ve turned their attentions to Dragonflight and they’re as ready to forget Shadowlands as the rest of us, but I do hope this isn’t their recipe for the future. It just didn’t feel cool or special at all. What are your thoughts on that last fight?
It was anticlimactic because he was never a great villain. Once we knew what he was doing we thwarted his every move without a setback. He’s the biggest letdown since we drove the warlords out of Azeroth and back to Draenor after dinner one evening.
Man I can’t wait to look up all the exciting stuff that I must have missed as the expansion ran too long and I sat at another command table playing mobile drop and click games.
I think that was something I loved about Legion. We saw the BL coming, it had been going on for years, yet the expansion kicked off with one huge, gamechanging L – the deaths of Varian, the main leader of the Alliance, and Vol’Jin, the last real Warchief (who didn’t get to do much as a leader to be honest, but that’s neither here nor there). Varian wasn’t everyone’s favorite guy (especially those in the Horde), but I can’t pretend the cinematic wasn’t heartbreaking.
Shadowlands just didn’t have anything like that. Nobody important died, Anduin coming back was super predictable, Sylvanas’ “redemption” was weird and rushed. And the villain felt cheap.
the general consensus is the raid was supposed to end with Anduin. when they decided to cut SL short they smacked three more bosses in the raid to get Jailer in.
so he was basically chucked in as an afterthought, and it shows.
Because the Jailer was a dumb villain to begin with, and made worse by how stupidly terrible Sylvanas’ actions and decisions were left unexplained and glossed over.
Her “free will” ended up being led by the nose under the Jailer’s “master plan” that was apparently retconned across the past games and expansions, only it becomes absurdly complicated and inane to the point of ludicrousness. All of that so Danuser can save his precious waifu that they wrote into such a ridiculously moronic corner.
And its even more silly that Golden spent all the time working on the Sylvanas book, and yet does ZERO NOTHING AT ALL to explain or expand the Jailer’s actual backstory. It’s all shoved into the final 9.2 patch as a last minute rushed bit of homework that “Oh yeah, we kinda forgot HE was supposed to be the big bad”
Could have had the actual expansion focused on the Jailer and his motivations, but were too busy watching Sylvanas faffing around as Blizzard desperately tried to dig their way back up out of the hole they created.
Because the Jailer was not fleshed out as a character. He was a shallow, evil antagonist with little to no explanation on his background or motive. Product of a rushed expansion, if you ask me.
Literally, this right here is my biggest beef with SL lore. So much simping for Sylvanas’s story. It was inevitible since we followed her into the Shadowlands, but they really never laid off it. An entire expansion around Sylvanas.
With how Blizzard tells it’s stories, a single expansion pack is not nearly enough time to introduce people to a central antagonist, and then have them be a meaningful end boss.
It doesn’t help when, prior to the final content patch, you hadn’t been given any meaningful reason as to why Zovaal’s goals were bad. The Shadowlands are horrifying. And it only became justifications when his goals abruptly shifted to, “I AM GOING TO RULE EVERYTHING!” only for him to say in his death cinematic that he was actually the good guy all along.
All of which gives me WOD vibes, because it’s roughly the same problem. Shadowlands was unpopular so resources were diverted to shoving out a new expansion as fast as possible, so the existing expansion had it’s development resources cut down to zero.
Shadowlands in design was planned as a major ‘reset’ because the new writers are big boys and girls to and EWW all that old wow story lore and world is TOXIC we can do so better.
And the first step to that was to tear everything down that was built before it, then build someone up so bad, so cringe, so horrid that the bar so so low ANYTHING next seems like a master stroke of story telling and the devs can go SEE WE TOLD YOU WE ARE THE BEST LOL WUT ARTHAS LOL WUT GARROSH LOL WUTWUTWUT STORY WE ARE SO GUUD
Wow. And just like that, the entire Jailer issue could have been resolved. They could have used this xpac as a way to introduce him and later develop him over a period of xpacs (plural) to make him more dimensional. Anduin being the end boss would have been fine. Jailer still wasn’t interesting to begin with, but they could have changed that. Granted, I’m glad that they’re not going with him as the major villain, but it just opens the door for something possibly more dumb to come sauntering in. IMO the final villain should be Denathrius, and they’d better do right by him, because he makes a lot more sense than the Jailer.
I think the evidence of this letdown started with the way the Jailer didn’t engage Haven.
It’s like his story was leading up to something and then it stopped. He had a James Bond Villian Achilles Heel of showing off or showboating rather than be the 4D chess Moriarty
And then he turns out to be a low budget Terminator except no time travel
Two in a row, really. BFA was another big Sylvanas party. They took her in the wrong direction, especially with burning the tree, and they knew it. I just wish they hadn’t wasted so much time with her.
Yeah, a lot of Nu-WoW’s writing gives me, “I wanted to be a writer but the only people who’d hire me is Blizzard so I’m going to write the story I wanted to and shove it into WoW” vibes. It’s incredibly disrespectful of the source material- I am more thinking in terms of the world Chris Metzen and Co. made rather than what we see in World of Warcraft since that often had things sneak in under the radar- and to the fans who are expecting story that is in keeping with what is already in the game and the established lore rather than repeatedly retconning your own setting because it doesn’t strictly adhere to what focus group testing told you was more popular.
A lot of people are upset Blizzard didn’t take advantage of the plot device that the Forge of Creation or w/e the Zovaal maguffin was to re-write the world and set things back to how they were at the end of Legion and not without reason.
Sylvanas actually dying would’ve been a great ending to her story. We should have killed her in SoD. At that point, she was an ally to nobody but the Jailer, and we should have offed her entirely.
Instead, they made a REDEMPTION ARC. They want us to believe that Jaina and Anduin are so quick to forgive and work with her. And that Tyrande doesn’t just decapitate her at the first given opportunity. You can tell these are different story writers than what we had in Legion. It’s incredibly cringe how milked the Sylvanas story is. I hope she stays in the Maw for the rest of WoW’s history and we never see her again, tbh.
I’d say the quality of being meme-worthy isn’t necessarily positive or negative, so much as it simply is and pretty much everything is a meme.
What matters, though, is the will behind the memes. Is the will good, or bad? Is the intent to mock something absurd, to cut out and highlight something cool, to express adoration or attraction, to display disdain? That, I think, matters more than something having the potential to be made meme of, and the eighty-seven-thousand-digit-IQ, all-according-to-keikaku, I-was-actually-the-good-guy-but-you’ll-have-to-buy-the-next-few-expansions-to-figure-out-why-assuming-Blizzard-doesn’t-trash-everything-worse-than-they-have-already Jailer is fertile ground for contemptuous memes.
It would have been an incredible way to breathe some life into the world, by coming back to it completely changed (reverted, really). And I do stand with the folks that would like to go back to their character being Joe Adventurer and not being called Champion, Champion, Champion all the time. It’s fun being regular and going on adventures and killing God with 39 of your closest friends, not really big on being the chosen one.
I guess there’s still hope there for the Dragonflight pre-patch. It’s a really big shift from Shadowlands, and they’re going to have to find a way to get from point A to B gracefully. I’d personally love if we came back and no one remembered us except Nozdormu. But that’s just me.
Sad part we still aren’t even the chosen one half the time us and our friends just set up the Npcs to do the work. Almost like playing DnD with that one DM who insist on playing a character himself.
