BfA compared to every other Expansion on Metacritic

Community General Discussion
102

I can tell you why I think BfA is so low in rating.

WoW is supposed to be a RPG game. Usually you play a character that gets more powerful in these games.

BfA has done everything imaginable to make you feel less powerful.

  • Abilities were cut massively - ever heard of BfA: Battle for Abilities?
  • New talent row? Nope. “New talents are hard to balance guise! Sorry, you won’t get power.”
  • Your artifact weapon? Yeah, kiss that goodbuy.
  • Heart of Azeroth is a joke.
  • Also: stat squish doesn’t help psychologically (lower numbers)

So basically people felt LESS powerful in BfA compared to Legion. And that’s a disaster for a RPG.

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104

Honestly, in what aspect?

Pruning + GCd + some specific specs ruling the board?

I honestly believe it’s much worse.

So I found another source, not really working in numbers from 1-10 but in amount of votes (%):

  1. WotLK: 37.6%
  2. TBC: 23.25%
  3. Vanilla: 12.49%
  4. Legion: 9.99%
  5. BfA: 7.4%
  6. MoP: 5.26%
  7. Cata: 3.03%
  8. WoD: 0.97%

Feels a bit more reliable if you ask me ^^.

Honestly, any poll where WoD isn’t dead last we can’t take serious. Even Blizzard admitted they messed up horribly on that expansion…

106

TBC all day long.

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107

You are talking like this is something new on WoW.

Ability pruning? Yeah never heard about that before BfA indeed

RPG elements? I don’think you can talk about WoW as an RPG atleast since…well…Cataclysm maybe? I mean, WoW must be seen mostly from a MMO perspective nowdays instead of the MMORPG it was earlier, but that’s not related to BfA alone.

Stats squish tbh is ok for me (IF is balanced in a way where if you stats got lowered, the enemies too are squished), i think is a natural evolution to remove some confusion about big numbers, because i agree we didn’t have any problem during Legion, but let’s say that we didn’t had any squish, be sure that there would be a time when you have to consider this: “Will 8375645251846483 be enough DPS for this boss? Or my 7363648281948579 damage is too low?”
I can understand that peoples like seeing increasing their numbers, but when it becomes too high it could be cunfusionary. Futhermore i want to add that Vanilla and TBC never had big numbers, but still these are two of the most beloved versions of the game, so i don’t think that the number itself could be considered as a main issue (but the balance in scaling could be the problem here).

I can agree with the Talent Row and the Heart of Azeroth, tbh i miss some interesting things like the Gladiator Stance for example (wich alot of peoples hate too i believe) and the fact that we didn’t get any new row since WoD (atleast we got the artifact during Legion), the Heart of Azeroth for now is a compilation of uninteresting traits for the most, there are some that are more interesting than others like Baleful Invocation for Demon Locks and Latent Poison for Surv Hunters but they don’t really add so much. Ion said that in patch 8.2 the Heart of Azeroth will be reworked and it will be something more like talents, or class set bonuses but we will see, i believe.

Oh and for the Legion Artifacts, Blizzard always said that it was a content related only to Legion, se we are arguing about something that we knew it would eventually been removed.

My point is that, even if we take in consideration all these things that could be issues for someone, if you give 0 for this in rating, what do you give to a game that it doesn’t even start? Or that is bugged like hell? BfA is not only the things you listed, the Metacritic rating it’s given by peoples that took in consideration only the issues and not the entire game, that’s what i mean, and that’s why i don’t think that this rating is 100% honest.

Another example is MoP: i’m pretty sure that’s 5 just because of Pandas, problably is just that.

108

The rated is not that much different, it’s only slightly worse with the lost of weapon ability without anything in return

The gcd can be debated, personally I hated getting globaled by swifty macros witch is a plus for me

The biggest difference is the removal of legendarys and added warmode in the open world, myself haven’t had world pvp this much since most likely ever

109

I think BfA is okay.

Only expansion I ever really disliked was Warlords of Draenor.

I think weeb-shaming is a pretty poor critique for a whole expansion based on what I’ve seen in this thread. I honestly think Pandaria was relatively well designed up until the last couple of patches.

110

they do. but they wont change bfa. big changes are introduced with new expansions. especially classes dont change much during expansions so thats that. wait for the next exp and play a different game until then. warcraft3 should be coming out soon

111

Also I really wouldnt be surprised if WoW is being tweaked to become available for console gamers at some point. Especially the GCD that slows down everything and class simplification seems to be a hint that they are thinking about it

112

This just in comparison to Legion? Because then I’d agree, there’s not much difference between BfA and Legion other than the loss of old pvp talent system and removal of templates.

If we go beyond Legion though, PvP is a s###show in comparison.
No vendors, no enticing pvp rewards, excessive pruning and class redesign (for the worse), removal of pvp stats, sharding/crz etc etc.

2 Likes
113

Also since blizzard is heading towards mobile gaming. I really see the possibility of them tweaking wow to the point where it can be played on mobile. Then theyll develop a mobile client for wow besides having a nomal pc client.

114

You have to understand that the MoP rating is based on comparison to previous expansions, not future ones. Therefore the OP’s rating don’t really workout as people probably had way higher expectation of MoP than those of WoD.

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115

If you only look at the rated pvp then it have been worse and worse every expansion since TBC

It’s only the open world pvp that have improved

116

There’s no reason to do a mobile client for WoW, it’s much simpler to just do a new game. The new game might try to show the same locations as WoW and have the same bosses and maybe have the same classes, but there will be near-zero code sharing - apart from some system services, nothing. That is, having desktop WoW does not help them develop mobile WoW whatsoever.

117

Still WotLK had two really good seasons, MoP had three good seasons, WoD last season was really OK as well. None of them compares to TBC in my opinion, but that’s far from them being horrible. Legion and BfA so far are just… eww. Like Wwhelp said, no vendors, no currency, no separation to not force us into pve, no enticing rewards…

118

If you have been on the forums since the start and talk to other people about expansion, this scoring list does not seem to be right at all. MoP being lower than WoD and cataclysm. Probably only because people didnt want an asian theme while the expansion itself was pretty solid and enjoyable.

Also wotlk not being the highest. If you ask people what the best expansion is most will say wotlk.

And the bfa one, sounds more like a case of “i dont like this expansion so i give a 1 instead of a fair review”

Reviews have basicly become memes nowadays. for example the whole ea and battle royale sucks memes. Everyone was hating and voting everything from ea the lowest. And that stuff ended instantly with apex being released.

Blizzard-activision has become a meme in the same way. And while it has become a meme i do not trust reviews like these because generally they just follow the meme and give the worst score possible

119

I would say it’s TBC, and a lot of players would as well. It is clearly between TBC and WOTLK, but it definitely isn’t clear cut.

Pretty much, Mists was fine if you played all of it, but a lot of players didn’t. It had the most divergent theme from the established world of Warcraft, and a lot of players didn’t give it a chance because of it. But that was also a choice, to make the expansion about pandas instead of something that the entire player base would relate to, and it definitely touches the rating.

What’s a fair review if you don’t like the expansion?

120

Also disagree with this, I think the appeal of wpvp was always more about community and rivalries. Crz/sharding and everything that goes against building server communities has gone against it.

edit: looking back at this I worded it very poorly but eh what can ya do.

121

The thing is, if everyone would agree about expansions and how good they are we would not need any polls or ratings because we would know it just by how we feel ourselves.

It would be better if such rating would be done by judging separately different elements (for example theme/story, world, quests, raids, dungeons, class balance, pvp etc.) than just the whole thing in one score. It would show bit better what people liked/disliked in each expansion.

122

Because the thing with online reviews often is. There are alot of people who if they dont like a game for whatever reason. It being a bad game or simply not being to their taste they instantly give it a 1. while always giving something they like a 10 .

What i learned about reviews is that people are more likely to make reviews when they are really angry. And dont make reviews as much if they like it.

It reminds me of looking trough reviews of internet providers when i was moving half a year ago. Every single rating and review on every site was negative. And alot of them were pretty unreasonable and posted by mentally unstable people.

For example a post : A guys gave a negative rating , the lowest possible. Because he threw his modem against the wall when there was a 5 minute outage, and they dared to charge him for a new modem.

People generally only come to reviews or ratings to complain, and from what i see on all kinds of reviews. Places like steam for example alot of times ratings are made in extreme ways, most of the time the lowest or highest possible. Even more so if there are memes about the game because of dissappointment

While yes sometimes games are dissappointment that doesnt mean they are instantly a 1.

123

And on aggregate, the grade anything gets is neither a 1 nor a 10. This is precisely why you don’t look at single opinions.

Well that’s just false. If that were true, why do some things get good reviews? I’m looking at my Steam page right now, and e.g. Witcher 3 has a 97% positive review rate out of 181779 reviews. Total War: Warhammer II has an 86% positive review rate out of 13746. Stellaris has a 77% positives out of 32,188 reviews. Endless Space 2 has 82% positives out of 7250 reviews, Galactic Civilizations 3 has 76% out of 6250 reviews… I could go on, but these are just a few games out of my Steam library that I happen to like a lot. They got great reviews, because shockingly enough if a game really is good, people will actually say that it is good!

OK, so one guy was bollocks. That invalidates the whole review system? It’s the silliest explanation I heard yet. By this logic, if one person casts their ballot in an election based on some stupid reason, the whole democratic process is invalid… Jesus.

Didn’t it dawn on you that no single other expansion of WoW actually got such bad user reviews? Not one, and as a matter of fact, most expansions actually got pretty balanced ratings, not making it seem either God’s gift to mankind nor a piece of trash that’s not worth touching.

In the end, you are ultimately the sole decider on whether or not you like something and you get to act based on that decision, but opinion aggregation does have its own role outside your own person. You can try to spin it any way you like, but this expansion simply isn’t well received. Don’t think of it in terms of a grade, maybe people tend to be too extreme when rating, but even if you only think of it in terms of positive, mixed or negative reviews, BfA stands at 72% negative reviews. That’s really bad mate.

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