I don’t trust metacritic anymore because there were many cases where products were abused and nuked with negative reviews i advice you to read those revievs, idiots are giving 0 because:
“Doesnt look like much was added. Will give it another month and re rate. People giving it a 10… crazy.”
metacritic is trash now, anyway i’m enjoying it so far so my personal opinion is still most important 
This is the way.
Can I have your gold?
1 hour into the expansion and you’re bored. I mean…
Refunding it is dumb because the refund you get is Blizzard balance. What are you going to use it for? But it again? Is this ‘refund’ any worth it after all or is it the thing easily offended people do to voice their frustration? The only thing you can buy with blizz balance is their other games 
I was worried after the first maw experience, I’m now just finishing up revendreth, and having read up on the threads of fate and now having done a few dungeons I’m pretty satisfied with the expansion so far.
At the moment they would have to do something pretty drastic to mess things up,
while it is fair to say that some metacritic scores are heavily effected by review bombings, some users actually take the time to write a well formulated opinion, here is what one person wrote about their leveling experience in the shadowlands:
"This review is only of the levelling experience: I am a player of WoW since vanilla off and on, I enjoyed many aspects of all expansions. But so far, for me, this expansion has been massively underwhelming. The worst of them all so far. From the beginning, going through The Maw I had an uneasy feeling, the zones are linear and lifeless, graphically the zones are good, but where is the sense of dread, mobs that might actually challenge us? The big bad feels in no way a threat and when you squared off against him and his boys before my heartpumping (zZzZzZ) escape I was thinking, is that him…and his army…him…??? I tried my best to read the quests and get into the story, but honestly it is convoluted, boring and lifeless. WoW used to throw in a lot of pop culture references and fun side shows to lighten the load. Gone, this is the afterlife and you better believe we are very serious about it.
Going into Bastion left me feeling like I had stepped onto IO in Destiny 2…It is so out of place in the World of Warcraft, it feels like a bad Diablo spin off. Unfortunetly, we have lost a sense of world due to the fact that to get to each new zone requires you to return to a boring lifeless shell of a hub to travel on a glorified loading screen flight path to another isolated shell of a zone.
A lot of players are describing the zones as beautiful, I have to disagree. The texturing is very well done, however thematically, Bastion and Ardenweald for example are just poor. God i miss the days of Orcs, Taurens, Undead, Cows and dangerous animals, now we are just running around in a furies fantasy world. (Oooh pretty and cute)
Luckily there are still many other aspects to WoW, from PvP to Dungeons etc that keep the game something to come back to. Normally I enjoy levelling, especially as a bit of an altoholic, but the thought of doing this again is almost putting me to sleep.
I am sure some developers and teams works very hard on this, but unfortunately the talents looks like it has left Blizzard long ago. This feels more like a tryhard attempt to push the rigid structure into the players face and say “LOOK, LOOK…we can tell stories…see I told you so…LOOK!”
this to me does not make the game look good. I know its subjective, but the leveling must be fun for the game to be good, you will want to have alts.
I second you. Bastion is really boring zone.
I think you answered your own question here.
Story and blabla are not bad, I just still don’t like covenant system. I would like to join Revendreth or Nightfae but I have to join Bastion and pick Pelagos…
We do not have freedom. There are too many bad and good things about the expansion.
The leveling is amazing, so you’re safe. And alts can ignore it anyway.
That nonsense you quoted is one of the most rambling pieces of garbage I have ever laid eyes on and reeks like someone who has built a personality around disliking retail wow.
No one cares about metacritic anti-blizz review bombers. At all.
Like, what a joke. No freaking way this dudes parents bought him shadowlands.
@op
Same boat here. No need to be a fanboi, BFA was just started like this.
This game as the best mmorpg, was all about player’s stories before. Now we play npc’s stories.
Click this, click that. So linear leveling process, like a one way adventure game 
It is not burnout, expansion just plain sucks. Linear, call of duty campaign style.
I rather log classic, even though it has no content. You know, it is an MMORPG after all, not just flashy effects.
The game is railroaded towards 60 in a manner which WoW hasn´t done before, some will like the simplicity, others will hate it.
In BFA the difference between being Horde and Alliance was significant during the leveling process at some stages, you could also choose to focus on one zone to level a character and another for an alt, that provided variety along with a few distraction mechanics to pass time.
Shadowlands is a very narrow road with a story being told, your only option comes from either doing side quests or not, zones aren´t independent and thus procedural questing is a must providing lack a lack of diversity which will impact mainly the leveling of alts, how many times will you do the same thing over and over? Some don´t care but many do.
As a leveler I find the lack of options, pass time events and even the lack of inspiration when it comes to crafting a very surprising outcome, I would have thought Blizzard would have heard the many voices who find crafting underwhelming.
Shadowlands is simply a step to 60 without anything in between, you level and period, some will like the story, others not. For many reaching 60 is where the “fun” begins, for others it´s all about the journey and being able to repeat it from multiple angles while being occupied with minor mechanics which require your attention.
Regarding Metacritic score (currently 5.6 = pretty mediocre) - I read some of the comments there and, honestly, some of them do have a point.
Eg, there are complaints that the world of Shadowlands feels completely alien to Azeroth. No orcs / taurens / gnomes / etc. It feels like some third-party game bolted on, hard to associate with Warcraft. Now, I didn’t finish leveling just yet, but from what I have seen, the complaints are not unjustified. I mean, I saw very little linking back to Azeroth so far. It’s all about these new species that I don’t know (and, frankly, don’t care much about) and their issues. And yeah, it’s cute, but it’s hard to see Warcraft in it.
So, maybe it’s too early for the final score, but some of the complaints don’t seem groundless.
It’s supposed to? Working as intended if you ask me. It’s the afterlife, it shouldn’t be like Azeroth.
I wouldn’t say that’s a particularly meaningful critique, it depends on the reader’s perceptions. When I was told we’re heading to the afterlife which services all worlds, even those beyond Azeroth, to me it makes total sense i’m not seeing Orcs and such everywhere. It would make less sense than if in this world, I recognized 90% of what i’m seeing. This said, i’ve seen NPCs of races I recognize here and there, it depends how much attention you pay to your surroundings. For example Warbrave Oro (the HMT dude who got killed when you were going after Gardul) is busy chilling by a pool in the first Kyrian town next to another tauren spirit. One of the Kyrians you quest with in the Temple of Purity is shown to be a tauren in their past life when you interact with their memories. There are Dwarf, Pandaren, Human and Orc spirits sitting around in Kyrian initial areas as well. The difference is they’re not absolutely everywhere, but they’re definitely there.
I like that it all feels alien. It makes sense. This is very much a “step into the unknown” and the fact the enviornments don’t feel like/look like WoW, and the characters feel like they don’t belong in WoW, really helps sell this to me. I’d certainly be less convinced of the otherworldliness of it all if it just looked like repaint of durotar for example except the orc NPCs are wearing white.
So when people say “yeah it doesn’t feel like the same world…” in their critiques, consider: that’s the whole freaking point. It’s not meant to feel like Azeroth at all and Oribos isn’t meant to feel like a cosy hub like Dalaran or SW/Org because it is not a capitol city in the same sense. It is essentially a glorified bus station for the dead.
Embrace change and think about why it may be that way, rather than opposing it on principle because it’s different. Particularly in an expo that is quite literally themed around exploring a completely different world. You head into an expo about the afterlife and “new dimensions” and then complain it all feels a bit too strange, different and a bit lifeless. Working as intended?
Well, I am playing Warcraft, so yes, if the stories in the content do not heavily tie into Warcraft, I don’t care about it. And so far, the ties were limited to basically - hey, it’s our underworld, we’ll drop you here, but generally it’s just totally disjoint and different, could have been poker or FPS.
It’s been a year of SL testing, you haven’t searched about it a little bit at least?
I don’t mean to be rude but I think by now everyone knew exactly what to expect from the SL lore.
And finally, I get it, it’s not for everyone, we can say that about every expansion though.
I personally hated the Legion theme and I didn’t play it even though I purchased it. It happens.
I don’t like it.