I always felt that way. Never liked leveling in Outland. Still love travelling through Azeroth.
And that’s what ruins my experience in WoW. Zones that feel “Alien”.
I haven’t play Shadowlands (stopped at WotLK), but watching videos, made me feel exactly what the OP said. Especially those “Vampire” Castles…
I saw an analysis about expansions and their popularity (expressed by subscriptions). And what the creator implied, is that the older players, enjoy the content, that they can relate to. We have to feel that we know the enemy. Wrath had Lich King. Legion had the Burning Legion (again).
It makes sense.
At this poing i’d take the gamble on a semi-decent writer addressing and fully fleshing out the end of a character arch, over the sort of ends we had in the recent game.
Take the one Saurfang had in BfA as opposed to the one Cairne had in the Shattering for example.
The latter died true to his principles and fighting for the faction he believed in.
The former did the same after renouncing everything the faction stood for, and only after being “inspired” by a teenage human boy whose best advice for the one that had been the prime example of orcish honour was: Lets go behind this girls back, bid our time, and undermine her from the shadows instead of challenging her openly.
And taking in consideration other examples, it’s not as if they even bothered having Nathanos developed any further after scrapping his demise out of Shadows Rising. What did his character gain out of it? What story or development did he have?
Some additional info from Shaw and Lor’themar that now retconned and botched even his background as a proficient ranger?
Yeah I guess the overall story, lore, cosmology, characters etc of warcraft is definitely suffering from “too many cooks” or whatnot. Despite their efforts of hiring multiple writers over the last few years, wow just lacks that unified, cohesive vision other universes have. How can you write good characters and interesting stories, if you don’t even know what the main identity of this world is meant to be?
Jaina is my favourite living character in the Warcraft franchise. She’s been afk in Torghast since the beginning.
Daelin is my favourite dead character in the Warcraft franchise. He’s nowhere to be seen.
Aside from a hypothetical Jaina-Daelin reunion, I’m not particularly invested in this expansion’s story, certainly not as much as I was back in BfA, which was an expansion centred around Jaina and the Proudmoore family.