One of the bigger criticisms of Shadowlands seems to be that it just doesn’t feel like Warcraft, and lacks clear connections to Azeroth. That’s really not helped by making it a wibbly-wobbly dimension and space spanning thing where Azerothians are only a small group amongst myriads, nor is it helped by everyone taking up a new form based on the realm they get to.
That’s really a shame, and makes things harder, but it wouldn’t have to keep it from meaningfully connecting with Azeroth. What Shadowlands could have done - and might still to some degree do (if unicorns start riding flying pigs) - is to fleshen out the historical world building of Azeroth.
It doesn’t really matter that not everyone there is from our world, and that they don’t look as they once did, they can still be used to tell the stories of their times. And those stories could fill some of the sousands of years long gaps that even chronicles leaves us with. We could learn about the relations between human kingdoms, we could learn about the fall of the Ogre empire in our timeline, we could learn more about the ancient conflicts of the nascent elves and the trolls… there is really no limit to the cool azerothian stuff they could give us here, if they ever wanted to.
In gameplay terms, we could have flashbacks, we could be sent around Azeroth to finish someone’s open business or even have stories of conflict, love or whatever that outlasted death to deal with within the Shadowlands. Heck, they might as well tie Archeology into it. It doesn’t have to be that hard and doesn’t have to be that prevalent, but there is certainly room, and I feel demand, for it.
Now I find it very much unlikely that something like this will happen in the addon. All the focus is on the big cosmic mysteries that Blizzard is trying to get us interested in. But I just wanted to share this idle thought about how easily Shadowlands might (have) become more relatable…
Archaeology is in a rather sad state. It could be a complementary “profession” allowing to discover things, even absorbing older stuff like profession-specific quests.
When it comes to what the Shadowlands can do to tell the story of Azeroth, I think there are 2 rather straightforward choices: brokers, since they already visit Azeroth anyway, and Eonian Archives that can do all we got from the Caverns of Time and then some. Could be a story of Azeroth, or any other place that ever existed in the Great Dark Beyond.
I’m really hoping the 9.1 mega dungeon will touch on these points. I mean, the pirate infinite dragon paired with all these rogue brokers, one can only hope that they’ll actually link it back to Azeroth in a meaningful way.
This something I’m honestly surprised they did not touch on more when in the Shadowlands.
Sure it’s supposed to a realm of undeath for multiple worlds but, you could still inject the occasional side story where glimpses of previous events on Azeroth not yet explored in the game can be viewed in some capacity.
Further to that, depending on how they craft these events they could be scenarios played out across future content too across a series of quests where it’s revisited on occasion.
Something like the Hemet Nesingwary hunts but, it doesn’t have to be that frequent.
Sinstones could even be a record of past tragedies and a darker version of events in telling the same story.
It could even be played of events recorded by the ‘hero’ in the Eonion Archives.
In this case from the perspective of the ‘villain’ recorded on their sinstone.
No idea why the concept of Archaeology was dropped for the Shadowlands when it fits so well with the idea of looking at past lives. Its a completely missed opportunity, even though I do remember a Blizz dev said it was a redundant profession in one interview.
The irony being this is actually one of the expansions where it could have had a lot of uses. My guess is they’ve tried to write it of as ‘unimportant’ because of time and budget constraints in conjunction with last years (ongoing) disruption. …pity.