… and they do it much more passionately than previous efforts to keep continuity from Cata, WOD, the Chronicles, etc…
Look, I get it. Blizzard in 2025 is not the same Blizzard from 2015 and even from 2020. There have been lawsuits, influential people have left. Maybe there are personal reasons for the Blizz team to love Shadowlands, but I’m a straight talker: The community in general HATES Shadowlands. They will NEVER expect to see it in the form of Shadowlands Classic after, let’s say, 5 years. We can’t be expected to love Shadowlands, especially if it’s constantly being shoved down our throats after all these years.
Look. Shadowlands isn’t Cataclysm and it’s most definitely not WoD. Even if we agree that Cata and WoD were bad, there are still strong elements that make people request Cata Classic or WoD Classic. Cata had good raids, transmog, Battle for Gilneas, good music. WoD had excellent music, storytelling and questing experience, though it suffered from content drought. But I can’t think of a single good thing about Shadowlands. I hated EVERYTHING - from the boring quests (especially world quests) to the music (the first time it disappointed me). Hell, I didn’t even have a proper capital city to rest as Oribos was a boring and featureless maze. And don’t get me started on the story.
But one of the things most hated about Shadowlands is that you can’t just ignore it. In the past you could ignore previous “bad” expansions. You could go to Legion and never deal with the Garrisons, for example. But Shadowlands changed the game so profoundly that it’s still felt today. You can’t simply ignore it. Before Shadowlands, WoW had a rich lore, with many religions and cultures and customs. Shadowlands destroyed even that, when each religion turned out to be wrong and every god - a robot.
And now we have Blizzard trying to shove Shadowlands elements down on our throats constantly. Brokers, Tazavesh, why? Why don’t leave the blight that was Shadowlands in the past and just move on? Is there some kind of trauma the Blizzard team can’t move on?
Because the current lore up to the end of The Last Titan had already been written since BFA; just as the lore up to expansion #16 has already been written. They cannot deviate much from what they have planned without causing damage to the production pipeline.
How? The zones, collectibles, dungeons, raids, features, large majority of the story were great. The Jailer as a big bad villain was pretty underwhelming and they killed him off instantly so he didnt had time to grew and develop. Most of the things I listed out had nothing to do with him.
Titles should contain as few words as possible, I see far too many in some recent threads and it’s a mortal sin in my opinion.
“Too much shadowlands in recent patches” - Now that would have been a fitting title to the rant followed by the title.
I know someone who is also not a fan of the patch: Alleria, now she was mad we had to run around doing some rookie tasks, you know, I think her behaviour these first few quests of the patch was blizz putting their perspective of a disappointed player into the game itself.
Shadowlands was the expansion I enjoyed the most since wotlk. Dragonflight granted the wishes of everyone unhappy about shadowlands and made a 180 turn into a very bland expansion.
I agree, I can to some point understand and appreciate brokers = ethereals ackshually cause that was the change I always wanted (I didn’t like how SL seemed to introduce races for niches that were already filled (hopefully they’ll do first ones = just what the shadowlands calls the titans ackshually next))
However, the fact that there’s venthyr and other covenant races roaming about is rediculous, Sylvanas had to punch a hole in the sky using the vast magic stored in the remains of the helm of domination for us to even be able to cross over between the realms of life and death while bypassing actual death and ressuretion, these Venthyr shouldn’t just casually be walking around in the realm of the living.
Shadowlands harmed so much, both lore and game design that I really hope this is the last of the SHADOWLANDS JUMPSCARE moments for the world soul saga
Brokers are fine, I understand the need for an asset flip because the original TWW plans got turned into a trillogy some way into development, but the rest of the SL crew just hurts to see, esp since they seem to acually be trying their best to respect established lore.
Seeing xal’atath say ‘The void consumes’ was a breath of fresh air after Calia’s ‘necromancy is necromancy actually’ ressurection debacle, no ambiguity
Despite it’s problems, Shadowlands was the last good WoW expansion.
Look at what a Dive the game is now. An example, in Shadowlands Van’ari was a mysterious figure who needed to fake their own death to escape. In TWW Van’ari is a gardener.
Also, the Dungeons in Shadowlands were easily the best Dungeons since M+ came out.
I like how low the standards for story telling / expansions have fallen for people in retail . (contrary to the rising price btw hahaha)
Shadowlands was good …l
It was not that bad .ll
Now DF and TWW …
hahahaha
It is like coming home and finding that your dog took a dump on the floor ,
vs
finding out that it had diarrhea and took a dump on your carpet and also wiped its butt all over the floor and the other carpets .
Both are crap , but the second one just escalated things in a much more graphical way .
And people who live in this are like yeaaa , that’s normal , you should have seen how it was when it had diarrhea .
While normal people look at this when they come to visit , and say that your house stinks like crap .
TLDR ,
All expansions since BFA , were a total joke . Don’t lower your standards , just because the new one was even worse that the previous .
I’m sorry but I have to strongly disagree here
Shadowlands is where the downhill momentum really took off, imo it started in legion but legion itself was still good enough to not suffer from it by itself, but it did set the stage for things for the oversystimization of power.
from game mechanics (the whole legendary crafting system) to forced content design (torghast for legendary crafting) to a disrespect of players time (zerith mortis rare farm) to lore (NPC’s reduced to sitting on the ground in torghast, afterlife consisting of zones that are never mentioned in any of the playable races mythology with the exception of one dungeon) and how to traverse the zones (disembodied areas split by loading screens)
It wasn’t even mid, it was just rotten through and through with the exception of maybe raid/dungeon design.
Though I feel like dungeons and raids are good in spite of their expacs, not because of them.
I wonder why some people can’t understand that some people liked SL
I started playing in SL, loved the zones, covenants (cosmetics, abilities), Torghast, dungeons, raids were cool. etc
There was so much to do in SL. I do not like DF or TWW only because I compare it to expansion like SL
Most people who hate SL were just too much into competetive stuff, so they hated the covenants
It wasn’t just a “bad expansion” , it fundamentally rewrote parts of the game in ways we still feel today. And unlike something like WoD’s Garrisons, you can’t just opt out of its influence. The lore gutting, the systems obsession, and the sterile feeling of the world all left scars that the game hasn’t recovered from.
But for me, Shadowlands is also just a symptom of the deeper design shift that started years ago.
The game slowly moved away from unique class identity, meaningful pacing, and immersive progression , the kind of philosophy that made the “original trilogy” (Classic → WotLK) so memorable , into a model built around speed, homogenization, and constant meta-chasing. That’s why so many of us say the game “lost its soul.”
I actually wrote a longer breakdown of my thoughts on this, going into detail about how Blizzard’s current design philosophy pushes players into a mindset that kills the social, adventurous side of WoW. If you’re curious, here’s the post: How Modern WoW Killed Its Own Legacy
And I started playing in Vanilla and can compare SL to BFA , than Legion and the other expansions , the same as you can compare TWW to DF to SL .
The other expansions had a more or less comparable quality , where as with SL it took a nose dive and the curve has been downwards since than .
To you the peak was SL , because you started at it . Others have been in a falling state longer .