Good job Blizzard! Now only three hundred or so quests more to delete before all of Shadowlands is gone!
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If I said it was removed in Cata would you be surprised?
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Don’t forget the old Vale. In 5.4, they outright deleted the intact version from the game, along with its entire storyline and dailies (which were controversial, but pretty fun to me personally), and replaced it with the grindy (not to mention depressing) wrecked version.
It’s puzzling. They already had zone-wide phasing technology in place in MoP, as demonstrated with Theramore. Why couldn’t they just stick Zidormi in the Vale? Which they eventually did in 8.3 to switch between wrecked 5.4 Vale and restored 8.3 Vale, so at least you can now see the zone as it currently is in lore… as long as you don’t mind it being colored a garish shade of purple and infested by void minions every other week. Sigh.
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I can kind of understand them re: deleting that shadowlands questline
If I had created garbage like that I’d rather delete it too.
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The problem is that Shadowlands is already an expansion that is light on content (they tried to use various Skinner box dark patterns to disguise it, and it backfired), and then they outright deleted some of what meager story content they had?
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I get it, but like… add a recap somewhere? anything? just straight up taking story out of the game while maintaining it as canon is wack
It’s a scary thought to do away with major parts of your expansion because they are bad.
But even if you have just 10% left after all that pruning, that 10 % is solid, it’s better than what we have now. Take BFA: A solid expansion, if it didn’t have azerite armor, essences, corruptions, Warfronts and island expeditions. Oh, and a better story toward the end (post. 8.1).
oh i don’t disagree- But if you’re expecting any kind of intelligent behavior from Blizzard with the current devs in charge…Yeah, no.
I honestly keep coming back to this point, but I know the WoW dev team around Legion was +200 people, and supposedly it just kept growing after that (albeit slower)… Now, if devs with half those numbers, less, were able to make expansions like WoTlK and MoP, it’s kind of telling what’s the problem.
- Bad leadership
- Bad employees
You can do whatever concessions you want to the playerbase but it will not fix the root cause. Bad people have to go, even if it means there is just 10% remaining.
But if those 20 devs are motivated, play the game and want it to get better, and above all, have one guy(or girl) with one goal, one vision, one whole picture around which to build the game back around, that’s better than 200 manchildren groping their co-workers, playing CoD during workdays and/or doing nothing.
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I think they play the game, just for wildly different reasons and most of them are not story related. Or worse, they think they like story but in reality what they like are Big Fancy Moments, like claiming FF13 is anything but a giant tech demo.
I mean, both WotLK and MoP had crazy big pushback and backlash when they were the current expansions, and I’ve seen a worrying amount of BfA defenders (or even WoD defenders).
Though the problems can definitely be too many chefs in the kitchen, especially when (allegedly I guess?) some people develop their own things and they just get thrown out of the window, so what use do they even have if half of the devs grope and be a rockstar, the other half are overworked and their work thrown out etcetera.
I’m pretty sure in some areas, having more people working can be OK (imagine if they had 200 people playtesting/bugtesting, or actual people in customer service etc), but quite often in the past I saw people question why couldn’t Blizz just throw money at raids to get content out, and it doesn’t really work like that.
I’m certain the problem is more with the leadership in Blizzard though, because the ‘bad employees’ end up being a consequence of bad leadership as well. If the leadership doesn’t care about half the employees groping their co-workers or playing CoD during workdays, then sure, the employees are also at fault, but how did it even get to that point?
(Also, to be pedantic, why would taking away optional content like warfronts/island expeditions make BfA better? MoP had scenarios and I don’t think the expansion would be better or worse if it had none, though I’d question why they even were a selling point.)
And also, why didn’t they just make an optional talk-to-NPC-to-skip for this entire thing. This seems like such a basic problem to solve and they… choose only from the wrong options. So bizarre. Delete the expansion while we’re at it!
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Conceptually BfA could’ve + should’ve been the best expansion in a while. Return to monke faction war, all the right component, Sylvanas screaming for the Horde in the cinematic. It was all leading towards something beautiful and then, what Boush said around all the systems, but also after 8.1 things got extremely off the rails.
If they had kept to the stories suggested in Before the Storm book, we could’ve gotten a chefs kiss of a story.
I doubt the bad bosses are forcing blizzard employees to trash their playerbase on Twitter.
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I’m not sure when they started conceptualising BFA though, they say that they plan expansions several years in advance and now they’ve said they’re literally winging the story as we go. If they planned it out in advance, BfA was doomed from inception as they wanted to faction war + Azshara + N’zoth all in one expansion.
No, but letting them is on the bad bosses.
Yes but… it’s not an excuse, is it. They can both be poop emoji, it’s not a case of A or B
My point is moreso that it’s a consequence of bad leadership. You could also argue that the devs start to feel like rockstars where rules don’t apply to them because they’ve been allowed to act like that in the workplace, so it also translates over to social media.
Sorry chum, the horde is nothing 
I don’t think it was ever leading to something beautiful though. The whole thing felt like corporate nonsense to me. Bunch of cringeworthy “it matters” ads that had the same energy as Coke vs Pepsi stuff. Wonder how much Horde and Alliance merch they sold from that, though. I have that goofy collectors edition medallion that I regret having.
Cinematic was pretty middling. Visually very impressive, but overall just felt like a generic Hollywood battle wearing the flesh of Warcraft. Not terrible, but not impressive. Still infinitely better than the Shadowlands one.
Had no hopes for the faction war either because Blizzard’s storytelling was bound to be terrible. They can’t decide if they want to be the old Warcraft, high octane “no mercy for humans”/“death to greenskins!” simple stuff or if they wanted a bunch of complex motivations, so we got this bizarre middleground full of mystery boxes that appeal to nobody in particular.
As you say though, should have been good. Could have been good. Will never be good.
They’ll break out a similar expansion soon though, people go full soyjak whenever someone gets on stage (not very accurate due to no Blizzcon now) and says “we’re putting the WAR back in WARcraft” for the 50th time.
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They should have ages ago(and now) just comitt to one or the other. War or peace. This constant jump every 2nd expansion is really stupid, especially since they never really just make it into just a truce but a “we must have peace, we have learned how bad it is to war”.
They can’t keep the status quo while also trying to tell a evolving story.
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But if they do that they can’t recycle the old Jaina hates the Horde but eventually comes to forgive them plot.
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All of that was so severely disappointing, because they didn’t just have her change her mind/see things from a different way, but the way they did it basically regressed nearly 20 years of character development.
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Honestly at this point every Alliance leader has a reason to hate the Horde.
Yes even Goldenboy and Emperor of Mankind.
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At this point WoW has the same energy as soulless Netflix reboots of 90s/early 2000s stuff. Name’s the same but it’s got no soul.
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