That expansion single handedly destroyed wow and majority of the playerbase that quit during that time period refuse to return. Making an afterlife expansion was a huge mistake.
47 Likes
You’re a few years late, but yes, you are right.
I’m hoping SL gets the “from a certain perspective” treatment or straight up retconned.
Only way to repair what has been destryoed in my eyes.
23 Likes
I wholeheartedly agree. That part of the WoW mythos should have remained mostly unknown and mysterious.
17 Likes
I don’t think the idea was bad, but the execution was AWFUL.
If there’s one thing you don’t do as a storyteller it’s write “NOTHING ESCAPES THE MAW!!!”
30 minutes later: You have escaped the maw.
I mean who wrote that? It’s awful.
But visiting the realm of the dead is in general not something I have a problem with. You can visit tons of afterlives in Planescape, a D&D setting, and it’s done no damage at all.
14 Likes
Shadowlands was ruined the moment I wasn’t allowed to send back a dog, forcing it to become anima.
1 Like
Can you recommend any D&D game that takes place in an afterlife setting? The only one I know is Planescape torment and that game is 30 years old.
Oh look we found this random pillar.
Oh look the pillar seem to react to YOU, quickly channel power on a thing.
Poof, done, escaped.
How convenient.
Plus as in a lot of bad movies, the bad guy just throwing the protagonist around instead of actually, you know killing, when they get the chance.
Just dont give them the chance then? So it does not look ridiculous. No wonder none cares about lore.
11 Likes
Not any game I’m afraid, no. But Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a 5E campaign book set in the Planescape universe. It’s actually 14 different 1-shots that take you to all sorts of planes, including those of the dead and those of rebirth.
The city floats in the Ethereal Plane and is full of ghosts and creatures from the past and other creates who must find their place or move on to either to a new life or to the outer planes, including D&D’s version of The Maw called The Shadowfell. It’s also full of phase spiders. D: It is extremely similar in concept to Oribos.
In certain conditions you can also join your god, the Feywild (aka The Emerald Dream of D&D) or go to the Planes of Chaos which is full of afterlives, and the whole thing is driven by the Wheel of Fate.
What this means is you’ve got a metric ton of portals and you can go to any of them you like really, provided the DM wants to set a campaign there.
There’s also Wild Beyond the Witchlight which sends you to Feywild for a pretty long campaign. This is more of a place of rebirth as mentioned, but yeah.
Homebrew content is your friend.
I’ve send my players to the ninth layer of hell a few months back to meet my world’s version of Asmodeus. 
Elysium is also a place in my campaign (it functions sort of like the opposite of the nine hells).
1 Like
do you know the phrase go … go broke 
it started in shadowlands. i always remember when they turned the helm of domination into a crown 
legion and bfa had a bad atz story!
3 Likes
I don’t think we can lay all the blame at the door of Shadowlands for the current state of WoW.
The downfall started in WoD. That had poor endgame, especially in open world content. It had very little content released (the selfie patch). They tried to remove flying.
So in Legion they burnt through so much of their Lore in an effort to mitigate the damage of WoD that they left so little to work with going forward.
So in BFA they jumped the shark (several times) in a (failed) effort to keep this momentum of story-telling going. So we get the World Tree burnt down and Undercity plagued. Then they promised this whole Faction War expansion but this fizzled out within weeks. We ended up with a divided playerbase telling two different stories. And when that wasn’t being well received they decided to blow through what little they had left of the Lore by doing N’Zoth and Ny’alotha in a patch.
So the game was not fighting-fit when it entered Shadowlands. If Shadowlands had followed Wrath or MOP it could have survived much better.
Wrath was followed by Cata and MOP by Wod. Cata and WoD used to be bottom of the lists of best expansions, until Shadowlands took that crown.
I divide WoW into two eras, Vanilla - MOP, WoD - Shadowlands. I’m hoping that DF heralds a new era.
In the first era the World (Lore, Music, Zones, Questing) were key to those expansions. In the second era it’s about systems and chores.
2 Likes
I remember a Ravenloft campaign from about 30 years ago that sent us to the afterlife. The way we got there was being attacked by Infinite Skeletons, although the DM didn’t say that’s what they were so of course we put up a fight. But we had to die to get into the Afterlife (no jumping into a glowie pit).
Can’t remember how we got back out afterwards.
Ardenweald is pretty much the only thing salvegable from that expansion. Since it’s pretty much the deaths door for emerald dream.
Everything else was either too disconnected from warcraft, poorly planned retcons or straight up bastardizations of existing concepts.
5 Likes
I think Revendreth is okay.
But the other two zones destroy a lot of lore, with Maldraxxus being particularly awful for a whole host of reasons.
And nothing beats the Maw. Unlike most I didn’t actually mind the gameplay - I thought it had some merit. The execution wasn’t perfect but they were onto something, especially if they hadn’t done those awful chores.
But the story and atmosphere of the maw… Father in heaven, save us.
Not quite true. They burned through much of their lore and killed a couple important old characters like Varian, Tirion, Vol’Jin and I don’t remember who else, which DID help with getting players to care, but we can’t just say that they ran out of usable lore. All it takes is a little creativity. Not a lot. Just a little bit. Apparently that was out of stock.
That’s just sheer incompetence. No other word to describe it. A faction war from two different perspectives, to a writer’s eyes, should look like candy. I genuinely believe that while one must be careful (because THAT’S the job), it really is not that hard to write a single-expansion all out war between the Alliance and the Horde. And this “all-out war” is not something we got to play through or even see anyway.
BFA had kicked WoW in the stomach and cut off its ears with a razor blade, but SL just walked up to it with a smile on its face and straight up shot WoW in the head with a .44 Magnum. Unfortunately, I don’t think Dragonflight is much different.
I divide WoW into 3 eras, or chapters.
CHAPTER 1: Tying up loose ends from Warcraft 3/ Experiencing the world from a new perspective
- Vanilla
- TBC
- WotLK
- Cataclysm (Acting as the big Marvel-like finale/ set-up for the Void)
CHAPTER 2: The New Age
- MoP
- WoD
- Legion (Another Marvel-like grand quest/ FINALE of the Burning Legion Arc)
CHAPTER 3: The… After Years (???) I honestly don’t know.
- BFA
- SL
- DF
2 Likes
I guess spring fever started lil early
SL story is masterpiece compared to BFA, the only story that is worse than BFA is TBC.
There are good elements here and there but it attributes to every expac.
I mean main plots of course
tBC doesn’t really have a main story. It does a little bit but primarily it only has lore, like the original game.
The story is basically: The dark portal opened up, Illidan is still there. Go get 'em. BE’s are mad at alliance, Draenei crashed… I mean Metzen literally said he messed that up but went with it because he liked it better. Fair enough I guess - at least he was man enough to admit that.
The “story” of tBC is going back to all the places visited in WC2 and WC3 and finding out what happened and what it looks like now. There really is no overarching story at all. And that’s intentional - and I like it. Sue me.
Fun fact: tBC does not retcon Outland’s shape, Warcraft 3 retconned Outland’s shape and tBC restores is to what it was like in Warcraft 2!
and the turtles near Darkshore are indeed from Pandaria, and Pandaria is where the Azuremyst Isles are now instead of where it ended up, and a new race was supposed to be Pandaren. They were going back and forth between elves on alliance and pandas on horde or vice versa, but had settled on elves horde due to faction imbalance. Had they done this that whole Draenei malarky could have been avoided, but I’m sure the drama would’ve been about the same level. They all said they wanted it, but when it was added… oh boi…
There are overarching plots that end up with raids in which previously established characters get killed, those characters also lost all their personalities and grey morality to solely justify them getting slaughtered for loot by players
But did he do 100 push ups in the process of saying that he “messed up” (lmao what an understatement) to prove that he man enough?
Lmao why would I even care what he said
You lack perspective. And so does Blizzard these days honestly…
When you experience tBC, you do not experience what they see and how they understand themselves, you see what you see.
We can certainly agree WoW is seemingly unable to use exclusive reputations and branching story arcs, pitting players against one another dynamically, but honestly tBC’s story arcs… there isn’t much setup to those things. There’s like a little bit with the dungeon quests and obviously a lot of quests take place in the shadow of the oppression caused by these characters, but that’s not really a moving story.
And in point of fact Blizzard is still unable to do branching story arcs which is ultra frustrating when the story is so much more center-stage.
tBC is like my current D&D campaign actually. A god of winter and frost is constantly harassing everybody and making the temperatures drop to -50 degrees, and she’s definitely the villain, but the characters are free to solve their quests in any order and far from everything is about her.