Okay so the Jailor was a big bad dude who appartently retconned literally the entire universe of the game, and was then killed off in an expansion in order to save the whole damn cosmos. Fine, whatever.
But did Blizzard just kind of forget the whole reason why we even went into the Shadowlands in the first place, besides saving our faction leaders? There must always be a Lich King, if there isn’t then all of undeath on Azeroth runs rampant and destroys everything. It’s a vital role that somebody has to take, if we are to stay true to the WotLK ending (not like it really matters, since everything’s cosmic now I’m void of feeling threatened by basic stuff).
Now Sylvannas claims that there’ll never be another Lich King reigning in Icecrown, since the helm is gone, so what happens now? The undead who are supposedly killing half the world by the time we return from the Shadowlands have just been dealt with?
(SPOILER WARNING)
They make a new crown, but it’s the crown of hope, or something like that. It’s basically a gold tiarra. It was datamined a while ago, but I have no idea HOW they are going to do it.
They put the new crown on the new Arbiter(it looks like a cheap Burger King crown)
Anyways, for some reason they put it on the Pelarbiter, and everything is gucci now and the Scourge is no threat anymore, maybe because they now stay dorment, maybe because they’re all sent to their proper afterlives, who knows? Blizzard sure doesn’t!
We shouldn’t have to, to follow the highlighted main story. If a majority of consumers of a mass entertainment product don’t understand the story, your story product is a failure. It doesn’t matter if there actually is a genius explanation for all of it that you can figure out afterwards, if you spend hours puzzling out what happens, that’s not wjhat mass entertainment is for.
That’s why I don’t really care to elaborate on if your explanations are right. The story felt horrible, and “actually you’re just too stupid to get it” doesn’t make it feel better. And since I am a paying long-term player and thus feel the story should actually be made for people like me, so if it isn’t… well, that’s still a miscalculation to lay at Blizzard’s feet.
Also, no one doubts that Legion to Shadowlands was a vaguely planned-out arc, though we know it had some major changes along the way. But Wrath to Shadowlands? That’s not even the same dev team, it’s ridiculous.
As the big sword still making Azeroth bleed Azerite. Even worse, with the weight of it, it’s probably a probem for the rotation of Azeroth around the sun.
Pretty sure that’s the Deathwing, the Earth Warden imbued with old god juice.
And that’s just the whole Cult of the Damned story arc with them serving false masters (leaders of the Alliance) while secretly architect-ing the plague, downfall of Arthas and all that jazz.
Perhaps, though i thought Deathwing was just healing, after his defeat, not drawing strength, he was already corrupted, and the dragon soul was his power source. Also his location was another plane, like the Firelands. the Earth plane, last i checked the elementals there are free.
And that’s just the whole Cult of the Damned story arc with them serving false masters (leaders of the Alliance) while secretly architect-ing the plague, downfall of Arthas and all that jazz.
I literaly quoted this from Kel’thuzad in Shadowlands. So pretty sure it was about him working with Zovaal.
We shouldn’t have to, to follow the highlighted main story.
I have to agree, the story telling has been fragmented, besides the main quests, into in-game hidden lore, books, comics. I don’t particularly like that either, but that’s how it always has been.
It shouldn’t be for “different audiences”, though. It’s mass entertainment, so it would try to get the biggest number of customers satisfied. And even taking these numbers for granted, turning off 35% of your playerbase is a pretty big failure in that regard. I mean, imagine that all 1-star-players quit, that the 5-star-players are particularly happy wouldn’t exactly balance that out financially, would it? But apart from that, I don’t think aggregated reviews are a particularly useful metric, considering that only certain kinds of people will feel motivated to write one. Player numbers sound much more relevant to me, and while they aren’t shared anymore, there are some good guesses out there, based on endgame participation data, which don’t exactly look great for Blizz, either…
Sure, but the story has never been as much of a central feature as it is now. It wasn’t that long ago that you actually had to read the quest text to follow what you were doing. Now you get an unskippable voiced dialogue and a cutscene after everything the main cast does. It’s quite hard to overlook. The story has never been WoW’s best feature. The world-building was pretty nice, but the story was always the ugly stepchild. And they haven’t improved that, they have just highlighted it.
I don’t really care to, though. Which is the point. I just want to forget Shadowlands ever existed. I don’t want it to retroactively get a good story, since it felt like poop to me, and that’s the part of the story experience that matters most. And they don’t get a chance for a Shadowlands remake, they only have a chance to make the next WoW sequel better. So, sorry, I won’t even skim that post.
So the origins of the Helm of Domination, Frostmourne, Revenants, Undeath, Death knights, Dreadlords … an answer to what ever happens to souls in the afterlife did not satisfy you?
How would you have written it then?
I believe each of the Shadowlands zone is well designed, you should see the nights in each place, its literally breath taking, complex, intriguing, full of mysteries, full of plots.
Yes, it’s an entire different World, at the other side of the Warcraft known universe. But is the point, there’s nothing bad about it being different, that was the whole point of it as it shouldn’t connect to what you know so far. The Maw is literal hell, designed for anyone to hate it. I get why some would dislike spending time in it. Zereth Mortis is a fresh breath of air after that hell hole.
Considering you can’t be bothered to make a 5 minutes read, that says plenty. I’m starting to conclude the human brain of young gamers is at a point where it just cant. Unless pleased, everything is meh.
Not my job. I wouldn’t have written this story. And I think they shouldn’t, either, but they certainly shouldn’t have done it like they did. And the large numbers of disappointed fans, no matter what number you want to put on it, are all I need to know for that.
They just failed to make me care about anything there. And not just me. A mystery is only relevant if it grabs your interest. none of these did. That I don’t trust the devs to deliver on their mysteries, because they’ve disappointed me too often, is certainly part of that. But that’s not exactly my fault, either. Fool me twice, and so on. That’s why for me, and quite a few I have read, admitting fault would be a good step, since it could rebuild lost trust. Not that anyone is expecting that, though…
They have pretty graphics, sure. They aways do. Though Shadowlands seems especially lifeless to me, which seems quite obvious when contrasted to zereth Mortis. Maldraxxus, Revendreth, the Maw and even Ardenweald are dominated by drab grays and browns. I understand that that’s a deliberate choice so that the bright Anima colors really pop (which is why night potions that highlight them work so well), but it doesn’t work for me at all. It’s certainl not what could safe the addon for me.
If I want to play Warcraft, being different from Warcraft seems like a pretty bad thing to be for Warcraft. Of course there have to be changes and variations, but if it doesn’t feel close enough that people still feel mostly “at home”, that’s a problem. Shadowlands certainly went beyond that for quite a few players. It didn’t have to, but it did.
How the heck is it ever a good idea to make people spent time with stuff that they are supposed to hate? Over months, without any changes within it? This isn’t a book, where I can read through it in a day, and feel carthatic about overcoming the ordeal. This is an MMO, where I will be asked to visit again and again and again and again and again while only the next patch can bring changes. There is no carthasis to be had during these months, only hate and resentment for being sent there. And those feelings leave their marks. That this trope can work in other media doesn’t mean that it can work in an MMO.
I don’t need to read some Twilight fan fiction to know that I don’t care for Twilight, I don’t need to read some fan fiction about the StarWars sequels to know that I don’t care for them, and I don’t need to read your SL-Fanfiction to know that I want to forget about SL. It’s not the reading time that’s the problem, it’s the topic. I don’t care for it. It’s too far from what I care for to ever get there, no matter what cool ideas you might have to get it closer.
Some people might argue that convincing oneself that the crap one is fed is delicious is a sad pitiful state as well…
But that would be childish, wouldn’t it? Good thing we can all be mature about it and accept that there are different viewpoints on the game, without attacking each other’s character over our video game story preferences…
And I really don’t think the devs have to write what I want. But I do feel they should cater to the greatest possible number of players, and I feel that I’m in a segment that’s big enough to warrant consideration. It’s not that they should choose pleasing me over pleasing you. It’s that they are failing, if they can’t please both of us to a satisfying degree.
Seek within Wimbert, I mean if you can feel its wrong, you must know what right is. So find it, shape it, give it form. Tell us what the story should be. Don’t be lazy, don’t be shy.
You can’t expect to just be entertained, like a royalty of the Medieval ages that casts judgement with meh, bleh, yey ! or off with his head! Don’t be superficial
Look, next tier we’ll probably be coming home to heal Azeroth, return to the roots, travel the known world, clear the scourge, legion remnants, old god remnants. Discover new plots, and see what the after math of all current expansions is.
There’s plenty games out there to explore if you feel this is not your taste, clearly something keeps you here. Maybe the gameplay systems, maybe the community, clearly not the story telling.
That’s literally their job. So yes, I can and I do, and that’s what I measure all my entertainment by. And some measure up. This doesn’t.
We have no clue, we only hope. But yeah, the game can become more of what I like in the fture. That doesn’t make my Shadowlands criticism any more or less valid, though. So… kinda besides the point.
Could we start with the aftermath of Legion and BfA first? Because we still have extremely large unattended consequences from those around. They haven’t been particularly good on the whole aftermath thing for quite a while. The story has gotten bigger and bigger, with consequences that should affect every corner of the worlds we are playing in… and if we are lucky we get to understand what it means for the few main characters, before the dial gets turned up again, but most of the time we don’t even get that.
Indeed. The world is part of what I loved, but the “story” never was. I read quite a lot of fantasy novels, and it’s not much of a surprise that an MMO story has a hard time impressing me in comparison to some of the really great work out there. But the story-telling, which I was mostly indifferent to before, has become an active annoyance that makes the whole game feel worse for me. And once again I don’t think I’m alone in that, or even part of a particularly small group. So I feel it’s perfectly adequate to come here and share my opinion, don’t you think?
This how I feel as well this whole expansion feels like the NuWriters and NuDevs trying to show how much better they are only to have it fail rather spectacularly. They don’t respect the setting, the players or the lore they just seem to want to tell their own story even if it means absolutely wrecking everything that came before it despite the fact the NuLore is obviously terrible. When you glance at games like FFXIV (despite their flaws) it really just shows how dreadful the WoW writers are comparatively and it doesn’t help that they seem to prioritize just about everything but the integrity of the game in general.
This is what happens when you replace people like Chris Metzen who came from TTRPGs, they were actual nerds not just reddit normies trying to ape a culture, he actually listened to the community and tried to gauge player reaction because he actually cared about the setting as much as the players. These new normiecore writers are lukewarm writers at best that spend most of their time espousing weird, inappropriate and often overtly political stuff on twitter than they do about the games narrative. They actively ignore the player base, criticism and the setting to them is obviously just a paycheck.
I can’t speak for everyone but it’s an almost universal opinion it’s been terrible on reddit, twitch, youtube, twitter, the forums, the Argent Dawn RP community (which is the biggest FYI) the Moonguard RP community or one of it’s biggest fan sites mmo champion-… Which is most of the english speaking community. I wouldn’t pay much mind to holier-than-thou posters especially when they act as an apologist for a corporation, or more over attack your character while condescending to you in a high minded way. Reading his posts make me cringe.
Labling folks, and putting them in a short-sighted precise narrative that fits well for you, is uncool. I can see you’re inteligent, but you need to work on your compassion and social skills. Just respect this is a dialogue and realize this is not an opinion pushing universe with sides, its a complex multitude of unique individuals, each expressing their thoughts, and most just want to have a good time and help improve the things around them, such as, in this case the story plot of this game.
Maybe try to be constructive about what you say, instead of toxic and condescending?
Just my 5 cents.
