Please don’t give the name of an expansion.
It’s a bit too easy to just say “Shadowlands” and it doesn’t allow for a real conversation.
Instead, pick a specific event, character or story that you had a problem with and explain why that is the case.
For example, I didn’t like how major/unique lore weapons were given to player characters in Legion, especially Doomhammer and Ashbringer.
It also bugs me how soft our faction leaders are, and how the Alliance keeps forgiving the Horde for literal genocides.
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Malfurion not just wrecking the horde totally. He alone could’ve taken on the horde army in darkshore.
Sylvanas - She was cunning and worked behind the scenes.
We are meant to believe she was fooled by the Jailer.
It’s laughable.
14 Likes
Her being named Warchief was the first mistake. It never felt right. Her whole story has been a mess after Legion, they should have dealt with her conflict with the Worgen instead.
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Shadowlands as a whole. The portrayal of the afterlives ruined most of WoWs religions and cultures as straight up retconning them. The recontextualizing the Jailor into pretty much everything ruined a lot of characters like Ner’zhul, Arthas, Kel’Thuzad , even a whole race like the Nathrezim because it removed agency from them and turned all of them into pawns of his master plan.
The destruction of iconic legacy characters, items and events. For example Uther and his fight with Arthas being changed to “Uther forgot what compassion is” when in the book RotLK Uther did have the upper hand over Arthas but stopped because of compassion for his former student, Arthas than took atvantage of that and killed him, removing/changing that remove the layer of Uthers character and it removes a highlight of Arthas’ ruthlessness. The breaking of the Helm of Domination and reforging it into a leveling green is also just another way of saying “let the past die, kill it if you have to”.
Making the whole universe be a product of cosmic 3D printers and everything being essentially a robot, but thank god for the curse of flesh and the void gods I guess… I think it speaks for itself but I can elaborate further if needed.
I can also go on and list more reasons, give more examples to already made points but I think I will rest my case for now that Shadowlands as a whole is the biggest and most destructive mistake to the lore ever made in WoW, and I don’t think Blizzard can ever recover from it.
After Cata actually.
7 Likes
“What sword?” comes to mind
As does Teldrassil
everything is explained here
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Shadowlands in it’s entirety is one of the biggest blunders Blizzard ever made. and it’s story will be quietly forgotten from overarching narrative as the years go by.
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No one understood it at the time, I didn’t mind her as Warchief but what they did with her in the role was disappointing but it was all part of the Jailer story arc.
Voljin also got a miserable death.
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I personally don’t enjoy all the races suddenly being friends…
It just doesn’t sit well with me, that we can go from BFA to everyone being able to enter the new Night elf city… I am by no means a lore expert, but I assume there was a reason Nightborne chose to join the Horde and not the alliance, now that reason just seems to be completely undermined by a “Oh we are fighting together now!”
Feels rushed and forced… And they will probably try to do a BFA 2.0 and go “Oh damn, now they enemies again womp womp!”
Let the factions be factions again, let the faction decision in the character customization actually matter… At the moment it could all be in the same
The JAILER. End of discussion !!! the biggest mistake they ever made was to bring that abomination of a story to the world of warcraft.
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Sylvanas bryong mary sue.
And doing N’ zoth dirty in one patch.
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I’m really disappointed with their way of doing the war. BFA and parts of legion as much as I love BFA were criminally bad about it.
One side loses Varian? Well, time to kill Vol’jin.
Darnassus? Undercity.
Darkshore? Arathi Highlands.
I can go on. It doesn’t feel like proper storytelling, they just don’t want one side to complain that only they lost something. It’s really bad. One more reason to hate the wars.
(thinking about it it happened before too, losing Gilneas and Kezan, etc, but BFA was especially bad about it.)
killing vol’jin?
making goblins horde specific rather than neutral (those mofos will work even for burning legion if paid lol)
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For me I think it’s the ever-expanding scope.
I think good fantasy tends to be defined from the beginning. Here’s the world, the characters in it, and the circumstances of their existence. Now let’s explore some stories within that defined space.
Blizzard have this tendency to just add more. Azeroth itself keeps expanding with new islands being discovered all the time. The God mythology used to revolve around the Titans, then there was the Pantheon of Death, and then The First Ones.
It’s cheap, because it feels like Blizzard can just pull whatever they want out of their rear end, instead of crafting compelling stories with the pieces that already exist.
It also makes it difficult to speculate and guess about where the story goes next, because Blizzard just invents entire new races and places and mythos out of thin air with each expansion.
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Blizzard killed Vol´jin and destroyed Darnassus!
Option 1:
The legion is meant to count in the millions.
Good thing we brought a million ashbringers in one ship! Clever us.
Taking out the legion as a threat is pretty sad…
Option 2:
The cataclysm somehow and very strangely did not affect anywhere but the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimndor. We do not even see remnants of its world-shattering effect anywhere else. Not even Pandaria, which revealed itself due to the Cataclysm but appears otherwise completely untouched by it.
Option 3:
A general insistence on old things in new places. Nothing even comes close to The Broken Isles here, containing nothing less than a world tree that Archimonde could have more easily gone for, a 10,000 year old civilization that is supposed to be located somewhere else, not being raised from the sea floor recently after all, etc.
Things that belonged in Kalimndor are there in abundance. As a matter of fact, 80% of it should probably be appearing somewhere between Azshara and Mt. Hyjal, and should in many cases outright be Azshara and Mt. Hyjal. The only zone that actually belongs there is Aszuna.
I agree and being “locked” in these islands makes the world feel small, as if WoW was only as big as these 4 zones.
With hiw ugly and outdated Vanilla zones are, they should absolutely be making stuff happen there and use the opportunity to update them.
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Death for any important lore characters have no meaning anymore. As we saw in DF we can just swap places with them to get them back or even go visit/talk to them.
The problem with exploring the afterlife is that nothing has any meaning anymore.
Lady Vashj, Kael’thas and Illidan being made into raid bosses and killed off rather unceremoniously. All three characters had potential to be interesting long term characters and though they have since made an effort to course correct somewhat it was very much the turning point towards removing a lot of depth, grit and nuance from the overall setting.
