But the rest of the expansion was not. None of the four Covenants were appealing. Passive blue greek angels, washed down Scourge rehash, blue tumblr fairies, and generic gothic vampires. It is also hard to get invested in these new factions when most of their characters were unlikeable. Only the Venthyr characters were tolerable, but not endearing. The Mawsworn as the enemy faction were also generic. The four Covenant questlines were very long but overall boring or unenjoyable to go through.
Gameplay wise, Shadowlands was very unenjoyable to play. The game revolved around farming anima, which you needed in humongous quantities to buy anything (tens to hundreds of thousands of anima), but the anima came at an abysmal drip rate of 10s or 100s, usually from world quests or rares. Because there was no flying, and Blizzard began designing their environments to be as difficult to navigate as possible after MoP, the process of running from world quest to world quest to farm a drip amount of anima was horrendous. I could only be assed to max out the Kyrian Covenant, no way I would do that grind three more times.
I thought that the soundtrack was forgettable. The only tracks I can recall are
Bolvar's theme, and the
violin at the Kyrian Hold.
shadowlands gets hate from the usual two groups of degenerates:
people who really care about the story in a game that has a history of writing chuck norris jokes into questlines
WoW did have good storytelling. Off of the top of my head:
- Death Knight intro (WotLK): you get to play as a legit bad guy working for the dark lord. You get to waltz into people's homes and slaughter them as they scream and beg for their lives. The Battle of Light's Hope Chapel is pretty immersive.
- Stonetalon Mountains (Cata, Horde). You enlist in Krom'gar's army and begin climbing up the ranks. You quickly become an officer and get to order peons around. Delivers on the experience of being a conqueror.
- The two part Invasion of Gilneas storyline. Part 1 is the Gilneas starting zone story, and the once you finish that you do part 2 the Silverpine Forest storyline as Horde and see that sameinvasion play out from a different PoV. Another good war story.
- Wandering Isle: again cast of likeable characters, fun quests, tension in the plot to keep me engaged and fast pacing.
- Isle of Thunder story was good. Threatening villains, fun quests, likeable cast and fast paced.
- The WoD levelling experience was overall the best expansion levelling storyline, particularly WoD Shadowmoon Valley and Talador. A tight cast of likeable characters, fun quests, and fast pacing.
And also several other storylines such as the the Jade Forest intro with Lorewalker Cho, the MoP legendary questline with Wrathion, the 5.1 faction war storyline, etc.
I found BFA to be a major letdown. The prepatch War of Thorns questline and the Battle for Lordaeron scenario were great and got me very excited for more war questlines. Then the expansion launched... and you don't do any warfare. Instead, you're sent to Zandalar/Kul Tiras to run around do chores for the locals. I finished the Drustvar questline and never finished Vol'dun. I found the questing so tedious and unenjoyable that I just queued for Island Expeditions to reach levelcap.
Nazjatar looked cool with the
The Ten Commandments-esque wall of water surrounding the map.
I thought that 8.3 was disappointing in that you didn't get to go to
the N'zoth zone as was teased in the datamines. Revisiting Pandaria and reuniting with Lorewalker Cho, and getting introduced to a friendly Mogu clan was neat.
