If there's one thing a gaming blog needs, it's opinionated armchair critics talking about what they think of the years of hard work developers put in to building games for us to play.
So buckle up, because I have opinions.
Background
I've played WoW since classic. According to google, that was August 26th, 2019 but I'm pretty sure that's not accurate.
After a few minutes of trying to figure out what magic words to use, google tells me the launch date for classic vanilla original world of warcraft was November 23rd, 2004, which sounds more reasonable. Now, I didn't play on launch day but I did start before Burning Crusade (2007) was a thing so if we work the math backwards on that, I've been playing this game for somewhere around 16-17 years, which is over half of my life (sidenote: holy f*ck).
All that to say, I've seen this game go through every stage of it's life and development. And when it comes to recent stages (Warlords of Draenor onwards), I've been highly critical. I generally think you can group WoW into three major eras:
- Classic (2004), Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King.
- Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor
- Legion, Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands
There's also the World of Warcraft: Classic and Burning Crusade Classic servers, but I don't really play on those so I tend to reserve judgement there.
Anyways, maybe I'll write a post on why I group the expansions like this, and my thoughts on each era of WoW but that's for another time. What we care about right now is the most recent era - Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands where Blizzard was seemingly too busy harassing their employees to worry about those little annoyances of running an entertainment business, like producing a good product.
This era of WoW saw things like Worldbuilding, Storytelling, Character Development, and Adventurism/Exploration - all things needed in an RPG - give way to glorified slot machines, systems of incremental time-gated progress, and an overwhelming sense of apathy and even disdain for the players by those driving the direction of the game. Many of the patterns that made their way into the ecosystem are recognizable as things that large companies use to build and reinforce addiction among their consumers.
- Fear of missing that incremental progress and falling behind
- Fear of missing the train as the player base moved through content
Slot machinesWeekly chests- Reductions in loot rates and quality, combined with increases in RNG
- A magical extending cap on gear (Titanforging) that means that just when you think you are finally getting close to the finish line, it moves.
Let's call this what it is - abusive. Some of it is not new to this era; Wrath of the Lich King, for example had that same fear of missing out, the same hamster wheel of loot upgrades, and so on. But it also had RPG elements that made it a good game independent of those things. The most recent expansions are the first time Blizzard has really dropped all pretense of caring about things like story, pacing, or content quality and have dove headfirst into squeezing the addicts for money.
Given the things we now know about the mindset of the folks making decisions at Blizzard, it makes a lot of sense.
Anyways, there's a point to all this. From about Legion (2016) onward, Blizzard stopped making a game and instead made a very complicated piece of software designed to keep players rolling the dice for loot. Sure, on the surface it sounds like a game. But it's not really.
More Recently...
A lot of folks liked Legion, and I get it. That was the beginning of the slide but there were still a few things like Demon Hunters and a few story moments like Ysera's death that were attention-grabbing. The visuals were good - as they almost always are, the raids were fun, and we saw the Challenge Mode dungeon system introduced in Mists of Pandaria evolve into Mythic+ which, in Battle for Azeroth became one of the funnest game modes in the game's history.
But it also saw the introduction of Artifact Power. This was a majorly abusive system, wrapped up in the window dressing of artifact weapons such as Ashbringer and Doomhammer.
While we've always seen content being re-used, it has generally been re-used for less important things like side quests, or the same cave appearing three hundred times in the open world. In Legion, though, we saw many of the artifact scenarios, which provide backstory and build attachment and uniqueness for each class with their legendary weapons, re-used across classes.
For example, Mages and Priests both had to make their way through a bland, straightforward meat grinder gauntlet in The Nexus. I'm fuzzy on the details (which says something about how memorable these pivotal story pieces were), but I recall Rogues and Druids had to go through more or less the same thing in Darkshire. Coupled with the fact that for 18 years, players have been doing the same three quests - kill x, go to y, or talk to z - and Legion started to show cracks early and often.
Battle for Azeroth was right out of left field. It took all the bad of Legion and none of the good, and ramped it up another level. Any pretense of a coherent story was thrown aside as Sylvannas started a morally gray genocide for reasons™ that Blizzard probably figured they'd make up later, went from edgy and annoying to become a walking trope, and the slow drip-feed of mind-bogglingly disconnected story points was delivered at a pace of one or two per year.
Loot continued to titanforge and drop at abysmally low rates for most of the expansion, with the most meaningful upgrades (for anyone other than mythic raiders, which is almost everyone) coming from a box that you got to roll the dice on once per week - but only if you did keys high enough during that week. Naz'jatar, the open-world area surrounding the Eternal Palace raid was memorable for how much aggro you pulled from surrounding mobs while running down the middle of a road, and the months-long grind to make any meaningful progress on open world content, as well as the horrors of farming hundreds of pieces of benthic gear to get the exact right stats if you were a mythic raider.
The last patch introduced corruption, a system based on the invasion of the conscious realm by the Old God N'zoth (which, conveniently enough, occurred entirely in zones that could be re-used). Corruption scaling was hilariously unbalanced, to the degree that an intern with a spreadsheet could see how broken it was going to be when it was introduced. Naturally, the only way to prevent players from becoming walking gods was to introduce a cap on how much of it you could wear at once, and that system gave way over time anyways.
This is where I should probably say that sure, for a single season it was fun to break the game. As a tank for over a decade, it was really fun to go in to a raid and fire lasers at a gigantic pile of trash that couldn't move my health bar. But was it a good game? Was it an RPG?
Absolutely not.
Graphics and Sound continued to be fantastic (for the game engine they had to work with) and the raid bosses were sort of interesting, but almost every other part of the game - lore, worldbuilding, mechanics, systems, socialization, crafting, the economy, and (famously) QA - was so bad that the only thing players could do was to laugh at the game breaking inbalances.
Shadowlands
So after a few years of Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands was announced with perhaps the most cringe-inducing premise I've heard at a Blizzcon - "The machine of death is broken."
Yikes, for a couple of reasons.
First, because that sounds like something someone who doesn't play the game came up with while trying way too hard to make sure everyone knows how edgy they can be. But second, because it takes the whole of the universe and existing lore - which by then had been retconned so many times that no one really knew what it was anyways - and pulls back the curtain.
Now, let's take a side trip for a second and talk about Blizzard and death. Blizzard has always had an extreme fear of death for their characters. Most notorious perhaps was the famous "there must always be a Lich King", but the first example I can remember offhand was Kael'thas "it was merely a setback" Sunstrider. The explanation for this phenominon is pretty straightforward. These are characters that players know, love, and grew up with (for those of us who played Warcraft 3 at least). It's the same reason that after 20 real-time years, Jaina and Thrall, both of whom were adults when we met them, haven't aged into gray hair yet. They're familiar, and players identify with them. And once you kill them off, they're gone. You can't bring them back.
Or can you?
What if, after this slow drip feed of losing these characters, we could go to the realm of death and see them all again?
Uther, Arthas, Draka, Kael'thas, Garrosh, and more - they're all there, naturally in the (sort of) prime of their new lives and with many more kill/fetch/talk quests to hand out of course. And that pesky little technicality of them being dead isn't a problem anymore.
Except...it is.
Now we get to the point I want to make about all of this. Blizzard's inability to commit to permanent, irreversible, meaningful death of their characters takes something away from the story at a time when it desperately needs anything they can give it to make players care. There's no real urgency for players to care about the fact that Anduin was captured by the Jailer, interrogated, and converted to a big bad because we know, with 100 percent certainty, that we are going to free him and make it all better. They won't kill him off.
There's no real fear about having killed Garrosh in Siege, because we knew he would come back. When he did and we killed him in Nagrand after years of him persecuting the players, what did it really accomplish? Nothing, and we knew that. We saw Soulrender Dormazain disenchant him in Sanctum of Domination which - speaking in terms of the current lore - is the most damned place in all creation from which no souls escape. But you know what? At some point we'll see him again, either as a ghost or a flashback or something similar.
In Shadowlands we defeated Sire Denathrius after he committed the unspeakable crime of siding with the Jailer, and what happened? Did he die? No. He was sucked into a magic sword which was immediately stolen from us so that he can reappear later. The players, who are the literal heroes of the universe, who command the power of old gods, the artifacts of the greatest warriors in creation, the heart of the titan Azeroth, who stood upon the Seat of the Pantheon and defended the world from Sargeras...are so inept that they didn't even bother to guard the vessel holding a captured Eternal One for more than five minutes after they finished the battle.
And at a larger scale, the concept of death itself loses something. Death is impactful (in the real world, and in coherent stories) because it is final. It is the moment that our lives, and the lives of the characters we learn about are laid bare for us to judge our accomplishments and the path we chose to take. It is the moment we see someone sacrifice for those they love, or embrace rest after a long life of achievement, and it is the moment that those who come after are pushed into the spotlight and the burdens of the world are passed on to them for them to begin their quest.
But, when you can take a portal from Stormwind or Orgrimmar to the literal afterlife and go have lunch with your frenemy Kael'thas in Revendreth, what is death? It's nothing.
This is a pattern that Blizzard has (hopefully unwittingly) embraced over the years as major lore concepts and moments are revealed with little to no fanfare, constantly pushing the unknown farther and farther away and pulling the curtain back to let players see that no, they actually haven't thought this out very much.
Information about the story is drip-fed with a patch cycle so slow that by the time something comes out we've forgotten all context for it, and when things do come out they rewrite history or reveal the mystery of major universe-building concepts to be basically nonexistent.
Shadowlands' story is the epitome of this. And the reason that it is so bad is because it takes all of the ills of this third era of wow - the homogenization of game mechanics, the formula-driven abusive systems, the bugs, timegates, and the horrificly bad story and storytelling, and it takes them to such extremes that most of us who care about good stories are unable to look away in a sort of grim fascination with the smoldering wreckage of our favorite fantasy universe. And then, the company that made it all is revealed to have been run by predators and abusers for over a decade who's behavior drove a human being to suicide.
So what
All that rambling aside, what happens next?
For the first time in a long time, it's safe to say no one really knows. In the past, we've known that expansions would be full of systems upon systems, plot holes and unanswered questions, the same three quests, and fantastic environments and music.
But Shadowlands - and Blizzard - has failed so spectacularly that it's possible (though, not likely) that for the first time in a decade, the rules have changed. There's a lawsuit with what could be a finance-shattering judgement (or more likely, settlement) coming. There's a push by employees to unionize because of poor working conditions. Players abandoned ship at the fastest rate in the history of the game, and have not come back. The value of the company tumbled so low that after years of rebuffing offers of buyouts, the company was finally sold to Microsoft in an effort to stem the bleeding.
And all of this happened in less than a year.
The only thing we can say for sure is that Blizzard's reputation is shattered. No longer are they the premier developer of RPGs. No longer is the Blizzard name synonymous with quality and legendary stories with memorable characters.
If patch 9.2 is anything to go by, there are hints that perhaps they realize that they don't understand how to make a good game any more. The new zone is, of course, gorgeous. The quests are well-paced and not overbearing. The systems are oriented around player choice to engage, versus driving a fear of missing out. You don't pull thirty mobs immediately upon zoning in, nor do things one shot you in prior-tier heroic gear.
Overall, it's a good zone so far, and the patch has potential, but not because it's a decent patch. Rather, it has potential because for the first time in a very very long time, Blizzard did something different. Someone, somewhere within the studio sat down and said "what we've been doing doesn't work and maybe we should change it". And the decision makers listened.
The biggest question is, does that translate into the next expansion?
Almost certainly, based on the delays, whatever comes next is undergoing major changes and revisions. If they truly have gotten the message that a video game has to be fun before anything else, then those changes might be the rework of the core systems (which, after the failure of Covenant locking and Conduit Energy would represent a huge lesson learned in itself) or the addition of new gameplay elements oriented around exactly that, fun, rather than power, dice rolls, or daily chores.
It's possible that this is all wishful thinking. The Blizzard ship has been battered, torn apart, and sits on the bottom of the ocean floor, sunk by their own hubris, narcissism, and apathy, but somehow I want to believe that they can pull it together, get it seaworthy, and set off in the right direction. I want to believe that because World of Warcraft has been a part of my life for 17 years. I've met some of my best friends on the game, had some of my greatest joy and sorrow, and have had thousands of hours of memories in every inch of the world. After so long, there is no city I can travel to, no building I can pass, no boss I can kill that doesn't have a memory attached to it.
I want World of Warcraft to succeed. And despite my horror and outrage at Blizzard's conduct, I want them to do better. The journey from here to there is long, and it will take a lot of courage from a lot of people to deal with things outside of the game first, and then a lot of hard work and reflection to fix the things inside of it. But I want them to succeed in that.
The immediate course of action in patch 9.2 seems to have been "just do the exact opposite of everything we've done up until now". That's a sort of uninformed desperation that worked this time around, but won't hold up to scrutiny in the future. What happens next remains a very big unknown, but given the fact that what's happened up to this point has been objectively, cataclysmically terrible, maybe that's a good thing.