Shadowlands Alpha Inc

Well, with the Mythic race to kill N'zoth finished, and only a couple more raid finder wings left to open, BFA is officially going into its post-expansion state. We are still probably many months out from the launch of Shadowlands, but that's a great time for the first testing of the content to begin!

And guess what? Apparently the alpha build is going to be deployed soon, as the initial files and such are being loaded into the Battle.net launcher. There's nothing to datamine yet, but it's really happening.

When it comes to testing, I think there's a very important thing lesson to learn from BFA:

Azerite Armor was going to be one of the central mechanical themes in BFA, and it did wind up being that. Here's the thing: I played on the beta, and it wasn't until the last month of testing (maybe the last two weeks?) that we actually got to see it in action.

Azerite Armor wound up being a frustrating, unsatisfying, and tedious mechanic, which is something I think they realized a while ago but had committed to too hard. Even after three major patches, when we've had new systems come in to be more engaging and interesting than Azerite armor, I'm still finding my Rogue feeling unable to equip his shiny new chestpiece because it doesn't have "The First Dance" on it.

So I would implore that Blizzard gets the Covenant system testable ASAP. Stuff like quests and dungeons and boss fights are all very important, but also something that Blizzard has been doing for a decade and a half (though the glitches on N'zoth suggest that there can always be errors.)

Azerite Armor should have been overhauled early in BFA's testing, but they didn't have time to actually do so, and as such it was a series of ill-fitting bandaids we got over the course of the expansion.

Genuinely, I think BFA would be received as a far better expansion if it had not been for Azerite Armor.

Naturally, I think the new leveling system is going to be one of the major things they'll need to get right in testing.

Here are my concerns:

Given that you can level up in any expansion's content - you can go from 10-50 in Northrend, Draenor, or the Broken Isles - I wonder how they're going to handle scaling old content like raids. I like to do transmog farming, and currently I can clear everything pre-Legion trivially (and I've also managed to clear Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor a few times - I finally got The First Satyr's Spaulders for my Demon Hunter's red/black Emerald Nightmare-themed set - I even dyed his hair black and changed his tattoos to red.) When level scaling was introduced, it didn't create much of a problem for people already at the level cap - if you were level 110, it didn't matter much that BC raids scaled up to 80 instead of 70, as everything still died in one or two hits.

But while I think the level compression is a good thing - especially because it seems that it will truly make leveling alts faster - it does make me worry a bit about accessibility of old content. I don't want it to suddenly be impossible to solo Alone in the Darkness, when currently it's trivial.

More than anything, though, I'm really excited for the expansion of new lore. Shadowlands seems like it's going to be World of Warcraft's Planescape expansion, which promises lots of really cool weirdness.

Naturally, we'll have to wait and see just how weird it gets. I'm particularly excited for Oribos, the city at the center of the Shadowlands (though I'm trying not to get myself pumped like I did to see Farahlon in Warlords of Draenor. How is that the one zone we knew had a different name before the world was destroyed didn't get featured in that expansion?)

To return to gameplay systems, I think they really need to make sure that they get Covenants right. At the moment, they seem like a pretty broad catch-all for many game systems, and I think that if Blizzard wants to learn a lesson from BFA, it's that they should try to get one new system right rather than pile on new ones in the hopes that one of them will be good.

Plotwise, I'm eager to see what new characters we encounter in the Shadowlands. While I hope that there's some connective thread to established WoW lore, I'm hoping that we see mysteries solved more than just saying "oh, well, this was all Titan/Old God stuff." I still want to know who the hell Ephial was working for in Spires of Arak.