My relationship with World of Warcraft changed a lot when the stories of abuse and harassment came out. Light's the best disinfectant, as they say, but it can still be painful to see a place you had elevated in your mind turn out to be a hotbed of the kinds of behavior you despise. And it has been a confusing time - weighing the desire to support the artists and technicians who work to make the games that mean so much to me against the ickiness of sending money to a corporation that is doing everything it can to avoid meaningful consequences and engage in union-busting tactics to prevent future employees from effectively fighting back against this sort of thing.
If you read this blog, you've probably noticed a sharp turn toward other games (mostly D&D) because, well, my mind has made that sharp turn. I don't play nearly as much as I used to (which was, frankly, a lot) and the name of this blog feels sort of inappropriate given that I more or less just play on my main when I do.
Shadowlands had the potential to be my favorite expansion, but I don't think it'll quite make that distinction. It started off incredibly strong, but the delays caused primarily by the plague we're still dealing with (9.1 did come out before the allegations broke) forced a lot of the expansion's greatness to wither on the vine.
I'm someone who generally likes when WoW leans into its high fantasy element - I found the focus on the Alliance/Horde conflict in BFA to be tedious, and wish that we had gotten more of the cosmic horror elements involving N'zoth. And so, doing, essentially, WoW Planescape, I was really excited.
I also think I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed the Dark Souls-esque punishing mechanics of the 9.0 version of The Maw.
When Warlords of Draenor was cut to only two patches (and 6.1 was barely anything,) it was a disappointment, but also if there was any expansion I didn't mind them taking a breather on, it was the convoluted mess that seemed to be a nostalgia trip for people who didn't like that the story had developed beyond Warcraft 1. I don't know if it was because of the decision to cut Warlords short, but the trajectory of Legion following it was fantastic.
But with Shadowlands, we've been unleashed into a larger multiverse, and so to see that story cut short by one patch and one raid, at least in comparison to the typical expansion, is sad.
I guess we might never know (or at least not until some developer a decade from now talks about it,) but I do really wonder what the longterm ambitions for Shadowlands had been.
To be fair, we're not really looking at a Warlords situation here. Korthia was certainly not designed to give us a year's worth of content, but it did give us something to do in 9.1. And with 9.2 giving us Zereth Mortis, you could argue that in terms of world content, we are actually getting a real expansion's worth of stuff to do. Really, I think the only real distinction is that Castle Nathria retroactively became the first "tier raid" when I had conceived of it as more of a Uldir/Emerald Nightmare/Mogu'shan Vaults-style "intro raid."
One of the interesting notes within the reaction to the whole abuse scandal is that we've seen people like Ion Hazzikostas talk about a changing attitude toward some of their design philosophies - particularly regarding a kind of meta-design-philosophy of "father knows best." Time and again, we've seen Blizzard developers balk at fan-requested features, claiming that what would seem to be a quality-of-life change would ultimately wind up undoing some crucial aspect of the game's mechanics. More openness to change in the way they approach the design of the game could potentially reinvigorate it.
I'm still advocating for cross-faction grouping for things like dungeons, but that's my soap box.
I know there are vocal players who haven't felt a strong connection with Shadowlands' cosmic story. Generally, these players think that the story is best when we're grounded and back in more conventional conflicts with human-like antagonists. I don't think these people are wrong, but I also think that a balance needs to be struck.
I guess the reason I'm saddened by the cutting-short of Shadowlands is that I was hoping for the eye-opening Mists of Pandaria moment - when we arrived in Pandaria, it felt like we'd just left the Warcraft setting and arrived in a whole different fantasy story. But as we explored, we found connections to the overarching plot - the Mogu were revealed as Titanforged races, and we discovered that the Sha were actually the aftereffects of a slain Old God.
We've now discovered connections in the Shadowlands to other parts of the lore - perhaps the most shocking being the revelation that the Nathrezim were created in Revendreth, and have been working for the Jailer all this time. I don't know that any of these have really landed with the same impact, though - feeling less like a grand reveal and expansion of the lore than kind of a retcon that potentially creates inconsistencies with previous lore (like, I thought Nathreza was the homeworld of the Nathrezim).
That, I think is where Zereth Mortis could potentially make things more satisfying - Shadowlands has been reintroducing ideas first explored in Chronicle, with the primal forces arrayed around the material plane (and even showing a different chart, which, as Taliesin & Evitel demonstrated, is actually the same from a different perspective).
Story-wise, Shadowlands has had a lot of cool things at work - finding Uther in an antagonistic role to start with was a bold move, but one that ultimately seems to be paying off as his capacity for empathy has given us a really interesting and nuanced view of Sylvanas now that her soul has been haphazardly glued back together.
I guess I want to keep steeping in these heady ideas about the cosmos and the moral and ethical implications of agency and responsibility when your soul is literally split into pieces.
The future of WoW is maybe more up in the air than ever before, both on an internal, narrative basis and on an external basis of its players and the company that makes it.
I've often thought about when my relationship with the game would end - most video games I'll be into for a while and then move on, but RPGs that are constantly added to naturally encourage long-term relationships with them. Fifteen years is a long time, which both makes it feel more like I'm on the tail end of it but also make the eventuality of ultimately stepping away from the game feel that much more emotionally fraught.
Having gotten into D&D over the past six years, I do think that a lot of the things I like in WoW I can do more effectively in D&D, but D&D requires scheduling and is more of a to-do than simply logging in and playing for a bit. And I still love Warcraft just as a fantasy setting.
I'll keep an eye on 9.2, and I'm curious to see what they announce as the next expansion (normally, this far into an odd-numbered year, we'd know by now). We'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment