I don't believe I've done this before, despite this blog being now like seven years old. Now that BFA has come out with its final patch, we've got the thing in its entirety to look at.
The following is going to be a totally subjective ranking. If you loved Warlords of Draenor (for some reason) and hated Wrath of the Lich King (for some reason,) I'm not saying your opinion is invalid, but I'll certainly disagree with you. Also, there are factors outside of the game that play into my various feelings about these expansions. For instance, I was going through a very painful period in my life in 2016 and 2017 and having a compelling escape from that was very useful to me.
I think I'm going to go from least favorite to favorite. I'm not going to be including Vanilla here because, while I did start playing before any of the expansions came out, it was only about four months before BC was released, and I don't have a very holistic experience of Vanilla to look back on.
Also, I've been playing this game since 2006, so there's obviously some nostalgia involved here. Some of the expansions really brought new things to the game that, later on, one could take for granted. So let's start:
Warlords of Draenor:
What I still consider the nadir of WoW (so far,) Warlords did have a few positive features. I found many specs fun to play in the post-Mists pruning, and of course we got the new character models for pre-Cataclysm races. Plus, there was finally a focus on the Draenei, possibly my favorite playable race, who had been kind of sidelined even in the expansion that introduced them.
But Warlords had huge problems. First, Garrisons were a total bust - initially set up as some kind of customizable player housing, they instead became a reason to just sit around and run missions without actually going out and playing. You could get very nice gear by doing essentially nothing, which meant doing something felt futile. On top of that, there were only two raid tiers, making it really just two thirds of a full expansion, but Blizzard wasn't able to follow through on the plan to make that work by actually coming out with the next expansion the following year. Thankfully, they abandoned the ridiculous goal (that they had talked about for a long time) of trying to come out with annual expansions, but Warlords suffered for it.
Finally, Warlords' story took what could have been a very cool time-travel/alternate universe-themed expansion and tossed out everything that could have made such a plot interesting, and then didn't even deliver on making the eponymous warlords interesting, killing all but two of them off in the first patch. It didn't work.
Cataclysm:
I'm a bit torn on this one: the remake of the Old World was, I think, a very important modernization of the leveling system. I might be in the minority on that point, given the popularity of Classic. But as someone who found the grinding from the old game far less compelling than the ability to truly quest all the way up to 58, I really needed this change.
The problem with Cataclysm was at the higher levels. There was practically no world content except the Molten Front in the middle of the expansion, and for a good chunk of the expansion, you basically could only run Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub - both dungeons being retreads of old raids - over and over to progress your character if you weren't raiding. Also, with raid difficulty pushed way harder than its predecessor, Wrath, a lot of the casual raiding guilds that had sprung up were sundered or demoralized in Cataclysm - my guild basically didn't do much serious raiding again until Legion.
Much like Warlords, Cata suffered from a lack of content - but at least Cataclysm had the excuse that the level designers had basically remade the entirety of vanilla on top of the new zones and content.
Battle for Azeroth:
This could go up or down in ranking with time. I was initially going to put it behind Cataclysm, but the thing is, on paper, BFA looks like an awesome expansion. Two continents, all the allied races, a separate leveling experience for the two factions, and tons of in-game cinematics and compelling characters.
So why does it not feel like a good expansion?
First off, Azerite Armor was a terribly designed system. And they were too committed to it as a central expansion feature by the time that was apparent that they were never able to fix it. Essences were a bit better, and I actually think Corrupted gear is a genuinely cool system, but Azerite Armor has actually made the game less fun to play, completely losing all the coolness factors of Artifact Weapons and keeping only the fiddly annoying aspects.
Second, BFA renewed the faction conflict for an audience that had already gotten sick of it by the end of Mists of Pandaria. On top of that, it was yet again an act of horrific destruction committed by the Horde while under the control of an unpopular and divisive Warchief against the Alliance that led to a rebellion within the Horde, making the Alliance feel like background characters... again.
But beyond that, the early focus on the faction conflict meant that its later focus - on N'zoth and Ny'alotha, felt rushed. And on top of that, the two plots didn't actually wind up having much to do with each other at all (given that it was the Jailor, and not N'zoth, who was manipulating the factions into fighting one another.)
The actual content they came out with was good, but the messy story and profoundly convoluted gameplay mechanics really undercut what could have been a fantastic expansion.
Burning Crusade:
This one's a little hard to evaluate, in part because it was so long ago, but also because it sort of established to me what "baseline WoW" was. While it grated with some, I personally loved the science fantasy aspect to it. Clearly, Illidan was done so dirty here that they had to bring him back for Legion (where they did right by him.) But BC also kind of established what it meant to be a WoW expansion.
They certainly got some things wrong, like releasing tiers 4 and 5 with the expansion, and coming out with what was supposed to be the final raid in 2.1. BC seriously shows its age these days, but just making gear that was actually useful and broadening the game to the point where, for example, classes that weren't Warriors could tank, was really great.
Mists of Pandaria:
I know a lot of people view this as the best expansion, but I disagree. Still, Mists did a few things really, really well. It was the first expansion to really truly start focusing on stuff that wasn't from the RTS games - inventing a compelling an interesting group of cultures for Pandaria, and deepening the lore of Azeroth. 5.1's Landfall patch gave us the first really compelling max-level quest narrative.
I will say that this expansion was frustrating to me as someone who loved tanking dungeons. 5-player dungeons became totally irrelevant pretty early on in the expansion, and along with them, Blizzard started to shift away from deterministic gear acquisition, which I think has been a problem ever since they did so.
But the expansion did become much more narrative-driven, which I think was a great direction to take the game.
Wrath of the Lich King:
Given that it was my favorite expansion for the better part of a decade, it almost feels disloyal to put this at #2. There were several factors that made this good: first, I'll say, was the introduction of the Death Knight, which remains one of my favorite classes (I often dream of making my DK my main, but I feel too much loyalty to my Paladin - and his many exalted reputations and other character-specific things.) But it also dialed the difficulty down to make the game accessible to mere mortals. You also had the Scourge, and Arthas, who remain Warcrafts' most iconic villains, and a narrative that kept you invested in fighting Arthas from the beginning of the expansion to the final boss fight.
Toss in Dual-Spec, Ulduar, and a system that would allow you to gear up alts even if they weren't raiding characters, and it makes sense that this expansion basically created the high water mark of WoW subscriptions (even if it didn't technically hit that peak until early Cataclysm.)
It wasn't perfect, of course - there were awkward points in the expansion, like when Trial of the Crusader - a genuinely bad raid - came out so soon after Ulduar - arguably the best raid in all of WoW - or how, yes, technically the Protection Paladin 969 rotation was a pretty dull affair. But still, it was damn good.
Legion:
I think Legion might find some detractors who fault it for having some of the issues the past few expansions have had - like its over-reliance on RNG (especially for Legendaries, dear lord.) But this expansion did so many things so right: not only did it introduce another very cool class in the form of the Demon Hunter, but it also gave you a reason to be excited about your class regardless of which one you were playing thanks to the Class Hall stuff and Artifact weapons.
Legion also gave us Suramar, which I think is probably the best quest-based storytelling they've ever done, and did something that previous max-level zones (Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I'm looking at you) failed to - which was to have a deep and involved story with compelling characters that didn't stop just because you had hit the level cap.
Plus, after the confusing stakes of its predecessor, Warlords of Draenor, Legion had a truly compelling sense of stakes.
I'll confess I think that the expansion seemed to lose a little steam after the first couple patches - The Broken Shore was really dull as a questing zone and while Argus was profoundly cool-looking, I really wish we'd gotten a Suramar level of detailed story there rather than the somewhat standard "handful of quests in the first weeks of the patch" treatment it got. And the Netherlight Crucible was kind of a portent for the crappiness of the Azerite armor system. But this expansion gave us Illidan's Rejection of the Gift, Velen's 25,000-year sigh of relief, and the entire Pantheon - Sargeras included. It was big in a way that WoW deserves to be by this point.
So.
We have Shadowlands coming out this year. Premise-wise, I'm very, very excited for it. But I do wonder where it will stand within these rankings. Historically, a lot of people agree that the even-numbered expansions (Wrath, Mists, and Legion) are usually better than the odd-numbered ones (which is clearly reflected in this list.) But while the expansion looks cool, we still have only a vague sense of its mechanics. And I think a lot of us were disappointed when there was no new class announced with the expansion - breaking the tradition of new classes coming every other expansion. Indeed, this will be the first expansion since Warlords with no new major character types (i.e. race or class.)
I'm hoping it will rank up there with Legion and Wrath, and I'm tempted to imagine it could on the strength of its aesthetics and its narrative ambitions. But it truly remains to be seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment