Thursday, July 23, 2020

No Beta So Far, Thinking About BFA Yet-To-Dos

Despite the fact that I've leveled up one of every class except Monk, and it's not as if I haven't played at all during BFA, I've felt remarkably unengaged in the game. For a while I was doing Horrific Visions, but I think I'm stuck on three masks, and I don't really see myself beating the 5-mask solo run to get the title and mount.

I actually did most of Ny'alotha, though I never did the final wing where one actually fights N'zoth.

Sadly, I've felt sort of uncompelled to do much in WoW for a while. It is, after all, the late-expansion doldrum period, certainly, and even in Wrath of the Lich King I remember having a similar experience (Legion... I feel like I was re-energized by the introduction of allied races, and my guild was also fairly actively raiding, getting about halfway through Antorus.)

So I am anticipating the release of Shadowlands, which is an expansion I am excited for, but the current state of the game is pretty... well, as you can tell by my posts, I've been playing way more MTG.

Even leveling up allied races has lost a bit of its excitement given that the 9.0 revamp to leveling will make that go ludicrously faster even than a 100% XP buff.

I'm nowhere near the 5 million gold I'd need to get the Caravan Brutosaur, and so I've sort of resigned myself to never getting it (the Grand Expedition Yak is still pretty damn good.)

It's too bad that I've come off of BFA with a sort of unsatisfied feeling. I don't know if it's really just Azerite Armor, or what. There have been some great stories, but at the same time I also feel like the expansion has felt like a lot of underserved elements.

It's ironic, because Legion had a similar approach - we had multiple elements of that expansion that we previously might have thought of as their own expansion-spanning ideas - the Emerald Nightmare, the Broken Isles, and Argus. Hell, I literally had a concept years before Warlords of Draenor introduced the idea of an alternate Gul'dan of having some expansion built around the Tomb of Sargeras where we fought a resurrected Gul'dan... not quite how it happened, but not that far off.

But while Legion seemed to nail its various exciting bits (ok, I might have liked to have a little more to do on Argus, though visually the place was phenomenal) and even introduce a super-compelling new element in Helya and her Helarjar (and I'm so glad to hear that she'll be an element in Shadowlands) somehow BFA's similar approach - giving us Kul Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatar, and the ultimate confrontation against N'zoth - left each feeling somewhat underserved.

Ok, maybe not the first two - I only ever expected Kul Tiras and Zandalar to be individual zones in the "South Seas" expansion (and by the way, if you're still holding out hope for some future nautical, south seas expansion... fellas, this was it) - but Azshara always seemed like a potentially expansion-headlining villain and N'zoth...

Ok, I think I understand the issue with N'zoth.

Of all the Old Gods, N'zoth's power has always been in subtlety. He was physically weaker than the other three, and he had fewer forces. So he always had to outwit them to get ahead, and often acted as if he had lost when in fact he had furthered his goals. So it makes sense that we'd spend most of the expansion not knowing that N'zoth was behind it all.

The problem, though, is that that doesn't even seem to be the case. If anything, the Jailer appears to be the one that has actually been manipulating things behind the scenes, and N'zoth wasn't so much a clever schemer as, at best, a rash opportunist, which sort of downgrades him as a character.

Anyway, I'm hoping that Shadowlands will be a more compelling experience, in the vein of Legion.

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