I haven't played World of Warcraft in a while.
It feels particularly painful to say that given how excited I was for Shadowlands. This sort of high-concept, elevated fantasy stuff is something I tend to prefer in my fantasy RPGs.
I can't really pick out anything other than the delayed release schedule to say what is really "wrong" with the game. And, emotionally, learning about the kind of cesspit of misogyny, racism, and harassment that Blizzard had been all through the "golden age" of the company has really harmed the warm feelings I had for its games, with WoW being the one I always cared about the most.
I've been subscribed to WoW solidly since 2006 - over 15 years at this point. Perhaps it's not that crazy for me to imagine that I'd just eventually get tired of the game. And I think in part I put a lot on to Shadowlands to revive my interest after I was really disappointed by Battle for Azeroth.
Actually, maybe disappointed isn't really the right word - I was never really sold on the premise of BFA. I think there's a contingent of WoW fans (my sense is it's a minority, but I'm biased) who think that the absolute core of the game is the conflict between the playable factions. But I'm one of those people who feel that that combative, us vs. them conflict is played out. It is hard for me to get behind the idea of the Tauren, for instance, getting gung-ho about fighting the Alliance - especially given that Baine and Anduin are canonically good friends.
I guess it's that this conflict requires more nuance than maybe the game system can allow. In a story, you often have members of opposing factions forced to set aside their differences to deal with a greater threat, but only the NPCs ever seem allowed to do that.
Another thing I've given a lot of thought to is borrowed power. The current trend of an expansion-long treadmill actually started with something I thought worked brilliantly - Artifact weapons. But the thing that I loved about the artifacts wasn't so much the mechanics behind them, but the lore and flavor of them. Being able to wield the Ashbringer - and not just as some legendary that only a few hardcore raiders would ever get, but instead using it the whole expansion long - was super cool.
Thankfully, Renown smoothed over a lot of the edges of this sort of system, with a pretty robust catch-up system for it. But I also think that this pattern of always having something outside of gear to empower players creates a stress in the game - the sense of an obligation to play incessantly.
Back in Wrath of the Lich King, I would hit a point where my main had all the gear they could get from Emblems of Frost. And I could let that character just sit tight until raid night, and play my alts.
There's a lot of talk about things being alt-friendly, and I honestly think that it boils down to just having some breakpoints of when playing the game more isn't going to make your character more powerful.
Is this just asking for less content?
I don't know that it is. I think instead, I want content that I can complete within a more reasonable time span.
Someone made a good point (I don't remember where) that time-gating is actually not good for "casual" players. A lot of time-gating systems allow you to get what you need done to progress certain goals with an hour of play per day. But I think a lot of players would prefer instead that they could play for four, six, eight hours on a Saturday and then not have to worry about playing for the rest of the week.
The most popular theory for 10.0 is that we'll be doing a Dragon Isles expansion. The Dragon Isles were actually cut content from the original game (along with, I believe, the Emerald Dream,) and despite the name, they were actually mostly going to be a big Old God-focused area with creepy Lovecraftian temples.
That seems very unlikely to be the focus this time since, I think, post-BFA, the Old Gods have officially been eliminated (as always, until they want to bring them back).
Dragons in WoW have a long history, though there's an irony for them as monsters - almost all the dragons are good guys. Cataclysm in theory "ended" the dragon-focused story of Azeroth, but even if Deathwing had a pretty epic end, I think there's a lot in there that we have yet to really explore.
Dragons are also a bit more diverse than they were in the original WoW. While Wrath introduced the concept of proto-dragons, in Legion we got the Storm Dragons, who don't really seem to be members of an official "dragonflight."
Also, as someone who loves the timey-wimey stuff (that Warlords of Draenor totally failed to deliver,) I want to point out that Murozond is a time-traveler who died in a future that no longer exists, so there are a ton of ways for him and his infinite dragonflight to still be up to shenanigans (they did help bust Garrosh out of the Temple of the White Tiger, after all).
In a normal expansion cycle, we'd already know what the next expansion was - this past autumn we'd have gotten a big announcement trailer. But the timeline is, of course, delayed. I don't even know we'll get 10.0 before 2023 (though with only one major patch left in Shadowlands, one would hope).
I guess my wishlist for the game is a bit of a back-to-basics, but I'd also like to see us finally break down some barriers to cross-faction play.
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