New patch today!
The servers are down, as is often the case when there's a new patch that needs extra love and care, but let's talk 9.2.
Shadowlands, as an expansion, feels like the ultimate mixed bag. I think it will draw comparisons with Warlords of Draenor, which I contend is WoW's nadir in terms of quality. What is shocking about that is that Shadowlands was supposed to be the Legion-like shot in the arm after the disappointments of Battle for Azeroth (which was never as bad as Warlords, but still had a lot of problems).
I never had huge hopes for Warlords of Draenor. The premise was so profoundly convoluted that it barely made any sense, and the very things that it might have been able to play around with - namely time-travel - were brushed to the side to make the Iron Horde a generically "physical" threat.
For years, Blizzard had talked about how they wished they could have an annual release schedule for World of Warcraft expansions. This was a big trend in video games, such as with the Assassin's Creed games, but which proved to sacrifice quality to quantity. Warlords, thus, was planned to only have one major patch after the first one (as far as I know,) but when Blizzard was unable to actually get the job done that quickly, we just had Warlords languish over a long period of time with nothing new to do. Indeed, by the time Legion was announced at Gamescom in 2015, the audience seemed profoundly skeptical (though to be fair, they were also German, and maybe not as emotive as American audiences are) toward what I personally think is WoW's best expansion.
Shadowlands, though, had a different reason to run into trouble: Covid. And then another reason: the legal fallout of the California lawsuit.
Now, for the record, there's nothing I want more for Blizzard as a company than to genuinely evolve, getting its workers unionized and truly dismantling the culture of harassment and abuse. And if that means sacrificing the quality of a WoW expansion - whether that actually makes sense or not - I think it's worth it. Sadly, I'm not super optimistic - Activision Blizzard's acquisition by Microsoft might mean getting rid of a slimeball like Bobby Kotick, but being part of an even larger megacorporation has never been particularly helpful to empowering workers to organize. Not much more I have to say about that.
Now, tastes vary, and some people really prefer their fantasy grounded and "realistic," set in a world that mostly functions like our own, just with magic and monsters. But I like the headier, weirder stuff, and I felt that Shadowlands had the potential to be essentially World of Warcraft's take on Planescape.
Sure, I think we can all agree that the Jailer sucks as a bad guy. He's generic and boring, and falls into some familiar patterns with Blizzard's WoW villains. And I do think that Shadowlands has not done a sufficient job in tying its new cosmic lore into the existing lore (unlike in Mists of Pandaria, where a bunch of new elements turned out to be part of the Titan and Old God lore).
But I think that Shadowlands launched very successfully, and the expansion had the makings of one of the bests when it first came out. Its biggest sin has been a lack of content, which has been only partially under Blizzard's control.
9.1, also, to be fair, was a pretty substantial patch for a 9.1. Normally, we wouldn't get something like Korthia until 9.2, and 9.1 would have just been the big raid and some new stuff in familiar zones (like the Maw Assaults). I've seen the argument that 9.1 sort of squeezed a 9.2 in with it (though minus a "mid tier" raid,) but in any case, it was clearly not intended to give us a whole year of content.
So, we're now getting the final patch of this expansion. I've heard very good things about it, and I think Blizzard's evolving philosophy on listening to players' feedback could potentially mean really great things for the game. But this patch also need to put the bow on an expansion that is arguably a bigger disappointment because the expectations were set so high.
A decade ago (well, nine years ago,) I had a series of posts that were a "Mists of Pandaria Retrospective," which I made before the final patch came out. In retrospect, it was a bit premature to write about the expansion's legacy before it was complete. Thus, I'll refrain from saying what I think Shadowlands' will be.
Still, I always worry that Blizzard will learn the wrong lessons from the successes and failures. For instance, I think that the success of Artifact Weapons in Legion led them to erroneously believe that every expansion needed some borrowed-power grind, when the thing that actually made them cool was the sense of lore and a bond with a weapon that had personality, and the aesthetic (it was cool to see them design various versions all themed around the same visual motifs).
I think Covenants were a lot of fun, but I wish that there was less of a mechanical incentive to pick one or the other. Almost all my characters wound up going Night Fae or Venthyr simply because their main specs did better with those covenants. My hope is that Blizzard will err on the side of making these sort of choices less mechanically-focused.
Anyway, having avoided the PTR and only glimpsed some of the discussion about the new patch, I'm eager to go in fresh-faced. Also, I never ran Tazzavesh, so being able to just queue for the heroic version will be nice.
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