Let's Talk About Shadowlands… What Went Wrong?



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Up next in Steve Danuser’s Eternals! But seriously, let’s dig deep into Shadowlands…

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48 thoughts on “Let's Talk About Shadowlands… What Went Wrong?”

  1. Last time they were given the benefit of the doubt. And mainly flopped since no one cares about the story AND especially since grind was so much of tier "systems" instead of just letting people do things

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  2. I like that the "What went wrong video" is the longest one you've released in months. I am however hopeful for the future (Inhales last copium tank) because they seem to be keen on listening to the complaints very quickly, with tier set changes for those that seemed underwhelming, I believe, somehow.

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  3. Base is good, dungeons are fun raids are fine, pvp abit wacky… only thing that went wrong is shit systems for power gain outside of main activities and massive alt unfriendliness… torghast was hyped as something to go in and have fun with no power scaling for you or enemies, yet they made people hate it by turning it into mandatory boreghast. Hate the circlejerk hating on every aspect of wow to just hop into hate train

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  4. Back in WC3, and TBC I was curious as to the other worlds where the dark portals would lead to. Where had the rest of the Alliance expedition into outland had gone to? Later on curiosities of the Bronze Dragonflight being turned into the Infinite Dragonflight, how time was being messed with; what was going on there? What about all those portals that the dragons were protecting scattered across Azeroth what was their deal? What of the nightmare? The answers or lack of answers were disappointing to say the least. Instead the lore just tossed things in from left field over and over, as if they were afraid that what they had built up prior was not enough.

    Remember the Scarlet Crusade? A lot of people used to be obssessed over this 'rogue' faction of humans that were steeped in the light fighting against the undead. Rightly so because they seemed to have the knowledge required to construct weapons similar to the Ashbringer. What was done with them? Nothing interesting and ultimately completely written out of the lore in the most boring way possible.

    It's a repeated theme really: Rogue factions being written out of the lore via being absorbed by a larger faction no questions asked. WoW would have been so much more interesting if you were able to explore the motives and stories behind the splinter groups that didn't adhere to the main faction's goals, and we did have that for a short bit of time with random reputations that were a pain to get, but their existence showed how people had their own separate goals and motivations. Everything these days is just "Here's a faction, everyone works in unison; there is no disagreements."

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  5. The Pantheon of Death (Eternal Ones) are supposed to be the counterpart of the Pantheon of Life, doesn't that strongly imply Elune ('Sister' of the Winter Queen) is also a 3-d printed robot made by the First ones?

    Wouldn't such a revelation utterly destroy any sort of religion or belief system surrounding them? For example with Elune when you realize; not only did the Goddess your people have worshiped for millennia make an error of judgement that inadvertently cast the souls of many of your people into an horrific fate, you realize she is flawed. However it turns out on top of that she's likely actually just Elune 1.1 from a 3-d printer because version 1.0 was a little too 'extreme'?

    Why would anyone deify beings coming off an assembly line? As Matt pointed out, how much of these characters is programmed and do they have any agency at all?

    Shadowlands and 'looking behind the curtain' really has the problem of cheapening anything else done in the universe afterwards lorewise. It's like finding out you live in a Truman show type fishbowl. You can't unring that bell and simply go back to what you were previously doing without losing a significant part of what made that experience interesting in the first place.

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  6. It's a disaster in every respect and they are trying to save it by piggybacking off WC3, while ruining every character that they touch. And squeezing the Jailor into everything doesn't help.

    Not that I'd entertain playing Classic Lich King as Blizzard is such a shit show and they don't deserve my money, but all this Jailor rubbish makes me not want to anyway.

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  7. I have a question!
    Did the first ones need anima? or did they set up THE WHOLE ANIMA SYSTEM just to fuck over their own creations?

    Cause if they need anima, then they must have had a whole fuck ton lots of it to create a afterlife creation machine that has continued to run for millennia without new souls to deliver it anima, alternatively if they didn't need anima then they specifically made anima for their creations to use… for no real reason?

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  8. As each expansion came along we were encountering beings who were more and more powerful who could squash us like a bug. We became more and more irrelevant. WOW needs to get away from gods and loa and such and get back to elves and humans and orcs fighting for land and food. When the titans were mysterious unknown creatures they were interesting. As a bunch of bored giants they are not interesting.

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  9. 3:42 well, maybe my English isn't good enough (what with it being my second language and everything) but… when they say that the Jailer "has never known defeat", am I misinterpreting his recent imprisonment at the hand of the other Covenant leaders? Maybe some subtext or stylistic nuance I'm not getting?

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  10. I mean, only thing I'll remember about this xpac in a positive manner will be the Garrosh cutscene. Not because it's Garrosh, not because the poor quality of the cutscene, but because it was the first time throughout the entire ordeal of a generally forgettable xpac where a characters action basically felt real/true to themselves and how they had previously been portraited. Random cosmic destroyer of all daddy? No thanks. Sylvannas suddenly never having served shit? No thanks. Bolvar? Please no.

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  11. The problem opf shadowlansd is that its super boring. Outsie of ddumb tiring ddaily quests there it nothing else to do. dungeons are fun sure but when you do same dung 10th time its not enjoyable anymore. Same goes for raids, the first kill feels great but every other kill i just that another kill. there is nothing interesting to do outside those few things. I had more fun lvling my alts in different expansions that i had playing shaddowlands.

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  12. A fantasy setting's mythos should not be so personally explored.
    Random adventurers who're just one in many thousands who're playing the MMO should not just be able to enter the afterlife and talk to the architects of reality. There's no mythos anymore, everything's cold, hard facts. We know exactly what happens after we die, one of the biggest questions in not even just ficitonal settings, but reality. And they just hand the answer to us at the beginning of the expansion then tell us to go collect fifteen bear butts. The utter incompetence in storytelling is so evident in this expansion, that it's just painful at this point.
    It's Game of Thrones all over again, we defeated the Legion and for some stupid fucking reason rushed through the Old Gods, the naga and the faction war in the space of a single expansion, so they've nothing left from the original lore to explore, and now they're fumbling pathetically, trying to feel important and butchering iconic, well beloved characters to try and cater to an audience they've already betrayed, stabbed in the back, pissed on, teabagged, laughed at, and then walked all over.

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  13. Bellular, About Ryan Reynold, i was thinking the same thing about him. Not joking, everything you said i told my sister last week. He is a typicall comedian, in the middle, created with the title as only comedian and nothing else.

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  14. Thing is, there's quite a few movies, TV shows, books, and video games that proof you can absolutely write good stories about AI becoming sentient and developing personality. The problem is, I don't trust Blizzard to tell such a story in any form of engaging way or with enough nuance to make it interesting.
    And on a more personal, subjective level, I honestly don't like how Sci-Fi WoW has become in recent years. Like, how have we gone from a game where we fight Dragons, Orcs and maybe a Tentacle god on occasion, to a game where the people in charge of the afterlife are robots out of a 3D printer? I played WoW because it was a great fantasy game, if I wanted Sci-Fi, I'd have played SWtoR.

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  15. Blizzard would have to make warcraft in unreal engine with amazing graphics to even hav a chance to bring new life to a new project with any faith. Right now its trendy to hate everything they produce and its gunna take alot to turn that stigma around. A whole new look

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  16. What if "Elune" is in hiding from these first ones the first one's killing all these other beings .. and remade them in some robotic way … like we see them now 🙂 …. and elune is one fo those true creators or true first ones … celestial ,startdust where we all made off … remeber alterned dreanor … no titan'ish things as far i know only life and all organic based beings not mechanical .. make videos about thad

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  17. And thats the problem.
    How, just HOW can blizz now try to create a new narrative, that isnt going to feel absolutely obsolete after all that "super mega thanos level villain and literall Universe 3D printing action"?
    There is nothing that can "canonically" threaten us anymore after we dealt with mister clean and his plans to clean up creation itself.
    No story narative is going to feel impactfull after this, because WE KNOW EXACTLY why its there, how it's created and why it exists in the first place.
    We have cleared the Story of WoW and the only thing that can even be slightly new is that "seventh cosmic force which decided to stay outside the circle and watch" and thats IT 10.0 has and MUST be the final expansion, but Danuser hasn't even realized that he has written himself into a corner.

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  18. Delay in release – delay in first patch – horrific pvp balance (as usual) – delay in second patch – LAWSUIT – firings – mass staff walkouts – internal investigations – NOTHING went right for Blizzard this year.

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  19. They went full Harry Potter mode. They wanted you to join a covenant. Gtfoh. Blizzard agenda is feminism and gays at the moment. Everyone is offended by words. This new blizzard team is a joke.

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  20. It's astounding you still upload videos with these titles when you all know exactly what happened and you have covered it several times…. I'm starting to think this is a farm channel. The content repeats itself weekly…. Like stop dude try to make more consistent videos with OTHER TOPICS

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  21. Well also start including the lore from books into the game. I hate being lost going into a new expansion not knowing why things are the way they are. You could say, read the books, well that doesnt make your game story seemless does it? Still has loop holes. Include that stuff because when i learned Cairne Bloodhoof died in a book, was a huge diservice to that character. From this point on i started not giving a $*@& about characters and lore because stuff stopped making sense. Like Thrall and the earthen ring, why he stopped being warchief, etc, so much stuff i started to skip not caring because it wasnt represented well at all. Which means gameplay and raiding carried me until shadowlands. Then gameplay and class advancements or lack of burned that for me. So i had nothing left to keep me invested.

    And i know story information exists, but im not going to hunt for it to learn it if the effort isnt there to properly explain it. Hence Bellular <3

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  22. I've never given Bellular flack for his theories. I know he's not a fan of this mess of a story Steve Danuser has made. My biggest complaint is Steve's nihilistic take on the cosmology. First we had the Light going bad in the Mag'har orc scenario. Then he dismisses the Chronicle as written from the point of view of the Titans. Then we have Elune partially responsible for the night elf souls going to the Maw and seemingly deny Tyrande justice, another big f- you in a long line of f- yous to the night elf players. And now we have these 3-D printed Eternal One prototypes…

    But to be fair, it could be a lot worse. Some other content creators (whom I won't name), were convinced the Jailer was the good guy all along, which would also (in their minds) justify Sylvanas' actions, and that we would join their "Maw covenant", betray our old covenants, and finally take the fight to the "real villains", the First Ones. Just the idea that the genocide of the night elves, and their souls being twisted into monsters in Torghast being canonically justified, makes me feel uncomfortable, so I stopped watching those content creators' videos. For all the nihilism and Sylvanas simping, I'm glad Danuser didn't go that far for the sake of fan- service.

    Despite the flaws in the story, I'm going to see this through, and play 9.2. It looks good enough. Whether I'll continue playing WoW after Shadowlands all depends how the expansion ends, and what's in store next.

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  23. I think the shadowlands story would have been good had they taken the time to really build the mystery of the shadowlands and written the characters to where you got to travel with them and understand them. Shadowlands really started going downhill for me when I got to Ardenwield with an extremely important message from the primus of the upmost importance with the fate of the shadowlands hanging in the balance but first I had to go on 5 to 10 hours of useless quests that had nothing to do with that message. Steve Danuser seems like the kind of author who is so high on his own farts that he rushes for the huge climatic moments in his own stories so that he can be praised but completely forgets that he needs to tell a story for those to make sense.

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