Musings on Shadowlands from a Casual Returner

I knew that it was a smart business decision by Blizzard to put Classic and retail on the same subscription when it was first announced, but I didn't think at the time that this was going to be very relevant to me (though I did comment in that linked post that I might "check out some of the new quest content while I'm subbed for Classic anyway").

What I didn't expect was that my husband had apparently secretly been pining for me to give retail another try, so when curiosity about the Shadowlands level squish and Chromie time got the better of me and got me to reinstall it, he pounced on the opportunity to play with me. We had done some levelling together during Mists of Pandaria many years ago, but I got bored after a few months, unsubscribed and concluded that the game just wasn't for me anymore.

But with Shadowlands... things have been different. I don't know if I would say that it's a better expansion than Mists of Pandaria, but the fact that I'm primarily subscribed for Classic has made it easier to drop in and out of retail without having to worry about justifying the subscription. This means that Shadowlands is the first retail expansion since Wrath of the Lich King that saw me subscribed and playing for its entirety (I'm assuming for now that I won't suddenly end up cancelling before Dragonflight).

This is kind of funny to me because it's also been my impression that community reception of Shadowlands hasn't been great, though I'm not sure how many people consider it "bad" exactly. For a long time there was this idea that WoW alternated between good and bad expansions, kind of like Star Trek movies and versions of Microsoft Windows. By that logic, Mists of Pandaria was good, Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, BfA bad, and Shadowlands was supposed to be good again but didn't live up to that expectation.

Do I think that Shadowlands was a good expansion then? Kind of, but I'm honestly not even sure what to compare it to. I used to feel bitter about retail because of everything it had turned into, but the creation of Classic largely neutralised those feelings, because now I can go back, and retail is just this "other version of WoW" that also exists and I'm okay with that. I treat it entirely differently, like a free-to-play game that I just dip in and out of, and so I don't have the same expectations and don't hold it to the same standards I would have had ten years ago. But then I also wonder: Does my opinion even matter? Saying that Shadowlands managed to clear the bar of ultra-low expectations set by a very casual returner isn't really saying very much, is it?

Regardless, I thought I'd jot down some of my final thoughts about Shadowlands, with the caveat that these are opinions coming from a very casual point of view, and I completely understand that more invested players have reasons to feel differently about some of these things.

First, let's talk about the world and zones. I do love my home of Bastion and its ethereal beauty, and I recently talked about how I think Zereth Mortis is very pretty, but all in all I've found Shadowlands a bit disappointing in terms of zone design. All the zones I didn't mention were "meh" at best for me, and I absolutely loathed the way verticality was done in Revendreth, even after unlocking flying. The fact that each zone was its own little "island" made the world feel kind of small, and having your home base in your covenant sanctum while having to go to Oribos for amenities and then still having to go to Stormwind for auctions felt unnecessarily inconvenient and awkward. Oribos as a hub city also never really grew on me. I appreciated that unlike in Boralus, everything was very clearly laid out, but I guess something about the whole city effectively being a giant indoor environment made it feel a bit oppressive.

I thought the theme of Shadowlands was very interesting to begin with, and I liked the way the levelling storyline introduced you to the different afterlives. I thought that had a lot of potential, and with so many important characters in lore that are already dead, there was a nearly endless supply of story threads to pick up and utilise if desired. Unfortunately Blizzard didn't really end up doing a lot of that. Instead we were mostly focused on the soap opera of Sylvanas and her victims, and the Jailer being the blandest of bland big bads, with the realm of death becoming just another generic backdrop for this.

I'm not mad about that, just a little disappointed, and I suspect that in terms of storytelling, Shadowlands will be relegated to a similar level as Warlords of Draenor, aka "that was an alternate timeline/dimension, we prefer not to think about it anymore". Honestly, they pretty much have to do that, because otherwise every future story death is going to be cheapened by a feeling of: "No worries, see you soon in the Shadowlands!" In hindsight, unravelling the mysteries of death in Azeroth so thoroughly may not have been the greatest idea from a lore point of view...

Covenants I really liked, and they are one of the systems where many of the criticisms levelled against them kind of made me roll my eyes. Did covenants have to be tied to abilities that affect player power? Probably not, but I don't think it was that big of a deal either. I was mostly annoyed by all the commentary about how covenants were bad because obviously nobody would choose RP flavour over maximising their output, so as someone who did exactly that with all of her characters, my opinion was mainly that the people who kept claiming that players like me don't exist can sod right off.

I also quite liked anima as a resource... at the beginning it was kind of annoyingly hard to come by, even if that fit with the theme of there being a drought, but I listened to the people who said that this was clearly a system that was meant to be used over the course of the whole expansion, and treating it as such worked really well for me, as it started out slowly and ramped up over time. In Zereth Mortis anima flows freely by now, and I kind of have it as a low-key goal to buy all the anima cosmetics for my main by the end of the expansion and then finish with a full reservoir.

Soulbinds and conduits were just unnecessarily complicated, made little sense lore-wise and I largely ignored them as a result, just setting some sort of default whenever they became available and then leaving it at that forever.

I liked Torghast because I never really cared about legendaries (and therefore never felt pressured into doing it for materials), plus it was a great duo activity for me and the husband. It was very fun to see how we'd get overpowered in different ways on each run as we ascended the tower, though regular runs tended to end too soon to let you really get the most out of it, meaning that Twisting Corridors was probably the best mode in terms of raw gameplay fun, while also giving almost zero rewards for some reason. I will say that most of the changes Blizzard made to Torghast throughout the expansion, such as adding a timer, were not improvements in my book and sidegrades at best. 

In terms of everyday activities, I was once again kind of confused by the criticisms I saw in some corners about there being nothing to do, that there were too few world quests and that they took too long. When an activity takes a couple of minutes at most and people already consider that too long, players' attention spans are even shorter than I feared. Personally I liked the variety and that there were a fair few that didn't necessarily require combat, and I was also quite content that there weren't a billion things to grind every day - which was definitely a criticism I had seen levelled against Battle of Azeroth.

Whatever the current solo power grind was for each patch usually kept me entertained for a few weeks at least - covenant callings, Korthia dailies, Zereth Mortis, but I'm at the point where I know that there is no point in doing these things longer than they are fun, because any power rewards will be totally obsoleted by the next patch anyway. Zereth Mortis has actually had surprising staying power for me as I maxed out the Cypher of the First Ones, bought all the toys and stuff from the Jiro vendor and still keep coming back for more because it's just so relaxing to fly circles around the zone.

As far as WoW's "core content", dungeons and raids go, I didn't do much of it. I mean, I did all the base expansion dungeons on normal and heroic, but those modes don't really "matter" for anything nowadays since it's all about Mythic+. I still need to check out Tazavesh one of these days... and in terms of raiding, I wrote about doing LFR for the first two raids and what an experience that was. The last raid is still on my bucket list. But beyond going once to see the sights, that content isn't really of interest to me at this point.

Reading all this back, I guess it sounds more mixed than positive, but the proof is in the pudding and fact is that I have continued to log in and play casually all throughout this expansion, sometimes even without my husband, which is the real litmus test for whether I'm enjoying myself or not.