World of Warcraft: Shadowlands review

I’ve been one of those people who has been playing World of Warcraft since it began way back in 2004 (Damn, 16 years, and god knows how many thousands of dollars I’ve poured into this), and unlike other members of The Outerhaven crew who has gone on to quit the game successfully and either find other games to drop all their spare time into or have found other MMO-RPG games to support and (one day) play, I have decided to keep going with this almost life long obsession with gear grinding to do bigger numbers to get more gear. So here we go with the eighth expansion for the World of Warcraft. It’s time to go beyond the door of death and enter World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

Name: World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows, macOS
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Activision-Blizzard
Game Type: MMO-RPG
Mode(s): Single/Multiplayer
Release Date: November 23, 2020
Price (Base Edition: Physical & Digital): AUD$59.95/USD$39.99
Price (Base Edition: Digital Only): AUD$89.95/USD$59.99
Price (Base Edition: Digital Only): AUD$119.95/USD$79.99
Price (Base Edition: Physical): AUD$179.95/USD$119.99

Lore, Lore, Lore…

The Battle for Azeroth has ended, the old god N’Zoth has been defeated, and the world of Azeroth is at peace for a moment. Even the war between The Alliance and The horde has subsided for a time, thanks to the efforts of Varok Saurfang and King Anduin Wrynn removing the Undead Queen Sylvanas Windrunner as Warchief of The Horde. However, her removal and ultimate thoughts about being trapped in a death-like state have made Sylvanas think about fate and if we really have free choice. This leads her to Icecrown, where the new Lich King Bolvar Fordragon, sits on the Frozen Throne, keeping the undead Scourge in check. Sylvanas takes the Helm of Domination and breaks it in half, breaking the seal between Azeroth and the Shadowlands, the realms of death itself. From there, Sylvanas joins forces with The Jailer, an Eternal level god creature that is the keeper of the afterlife’s most dangerous souls, and together they plan to destroy the world of the living and the dead. The Azeroth champions make their way into The Maw to begin their journey to stop the duo from destroying everything in existence as they traverse across the four main plains of the afterlife before heading to The Maw for the final confrontation.

Bastion: “Should we forget who we were to serve those worthy of redemption?” This is the question asked by The Kyrian, a group of angel-like creatures that help others to be redeemed for their sins during life to serve as guides to those who are yet to cross into death. The main story revolves around a group of Kyrian called The Forsworn, who spread doubt about their purpose as one of service and purpose, or service in slavery. You’ll spend a lot of time helping The Kyrian either battle The Forsworn or some lower Kyrian Aspirants in their quests to be deemed worthy to serve The Kyrian cause.

Maldraxxus: Do you like Metal? Do you long for battle? Do you love the cover to Meatloaf’s “Bat out of Hell” album? Then Maldraxxus is for you. From the second you arrive in Maldraxxus, you are in a battle for your life as you prove yourself the strongest being in the realm to bring glory to what is essentially the military arm of the afterlife. Maldraxxus is a realm of the undead and necromancy, the place where the Scourge and the Lich King were created. However, without The Primus, Maldraxxus is without a leader, leading to a war between all the houses contained within.

Ardenweald: An enchanted, mystical forest of rest and hibernation, Ardenweald is where Wild Gods (such as The Winter Queen) and other spirits of nature (the Night Fae Covenant) travel upon death. Giant dream trees across the forest draw in anima, which is then used by the Night Fae to rejuvenate the spirits as they slumber inside wild seeds and prepare them to be reborn into the world of the living. At the Grove of Awakening, a portal is maintained to ferry souls back to their worlds; when it is time for a soul to be reborn, they are brought to the grove to return home and begin their cycle anew.

Revendreth: A land of gothic spires and dark secrets, and no soul wishes to end up here. Souls sent here by the Arbiter tend to be prideful or have some other flaw preventing them from serving in or going to one of the other realms. They come here to atone for their sins and hopefully be redeemed, as the alternative is being cast into the Maw. It is the duty of the vampiric Venthyr to prepare the souls through unimaginable torment. Although the realm is mostly shrouded in darkness, there are parts of Revendreth where light has broken through the clouds and seared the earth. Many of the souls in Revendreth are vulnerable to the light and have been chained up in these areas, while others are unrepentant and need to do things the hard way…

The Maw: This horrific place houses the vilest and irredeemable souls in existence. Ruled by the enigmatic Jailer, the Maw inspires nightmares and legends even among the Shadowlands’ denizens. No one has ever escaped this vile place, and any foolish enough to venture here are never heard from again. At its center lies Torghast, a cursed otherworldly prison where the most wicked souls in the universe are locked away. In recent years, the machinery of Death has been broken, and all souls who enter the Shadowlands are now condemned to torment in the Maw, no matter their deeds in life. This has caused the Maw to begin growing larger and more powerful while the rest of the Shadowlands wither from a lack of anima.

The four visuals of the afterlife…

Visually, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is probably one of the most varied games in the series. In the past, when you enter a new land or realm, you have a very singular visual style (except for Cataclysm, which changed many existing areas on Azaroth, the mainlands in World of Warcraft) throughout the whole expansion. But with World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, you get five very different areas to explore that have their own visual style that sets them apart from each other, which is a very welcome change… Except it’s all stuff, we’ve seen before in some way or another.

The first place you get to see is The Maw, which is very desolate and boring, much like the area’s gameplay. If you liked playing The Burning Crusade, this area is very visually similar as there is a lot of open space filled with enemies that will crush you if you cross their path. The only upside is that is contained in The Maw is Torghast, which has a more Wrath of the Lich King style to it, which is pretty cool.

Next is Bastion, a very angelic-looking area complete with white marble architecture everywhere and is the most unique looking out of all five areas. Many wide-open plains surround the white marble cities, which gives it a very Warlords of Draenor feel to things but without the corruption by The Horde influence and takes some Norse inspired looks from the same expansion in the way the cities look and feel.

Maldraxxus is Legion all over again with a small mix of Wrath of the Lich King added into how the buildings are designed and the enemies look. So expect a lot of heavy bone structures all over the place, dead bodies everywhere, and enemies that look like they came right out of an S&M dungeon.

Like nature? Like something that looks taken once again from areas of Telsrassil, Var’Sharal, etc.? Well, then Ardenweald is the place for you.

Finally, Revendreth is one of those places that feels like a mix of The Burning Crusade’s endgame content mixed with a bit of Wrath of the Lich King, so a lot of gothic areas but a lot of dried up death too. Which does suit it the most since it’s full of Vampires.

At the time of publication, the first raid in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has not been released, so I don’t know how they look visually, but given that even the dungeons look like recycled Battle for Azeroth content and stuff that is connected to the realms look and feel. I’m not expecting much from the raids visually at all since it’s all going to be taken up with spell effects and hit animations. Given that there are many looks taken from other expansions, I’m expecting more of the usual designs for the boss characters that are huge blobs or skeletons with extra pieces.

Prepare for the endless grind…

So when it comes to any expansion for World of Warcraft, you’re going to start things out by leveling your character by 10 levels. The difference this time is that for the second time in World of Warcraft history, we’ve had a stat squish (A reduction of numbers that go into all character stats to “improve the legitimacy of the game,” aka “We don’t want you hitting for billions of damage”) and also for the first time, a complete level squish. Whereas before World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, our character had to level from level 1 to level 120, we now were reduced to level 50 at the end of the previous expansion and returning to a maximum level of 60. The idea behind this was more of a “new game +” style for players, giving the feel of what it was like to level through the original World of Warcraft game (Even though World of Warcraft Classic exists and is extremely popular) and recapturing that nostalgic feeling in the main game once again.

What we got was one of the most underwhelming experiences for the final 10 levels in over 16 years. World of Warcraft: Shadowlands tries so hard to please too many types of players all at once that it ultimately fails to satisfy anyone who isn’t a Blizzard loving ultra fan. The stories are filled with long dialogue-heavy moments that slow the leveling experience to beyond a crawl, almost hitting a complete stop at times in order to give the lore nerds their time to gasp and praise Blizzard’s cinematic work, which is always top tier. For people who want to level quickly and move on, this is a terribly long slog through stuff that we know doesn’t matter till sometime later in the endgame.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands does something that really has had many people I play with got really pissed off with. World of Warcraft: Shadowlands forces you to play through all the story chapters for all five areas before you can unlock all the dungeons and other endgame content, unlike previous expansions where you unlocked these features when you reached maximum level and could choose to either abandon the story and focus on endgame content or keep playing the content for extra gold and gear. Considering that you will reach level 60 by the end of the Ardenweald area, leaving the whole Revendreth and The Maw areas to go through before you can experience the four extra dungeons, world quests, and raids that the game has to offer.

Once you are done with the long story grind, then you can start the next series of grinding as World of Warcraft: Shadowlands introduces it’s endgame content, mainly the Covenant system. This new system has you picking one of four factions in the four main areas of the game and building upon their own stories. When I finished the main storylines, I picked the Night Fae from Ardenweald as my Covenant (Mainly because their special abilities are the best for a Beast Master Hunter), which locks me in with the fairy things and hippies as they work to use anima (one of the currencies you’ll be grinding) to restore the power of the dream-seed or something… I stopped giving a shit by this point. All I know is that from here on out, I’m grinding anima for the Covenant to unlock gear, crafting profession recipes, and other things that will come in handy later. But that’s not all. I’m also grinding renown; the secondary reputation grinds for each Covenant, which unlocks more bits and pieces like assistants for mini-missions, titles, and other pointless shit… Oh! And don’t forget the renowned ability grinds for your assistants that drop from world quests, dungeons, and other places.

Outside of three Covenant grinds, there are more grinds to do. There are the usual grinds for gear in world quests (which has been reduced to next to nothing), dungeons (again, drop rates have been reduced to less than one piece per character per dungeon run), raids (Only 3 pieces drop per boss for a group of 20 people), and PVP (Which I don’t do as PVP is toxic as all hell). Not to mention that you have Torghast, which has another set of currencies to grind for to progress further into that area. All of these grinds are designed specifically to progress you personally as slow as possible so that you will keep that subscription money coming into Activision accounts for a long time to come.

As I mentioned above, there is a new area called Torghast, a rogue-like, diablo-inspired, multi-leveled dungeon crawler mode that you can use to test your skills and get special abilities as you traverse floor after floor that is meant to test you to the limit and then make you grind more gear to progress further… Not that this mode gives you any gear or anything worth using in the long run, but you need to do it weekly, or you’re going to miss out!

If you notice something that I haven’t talked about too much in this part of the review, it’s the actual gameplay itself. That’s because World of Warcraft: Shadowlands hasn’t really changed anything to the core gameplay of World of Warcraft that didn’t exist in the 2004 game. You’re still pressing buttons to do different spells, over half of which are pointless unless they have a specific requirement in a raid or something. If anything, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands took a step back during the level squish and removed abilities that we had already gained during previous expansions and leveling, only to reactivate them once we got closer to the new max level.

The final thing to say about World of Warcraft: Shadowlands from a gameplay standpoint is that in a game where you are meant to be this ultimate champion of the world, or worlds, in the Warcraft universe, you are left feeling like a new player by the time you hit endgame content, which in the past made you feel truly powerful and worthy of taking down the big bad guys of the expansion. The problem is that you don’t feel powerful anymore. You feel like endgame is the real beginning of where you must prove you might, over and over to the Covenants, to your guild, and to yourself as you get smacked around by the same enemies that you were kicking around easily only a few levels ago. When this is how you feel coming into endgame content, it’s not something that is a failure on you as a player, but the game’s design itself. Maybe in future patches, things will actually feel like they should again.

There’s a soundtrack here somewhere…

If there is somewhere where World of Warcraft always seems to shine was the soundtrack, and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands soundtrack is no exception. Each bit of music has been scored with the dedication and care we’ve come to expect from Blizzard’s sound design team. Each of the five realms in Shadowlands has a very distinct sound, with Ardenweald being an exceptionally calm and peaceful soundtrack that is really needed as this is where the game slows to a crawl. Unfortunately, since this is a very somber and ethereal type of game, there are no tracks that really get the adrenaline pumping, something that is really needed at times since a good piece of music can really help push through the excessive grind that World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has in spades.

I will say that it is disappointing with the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands soundtrack is its availability. In the past, Blizzard usually included a physical CD in its Collectors Edition of each game that you could listen to anywhere at any time. This time around, there is no CD. What you get instead is a digital code where you can download an IP-locked set of files to listen to at home, or you can use Spotify to listen to it instead. I understand that digital music is the current way to do things, but there is something that is lost when you have a collection of physical media that will forever never have a full set available. Also, the soundtrack was not included in any digital edition of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, only in the physical Collectors Edition, which seems weird and unfair to people who have spent just as much as the physical collectors did.

The World of Alts…

If the relentless grind of the endgame content wasn’t bad enough, the way that Blizzard has treated “Alts” (Other characters you’ve made that you use at later points to experience the game with either an alternate faction, race, class, or whatever.) is even worse. When you finish the unskippable introduction to The Maw section, you are provided with a choice. Either you can choose to replay the story campaign from the beginning all over again or choose the “Threads of Fate”, a mode where you’ll sacrifice all story mission and campaigns in order to gain early access to your Covenants and then level via either dungeons, world quests, side-quests, and bonus objectives. However, you cannot access Torghast till it unlocks at something like level 58.

Honestly, the second I read this over in the game, I decided to replay the story again to level. After experiencing dungeons, world quests, etc… as endgame content and how much of a pain it was to do. I couldn’t imagine leveling using those small bits and pieces to be any fun at all. At this point, you might as well wait till way later in the expansion when Blizzard hopefully will include a better alt leveling experience or catch-up mechanics that make alts worth leveling and playing again.

On the flip side, though, leveling a brand new character is a lot more fun than World of Warcraft: Shadowlands leveling. With new characters, you get two choices: Level through the traditional starting zone for your race, or a new area called Exile’s Reach, where you go through a tutorial on how to play the basics of your character before moving on at level 10 to your main city. When you get to your main city, you have a couple of options once again. This time you can level through the Classic World of Warcraft areas or talk to Chromie (A time dragon… Don’t ask) and activate an expansion of your choice from all of the expansions before Shadowlands and level in the one that you like best. This way of leveling allows people to relive the old content in a new way that is extremely fun for someone who likes going back through old content.

Ultimately, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is like most World of Warcraft expansions, it feels different. There is content there to do, and there is some progression to what you are doing overall. However, what has happened with the game is that there is almost too much to do, making the game feel like more of a job than a game. There is nothing casual about World of Warcraft: Shadowlands for the average player to be satisfied with, leaving the hardcore player-base to carry the game’s success or failure on their shoulders. Yet as a player of 16 years, I know that a lot of the players currently playing World of Warcraft: Shadowlands are the ones who will eventually go back to World of Warcraft Classic (or the rumored World of Warcraft Classic: The Burning Crusade, due out next year) and keep playing that, leaving those same people in retail to grind endlessly for minimal progression at all in endgame content.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has gone from being a great game about fantasy creatures fighting huge threats to a game where politics rule all, questions way above a fantasy game area asking, and just recycled everything mashed together to make it feel like a new experience that took some of the worst parts of the World of Warcraft Classic success and added them where they were not needed. The whole process stinks of Activision management oversight since a lot of the key people who made World of Warcraft great left the company over the last 2 expansions, leaving people from other divisions (Like Diablo, a division that thinks mobile gaming is the future of Diablo) to pick up the slack and implement ideas that might work for their division, but not for the World of Warcraft division.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands really doesn’t feel like the game it once was. The overall graphics are dated. No matter what Blizzard thinks, the game makes you feel less like the ultimate champion of the world/universe and more like a measly little shit-kicker peon (ZugZug) from start to finish, and overall actually makes you see the corporate management oversight telling the developers to stop making a game for the players, and make a system that keeps people tied to their PCs afraid to play anything else at all and keep the subscription money rolling in. A true shame to a once very popular game and company.

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