During the crushing lows of Shadowlands, I listened to a podcast, I want to say, from Blizzard Watch. The hosts were sort of riffing in a weird way about displeasure with Shadowlands, noting that, “two expansions later everyone will talk about how they miss things from it,” and basically putting forward the idea that displeasure with WoW in the present-tense is not long-term or serious, because those same people will have nostalgia for it later. It was offputting to me because it was very dismissive of the real and substantive criticism Shadowlands was catching at the time, but it also kind of left me with an interesting thought – is that accurate?

And I think here’s the thing – it’s a flawed way of looking at the issue. What do I mean? Well, let’s discuss that today.

Looking Back on Content

If I look back at nearly any piece of WoW content, there’s something I kind of like going on in it. WoW is often a beautiful game with a strong central art direction and idea about what it is in terms of setting and place, and the artistic principles on display always (or nearly always) meet or exceed expectations. As an overriding theme, WoW generally delivers strong content with a solid aesthetic direction and mostly good gameplay mechanics. When I look back at, say, Battle for Azeroth, the islands of Kul Tiras and Zandalar are visually rich and interesting, and the gameplay environments built into that setting are fantastic. The overall dungeon and raid gameplay was decently strong, and the overall hit rate of interesting raid and dungeon encounters is high. Sure, there are a few misses, but overall, playing the leveling experience now is fun and doing the dungeons and raids at this point in time is cool. Sure, is some of that down to the nature of power creep, especially in the raid setting? Absolutely. But even on-level or closer to the intended power level, a lot of the raw content of that era holds up.

I’ve been doing the same with Shadowlands as I’ve leveled alts, taking a bunch of my characters into Chromie Time for the expansion and replaying the zones of Shadowlands, and they’re honestly pretty neat. I liked the dungeons for the most part, the raid content I did get was largely decent (Castle Nathria was an overall excellent raid and Shadowlands’ average quality is marred mostly by the Sylvanas fight in Sanctum of Domination), and the idea of it isn’t inherently bad.

As I started to think on it, the thought occurred to me that maybe this inflammatory line of logic was correct – maybe WoW does, in fact, age like fine wine, to a point that we start to appreciate the things we once disliked as they age into the growing legacy content base of World of Warcraft. But the astute among you might have noticed two glaring holes in this line of thought, and I think now we have to discuss why it is that I think the idea is ultimately bullshit.

Gameplay Leaves a Troubled Legacy

I really love Castle Nathria, and the overall mood and ambience of Shadowlands are good to great. What did I hate about the expansion? Well, it’s one word – systems.

Systems are this thing we tend to stigmatize within the WoW community, and I think we need to say up front that systems are not inherently bad. However, the era of WoW that was most contentious to date is the one where systems defined so much of the gameplay of a given expansion, usually through limiting gameplay options and viability. Castle Nathria is a great raid – but it was harmed by needing to slow-grind Renown with your Covenant, level-up those Soulbinds, and farm Conduits and Legendary Powers for that extra boost. If you wanted to switch characters or even specs, you opened a whole can of worms and a lot of refarming. At the time, this sucked ass! It wasn’t very fun as a system and the small drip-feed of power wasn’t worth the squeeze of mandatory time sinks and forced adherence to a specific, designed gameplay track if you wanted to stay current. Modern WoW’s flexibility with specs, talents, and gear don’t mean very much if you get locked into a specific build of extra power modifiers that only really work on one spec, requiring you to farm a whole other set of extra increases for any spec you wanted to play outside of your designated “main.” Wanna level an alt? Gotta do the whole fucking grind on them too, and maybe you get a little speed-up at random, but not a lot!

BfA was the same way with Azerite and later the legendary cloak for the last season, and even beloved Legion was this way with Artifact weapons and Legiondaries. For the last several expansions, the satisfying part of WoW’s gameplay was gated by a less-satisfying forced grind to relevance, and it was something no player could really escape. Sure, you could just make bad power choices if you were a world-content enjoyer, take no legendary or a subpar generic one along with meh conduits and soulbind choices, you could pick a Covenant for flavor and disregard the power component, but you didn’t need to climb very far up the content difficulty ladder for those things to suddenly matter a whole lot. As a sidenote, while I get that it is technically correct and I just made the technically correct version of the argument, I fucking hate the idea that people dismiss concerns about WoW’s design with “you can just choose the thing you like.” Yes, sure, you can, but that choice carries consequences for admittance into group content and ability to perform and I’m glad that we’ve gotten far away from that model of design in Dragonflight. Sure, if I really liked playing a Necrolord Demon Hunter, I could, but the ability at launch was ass and the inability to control the revised version meant it was often tricky to get any sort of synergy. Sure, I got flavor if I made that choice, but I guess I’d have to enjoy the flavor by myself when my logs as it prohibit me from getting into good groups for high-end content.

This is the first major strike against this theory. Most people who hate on WoW’s current content (in a given timeline) aren’t often talking about the content but instead the entire construct of the game at that point in time. Shadowlands has a lot of great content, but the gameplay of the expansion as an overall whole was pretty bad! Who cares if the 8-10 dungeons and 2-4 raids we get in an expansion are beautiful and well-executed if doing them requires me doing dozens of hours of busywork and then having that same work erased in a balance patch or hotfix? Opinions about Shadowlands from a content basis will, inevitably, improve as our distance from the expansion grows. Does that mean it was a good expansion for the years of 2020-2022? Absolutely not. If you suffered with it to enjoy the parts you did like, you likely don’t so much “like Shadowlands” as you enjoy pieces of individual content from it or experiences you had within it. And I mean, it’s possible you like Shadowlands genuinely too – I don’t ever want to discount opinions I personally disagree with just because of that – but I would feel confident in saying that a minority of players are in that boat. If you played Shadowlands as current content, you didn’t just get content – but the friction of systems and the weight of that upon the content.

And then there’s one other element that needs to be discussed here…

Story and the Hole of Waiting

Looking back at Shadowlands, the story is laughably bad. I think that is fair to say, subjective though it may be. The Jailer was hyped as a big villain only to turn into a troubled soul on the way out with an ominous warning that has gone nowhere and done nothing. It might, eventually, be looped back in to the story, but for now, it’s just a funny and stupid waste of time and investment. Likewise, a lot of BfA’s story goes nowhere and does nothing in the moment it happened, with only the leads of Xal’atath and N’zoth bringing us forward, things that were added late and relatively weird additions to the story being told in BfA.

One of the things that has plagued WoW’s storytelling in the moment is the idea of, “wait and see,” that we eventually will get a complete and compelling story by the end of the expansion and there will be these little hooks and threads that we pick up over the years. However, most of WoW’s story is better in the moment when we’re waiting and seeing and thinking of what might come, and the storytelling of WoW has been less and less exciting simply because the number of times we’ve waited to see only to get little or nothing out of it has been too high. Looking back on an expansion’s story, then, is almost always worse, because there’s little or no waiting to see left to be done – what the expansion’s story was is done and on the table, able to be judged as a comprehensive whole. To be fair, sometimes this is good – missing pieces in early expansion content can snap into place later as planned and look better in retrospect – but it’s quite often worse as the mystery that at least created tension is off the table. The Jailer was threatening to be almost interesting – the whole idea of him falling out with the leadership of the Shadowlands, losing his Arbiter status, and the tension of the differing beliefs of how to lead the Shadowlands – that could have been really interesting, as seeing his goals would have also been. However, he ultimately ended up exploring none of that and died on the vaguest notion of his true intentions, which actually makes a lot of the early Shadowlands story content less interesting and less engaging as a result.

And so we end up in a situation where an expansion might actually be more interesting when it is current – when the story remains shrouded in some mystery. Looking back, we can see the story for what it was in totality – and in recent history, WoW’s expansion stories have been panned while they were ongoing, only tending to get worse when the full details are out and available. That’s pretty rough, and also kind of a shot through the heart for this notion.

Why Does It Matter?

I found this whole idea interesting because the flippant way it was expressed was kind of irritating, but it also did lead me to what I thought was some interesting retrospective.

Honestly, I like a lot of stuff in WoW, and yeah, going back today, content from those “bad expansions” is fun and enjoyable, so I was left to question if the hosts of this podcast were on to something. Ultimately, however, I wind up in a place where I have to vigorously disagree, because to me BfA is not the content from that expansion but an era of the game frozen in time. If all that truly mattered was content, we’d never need Classic (except for pre-Cata world content and dungeons), right? I can go to Cataclysm zones, dungeons, and raids, and play through them right now, so Cataclysm Classic is a waste of time, yeah? Except it obviously isn’t, because the composite product that is Cataclysm is timelocked to the talents, gameplay design, gear scaling and such that we had in 2010-2012. And sure, when I put it that way, I guess we can question why I typed all of that up there, and that is fair (I’m doing it a little right now myself!), but I think it is worth understanding what people who compliment past content now are talking about and to make clear distinctions between the content and the overall gameplay ecosystem. Both matter and both influence what we perceive as the general vibe of an expansion, and when we go back now and look at Shadowlands, at BfA, even at Legion, what we get to see now is a byproduct of the rough and annoying edges of that gameplay paradigm being sanded away into nothing.

Today, we can do Shadowlands, BfA, and Legion without the power grinds, without stalling out at Renown breakpoints, needing to farm the right Azerite pieces, or without needing to grind up that Artifact Power – and without those things that made playing in those eras tedious or even bad, the content that remains is, quite often, good. But it’s not the whole picture, and that is where I land.