WoW: Beyond Death

I’m currently knee deep in The War Within, but before it launched, I took a few weeks to catch up on what I’d missed in World of Warcraft by running through all the story content of Shadowlands (minus the raids, but I was able to get the jist of them from a combination of in-game resources and YouTube).

I planned to do this entirely with my new Dark Iron Dwarf shaman, but due to some issues with Chromie Time too complex and confusing to get into here, I ended up exploring Shadowlands with a mix of her, my Tauren death knight, and my Worgen druid. Which mostly served to remind me why I don’t play druids more.

Before the Worldsoul Saga announcement, Shadowlands was almost what brought me back to the game. I thought the premise of delving into the afterlife was intriguingly different. Ultimately my distaste for the Pathfinder system and general feeling of being done with WoW kept me away, but my curiosity about it never entirely faded.

Of course, Shadowlands ultimately proved to be possibly the most hated expansion in WoW’s history, but my opinions are often outside of the mainstream, so I wanted to know if I’d agree with the hate or not.

Yes and no.

When it comes to game systems and reward structures, yes, Shadowlands deserved the hate. I dodged the worst of it by coming in after the fact and benefiting from quickly unlocked flying, a wealth of catch up mechanics, and the luxury of being able to mostly ignore its various borrowed power systems, but even so, it was a slog at times.

There’s a tonne of really cool cosmetic rewards you can get from Covenants, and the good news is you do get a lot of them for free just by doing the campaign and getting to max renown (that much at least is pretty much effortless at this point), but if you want anything more than that, it gets real bad real fast.

Everything costs anima, which is shockingly slow to acquire, and most things also cost another currency called grateful offerings, which is almost as hard to get. Thankfully I’m not a completionist and only wanted a tiny fraction of what was on offer, but even that took a few days of grinding. If I’d tried to get everything, it would have broken me.

There is a lot more I could say about all the ways Shadowlands went wrong on the gameplay front — Torghast alone deserves a mighty tongue-lashing — but it’s old news, and I don’t feel like beating a dead horse. Suffice it to say I was continually taken aback by the sheer amount of misery baked into every aspect of this expansion.

When it comes to the story, though, I’m not sure I agree with the scorn.

For one thing, it has one of the better leveling campaigns of any expansion. There’s a real sense of mystery, and it was the first time since Pandaria I felt like I was truly exploring the unknown (thankfully a vibe War Within has also delivered in spades). This is helped along by some amazing zone design; Bastion and Zereth Mortis especially are breathtakingly gorgeous.

I’m a little lukewarm on the Jailer as a villain overall, but the concept of him using his eons of imprisonment to hijack and weaponize his own chains and binding enchantments is unbelievably badass, and the story should have put on a finer point on that.

There’s some side stories I liked, too. I love that Kael’thas finally got the redemption he has long deserved (narratively if not morally), and I love that Vol’jin finally got some respect.

Also Garrosh’s soul got erased from existence, so that’s nice.

I’m also going to drop a really hot take here: I like what they did with Sylvanas. I think the revelation of her splintered soul is a good way to square the circle of the hero she once was with the monster she became, without totally excusing the choices she made.

The criticisms of this story I’ve seen don’t hold a lot of water to me. A lot of people seem to think her turning on the Jailer came out of nowhere, but it’s pretty clear he simply lied to her about his plans, and she rebelled once she realized she’d been deceived. There’s no inconsistency there.

It’s certainly not perfect. I think her “redemption” (for lack of a better term as I don’t consider it a redemption arc in the traditional sense) was a bit rushed, but that’s hard to avoid given WoW’s game design isn’t well-suited to depicting deep character introspection. I also think they could have been clearer about what she thought the Jailer’s plan was and how it was supposed to be a positive (and what his actual plan was, for that matter). But by and large I think the story provides a satisfying resolution to her long and tortured history.

I find it a little fishy that the male villains and anti-heroes of Blizzard games always seem to be viewed with sympathy by the fanbase — even when it’s wildly undeserved, IE Arthas — but the female villains/anti-heroes mainly seem to be viewed as beyond forgiveness — even if they weren’t in control of themselves for their worst actions, IE Kerrigan.

I know it’s easy to wave off any criticism as some form of ‘ism these days, and I’m not saying this is true of everyone who’s critical of these stories or even necessarily a majority, but it does feel like there’s some degree of double standard at play here.

Ultimately, I think — and have thought for over a decade now — that Sylvanas has been so controversial for so long that people were going to be furious no matter what they did with her. This seems like as good a path as any.

There’s definitely lots of other rough edges, though I think their severity can be overstated. I don’t love the revelation that the Jailer (via the Nathrezim) was ostensibly behind almost everything that’s happened in the history of the setting, but it also doesn’t really change anything when you think about it. Even if the Nathrezim nudged events one way or the other, all the other characters’ actions were still their own. It’s more of a weird historical footnote than something that ruins all the lore to date.

I wasn’t initially happy with the retcon that Frostmourne was only stealing pieces of people’s souls instead of the whole thing, but on reflection having your soul ripped apart such that you are forever broken in this life and the next is actually even more horrifying, so I’m fine with it.

It is a very dense expansion narratively with a lot of new info being thrown at you at all times, and I think that could have made it hard to follow for a lot of people. I also think they laid the drama on too thick at times; hearing the Jailer described as a worse threat than the Burning Legion right off the bat was a definite eye-roll moment.

And the Covenant campaigns were a disappointment, being rambly and generally dull across the board. This is especially disappointing in the case of the Kyrian campaign, which had a very good premise in the conflict with the Forsworn but never really did it justice.

I think my biggest complaint is there’s no explanation of what happens to the Scourge now that there’s no Lich King. You know, the undefeatable undead army that must be kept contained for all time? I understand the pre-expansion event dealt with it a bit, but the expansion itself ignores it altogether, and I don’t think there’s any clear explanation of what the new status quo is. Bolvar’s sacrifice to keep the Scourge contained is one of my favourite moments in WoW’s story, so I’d really like some follow up here.

So I don’t think it’s one of the best expansion stories, but I also think it’s unfair to say it’s one of the worst. It feels pretty comfortably in the “okay, not great” category for me. It’s certainly far better than Dragonflight’s story, at least.