Month: November 2020

Good morning friends! I have been playing an awful lot of World of Warcraft Shadowlands, and I have thoughts about it. This is I guess the closest you are going to get to a comprehensive review. I am going to try my best not to really spoil anything that has not already been talked about in public trailers for the game. As such I am going to spend a lot of time talking about mechanical things and sort of glossing over story beats. If you have any specific questions about my thoughts on specific bits of the main story quest, feel free to engage me in private because I almost certainly have things to say. So some housekeeping that we need to get out of the way. I did not hit this game hard and heavy, but instead played fairly casually. The game released on Monday November 23rd at 5 pm my time and I played more or less from launch until around 10 pm that night. Then I picked up and played off and on for the next several days and wound up dinging 60 sometime on Wednesday the 25th. That has given me roughly four and a half days of play at the level cap, and I have been playing World of Warcraft to the detriment of pretty much everything else.

In my discussion I am going to say some things that come across as fairly negative. Please note that I am still playing the game on the regular and I am still more or less happily. That said… Shadowlands is a flawed experience and to be truthful I am still making up my mind if I actually like it or not. This game represents Blizzard trying something significantly different in focus than past outings. Essentially they have taken the concept of the Main Story Quest (MSQ) from Final Fantasy XIV and applied it to World of Warcraft. Everything revolves around the MSQ and it ultimately is a hard gate for later content. Previously you could pick and choose which zones to visit and which quests to do, but this time around you are on a path and more or less locked into that path at least your first time through the content. This has some definite positives in that it presents a clear narrative that flows across the collected zones of the expansion. The negative however is that not all of the content was created equal and it seems that each player finds certain parts more compelling than others. I know I have my opinions that I am going to share with you today, but know that these opinions are going to be incomplete because I have heard many folks saying the exact opposite. No matter how you start your journey it leads to an introductory event in the Maw, but I am going to talk about that zone in depth considerably later. Essentially you have an event where you escape from the clutches of the Jailer and begin your life in the shadowlands.

Oribos

Your first real destination is Oribos, a “city” that is maintained by the Attendants and the Brokers and serves as a hub for the cosmology that makes up the various afterlives you will be interacting with. The story sees you explaining the predicament and seeking the help of these folks that are confused as shit to see a mortal walking around in their realm. This feels a lot like Shattrath 2.0, in that it is a city that is way the hell bigger than it actually needs to be. For as grand in scale as it is… there really isn’t a whole lot going on here. You have a factional enclave that comes into play later, a bank, a trade hall, an inn and then the transit network that will see hopping between realms. Oribos as a whole is definitely in the “It’s Fine” territory. It is a better hub than Ashran but significantly worse than say a Dalaran. It feels very disconnected from the rest of the expansion, but that is sort of a wider problem that I experienced. The fact that there is no central land mass, but instead five disconnected “islands” of content with a hub city being the only connective tissue… makes the entire experience feel significantly smaller than any other expansion to date. Now if you add up all of that land mass it might be fairly large, but it feels “lacking”. It ends up giving you the feeling that you got an expansion that was effectively made up of Nazjatar, Mechagon, and the three Argus zones. It will feel slightly better if the tradition of new zones being added in with patch content continues.

Bastion

In alpha I had not really spent much time questing, and had completed the introduction in the Maw and set foot in Bastion but just barely. I spent most of my time testing out class abilities to see which class changes I liked and did not like. As a result I was not prepared for just how boring of a zone Bastion was going to be. I said earlier that the story content is very uneven, and for me it began with the first questing zone. The story that is being told here I want no part of, and the way that it is unrolled is done so in a manner that ultimately represents the “calm before the storm”. The key problem that I had is that there is a religious underpinning to everything in the zone of “accepting your role in the greater cosmic plan” to paraphrase. So you see these blue angels being cleansed of their former selves and having to forget about all of their past attachments. None of that felt good because it conflicted with me on a personal level, and the fact that have this serene idyllic scenery with a lower than average number of aggro mobs… just made the whole experience feel strange. The tail end of the zone ignites the central conflict of the main story, and as such it gets better as you go along but getting through this zone was a slog for me.

Maldraxxus

The conflict from Bastion spills over and sends you to Maldraxxus, which is effectively what if Game of Thrones was made up of a bunch of The Horde but they were actually all dead. There are five houses and this entire central conflict going on in the zone and you finally start being introduced to characters that you might recognize from other World of Warcraft expansions. It doesn’t hurt that there is this awesome metal guitar reverb thing going on in the background of the zone music as you are flying in. This zone is metal AF, and it was also the first time that the content really tugged on my heartstrings… which was supremely strange given that it was about a bunch of skeletons and zombies. This is my favorite of the zones, because the content is extremely interesting. The only negative however is you are essentially playing Fallout 3, because everything has a sickly green tint to it. If you are squeamish about body horror, then this zone is going to give you some fits as there are mountain ranges made out of bone and teeth and such. The main story quest gets really good as you pass through this zone and I was super amped to see where it was going after this.

Ardenweald

From there we travelled to Ardenweald, where things slowed back down again. If you love the Night Elf aesthetic as so many seem to… you are going to love Ardenweald. If it was not your jam you are either going to dislike the zone or be largely neutral to it like I am. I admit that there are aspects of the zone that are very pretty, but also it is not really my choice as far as content goes. You however are going to end up spending a lot of time in the zone later because they seem to have crammed all of the easy to get mounts into this one place. As I said above, the story slows to a crawl here because Ardenweald is adversely impacted by the anima drought. Essentially the story flows through the same sort of thing as the Afterlives trailer, as groves are culled in order to collect anima in the hopes of saving other groves. This leads to a storyline that is thirteen sads out of ten. This also ends up in a bunch of questions as to how exactly things work given that the spirits of the wild are sent here to regenerate…. but they use this entire seed metaphor which doesn’t necessarily work because a seed can weather years of drought and then grow once more whenever the conditions are right. I enjoyed some of the individual story beats of Ardenweald but the overarching story seemed to just slow down the pace a bit too much. Instead of a “page turner” like Maldraxxus I found myself just wanting to push through it to get out of Night Elf land.

Revendreth

Do you like Castlevania? Are you a Goth Edgelord at heart? Revendreth is going to be your zone. I was so looking forward to making my way here, but the sad part is that you end up spending the least amount of time in this zone as compared to the others you travel through as part of the Main Story Quest. There is a slight twist in the story, but it is one that you end up expecting from the moment you first are introduced to the ruling characters so I am not sure if it even counts as a twist? As far as pacing goes… I dinged 60 just a little ways into the zone and because you have to finish the Main Story Quest before you can do any of the end game content… it meant I was just pushing through content since I was no longer gaining a tangible benefit from it. The storyline ends in what is the introduction to the very first raid of the game. Like I am imagining that the raid is going to take place moments after the events at the conclusion of this zone. This is something that Final Fantasy XIV does really well with dungeon content, and it is interesting to see World of Warcraft trying to same thing. This means that you are going to want to complete the dungeon so you can see the conclusion of the zone story. Thankfully LFR is a thing that exists because I am not entirely certain if I am raiding this time around or not. It was a fine zone, but you don’t spend enough time with any one character to really become attached to them.

Your Covenant

It is after finishing the Main Story Quest that you get to begin engaging with the end game systems. The first of these is to choose which Covenant you want to join. As you have traversed the various zones, you have been given access to temporary powers hopefully giving you enough time to see how they work and decide which of those you enjoyed the most. Initially I went into Shadowlands expecting to go Kyrian covenant on my Paladin, but wound up finding I greatly preferred Maldraxxus and the abilities it gave me access to. So I followed my heart and am now a proud Necrolord.

There are a number of systems that open up… but not immediately. You have to spend time gathering anima in order to unlock these systems and upgrade your sanctum. The game will direct you to unlock the soulbinds first, which is effectively an Alternate Advancement system for World of Warcraft if any of you have experienced that from Everquest. Doing “stuff” has a chance of rewarding you soulbinds that can then be slotted in like talent points. These end up modifying your core abilities and allow you to tweak your build. These are gated by renown level… which is in itself gated to only being able to progress three levels a week. Which then gates your ability to progress through the campaign for your covenant… which limits your access to specific characters and their soul binds. Gating is a core theme of Shadowlands, of them not wanting to allow us to gain too much power too quickly. There are supposedly catch up mechanics in place that will allow you to rapidly get to the same point as other players before also finding yourself gated. You can pop over to your Sanctum and change which path you have active at any given time, but it costs a pip seen in the lower right hand corner in order to change out a bind. Each pip regenerates after a period of time. I’ve not found myself in a situation where I ran out of them… but also if you needed to change out all of your binds at once I could easily see it happening.

So one of the things that was mentioned prior to the expansion… was how they were reworking the command table concept to be more interactive. I feel like this is a massive lie, because while you get to choose where you place your characters on the screen… it is still the same old concept of slot some minions, click a button, and then wait a number of hours to see how you did. Like sure the UI looks different and sure there is supposedly a strategic element to the placement… but largely it seems to just add up so far to casters in the back and melee in the front. The other big problem I have is that unlike the other command table systems, the game is absolutely slow rolling getting you new companions. You have to have a companion lead your force and you get one when you unlock soulbinds, and I happened to find one in Torghast giving me a grand total of two missions that can be run at any given time. This just feels cludgy compared to other command table systems and I am sure over time this will expand… but for now it just feels bad.

Another system that you can unlock is the ability to direct Anima towards one area of your zone. Again in the early demonstrations this sounded like a pretty involved system that had some wide reaching impact. What it does in practice right now is allow me to choose from unlocking a chest that I can loot once a day that largely has vendor trash, or a boss that I can fight once a day that has a chance of dropping a mount. I feel like fighting the boss is the clear correct choice, and I am hoping as this expands out to other areas that the choices become a little more interesting.

The other challenge with covenants is the fact that if you decide that you want to change… you start back at square one and I am guessing lose all of your anima that you have contributed to that factions stockpile. I had a lot of issue choosing only one covenant, because I liked the gear style of Revendreth the best, the faction and characters of Maldraxxus … and honestly given the choice I probably would have picked the Kyrian ability just for sheer lulz of throwing five Avengers Shields at once. The covenant feels like it is incomplete… or something you drag home from IKEA that you have to assemble yourself. I guess that is a general sense that I am having on whole… things don’t feel quite as finished and polished as I have come to expect from a World of Warcraft expansion.

The Maw

The Maw is the zone that you start out the expansion in and eventually return here periodically to rescue souls or gather resources. It is designed to be harder than other content, which is true at times…. but more than anything it is just more annoying. For some reason they made the decision to make it so you cannot use mounts… which makes every interaction with the zone needlessly cumbersome. Additionally as a side note they did not update the Whistle for this expansion, so everything feels needlessly cumbersome.

The concept of the zone is that it has a Dark Souls type progression system where doing things gives you a currency called Stygia, that you then in turn spend at a rogue broker named Venari. These give you power ups that in theory make your time in the maw a little less dangerous, or counteracts some of the negative effects of drawing attention from The Jailer and his forces. A number of unlocks are unique to another system that we will talk about later called Torghast. The problem is… these feel like systems that are isolated on an island and have very little impact on the rest of the game. The Maw as a whole feels like this colossal waste because the power you gain here doesn’t actually impact and benefit the real game. I will get to WHY it still matters in a bit, but I find it frustrating that nothing I do in the maw really helps me gear my character in a meaningful way. I still feel like I need to be spending time there, but it largely feels hollow and empty because nothing I am doing has any immediate impact on what I want to be doing in other parts of the game. This could have been so cool if it were like a massive open raid zone experience and that there were interesting bosses that you could fight that had a chance of providing some interesting progression.

Torghast

Beside Venari is a portal that takes you into Torghast, a giant tower that represents World of Warcraft dabbling with the rogue-lite genre. Each wing of Torghast has 8 layers, and each layer is represented by 6 floors with the final floor representing a boss encounter. The progression seems to be akin to the Torment levels in Diablo 3, where each tier is considerably harder than the previous one. Right now we are gated to only having access to three years and two wings… The Soulforges and The Upper Reaches.

As you climb the tower you will encounter these nodes which allow you to pick from three random boons, much akin to Hades if you have experience with that game. These represent borrowed power that buffs your abilities and can often change the way you might approach the content, favoring specific abilities over others. In my experience Layer 1 and 2 were both Cakewalks, but Layer 3… was when things got real and you started to encounter packs with multiple elites in them at the same time. Mechanically Torghast is enjoyable… which I guess is good because you are going to be spending a lot of time in there.

At the base of Torghast you are going to unlock an entity known as the Runecarver. While clearing layers of Torghast you are going to gain a currency called Soul Ash, which is used as part of the system of crafting legendaries. First you will need to get a crafter to create a base item for you, which is a statless piece of gear. Then you will pay the runecarfter 1250 Soul Ash to turn that white item into a legendary piece of armor with the ability that you choose. This is designed to combat the RNG that made Legion Legendaries awkward and frustrating, but it also takes away the excitement of seeing something that you have been hunting for drop.

The core problem that I have with both the Maw and Torghast is they are systems that build upon themselves and are essentially a contorted delivery mechanism for Legendary items. Neither system in itself is capable of producing much in the way of moment to moment joy, because both systems don’t really reward anything exciting in themselves. They are a progress bar that you are filling through your actions so that once every few weeks you can spend a lot of money to craft a legendary and then feel a sense of accomplishment. In both cases I think they would have been significantly more interesting if there was at least a chance of BOE epics or something else interesting dropping from the encounters. Sure the act of clearing Torghast is somewhat fun, but feels like it is less rewarding than spending that same time solo clearing an old raid.

Mixed Emotions

So like I said at the start, I have some negative things to say about Shadowlands but also I still find myself enjoying a large chunk of it. I appreciate that Blizzard is trying something different with some of these systems, but right now at launch a lot of them feel incomplete. I am sure as gates open and we get access to more things it will start to feel better. I hope they rework how The Maw and Torghast work, because right now they just don’t feel terribly rewarding for the amount of time that they require. The world quests as a whole feel really sparse and uninteresting, given that the rewards for the most part have not been that interesting either. The flappy bird game that seems to have a Soul Bind attached to it every single day can die in a fire. I know there is a group of people that like WoW Mini Game quests… but I am not one of them.

There are however a lot of really cool things going on like puzzle that take place in zones and reward things like mounts. This frog for example involves getting an item to drop… and then interacting with an item on the ground… which spawns a world boss that grants everyone in the area access to this mount because it is a 100% drop rate. There are other really interesting puzzles happening in the world that unlock various other things… but unfortunately more commonly you just get a fist full of grey vendor trash. Granted some of that trash has sold for over 1000g which is really nice… but I would rather have useable items. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be as cohesive of a design ethic this time around… and that might just be a casualty of remote work during this time of the plague.

This has been the year of disappointments across the board on so many levels, that I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Shadowlands is also slightly disappointing. Not saying it is a bad expansion, and not saying that it isn’t fun… but I find myself getting frustrated more quickly than I have with other expansion launches. I however do give them props for making Normal Dungeons feel meaningful once again, and similarly making Heroic Dungeons feel important. So I am sure over the coming weeks now that I have gotten this out of my system I will probably be focusing on some of the more positive things.

If for some reason you want to hear a more in depth discussion, you can check out the podcast we recorded this weekend. I had no intention of turning into “The Shadowlands Show” but that is what ultimately happened. We also were collectively super positive, but we did delve into a lot of discussion about various things as well as me attempting to give those who have checked out of WoW and overview. So what are your thoughts? Are you also slightly confused as to what your opinion is, or are you loving it? Drop me a line below. The post Shadowlands: Thoughts So Far appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends. I am not sure how long this mornings post is going to be because I want to try and walk a thin line between talking about events happening in Shadowlands and not really spoiling things for anyone who isn’t quite as progressed yet. Yesterday I hit somewhere in the vicinity of 57.5 and am a little bit into Ardenweald. When I talked about my experiences yesterday I focused mostly on the smooth launch, but I was a bit down on the whole storyline and experience of playing thorugh Bastion. I think the spirituality and “trust in the path” sort of narrative just didn’t land with me. I am not a religious person, and the zone while beautiful… also sorta felt barren and bland. This is making my start to rethink my original goal of aligning my Paladin with them for access to that ability.

Maldraxxus however, I loved every single minute of the experience of running through that zone. This is where Shadowlands really starts to kick in and the story feels important. Bastion is a bit of a slow burn and by the end of that zone the events are starting to click into place setting up for an amazing romp across the true land of the dead. I can’t say before now I have ever really had a “page turner” moment in World of Warcraft, where I just wanted to keep getting to the next main story quest so I could see exactly what was happening. Side note… they are actually marking what is and is not a main story quest with a unique icon and I thoroughly approve of this. I am starting to feel like Maldraxxus might be my true calling as far as covenants go.

Then Ardenweald comes along and starts sucker punching you straight in the feels. Like I don’t love the design aesthetic of Night Elves and by connection zones like Ashenvale, Val’Sharah and now Ardenweald. That said however the story in Ardenweald keeps the intrigue going in a way that also makes me really want to find out where things are going. Like I THINK I know where things are going, but I am not entirely certain what is up with the Winter Queen. Through Maldraxxus and now Ardenweald you are starting to see the first signs of the larger cosmology of the Shadowlands and I approve. Essentially the drought has impacted each area differently, and it is interesting to see that being played out in the way that the denizens react to it.

Right now the main thing that Bastion still has going for it are the little Swolekin friends you can get… who will follow you around and play music for you. I am a fan of this and I could see getting used to bringing birb friend out on missions. I specifically chose one that was fully armored for their own safety. The first night of gameplay left me a little iffy on Shadowlands as an expansion, but those fears are being pushed aside by the really cool content that took place in Maldraxxus and now Ardenweald. I would have preferred to have gotten a choose your own adventure style start, where I got to pick which faction I would venture into first but I get why they didn’t do that because the storyline needs to flow in a specific way. My only long term concerns however are as to how exactly playing alts through this content is going to feel. If you have to do everything in the same order a couple of dozen times it is going to feel pretty grindy. So my impressions have improved, but I am curious where you are right now on your feelings as to this expansion. Drop me a line in the comments with your thoughts so far. The post Maldraxxus Was Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good morning everyone and welcome to the land of the dead. Yesterday at 5 pm my time the gates swung wide letting players into the next World of Warcraft expansion. I have to admit it was a little odd and uneventful the way the expansion launched. At 5 pm on the dot I got a message from Thassarian granting the starting quest for the expansion. This lead to the introduction event happening at Icecrown Citadel that I had experienced in alpha and shortly thereafter I was up and running in the Maw and tackling the introductory quests.

All in all it was one of the smoother launches I have experienced. I of course did get hung up for it bit with some challenges, but they were resolved reasonably quickly. There is a quest that asks you to open the portal to your capitol city and then teleport right back to the new Shattrath style city. I got disconnected on the port back and that lead me to spend quite a bit of time with a “character with that name already exists” error. I tried several things but ultimately what seemed to unjam things was logging into a character on another server and then back out again. Immediately following that I was able to load back into Belgrace and continue questing.

I dig the art design of the Shadowlands. It feels sufficiently different from the sort of things that we normally see on Azeroth, but also familiar enough to make you question how the land of the dead has ultimately influenced the things we are more familiar with. You don’t spend a lot of time in the new hub, but you do find out that something happened to the Arbiter that judges and divides the souls into the various afterlives. When this entity was taken offline for lack of a better term, all souls started flowing straight down into the Maw, and I now have my theories as to what event caused this. The problem is we have no gauge on how time flows in the Shadowlands versus how time flows in the Mortal realm. That could have been millennia ago… or something that has taken place within the lifespan of our characters.

Bastion is really pretty but also sort of dead feeling… which makes sense given that it is one of the various afterlives that we are going to be visiting. I think part of this experience is enhanced by the fact that there is apparently some sort of new phasing technology that limits the other players you see out in the world. Rather intentional or not, it gives the entire experience a very isolating feel… which I am mostly okay with. I didn’t feel like a lot of human interaction last night as I wandered around the deadlands questing for the strange blue people. The positive is that it meant I never really had much in the way of contention for other mobs… the negative is that it maybe became a bit harder to take down group encounters.

The only negative of the night is that I am not sure if I am still sickly and sort of out of it… but for a lot of the evening I mostly just felt like I was going through the motions. The expansion did not grab me in the same way that Legion did for example, or to be honest even Battle for Azeroth. There is one thing that I wish would die in a fire… this expansion is full of NPCs that like to dole out text a single message at a time in your text box. I would far rather have this as a single block of readable text because I read WAY faster than the timing of these messages. This ends up making a lot of the story content feel like it is dragging because I am constantly waiting on the NPC to spit out the next line. I feel like this is probably a way of forcing players to read the quest text…. but it ends up almost having the opposite of effect of wanting to alt tab while I wait for the NPC to finish yammering so I can read it all at once.

All in all I consider it to be a very successful launch night. I ended up throwing in the towel around 10 pm and heading on to bed giving me a pretty solid four or so hours of leveling. I managed to get to 53 and some change and I am guessing I am maybe a little past the midpoint of Bastion. I am enjoying myself but I am not as into this as I expected to be. Maybe it will grow on me over time… but I have to admit there were moments last night where I contemplated logging out and just playing some more Diablo 3. Not sure if that is the content I am playing or just my mental state right now and being deluged with too many options. Whatever the case I will keep an eye on it as I keep moving through the content. Did you play through the Shadowlands launch last night? What are your thoughts of the expansion so far? Drop me a line below and let me know your feelings. The post Shadowlands Launch Night appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.