World Of Warcraft: Shadowlands is the latest expansion for an MMORPG franchise that I’ve been playing since the beginning. Attempting to shake up a new things to solve the incredible bloat of a 1-120 leveling experience while giving players a new expansion with a choice of faction that would influence gameplay options, adding a new tutorial area and updating the character creation options, there’s a lot to enjoy in Shadowlands, but there’s a lot that frustrated me and quickly deflated my original idea of trying everything it had to offer. I still played it quite a bit!
I wanted to see everything, so I started a few new characters. The new character creation system is quite streamlined and I was able to admire the visual overhaul. It’s quite an upgrade in certain aspects, which brings the game a bit closer to something modern. Then I decided to do the tutorial, which levels you from 1 to 10 in a back-to-basics small quest that you have never played World Of Warcraft before. It works fairly well - even if some of it is a little buggy - but I wouldn’t do it more than once as a novelty. It teaches you more or less everything from basic controls to dungeon instances, so that’s neat.
The leveling experience was squished from 1-120 to 1-50 and this means a lot of things. First, you get new skills, talents and upgrades more frequently, which is good (you do not have long streak of levels where you get nothing.), you also get max level faster. You can also select any expansion you want to level in, so you can play your favorite or try to get a few achievements you are missing in some of them. These are good ideas, but I dislike how crafting doesn’t follow suit. Forget about leveling your ‘vanilla’ crafting on a new character and then getting trained in each expansion, you’ll be going so quickly you’ll miss a large part of it. Maybe they could’ve someone combined crafting experiences for all expansions into one single crafting system?
Shadowlands in itself is a very cinematic and story-driven expansion, you’ll explore five large zones with a central hub area trying to solve everyone’s problems. There might’ve been a few too many cutscenes for a MMO during my time with it, but it kept me mildly interested in the story, so that’s fine. Each zone has their own faction and they give you special powers to try out, alongside the classic string of sidequests and enemies to slay. I went from zone to zone, fighting in a neat semi-roguelike tower where you get different rooms and powers every time and ultimately got to level 60 and finished the campaign story.
Then I was offered to join one of the four covenant - after getting to the max level - and the more interesting content of the expansion unlocked then. This is quite weird, I started getting a bunch of layering systems at that point; World quests, covenant upgrades, a weird ability-modifying skill tree, smaller automatic battles that were present in other expansions and a nifty piece of set gear for my character. Why wait at level 60? These systems remind me of Diablo 3’s adventure mode and they all build towards raising your renown with your faction, which unlocks more stuff over time. I wish I had that by default!
When you create more than one character, you can choose between replaying the story or choosing your covenant immediately… But you still have to get to level 60 to start the fun stuff! The world quests are unlocked at 50, why can’t you start building your covenant and unlocking neat things immediately? I’ve read that each covenant has some unique mechanics and I kinda wanted to see them all, but now I don’t know, it takes a bit of time to get from 50 to 60, even with the special quests they give you to level up faster…
The Shadowlands experience is a nice refresh on an old title, that’s for sure, and it got me playing WoW for a bit (and I might still try to see everything each covenant has to offer), but I think they could’ve sanded off some of the rougher edges to give certain systems of the game more meaning in a new leveling-compressed experience.
