World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Reviews
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands breathes new life into an aging MMORPG with some fun new features and an excellent story.
The first hour or so of the expansion provides a great introduction to the setting and story. The quests involve pushing through The Maw with the help of storied heroes from WoW's lore, with frequent cut-scenes and events which make for a surprisingly cinematic experience. WoW's expansions have been a little inconsistent in the strength of their stories, but I found this narrative and its characters to be compelling. Although The Maw is not the most aesthetically pleasing zone, perhaps by design, the overall introduction seemed like a very polished experience and demonstrates quite how far WoW has come in 16 years.
Shadowlands offers reiable new challenges for online heroes. Good reason to still play WoW.
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All in all, WoW’s latest expansion has been a joy to play and experience. While not entirely alt friendly, strides have been made to at least make it easier to catch up should you wish to change classes once you have started the expansion.
In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, the eighth expansion to Blizzard Entertainment's world-acclaimed massively multiplayer online role-playing game, players will venture into the unknown horizon of the Shadowlands, an infinite plane to which the souls of mortals flock to be reborn, serve, fight, or suffer eternal torment. The heroes of Azeroth must forge alliances with the powerful curias that dominate these lands and claim the ultra-earthly powers necessary to unveil sylvanas' purposes.
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Blizzard clearly learned from the mistakes from Battle for Azeroth's endgame launch state, injecting piles of content that actually contribute to player power in meaningful ways. On the one hand, the time gating on the story elements is irritating, but it's not like most players will find themselves short of things to do. Shadowlands has some of the most stunning art in the game's lengthy history, and the cinematic treatment represents a step up for the studio. Despite balance issues, Shadowlands may end up among the likes of Legion and The Burning Crusade as one of the game's best expansions to date.
As it stands, Shadowlands feels a little lost in translation. Blizzard spent the better part of the last year saying how it wanted its juggernaut MMO to feel more like an RPG again — where choices matter and rewards and plentiful. Yet, oddly enough, Shadowlands feels more bereft of that than ever before, becoming something of a jumbled experience that sits awkwardly between being an open-world “sandbox” MMO and a more linear “theme park” one.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands shows that the whole World of Warcraft game is really showing it's age, not to mention that since losing a lot of their key development people from the Blizzard side like Chris Kaleiki and many others, leading to this being a more "by the metrics" Activision based game experience than what Blizzard is renowned for. For a lot of people, the heart and soul of World of Warcraft is dead at this stage, but since it is still early days, future patches and content additions can revive the game into a playable state for those who are still addicted to the game after over 16 years… But only time will tell at this stage.
A far-out new expansion and major levelling revamp see Blizzard's veteran online world riding a new wave of popularity.
So far Shadowlands does not disappoint, with the question of which of the four covenants to soul-bind to being a particularly tricky one, as you get to grips with the endgame content of world quests and dailies. Shadowlands is reminiscent of aspects from earlier expansions, such as Wrath Of The Lich King (even including the grind), but it has a style all of its own and a good sense of momentum that, so far at least, makes it great fun to play.
Shadowlands doesn’t do everything perfectly. The questing experience doesn’t feel as fluid in as previous expansions, and the quests aren’t as diverse. And it’s still too early to see how good the endgame content and updates will be. But even with the limited time I’m willing to put into Shadowlands, I’ll actually be able to play that endgame content as it comes out. And as my real life just gets more complicated the older I get, I couldn’t ask for a better shift in philosophy from my favorite MMO.