Games

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.

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.