As a former WoW player, with over 14 years of experience playing the game, Battle for Azeroth showed me more than any other expansion that my time having World of Warcraft as my main game was at its end. The monotonous rush to max level, so the real game of running dungeons, mythics and raids rinse and repeat for another expansion with no real innovation in story creativity or endgame variety for those of us who love the immersion (the RPG part of the MMORPG) was nearly extinguished for me. I loved Jaina’s storyline and the Drustvar area of the Alliance side of the story. I love the Vulpera areas of the Horde side. That being said, from the last days of Alpha through Beta—in all honesty long before the release of BFA, I thought that it was incredibly stupid that after all the fighting the Horde and Alliance did to end the threat of the Burning Legion, we would all come back home, and just start fighting each other again. It didn’t make any sense, and that feeling never change for me, and instead it was strengthened as I played through the stories of the Horde and Alliance during the early part of the expansion. There quickly came a point where I couldn’t justify paying for a game that made me feel like I was performing a daily chore to play. So, I left and after some travelling found everything that I’d been missing from WoW in the form of Final Fantasy XIV.
I preface all that to say this—there is no way I could ever make WoW my main game ever again. There’s just too much baggage and water under the bridge associated with the game to ever draw me back to it on a fulltime basis. Having said that, with all the positive changes that I have seen from the devs of this game, and with the years that I’ve spent enjoying this game, I wondered “Could WoW become a side game for me?” So, after watching some of my favorite streamers trying out the new expansion, I somewhat felt the pull that most WoW players feel (especially long time players of the game), I thought maybe I can play the new expansion and see if it is a good candidate for a side game that I can play. So, I bought a WoW Token, reinstalled the client and logged in for the first time in over a year and a half or more. Also, just a heads up, I am going to give a lot of spoilers, so if you don’t want to know the events of the story of Shadowlands, wait until you’ve played through storyline before reading this blog. For those who don’t care, please read on.
Day 1
I logged in and immediately realized two things about the game. First, I’d almost completely forgotten how to play the game. During the year or more that I’ve been away from the game, and honestly tried to put it out of my mind, I realized that all the knowledge I had about my Ret Pally that has been my main character since first starting the game in Vanilla, the endless rotation repetitions, talent knowledge—all of it was void from my mind. I actually laughed at myself, because for at least a few moments, I felt as lost as a brand new lowbie to the game as to what I was supposed to do with all these skills on my hotkey bars. The second thing I immediately remembered about WoW was just how much I hated the default UI of the game, and how much a replacement UI is needed in order to play the current retail game. I missed the ability to log in and be able to move the quest log, to be able to move anything on the screen for that matter. For those of us who have played WoW for a very long time (at least for me), I needed to get a replacement for the UI with a quickness. So after looking online, and finding out that the Curse/Twitch client was now owned by Curseforge, I settled on Mayron’s UI (https://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info21221-MayronUIGen6.html), a UI that I’ve used in the past, along with the other host of addons needed in order to play retail WoW, and logged back in to set up my UI. After completing setup of my UI and getting reacquainted with playing the game on the Old Town training dummies, I took the quest to talk to Highlord Darion Mograine and began my journey into the Shadowlands.
After arriving in the Maw from Icecrown, I helped Mograine and the rest of the Deathknights with clearing out would-be enemies that dared to attack us, while attempting to look for any survivors along the way. It wasn’t too long before we happened upon a couple of survivors holding off their attackers and there was Jaina and Thrall cutting down enemies left and right. I was actually glad to see them, because anyone whose played this game knows that Blizzard loves to kill off main characters, if they think it will advance the story—even if it doesn’t make sense. After helping them recover, Jaina led us to a cave that would be our temporary base of operations.
After capturing and torturing an already tortured amalgamation of souls into telling us where Anduin is being held, I watched as a chained Anduin and Sylvanis have a conversation where he exclaimed, “It will never work.” I am guessing he is talking about the plan that she and her new master, Zovaal the Jailer have for the denizens of not just Azeroth, but for all worlds in existence. Seeing Sylvanis as the villain is definitely a hard one for me, because my love and respect for characters like Thrall and the Banshee Queen were some of the reasons I actually created a horde character back during Wrath of the Lich King days, after having played exclusively Alliance from the days of Vanilla WoW. Seeing the way they’ve written Sylvanis into this seemingly moustache twirling baddie should never have come to pass. After doing a quest to get keys from some baddies to free Anduin (while freeing some other tortured souls along the way), I returned with Jaina and Thrall to free Anduin. At this point, my character is a little more than halfway through level 50, after about 25-30 minutes.
And that was the end of my first back in Azeroth playing the new expansion. So far, I’m taking it slow in the very beginnings of the stages of Shadowlands. The quests aren’t really anything new, and honestly I am only moderately concerned about the characters that I am tasked with finding and saving. In the past, I love characters like Jaina and Thrall, but I think my disillusionment of how they have written Sylvanis so far is kinda put up this barrier of immersing myself into the stories of the other characters, because I feel like if one shoe in Sylvanis is being used like my puppy’s gnarled chew toy, I don’t quite know what’s going to happen to these other characters that I’ve grown to love throughout the years. That being said, so far playing the game doesn’t feel like a chore yet, so I am continuing my play through with a little hope that the story will get better or at least continue on pace.
