This post will have no real spoilers for 8.2.5 war campaign in it. I will express an opinion quickly, as I haven’t played it myself yet and once I do, there will be a spoileriffic post that will expand on what I am about to say.
This story sucks. I’m glad they held the surprise, but boy do I wish the surprise was good. It is clear to me that there will definitely be an 8.3 but this story is awful. Never in the game’s history have I wanted an expansion to end as badly as I want Battle for Azeroth to end right now. It’s dead. There were a lot of possibilities for better outcomes on the table and Blizzard has denied all of them in favor of raw shock value and a race to the finish.
Never in the game’s history have I felt like a story has setup so much and done so little with it. I’ve not been a fan of the expansion story so far, but now? I loathe it. The direction they’ve pointed us in has taken one of my favorite lore hooks and poisoned it so completely I almost don’t care to see it.
This is a bit overdramatic, because as long as the content is good, I’ll play, but guess what – 8.2.5 doesn’t add meaningful new content either, so it is just back to raid night gameplay and nothing more for me once tonight is over.
I’ve been one of those who has been optimistic about where this is going, insisting in posts and to myself that the story was going to wind up to something big. Now I just feel like an idiot. This story is awful, and it is going to shortchange the thing I was most excited about in the first place (Old God shenanigans) so we could get all this faction conflict shit. And it is shit – Blizzard has never written this well and BfA shows why they should just give up and merge the factions already.
As pained as I would be to say “let’s just move past the Old Gods and on to 9.0” it is where I am.
Maybe the gameplay will make me change my mind, but somehow, I doubt it.
At least I prepared for disappointment.
Kaylriene 
I am always a bit detached from the story in expansions. It comes from not raiding I think, so I rarely ever see the big raid finale. (Main exception was MOP, where I did all the LFR runs and saw Garrosh defeated.) As long as the game play is compelling I can skip past the story and make it my own tale. But even with some of the really good bits and pieces in BFA, it hasn’t really been solid for me on that front either. And then came Classic. I swear I will unlock flying in BFA at some point, but it won’t be any time soon. And BlizzCon is coming. The start of the march to 9.0 is about to begin.
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For as much as I write about the lore, I tend not to care about it much either. If the gameplay is appealing, the story could be a complete dumpster fire and I’ll still get into it. This expansion has just paired a dumpster fire narrative with less-than-stellar gameplay and the combination of the two means there just isn’t much to latch onto there, which is disappointing.
So far, my opinion change is this – Blizzard has to announce 9.0 at Blizzcon now and be clear about what will change and improve, or the reaction is going to be rough.
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If it’s as bad as you fear it’s going to keep more people in Classic and maybe drive a few more that way.
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I agree, but I feel like that migration has already happened and was unlikely to change. Most people I know that play for story remain subscribed during an expansion but just don’t log in, and I wouldn’t expect them to come back even though they are playing a game still called World of Warcraft.
Blizzard probably hopes that isn’t the case, but I think it is and is unlikely to change.
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I reset my expectations to neutral because I figured that I would be disappointed. I’m glad I did that as the story letdown wasn’t as big if I had hoped for something good. It feels horrible when I think I could write a better, more coherent story than paid developers *and* I’m sure I would tell a amateur, crappy story.
This expansion just killed my Heroic raiding guild, which has survived internal upheavals in the past that would normally kill a guild. It took Blizzard being out of touch with a sizeable portion of their fanbase to do it.
BfA will end up being the first expansion since The Burning Crusade that I will leave alts unleveled and unplayed. I haven’t cared to level on the Horde side and I know there are important story points over there. I may just end up going with one or two toons into 9.0. That the devs mucked things up so badly after getting so much right with Legion is just beyond me.
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Thanks for the comment! I think this expansion has really wrought havoc on my expectations for Blizzard – I haven’t been able to count on the core competencies they’ve had in the past, like raid design, solid overall PvE direction, and fun ability design. I feel like BfA will end up in retrospect being a “systems” expansion – it feels like Blizzard is trying to clear the field so they can revamp the foundation of the game, but by doing that as a single expansion, it just feels awful. WoD was pretty similar for me – it’s clear that item squish, stat changes, and the start of pruning were all designed around building a new foundation for the game.
Definitely feel the point about guilds – mine isn’t dead, but we had to merge with another guild to field a good-enough raid roster, and even after that, we’re back down to around 15, near where we were already pre-merge! I think we’ll keep going, but enthusiasm is definitely waning.
I’m in a similar boat with alts too – I’m likely at some point to level them out of boredom, but any ambition for BfA-only Allied Races getting leveled for heritage armor is gone and I still have 3 classes that aren’t at 120 and I have no plans to start anytime soon. It at least fits the cycle, though – even numbered expansions are cursed and odds are great, so at least the cycle remains unbroken!
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I’m not sure how you’d be disappointed with this – Garrosh 2.0 was written in the stars from the beginning. Sure, the writing is atrocious (where is home & then the let’s bring him home) but the main plot points are all there. Feels more like Occam’s Razor here – the absolute most obvious conclusion is the one we get. The only way out of this is a deus-ex-machina scenario, where an as of yet unfound superbeing (Sha 2.0) is unveiled as the mastermind.
So color me curious as to where this train wreck ends up.
Props to the cinematics team. It looks spectacular. Frankly, the entire world building and art/music team is at another level in BfA.
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Oh, to be clear, the Sylvanas part of all of this was crystal-clear since last July, so there’s no disappointment left to be had there. There are tertiary characters involved that I thought could maybe get some more development and clearly aren’t, and that is disappointing, but I’ll detail that more tomorrow!
Which is a shame, because the art and acting is pretty good – the presentation soars far above the material and that is a shame.
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