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World of Warcraft: Shadowlands might go down as one of the worst-received expansions in the game's history—a situation so dire that it quite literally caused Blizzard to do a 180, scrap whatever plot it was working on, and throw players into a five-year timeskip on the Dragon Isles just so it could shake the dang thing off.
That's for a number of reasons—arduous endgame chores, massive content droughts—but also its story, which made a huge attempt at retconing an extremely boring villain, who spent most of his time saying "pitiful mortal," into years of beloved Warcraft lore. It didn't work. People hated the guts out of it.
There was also Sylvanas, who I'll let our former WoW expert Sarah James explain through this opinion piece she wrote back at the tail-end of Shadowlands: "But Shadowlands hasn't been a good expansion for Sylvanas fans … Not content with killing countless night elves, she turned her back on the Horde, killed Saurfang, and has apparently been in contact with the Jailer for years—as far back as her 'death' at Icecrown Citadel at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion."
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She… doesn't do much other than spook Xal'atath, who doesn't seem keen to try and 1v1 a banshee queen, but I do think the hug from Vereesa is a genuinely sweet little bit of characterisation. Then she says something that made my eyebrows actually vacate my skull and book a little beach holiday for the rest of the month:
"The Shadowlands are not at all what they seem, I cannot rest until I've uncovered the truth." And I mean, this might be me reading into it, but—that's a retcon, right? Or at least a soft retcon. Grabbing a poorly-received story and trying to spin something else out of it.
Harvey might be willing to award chutzpah points to Blizzard on this one, but I'm less willing to offer props for boldness when it's been relying on the 'pull an elf from off-stage to introduce new cosmic implications' maneuver for the better part of a decade. We're trapped in a vortex of Windrunners and extraplanar entities and I don't know if Blizzard can write itself out if it wanted to. Maybe it's not Blizzard's worst storytelling impulse—maybe it's Blizzard's only storytelling impulse. Maybe Azeroth will only ever be a place where Sylvanas and her siblings usher in whatever's the next interdimensional threat with a menacing cool-toned color palette. Perhaps it's best to accept it.
That's not to say Blizzard stopped caring at all about the implications of Shadowlands, mind. A huge central point of The War Within followed Anduin's path back to the light after his brief Jailer-brainwashing snapped his connection to it.
But in terms of the cosmology? Going ahead and saying 'yeah, the realm of death we pranced around in? Not at all what it seems. Later, losers' is a huge move on Blizzard's part.
Such a huge move, in fact, I'm almost begrudgingly interested. I'm a sucker for flawed, but sincere stories, and the process of repairing a long-standing one like WoW's has always fascinated me: How do you make something decent after all of those fumbles? I don't know if the result will be good, but it's bound to be interesting.
We'll have to see if the studio can stick the landing—whether that's at the tail-end of The Last Titan, or picking up Sylvanas' story after The Worldsoul Saga is done.
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