The end of WoW as we know it.
Playing through this expansion (although I dropped it before the final patch), there is a sense that WoW is no longer an MMORPG. It is now a "multiplayer dungeon crawler".
Playing this it became obvious no one wanted to do anything anymore. Unless you Role Play, there is no server community. It's dead. Everything is automated either through an interface, like dungeons and raids or via buying it in the in-game shop that's shoved into your face at seemingly every moment (that's selling level boosts and gold). This expansions latest addition "Cross Realm Raids" (with the cross-realm group finder), where you can find a group made up of people from all realms, only made this worse. "Cross Realm Raids" were another half-hearted attempt to address dying servers, when the solution a decade ago was to just simply hard merge the servers which Blizzard won't do. Since they need the extra cashflow of people transferring to the few populated servers left.
Blizzard meanwhile are seemingly perfectly happy about this. Why would they care about subscription numbers when you can now buy gold and pay to get boosted through the latest endgame content? The game pretty much became "pay-2-win" via the WoW Token and the "boosting culture" that has developed.
Being in a guild is literally pointless unless you're Role Playing or are in one of the Mythic Raiding guilds selling boosts.
There's also Mythic+. 5-man content that blizzard wants to replace raids by the looks of it, given how many players that would ordinarily push for higher difficulty raids decide to just grind out mythic+ instead. This content feels hollow and the antithesis of what WoW once, that being joining up with many more people in "epic" scale content of a massive amount of people.
These "meta" issues with the expansion aside, the expansion content isn't particular great. For the never ending story that feels like its been going on far longer than it should have, the premise seemed fine. A faction war, although we already had that from Wrath-MoP, but this time they seem serious about it by blowing up player cities. The execution is where it falls apart. As Blizzard struggle to write new characters without them being cringe inducing self-inserts of the writers like Nathanos or desperately clinging on to legacy characters, while contradicting their aim in this by killing more of them off. With that said, I did rather like Jania here, who always been one of the better story characters. The quests themselves are very mid or downright forgettable, as are the zones. The Kul'Trias city is rather nice however. The dungeons are also mid or downright bad such a MOTHERLOAD!, which is a contender for the worst dungeon in the entire game across all expansions.
As for the features we have Warfronts, which is the pointless and disappointing feature ever added. What was presented as a PvP MOBA battleground turned out to be a PvE weekly where you get free loot. It's nigh-impossible to lose and it being PvE is totally baffling. It's not fun to play in itself and seems completely wasted. Another feature is island expeditions, which aren't all that interesting.
With all these complaints I would rate this game a 2/10, or 3/10 but Mechagon was this expansions saving grace. The "mega-dungeon" was fun to play through with interesting raid-quality boss fights and the zone itself, while grindy, was not all that bad. I am rather bias in favour of it due to the theming, but it really is the highlight of the otherwise terrible expansion.
Nazjatar meanwhile was a horrible zone. Not fun to navigate one bit, the raid was also just tedious with boss mechanics having now become completely catered towards Ultra-Hardcore raiders. Long gone are the days of fairly simple raid bosses and now every raid boss has like 30-40 tactics. The complexity bloat really makes the barrier to entry nigh-impossible for higher difficulties. As learning an entire raid is like trying to learn a "Grand Strategy game" with the amount of "revision" needed to navigate around even 1st or 2nd boss. Most players will just stick to lower difficulties where 3-4 people can carry a 20-man group and hoping they'll be randomly matched with such players in LFR or the "cross-realm group finder".
In conclusion. BFA is WoW's gravestone and it only gets the generous rating I give it because Mechagon was one of the best instances Blizzard had made in literally years.
Playing through this expansion (although I dropped it before the final patch), there is a sense that WoW is no longer an MMORPG. It is now a "multiplayer dungeon crawler".
Playing this it became obvious no one wanted to do anything anymore. Unless you Role Play, there is no server community. It's dead. Everything is automated either through an interface, like dungeons and raids or via buying it in the in-game shop that's shoved into your face at seemingly every moment (that's selling level boosts and gold). This expansions latest addition "Cross Realm Raids" (with the cross-realm group finder), where you can find a group made up of people from all realms, only made this worse. "Cross Realm Raids" were another half-hearted attempt to address dying servers, when the solution a decade ago was to just simply hard merge the servers which Blizzard won't do. Since they need the extra cashflow of people transferring to the few populated servers left.
Blizzard meanwhile are seemingly perfectly happy about this. Why would they care about subscription numbers when you can now buy gold and pay to get boosted through the latest endgame content? The game pretty much became "pay-2-win" via the WoW Token and the "boosting culture" that has developed.
Being in a guild is literally pointless unless you're Role Playing or are in one of the Mythic Raiding guilds selling boosts.
There's also Mythic+. 5-man content that blizzard wants to replace raids by the looks of it, given how many players that would ordinarily push for higher difficulty raids decide to just grind out mythic+ instead. This content feels hollow and the antithesis of what WoW once, that being joining up with many more people in "epic" scale content of a massive amount of people.
These "meta" issues with the expansion aside, the expansion content isn't particular great. For the never ending story that feels like its been going on far longer than it should have, the premise seemed fine. A faction war, although we already had that from Wrath-MoP, but this time they seem serious about it by blowing up player cities. The execution is where it falls apart. As Blizzard struggle to write new characters without them being cringe inducing self-inserts of the writers like Nathanos or desperately clinging on to legacy characters, while contradicting their aim in this by killing more of them off. With that said, I did rather like Jania here, who always been one of the better story characters. The quests themselves are very mid or downright forgettable, as are the zones. The Kul'Trias city is rather nice however. The dungeons are also mid or downright bad such a MOTHERLOAD!, which is a contender for the worst dungeon in the entire game across all expansions.
As for the features we have Warfronts, which is the pointless and disappointing feature ever added. What was presented as a PvP MOBA battleground turned out to be a PvE weekly where you get free loot. It's nigh-impossible to lose and it being PvE is totally baffling. It's not fun to play in itself and seems completely wasted. Another feature is island expeditions, which aren't all that interesting.
With all these complaints I would rate this game a 2/10, or 3/10 but Mechagon was this expansions saving grace. The "mega-dungeon" was fun to play through with interesting raid-quality boss fights and the zone itself, while grindy, was not all that bad. I am rather bias in favour of it due to the theming, but it really is the highlight of the otherwise terrible expansion.
Nazjatar meanwhile was a horrible zone. Not fun to navigate one bit, the raid was also just tedious with boss mechanics having now become completely catered towards Ultra-Hardcore raiders. Long gone are the days of fairly simple raid bosses and now every raid boss has like 30-40 tactics. The complexity bloat really makes the barrier to entry nigh-impossible for higher difficulties. As learning an entire raid is like trying to learn a "Grand Strategy game" with the amount of "revision" needed to navigate around even 1st or 2nd boss. Most players will just stick to lower difficulties where 3-4 people can carry a 20-man group and hoping they'll be randomly matched with such players in LFR or the "cross-realm group finder".
In conclusion. BFA is WoW's gravestone and it only gets the generous rating I give it because Mechagon was one of the best instances Blizzard had made in literally years.