WoW: Shadowlands will end up as a “filler addon” – and that’s a good thing

Shadowlands will go down in World of Warcraft history as a “gap filler”. MyMMO demon Cortyn thinks: That is the best solution.

In the meantime, the last person should have noticed that WoW: Shadowlands did not go down as well with the players as they had originally thought. If the enlargement was considered “good” by many at the beginning, this opinion crashed very quickly. With Patch 9.1 at the latest, only a few players felt like it. Even improvements from patch 9.1.5 brought little relief.

So the developers pull the rip cord and bring Shadowlands to a very quick, but also inglorious, end.

Spoilerwarnung: The article also deals with data mining and alleged content from patch 9.2. You have been warned.

What is a filler addon? Similar to “filler episodes” in TV series, filler add-ons also serve a simple purpose in World of Warcraft: something should happen just so that something happens. A filler add-on has a related action, but after completion of the filler content, the situation is basically the same as before. Few details have changed.

And to be honest, Shadowlands was the perfect choice from the start. The whole concept of “afterlife” with the different realms in which the different variants of the afterlife exist is so unreal and detached from the rest of the Warcraft cosmos that you can simply put a lid on it again. Much like back then with “Warlords of Draenor” one can simply say: The connection to the Shadowlands is now broken again, story-wise you are no longer connected to these creatures.

However, I think the decision is a good one.

Sure, I liked the new areas a lot. Because everything was so new and unknown, the developers were able to let off steam creatively. I still find the Ardenwald breathtaking and I also have fond memories of Revendreth.

Blizzard could now have stood up and tried to steer the story of Shadowlands in a different direction in order to recapture the players who have been lost. A patch 9.3 and a dungeon master, who still pulls himself through other expansions – that would all have been an option.

The first information about patch 9.2 now shows that the dungeon master will ultimately be defeated and destroyed. Complete, nothing remains of him. Pelagos is installed as the new judge of souls and takes on the role of sending all souls to their respective afterlife in the future. He receives this power – presumably – from the smithy of the first.

It is a good thing that the jailer is defeated in the end and thus presumably finally destroyed. He was a “filler boss” that was only introduced in Patch 9.0 and will disappear from the scene again with Patch 9.2. Of course, it somehow “burned it up” – but at the same time it allows a clear cut to try something new afterwards or to tie in with the old, tried and tested story.

Shadowlands thus becomes a small – more or less – self-contained story.

Of course, one also has to say: So far, most of Patch 9.2 has only been data mining. It is quite possible that Blizzard will reveal another big twist in the final cinematic and that the jailer is not quite as dead as one had actually thought.

The only bland aftertaste is that Blizzard tried to give Shadowlands a lot more meaning than was actually necessary. The fact that the jailer was basically behind all the major events of the past 20 Warcraft years could have been a cool plot point, but unfortunately it was not implemented well.

The story team will surely have to nibble at this justification for a few more years. Because if the “big boss”, who has been leading the strings of fate for millennia, suddenly turns out to be a boring character that nobody can do anything with, then that’s damage from which Warcraft will only slowly recover.

However, I want to be confident. World of Warcraft has delivered exciting and interesting stories for many years – and that was often the case in Shadowlands, too, although often more hidden in the side quests. If Blizzard can build on with 10.0, give its opponents more profile and create a Warcraft again that does not get entangled in more and more parallel dimensions … then I hope that the next add-on will really inspire again.

Because if that’s not the case, things are starting to look really bleak for World of Warcraft. And that would be a shame.